A few weeks ago at AutoCon 2 in Denver I had the pleasure of proctoring the “Network Automation Zero to Hero” workshop for a room full of eager network automation practitioners. I was joined by Otto Coster of Netpicker, Dave Kempe of Sol1, Pieter van Os of Slurpit, and Wim Gerrits of Netpicker/Slurpit as we guided 50+ participants through a ton of great content covering many aspects of modern intent-based network automation.
Today I am excited to announce that the Network Automation Zero to Hero workshop is available for everyone to try out, along with detailed documentation and helpful videos to guide you from network automation zero to hero!
The Network Automation Zero to Hero workshop at AutoCon 2 in Denver
It takes a community
In the run up to the workshop we had spent countless hours online together preparing each of the steps in the workshop with the joint aim of giving the participants a holistic understanding of how all the pieces fit together in the modern network automation reference architecture, which has been built and refined with NetBox Labs customers, partners and open source community over the last 18 months.
The Modern Network Automation Reference Architecture
Learning by doing
While our modern network automation reference architecture has been a fantastically valuable visual aid in hundreds of conversations since its inception it can leave much to the imagination. How do all these pieces fit together exactly? While there is a wealth of information about using individual tools, information about how to combine them all together to move through your network automation journey can be hard to come by, so that’s what we set out to fix.
If you look at the diagram above and think “that looks like a lot” fear not! In a few short hours the workshop will guide you through to implementing your own fully functional intent-based network automation stack including:
- NetBox as your Source of Truth
- Slurpit for network Discovery and Reconciliation
- Icinga for Monitoring
- Netpicker for Configuration Assurance
- Ansible for Automating Changes to the Network
- ContainerLab for our lab devices
The workshop is designed to preconfigure as much as possible so that you can focus on learning the key concepts. It is our hope that this will demystify the core concepts, and give you ideas for how you can apply some of these concepts in your own organization.
Get started now
You can get started right now by heading on over to the Automation Zero to Hero training page here
You’ll find detailed documentation for the practical sections and useful videos to guide you through both the practical exercises as well as higher level videos introducing important concepts and ideas.
We encourage you to reach out to us if you have questions, issues, or ideas in the #netbox-learning channel in the NetDev Slack. If you’re not already a member, you can join the NetDev Slack here: https://netdev.chat/
The workshop is open source under the Apache2 license and we encourage you to use it, fork it, and extend it to implement your own automation workflows. We’re looking forward to seeing what you get out of this, and we’re already thinking about what version 2.0 of the Network Automation Zero to Hero course will look like!
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Be sure to read the requirements in the Installation guide. Currently the workshop must be run on an internet accessible machine as we rely on the public IP for much of the functionality. We recommend a cloud VM for now and we are working on ways to make this easier to run over time.
If you’re new to NetBox you may also be interested in the popular NetBox Zero to Hero course by Rich Bibby: https://netboxlabs.com/zero-to-hero/
