Network Automation At Enterprise Scale With Python

Summary

Designing and maintaining enterprise networks and the associated hardware is a complex and time consuming task. Network automation tools allow network engineers to codify their workflows and make them repeatable. In this episode Antoine Fourmy describes his work on eNMS and how it can be used to automate enterprise grade networks. He explains how his background in telecom networking led him to build an open source platform for network engineers, how it is architected, and how you can use it for creating your own workflows. This is definitely worth listening to as a way to gain some appreciation for all of the work that goes on behind the scenes to make the internet possible.

Announcements

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• Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Antoine Fourmy about eNMS, an enterprise-grade vendor-agnostic network automation platform.

Interview

• Introductions
• How did you get introduced to Python?
• Can you start by explaining what eNMS is
• What was your motivation for creating it?
• Who are the target users of eNMS and how much background knowledge of network management is required to be effective with it?
• What are some of the alternative tools that exist in this space and why might a network operator choose to use eNMS in their place?
• What are some of the most challenging aspects of network creation and maintenance and how does eNMS assist with them?
• What are some of the mundane and/or error-prone tasks that can be replaced or automated with eNMS?
• What are some of the additional features that come into play for more complex networking tasks?
• Can you describe the system architecture of eNMS and how it has evolved since you first began working on it?
• eNMS is an impressive project that looks to have a substantial amount of polish. How large is the overall community of users and contributors?
  • For someone who wants to get involved in contributing to eNMS what are some of the types of skills and background that would be helpful?
• What are some of the most innovative/unexpected ways that you have seen eNMS used?
• When is eNMS the wrong choice?
• What do you have planned for the future of the project?

Keep In Touch

• Website
• LinkedIn
• afourmy on GitHub

Picks

• Tobias
  • Tedeschi Trucks Band
• Antoine
  • CheckIO
    • Podcast Episode

Closing Announcements

• Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, the Data Engineering Podcast for the latest on modern data management.
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Links

• eNMS
• Orange
• Netmiko
• NAPALM
  • Podcast Episode
• Paramiko
• Ansible
• Requests
• OpenNMS
• LibreNMS
• Ansible Tower
• Rundeck
• SaltStack
  • Podcast Episode
• StackStorm
  • Podcast Episode
• SaltStack Proxy Minions
• Hashicorp Vault
• VirtualBox
• Flask
• Django
• SQLAlchemy
• APScheduler
• Docker
  • Podcast Episode
• Redis
• Celery

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA