Whenever you hear about someone using network automation in a production network it’s usually a startup or large web property (Netflix, Spotify, Twitter, Facebook, and so on). While some ISPs used automatic service deployment for decades, it seems nothing’s going on in the enterprise networks. This 2-day Hands-On Network Automation (HNA) with Ivan Pepelnjak workshop will show you how wrong that notion is.
We’ll start with easy tasks like generating network device configurations using Ansible instead of Excel spreadsheets, and you’ll see that you don’t have to be a programmer or speak fluent Python to get the job done.
We’ll also explore what the vendors already offer us: most of the data center vendors provide Puppet or Chef agents on their boxes, and you can use them to solve one of the most mundane networking challenges: configuring VLANs on server-facing ports.
Moving to slightly trickier topics, we’ll discuss collecting network configurations with RANCID, storing them in Git, and automating the deployment of our configurations while still retaining full control and sanity checks with tools like Gerrit and Jenkins.
Finally, we’ll tackle a troubleshooting challenge: find a device with known MAC address hiding somewhere within a large network.

The workshop was developed by Ivan Pepelnjak
Ivan Pepelnjak (CCIE#1354 Emeritus) has been analyzing OpenFlow technology and SDN ideas (and being pretty vocal about their shortcomings) since March 2011, resulting in a number of high-impact events, including chairing the technical roundtable of first-ever OpenFlow symposium in Silicon Valley in September 2011, various presentations and workshops at Interop, Troopers, RIPE and other regional ISP meetings, on-site SDN workshops for large enterprises and Cisco Clouds, and vendor-sponsored webinars for NEC (describing their ProgrammableFlow solutions and SDN/OpenFlow in general), VMware (the first technical webinar describing VMware NSX after its launch in August 2013) and Nuage Networks (scalability challenges of overlay virtual networks).
Ivan is the author of several SDN-related books, highly praised webinars, and dozens of OpenFlow and SDN-related technical articles published on his blog.