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AUTOMATION STRATEGY


HOW NETDEVOPS TEAMS CAN INTEGRATE NETWORK AUTOMATIONS WITH THEIR ENTIRE IT
ECOSYSTEM

TYLER LOCHAN

Technical Content Specialist ‐ Itential



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Posted on July 6, 2023

Integrations are the building blocks of network automation success.

Think about your organization’s network and cloud infrastructure. You have
multiple network domains, different systems like IPAM and monitoring, devices
and controllers and cloud-based services from a variety of different vendors. To
automate effectively, you need to be able to integrate with all of it.

But many network and cloud automation solutions out there limit your options.
You might have a network automation platform where the vendor charges you per
integration because they’re building each one from scratch. Or you could be in a
situation where all the responsibility for building and maintaining integrations
falls entirely on your organization. In these kinds of scenarios, attaining
access to integrations will cost you and your organization time, money, or both.

All these barriers make network processes less efficient, and they can influence
network leaders away from adopting useful technologies because of the cost of
building out the required integrations. Itential’s integrate-with-anything
approach offers another way. Our software leverages modern API standards and
JSON to provide powerful auto-generation capabilities so you can instantly
integrate with your systems (for free!). And you can also onboard all of your
CLI or other automation assets like Ansible Playbooks and Terraform Plans and
attach APIs to them, allowing you to leverage them in larger automation
workflows.

At the most recent Networking Field Day (NFD) event earlier this year, Rich
Martin, our Director of Technical Marketing and a network engineer for over 25
years, gave a presentation and demo that detailed how integrating network
automations with your IT infrastructure for both NetOps teams and DevOps teams
makes end-to-end automation possible. With Itential’s robust integration
capabilities, both sets of teams are able to take the best toolsets, methods,
and skillsets from each other and move toward the more effective NetDevOps
approach.



You can find the full presentation here, or keep reading to get an overview and
some key takeaways.


Integrating with API-Based Systems

Today, most tools and systems that organizations adopt for their networks
provide publicly accessible APIs, and more and more of those use the
Swagger/OpenAPI specification. That’s a level of standardized connectivity that
was unheard of in networking until recently, and it’s an opportunity for network
teams to evolve. Itential is built for this API-driven ecosystem, providing new
options for both NetOps and DevOps teams to automate.

Itential’s Solution:

Itential users can leverage the Itential Adapter Builder to auto-generate a
connection based on API documentation. Any system that provides API
documentation in the Swagger/OpenAPI specification or a Postman collection can
be used to auto-generate an integration which allows the system to be
incorporated into an end-to-end change process workflow.

For systems that do not provide standardized API documentation, the Adapter
Builder also provides a way to build integrations using form-based inputs, so
there’s still no code involved. And on top of that, Itential publishes an open
source collection of Pre-Built Integrations here, which you can use for many
systems that have non-standard APIs, or just to speed things up while you’re
building automations. Using Itential, you can seamlessly orchestrate workflows
across every API-based system your organization uses.

Example API Resources For NetOps Teams:

 * Data center controllers, SD-WAN controllers.
 * IT systems such as IPAM, ITSM/CMDB.

Example API Resources For DevOps Teams:

 * Cloud environments: AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and others.
 * Key tooling like GitHub or BitBucket.

Itential provides a unified way for teams to build automations that incorporate
any changes, inputs, or outputs from API-enabled network and IT systems, giving
network teams the tools to make the most of the modern networking environment.


Onboarding Non-API Resources (CLI, SSH, NETCONF, GNMI, etc.)

While charging ahead to fit an API-first world is all well and good, there’s the
other half of things to consider: tooling and assets that are based in CLI, SSH,
NETCONF, GNMI, or similar. For example, many network teams today build
automation scripts for individual tasks using Python or Ansible, and many cloud
teams use tooling like Terraform and Azure DevOps for the same. It’s important
to be able to leverage these kinds of assets in your larger workflows to get the
most out of automation.

Itential’s Solution:

A standalone application called Itential Automation Gateway provides all of the
different sets of capabilities needed for onboarding script-based assets,
attaching APIs to them, and normalizing them for use in a drag-and-drop
workflow. This application allows teams to continue using the automation tooling
they are familiar with, even after taking a platform approach to network
automation. Further, it extends the value and lifespan of each script or similar
asset. What had previously been built for one task, by one user, is now
presented in an organization-wide directory for reuse in future workflows, so
that there isn’t any repeated work if a certain task must be executed across
multiple workflows. Or, put in simpler terms: NetOps and DevOps teams alike can
stop repeating the same work over and over.

Example Non-API Resources For NetOps Teams:

 * Python scripts, Ansible Playbooks.
 * Custom or vendor-specific command-line tooling for network systems.

Example Non-API Resources For DevOps Teams:

 * Terraform Plans.
 * Java, JavaScript, and other programs.

These scripts or similar assets are useful, but they are also limited — alone,
they can only take you so far, and one person’s script might never leave their
machine. The ability to plug these assets into larger workflows solves a couple
problems. It helps users share and reuse what is being built, allows
practitioners to continue using tooling they’re comfortable with, and provides
the ability to automate CLI and API resources right alongside each other. Let’s
get into what that means for you.

Putting it All Together: Leveraging Normalized Assets to Build Automations

By putting all the pieces together, you get a network automation platform that
serves as your central hub for all network and cloud infrastructure, plus the IT
systems that they need to connect with. Instead of automating single tasks and
swivel-chairing to external systems to make manual changes, you can orchestrate
an entire change process end-to-end, whether it would require zero integrations
or a hundred.

The big word here is flexibility. Flexibility from a technology standpoint and
from a business standpoint. On the tech side, you have the flexibility to always
choose the right tool for the right job, adopting technology to fit network and
cloud needs without hesitating due to custom or slow integration work. On the
business side, you get to free yourself from vendor lock-in. An automation
platform that integrates with everything lets you adopt new vendors with ease,
retool your infrastructure to accommodate new vendors, and even use different
vendors for similar purposes across different locations, use cases, or
otherwise.

Then, looking ahead, a robust approach to integrations is how organizations get
to the point where they achieve zero-touch automation. Itential’s integration
model makes network automation easier for everyone — both the practitioner and
the end user, across both NetOps and DevOps teams.

Learn more about how this works in Rich’s on-demand session from NFD here.



Tags: Infrastructure as Code   NetDevOps

TYLER LOCHAN

Technical Content Specialist ‐ Itential

Tyler Lochan is a Technical Content Specialist at Itential. Tyler is a Georgia
Tech grad who began his career as a technology consultant in financial services.
He has a passion for bringing his technical expertise together with writing, and
he focuses on creating content to support our customers as they navigate their
network automation journeys.

More from Tyler Lochan

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