Network Programmability and Automation, 2nd Edition

Chapter 14. Network Automation Architecture

This book has covered and introduced many concepts, technologies, and tools for network automation. However, there is a big leap from learning a new technology or concept to stitching them together to create a plan that can be used to drive enterprise adoption of network automation. This chapter aims to give you a comprehensive strategy to start building network automation solutions, including the ones described in Chapter 2.

It is common to build network automation solutions to address an specific domain (e.g., Campus, Data Center, Security, and Cloud), but this isolation adds complexity and doesn’t help in breaking down silos and reusing automation among teams. To mitigate this, we dare to propose a network automation architecture to help you organize the tasks to be automated in an easy-to-understand and easy-to-apply way. This architecture will provide you with a structured view to ease the definition of requirements and dependencies, which will lead to better decisions when choosing how to design and implement each task that will be automated by the network automation solution with a holistic approach.

This chapter starts by presenting a structured approach to a network automation architecture, followed by a deep dive into each component within this architecture. Finally, an example of how to apply this methodology in a real use case will show you how you can leverage it.

Note

In this chapter, you will find many references to other ...