Python Network Automation Training changes today!

Key Takeaways

i'm really hoping that what i'm going to share today is going to change your life i'm really hoping that what i'm going to share is going to inspire you to show you what's possible with network automation and network programmability but also get you motivated to learn to code using python [Music] i'm really excited to announce that i'm collaborating with chuck black and have been for a long time now on the development of a software product that you can have access to for free but also have access to 52 weeks of python training for free chuck black in my opinion is one of the best people to teach all of us how to use python for network automation and network programmability time really does fly i uploaded my first python for network engineers with gns3 video in april 2017. so i've been training network automation network programmability for quite a long time now but things have moved on since those days and i want to show you that that is very basic network automation i've seen a lot of other examples on the internet of network automation and network programmability but in a lot of cases i find that it's a network engineer learning coding and then teaching other network engineers coding in other words they are approaching the programming piece from a network engineer's perspective that's what i did and i think that's very valid but to take this to the next level i've joined forces once again with chuck black who's a software developer with networking knowledge he worked for hp for many years developing network monitoring software he's got 12 patents chuck doesn't like me to boast about him let me just say chuck is an amazing guy an amazing developer amazing architect has many many years of experience and he's going to teach us how to become a software developer or programmer or coder whichever term you prefer he's taking all his knowledge of software development software architecture and he's going to teach us for free in his 52 weeks of python course how to create software like the quaker software so rather than just doing basic scripting or making the mistakes that we shouldn't make as new coders he's going to teach us how to code properly how to think like a programmer so he is taking his programming knowledge and applying it to a networking context chuck has done this for many many years he has written software once again for hp he's developed code for huge financial institutions names that you will recognize other networking vendors which i won't mention here chuck is in my opinion one of the best people in the world to teach us this stuff because he knows programming but he's also worked in a networking environment and worked with software-defined networking and all the buzzwords of the last few years i met chuck at hp over five years ago when he was developing a sdn course for programmers and i was developing an sdn course for network engineers and we've kind of combined our knowledge and our experience i coming from the networking side he coming from the programming side and we've created well he's done all the work he's created this product called quacker based on things that i would like to see so as a network engineer have told him chuck it'd be fantastic to have this feature and then he's added a whole bunch of features to the quacker software now what's really amazing is chuck is doing all of this for free you have free access to the software you can use the links below this video to download a virtual machine that has this pre-built you can download the code from github chuck is giving back with a hope that he can change many of your lives i won't have time to go through all the features of this software in this video i just want to show you some of the features that are available some of the cool things that this software can do but i can tell you this he's working on some really exciting new features to the software what chuck's done here is connect to various cisco devnet sandboxes so that you don't have to have a network device available so by default this will connect to some cisco devnet sandboxes and he's also written his own sd-wan virtual devices so you can see the vendor operating system here is talaq chuck spent a long time developing software with talaq for big financial institutions and big networking vendors i can't mention the names here but you'll know them if i mention the names but he's done this because one of the problems people have is when they want to write software to interact with network devices they might not have network devices so we've got some cisco sandboxes and we've got some to lack virtual devices let me show you some of the features that i really like about this software which you will learn to code if you go through chuck's python course so let's do a trace route to this cisco csr sandbox hostname is this ip address is this click on trace route to the device after a few seconds you'll see something like this now obviously your trace route to that device will be different to mine this is a switch in my internal network this is my internet router i'm connecting to british telecom so you can see autonomous system 2856 bt public internet service goes through a few routers and then it goes to the bt global networks autonomous system so this is basically showing you all the hops across the internet to get to the cisco sandbox it goes via reach goes via gtt and then it arrives in the cisco autonomous system autonomous system 109 goes through a bunch of routers and then hits this device 64 103 37 51 which is the cisco csr router so this software has once again been populated with various cisco sandboxes let's go to this nexus device but you could add your own devices to the software and you could do trace routes to any device that you want to so once again i'm going to a cisco switch to my internet router i'm going via bt the bt global network other isps and then i arrive in the cisco autonomous system and go through a bunch of devices okay so that's one basic component to the software traceroute you can once again add your own devices by opening up this yaml file and adding devices okay so let's have a look at a configuration diff click on this little icon and i can see that these lines of code were added since the last configuration backup i can see the full configuration of the device if i want to so there are 83 lines of code here but none of that code is changed scrolling up here i can expand 266 lines of code none of that code has been changed but this code has been added since the last configuration backup let's have a look at another device so let's have a look at this nexus device so we can see here that the running configuration has been changed we can see that some loopback interfaces were created and if i expand this this is the code that hasn't been changed this is happening in real time people are configuring the cisco sandboxes and this software is continuously sshing to the cisco sandboxes and pulling back configurations you can change that interval if you want to so if any configuration changes have been made to the cisco sandboxes you'd be able to see that but the same is true for any device you can add your own devices once again to the software as an example here is my cisco switch running cisco ios quaker also gives you device status information as an example we can see that this device is currently offline let's have a look at the nexus device so display device status i can see response time cpu utilization availability memory utilization of that device i can look at the facts of the device you can see what type of device it is i can pull back a configuration of the device in real time the software is pulling back configurations of the devices on a regular interval and then showing a diff of the device configurations but this actually connects to the device and pulls back a configuration in real time so there is the configuration of the cisco nexus device running in the cisco sandboxes so on the csr sandbox let's have a look at the op table of the device okay this may take a while to display but there's the op table on the device let's have a look at counters that also may take a while to display but there you go it's pulled back the receive and transmit octets and packets on that device this is happening in real time again chuck is going to teach you how to write code to do this let's have a look at services this is any website as an example that you want to monitor so you could monitor a website using https you could check if the dns resolution works you could monitor using ntp as an example so here i've got two websites courses.davidbomble.com and davidbomble.com so let's do a trace route firstly to courses.davidbomble.com and see if there's a difference between the trace to that website and the main davidbomble.com website so as you can see here i hit my local switch my internet router i go through the bt autonomous system and then i hit cloudflare so that website is being hosted in cloudflare but the main davidbomble.com website is not so if i do a traceroute to www.davidbombl.com you can see that i hit my switch internet router go through bt and then i end up in the one-on-one internet autonomous system this website is hosted by one-on-one which is a web hosting company based in germany but has a big presence in the uk so you can see that this website is hosted by a different company to the courses.davidbomble.com website so you can see visually all the hops to get to that website you can see the autonomous systems that you go through but what this does is it allows you to monitor the availability of a website so if i click here i can see the response time of that website i can see the availability and this will just keep on refreshing you can set a lot of these intervals but notice i can do that for various websites to see if they're up or down you can see that i lost connectivity to the bbc website on tuesday the 27th going to google let's have a look at google you can see same thing happened and that's probably because i shut this virtual machine down and it wasn't running continuously now chuck and i are working on making the software even better so one of the things that are coming in a later release is the idea of having a central node which controls worker nodes that means that you can do trace routes from devices all over the place so you can create these worker nodes in different parts of your network and do traces to various websites from those worker nodes and also check availability from those worker nodes and see all that information on the main quakka device what the software also allows you to do is to discover devices in a subnet this is the local subnet what i can do as an example is filter for a device and then scan for open ports on that device so these are the well-known port numbers so we can do what's called a standard port scan of well-known port numbers and then we can do an extended port scan and i think something a lot of people will like is the fact that we can capture packets to a device so what i'll do is start a capture refresh any packets to that device and you can see a lot of traffic is going to that device at the moment because that's a default gateway if i ping that device and then refresh the packets you can see icmp packets here and then i can actually view the information of the captured packet so as an example there's icmp once again here's an ssh connection but the idea is is that quacker can capture packets sent to the device but what makes this really exciting is in a later release which hopefully will be released very soon we have a distributed model where we have worker nodes that you can place all over your network and you can run a capture on that remote device so i could place a worker node which is basically a virtual machine in a remote site and then tell qocket to capture packets on that worker node and then i can view that information on the central device or the central monitoring station so rather than just capturing packets on this local vm and only having visibility of the local subnet you could put worker nodes all over your network and then get them to capture the packets and then forward that information to the central monitoring station now really important chuck wants me to emphasize this this isn't a commercial product this is licensed under the mit license which means you can do anything with us you can create your own versions of the software chuck has created this to inspire you so that he can teach you what's possible with python so he's going to show you in the course how to create a whole bunch of this stuff but we believe that it's important that you see what's possible what you could create yourself so not only have we created this product which you can download and run in your networks if you want to but obviously with the mit license at your own risk but you'll also learn how to create this yourself now there's a whole bunch of other parts to the software chuck and i are continuously thinking of new ideas please join my discord if you want to give feedback and have questions about the software please put your comments below this video and let us know what you would like to see added to the software the main goal here is to inspire you and teach you how to create software yourself [Music] you