Anton Karneliuk

Author Archives: Anton Karneliuk

From Python to Go 003. Functions, External Modules, And Linux/MAC Environment.

Hello my friend,

We continue our journey in the realm of software development, or how some people call it programming. In the previous blog post we’ve introduced you to variables, which are the storage containers for your data. Today we’ll take a look into functions, which are next essential building of any application.

How Is Automation Important Today?

Interviewing people to various roles at high-profiles companies, I was sadly surprised that there is very low number of people who really understand network and IT infrastructure automation and are capable to write the Python code to do so. And I’m talking about companies, who are genuinely interested in good automation engineers. Don’t waste your chance, start learning network automation today:

We offer the following training programs in network automation for you:

During these trainings you will learn the following topics:

  • Success and failure strategies to build the automation tools.
  • Principles of software developments and the most useful and convenient tools.
  • Data encoding (free-text, XML, JSON, YAML, Protobuf).
  • Model-driven network automation with YANG, NETCONF, RESTCONF, GNMI.
  • Full Continue reading

From Python To Go 002. Basic Data Types (Numeric, Boolean, String) and Variables.

Hello my friend,

We continue our blog series about learning Go (Golang) as second programming language, which you can use for network and IT infrastructure automation. Today we’ll talk about the basic data types and variables both in Python and Go

How To Start Automating?

Any programming language, whether it is Python or Go (Golang), is a tool to implement your business logic. Whilst it is very important to be experienced with the tool, it is important also to understand the wide context of network automation, and this is where our trainings will kick start you:

We offer the following training programs in network automation for you:

During these trainings you will learn the following topics:

  • Success and failure strategies to build the automation tools.
  • Principles of software developments and the most useful and convenient tools.
  • Data encoding (free-text, XML, JSON, YAML, Protobuf).
  • Model-driven network automation with YANG, NETCONF, RESTCONF, GNMI.
  • Full configuration templating with Jinja2 based on the source of truth (NetBox).
  • Best programming languages (Python, Bash) for developing automation
  • The most rock-solid and Continue reading

From Python To Go 001. Get Started.

Dear friend,

As mentioned in previous blogpost, I’ve kicked the new series of blog posts related to Go (Golang programming language) and how to pick that up. Originally my idea was just to explain some concepts, pretty much I’ve done back in past with Code eXpress (CEX) for Python. But then I’ve thought through it further and decided to write a side-by-side guide with Python and Go together, exactly as I’ve done before with multi vendor network automation, when started writing about Nokia SR OS and Cisco IOS XR back in 2016.

Do I Need Both Python And Go?

In our opinion, yes, you do need both. Each of these programming languages shines in some areas more than another. And both of them are applicable to network and infrastructure automation. As such, we recommend to study both, but to start with Python as it is easier and at this stage is wider used than Go. So we encourage you to start with our Network Automation Trainings:

We offer the following training programs in network automation for you:

Go as another automation language 000. The Beginning.

Dear friend,

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged for the last time. Probably it was too long since I’ve blogged. But, here I am back, with some new ideas and fresh perspectives. One of the key new idea is usage of Go, which I’m actively picking up now. And just shortly I will tell you why.

Do You Still Use Python?

We absolutely do. In fact, we not only using it, but also teaching it from the perspective of network automation. In our flagship training Zero-to-Hero Network Automation Training we guide you the whole way from having little to no theoretical knowledge and practical skills to a good level of developing automation software with Python. Python is at heart of many purpose-built network (and not only) automation systems, such as NetBox, StackStorm and many others. It’s ecosystem is vast and there are no signs of it slowing down. Therefore, getting good exposure to Python from Network Automation perspective is a good step to increase your own value and secure your job place looking forward. To be brutally honest, any network engineering role nowadays requires Python and/or Ansible knowledge, so don’t pass by.

Here is what we have to offer Continue reading

C 001. Intro into the IPv4/IPv6 Application Support from the Software/System Point of View.

Dear friend,

Being a long-time network engineer, I’ve seen (and done) it all: talking about about IPv6, designing and implementing IPv6 in production service providers and data center networks, holly wars IPv6 vs IPv4, industries saying they aren’t going to use IPv6 ever, and many others. For some network engineers, it could be even quite an “innovation” project (I clearly remember some senior person told me back in 2018 that introduction of IPv6 is an innovation; quite a statement in the 20-years anniversary of IPv6). But today I want to talk about it from a different angle.

How Is Network Relevant for Software?

In many cases every day we rely on the software, which works over Internet: whatever you need to buy or sell some goods, order a table in your favorite cafe, book ticket to train to visit your friends. Connected world is around us and, if for whatever reason it breaks, our life immediately becomes much more difficult. That’s because the applications rely on the Internet and their capability to provide you the service depends on their capabilities to connect from your smartphone or laptop to the application servers. And this capability is significantly affected by Continue reading

Kubernetes 005. Overview of MicroK8s from Canonical (Ubuntu-folks).

Dear friend,

This year I had a pleasure and privilege to attend KubeCon Europe 2023 and this was the first time I’ve heard about MicroK8s. That sounded interesting and I decided I shall experiment with it and write a blogpost; but it didn’t catch my attention to a degree that I put it on top of my list; instead, I’ve put it to back burner. The last week I was talking to a colleagues of mine, who told me that he needs to test something in his production Kubernetes at home. I was quite interested, what does the one mean by “production Kubernetes cluster at home” and it appeared to be MikroK8s. At this stage I though, I don’t have any more excuses, so I just should sit and write it.

Is Kubernetes Used in Network Automation?

It is, indeed. The last week when we posted a blog about starting programming in C we got an interesting discussion in LinkedIn about Go vs Python with one right-honorable gentleman, who rightfully suggested that one of the main weaknesses of Python is that it requires to install dependencies on the host before you can use application. However, to be brutally honest, many Continue reading

C. Part 00. How I have appeared here after many years in Python?

Hello my friend,

It has been a long, very long break in posting. In fact, it was almost for half a year, which are not proud of in any capacity. However, this was needed to allow my to accomplish a few things in my own study and get back even more loaded, so that I can share more useful information and insights about networking, computing, software development and IT in general.

So, Have You Stopped Doing Automation?

We have absolutely not. In fact, developing software for distributes systems, which requires network connectivity between their components, I see how critical is to have the entire IT infrastructure (including networking) to have done right. By “done right” I mean the IT/network infrastructure, which is stable, predictable and deterministic. And in the fast pace environment, where you scale your infrastructure quick up and down (we are not talking about Kubernetes here), the network automation is the only way to achieve this level of precision and sustainability. So, my dudes, network automation is THE ONLY way how the network can be operated in now and in future. Your software development/business teams will be happy if you do things in your network automated way, I Continue reading

Automation 22. How to Use NetBox Scripts To Add Value To Your Network Source of Truth

Dear friend,

Source of Truth plays crucial role in network automation as this is the basis we are automating our IT and network infrastructure against. It doesn’t mean to be monitoring system in any capacity. At the same time, it may be useful to quickly do some checks against your network infrastructure and to update some metadata in the Source of Truth.

Oh, Are You Talking About NetBox Again?

Yes, we are. NetBox is a leading tool in the source of truth framework. Being open-source, it by far outpaces all other open-source and commercial tools existing worldwide in this area. On top of its wide built-in capabilities, it is highly extensible via plugins and scripts.

The good news is that we covered NetBox in our Zero-to-Hero Network Automation Training, and you can benefit from learning it from the context of network automation with integrations to Python and Ansible tools, which you create during our training.

We offer the following training programs for you:

During these trainings you will learn the following topics:

DDoS Protection 1. Collecting and Visualizing NetFlow Data from Nokia SR OS using FastNetMon (FNM).

Dear friend,

It wouldn’t be an overestimation to say that in the modern world the availability of service online plays one of the key role for success of any business: we buy, sell and use goods and services via Internet from various private and public companies as well as governmental bodies. As such, if services are not unavailable online, we, as consumers, cannot get what we need and suppliers cannot provide use the service (and, therefore, cannot make some money). That’s why the information security in general, and protection of service online becomes the hot topic these days.

Can Network Security Be Automated?

Absolutely it can be. Ensuring that configuration of network devices and online services are in-line with the security hardening blueprints is one of the most straightforward automation use cases, which provides significant value by ensuring that the amount of attack vectors is reduced and is limited to the set of services, which are really needed. Besides that, we have the whole range of vulnerability scanning, software upgrade, etc.

And for all these, and other network security automation activities, we are using the same set of tools as for “ordinary network automation”. Therefore, come and learn with us:

Continue reading

Automation 21. Interactive Python with Jupyter Notebooks to Collect Data from Network Devices with pyGNMI and Process with Pandas

Dear friend,

Today’s topic will be an unusual one. We will talk about some (of course) Python-related technology, which despite its existence for quite a while already, we have been always somewhat avoiding. It always seemed for me that Jupyter is not a right thing for network automation, especially when we talk proper software development, not simple scripts. I still stand this ground; however, I see now where Jupyter can be quite useful.

Is There Any Limit in Network Automation Tools?

Well. The truth is that there is no limit. In vast majority of cases, tools used in Network Automation are either ones coming from DevOps or from Software Development. Both of these areas are massive and are ever growing, what ultimately means that amount of tools for network automation is growing as well. Some of these tools are more suitable for network automation, some are less: it is possible to assess if the particular one is suitable for network automation only if you test , which is time consuming.

The good news is that we already created a selection of great network automation tools and technologies for you. We have carefully tested and put them together, so that you Continue reading

Tools 12. Using Prometheus with SNMP Exporter to Monitor Cisco IOS XR, Nokia SR OS and Arista EOS Network Devices

Dear friend,

Awareness of what is happening in your IT infrastructure (in our case, in network) is a key success or failure factor of any modern business, as huge majority of businesses are now running online. The awareness is built on top of visibility of network events and activities happening in the network, which in their turn reflects in data points, which can be collected. In this blogpost we’ll cover how these data points can be collected in multi vendor network running Cisco IOS XR, Nokia SR OS and Arista EOS switches using Prometheus, which is one of the most popular monitoring platforms these days.



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No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a 

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 

means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

Is Monitoring Needed for Network Automation?

The ultimate state of any system, including the IT/network is self-managed (self-healed, self-controlled, etc). It is simply impossible to build any self-controlled system without monitoring and collection of the data, as this data collection in the self-controlled system is the only (as we remove people Continue reading

Automation 20. GNMI to Spreadsheet via Pandas or Intro to Data Analysis in Network Automation

Dear friend,

We all like spreadsheets, as this is an easy and intuitive way of representing data for us, humans. The possibility to analyze data with spreadsheets are endless, starting from simple aggregation till complicated pivots are endless. Even the people who say that they don’t like spreadsheets, use them so often. Network automation, for sure, is not an exclusion here. 



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No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a 

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 

means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

Are Spreadsheets Valid In Automation Era?

They absolutely are. We haven’t seen so far any non-IT person, or even IT high-profile engineer or manager, which won’t like spreadsheets. To put it simple, spreadsheets can be an easy way to represent data collected from network devices; likewise, it can be a good way to provide some input, either as inventory or as configuration details for your network automation intent. So the questions becomes, provided you can read data from your spreadsheet in a programmatic way, what would you do with it?

The good news is that Continue reading

Automation 19. Enabling OCP SONiC To Be Managed Via GNMI With pyGNMI

Dear friend,

We hope you are doing great and had a nice time over the festive period to recharge your batteries towards the new year. We wish it to be successful, productive and prosperous. With this, let’s dive into the topic of today’s blog, which is network automation for OCP SONiC with GNMI and Python over pyGNMI.



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No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a 

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 

means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

Do I Need to Automate SONiC? How Can I Do It?

SONiC, which stands for Software for Open Networking in the Cloud, is a Network Operating System (NOS). SONiC’s main purpose is to run on the data center switches and provide simple and reliable connectivity between endpoints (Baremetal servers, virtual machines, containers, etc). As it is a piece of the network software, which runs on network hardware, it is for sure requires automation.

The good news is that it supports RESTCONF and GNMI with OpenConfig YANG modules, which we extensively cover in our Network Automation Trainings:

We offer the Continue reading

Kubernetes 004. Real-world Example of Deploying Kubernetes at Azure Kubernetes Services with Terrafom

Hello my friend,

In one of the past blogposts we have highlighted the journey for automation for engineers, who is willing to develop further outside of their core remit, such as networking, compute, or storage. In today’s blogpost we’ll provide some of examples how the different moving pieces are coming along together.



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No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a 

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 

means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

Do I Need to Learn Network Automation?

Yes, you do. Start today with our Network Automation Training programs:

We offer the following training programs for you:

During these trainings you will learn the following topics:

  • Success and failure strategies to build the automation tools.
  • Principles of software developments and the most useful and convenient tools.
  • Data encoding (free-text, XML, JSON, YAML, Protobuf).
  • Model-driven network automation with YANG, NETCONF, RESTCONF, GNMI.
  • Full configuration templating with Jinja2 based on the source Continue reading

Tips For Network Engineers Willing to Transit to Network Automation

Hello my friend,

quite often we are getting questions from various folks on LinkedIn or via private consultations about how start with network automation and, more importantly, whether to start with network automation at all. With this blogpost we’ll try to answer the most popular question.



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No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a 

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 

means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

What to Do If You Already Want to Start?

The answer is simple: don’t wait. The amount of things you need to learn in order to succeed is huge and growing daily with new tools and platforms released. However, the good news is that we we provide you everything you need to start successfully in the role:

We offer the following training programs for you:

During these trainings you will learn the following topics:

  • Success and failure strategies to build the automation tools.
  • Principles of Continue reading

Automation 18. LibreNMS to NetBox Sync for Brownfield Automation Deployment

Dear friend,

Today we’ll look into a question, which is raising quite often on various meetups related to network automation or various threads that is the addition of any automation components (say, NetBox) to the existing networking managing suit, where you already have some inventory (say, LibreNMS). We’ll take a look into multiple approaches and, as usual, will share some code snippets how you can do that.



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No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a 

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 

means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

What Is Integration Between Different Automation Tools?

Integrating different automation tools is typically the most labor-intensive work, as it requires understanding of the tools you are integrating, their internal hierarchy and APIs capabilities. That is not even saying that you shall be proficient with a variety of technologies, such as REST API or GRPC API, JSON/Protobuf/XML, Postman and many other tools. That’s a lot, and may be not easy to start with.

The good news is that all these things you can learn at out Network Automation Training programs:

Continue reading

Automation 17. Using Operational Commands via NETCONF at Nokia SR OS in Sequential Mode

Dear friend,

After a bit of break caused by preparation to Kubernetes exams (we will continue blogs about Kubernetes as well) we are getting back to network and network automation topics. One of the interesting things, which is gradually emerging these days, is the possibility to manage multiple aspects of network devices (not only configuration or collection of operational data), such us issuing ping/traceroute checks, copying file, etc in a model-drive way (i.e., NETCONF, RESTCONF, GNMI with YANG). Today we are going to look into such a topic.



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No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a 

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 

means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

Is that About Model-Driven Automation?

It is exactly that. NETCONF/YANG all the things, my friend! Usage of model-driven network automation significantly improves the stability and manageability of the network due to much simpler way to perform all the operations remotely. You don’t need to scrape and parse CLI anymore; instead, you interact with network devices via programmable API, what makes it possible to integrate them Continue reading

Kubernetes 003. Developing and Publishing Cloud-Native Application: Overview of Key Kubernetes Primitives

Hello my friend,

It took a bit since our previous blogpost about the setup of the highly-available Kubernetes cluster with multiple control plane and worker nodes. We aimed to write the blogpost about the upgrade, but we will park it for now for two reasons:

  • Despite this topic is needed for the exam, it is not very often performed within the cluster.
  • We want to provide a broader overview of Kubernetes from the perspective of building and using applications on top of it.

Therefore, we decided to walk you through the main components used to build and publish your application in a cloud native way on Kubernetes. Let’s dive into that.



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No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a 

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 

means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

Can Kubernetes Help to Automate Networks?

These days there are interesting projects emerging with Kubernetes acting as a management plane for network devices. Kubernetes in such projects has a role of the entity, which distributes configuration to the worker nodes, which are either proxies for Continue reading

Kubernetes 002. Scaling Out Cluster and Turning It in Highly Available One

Hello my friend,

As mentioned in the previous blogpost, we continue looking into Kubernetes. In the previous blogpost we have built a simple cluster consisting of one control plane node, which is the one ruling the cluster, and two worker nodes, which are the ones hosting the customers’ workloads. Today we will add a few more nodes, both workers and control plane, to the cluster to convert it into a high available one.



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No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a 

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 

means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

Are You Still Teaching Network Automation?

We absolutely are. One of the important things we have figured out is that automation is for sure the cross-platform technology. Therefore, whatever area you are coming from or heading two (networking, system administration, or cloud engineering), knowledge of automation frameworks and components, such as Ansible, Bash, Python, YAML, JSON, REST API, GRPC/GNMI is very beneficial and, in fact, is almost mandatory these days.

And in our Network Automation Trainings we have put it together in Continue reading

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