Network Automation At Enterprise Scale With Python

Summary Designing and maintaining enterprise networks and the associated hardware is a complex and time consuming task. Network automation tools allow network engineers to codify their workflows and make them repeatable. In this episode Antoine Fourmy describes his work on eNMS and how it can be used to automate enterprise grade networks. He explains how his background in telecom networking led him to build an open source platform for network engineers, how it is architected, and how you can use it for creating your own workflows. This is definitely worth listening to as a way to gain some appreciation for all of the work that goes on behind the scenes to make the internet possible. Announcements Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. When you’re ready to launch your next app or want to try a project you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so take a look at our friends over at Linode. With 200 Gbit/s private networking, scalable shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40 Gbit/s public network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to scale up. And for your tasks that need fast computation, such as training machine learning models, they just launched dedicated CPU instances. Go to pythonpodcast.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with the ways that Python is being used, including the latest in machine learning and data analysis. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, Corinium Global Intelligence, Alluxio, and Data Council. Upcoming events include the combined events of the Data Architecture Summit and Graphorum, the Data Orchestration Summit, and Data Council in NYC. Go to pythonpodcast.com/conferences to learn more about these and other events, and take advantage of our partner discounts to save money when you register today. Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Antoine Fourmy about eNMS, an enterprise-grade vendor-agnostic network automation platform. Interview Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? Can you start by explaining what eNMS is What was your motivation for creating it? Who are the target users of eNMS and how much background knowledge of network management is required to be effective with it? What are some of the alternative tools that exist in this space and why might a network operator choose to use eNMS in their place? What are some of the most challenging aspects of network creation and maintenance and how does eNMS assist with them? What are some of the mundane and/or error-prone tasks that can be replaced or automated with eNMS? What are some of the additional features that come into play for more complex networking tasks? Can you describe the system architecture of eNMS and how it has evolved since you first began working on it? eNMS is an impressive project that looks to have a substantial amount of polish. How large is the overall community of users and contributors? For someone who wants to get involved in contributing to eNMS what are some of the types of skills and background that would be helpful? What are some of the most innovative/unexpected ways that you have seen eNMS used? When is eNMS the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of the project? Keep In Touch Website LinkedIn afourmy on GitHub Picks Tobias Tedeschi Trucks Band Antoine CheckIO Podcast Episode Closing Announcements Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other show, the Data Engineering Podcast for the latest on modern data management. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you’ve learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email hosts@podcastinit.com) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes and tell your friends and co-workers Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at pythonpodcast.com/chat Links eNMS Orange Netmiko NAPALM Podcast Episode Paramiko Ansible Requests OpenNMS LibreNMS Ansible Tower Rundeck SaltStack Podcast Episode StackStorm Podcast Episode SaltStack Proxy Minions Hashicorp Vault VirtualBox Flask Django SQLAlchemy APScheduler Docker Podcast Episode Redis Celery The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA