Meraki APIs for Beginners

The difference between a good code project and a great code project is often the quality of the peripheral components. Topics like documentation, regression testing, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), and runtime error checking tend to be forgotten once the program functions correctly. I've discussed my "narc" tool in the past which uses Nornir and Netmiko to test the efficacy of Cisco ASA firewall rulesets. That session "Is Your ASA Really Doing What You Expect" focused on the functional Python code to accomplish the program's purpose. This session will focus on everything we skipped last time, including design tips on how to test your own code projects.

Sure, you've figured out how to up your game in network configuration, but what are you doing to modernize your network monitoring and logging? I bet you're still stuck in the stone age, stockpiling syslog like a dragon hordes gold, hoping you never need to look through it to find that particular gem of good information. Join Hank on his quest through the Mines of Local7 guided by the Wise Wizard of ELK, George Kobar!

Who would have thought IP Address Management would be one of the hottest topics in network automation? If anyone did, it was Jeremy Stretch. You'll have to pardon Hank if he's a bit star struck on this one, because not only is Jeremy leading the team behind NetBox, he's also the creator of the networking cheat sheets that have helped many of us learn networking fundamentals. Whether you've been using NetBox for years, or never heard of it before, you'll want to join this episode to learn why Source of Truth MUST be a key to your network automation strategy.

Cisco DNA Center provides a fully comprehensive software solution to managing enterprise networks and the devices that comprise them. Built with an “API first” ethos, Cisco DNA Center API offers the ability to build solutions with “intent” and “assurance”, making it a fitting compliment to a variety of networking Day 0 through Day 2 needs. In this session, learn how to implement Cisco DNAC APIs to provision enterprise wireless networks as part of a multi-domain solution.

Postman has been a supporting character in so many network automation lessons and presentations, but today it's the star of the show. Network engineers world-wide are leveraging REST APIs to communicate with devices, controllers, management systems, and other applications. Postman can be your cockpit for exploring, storing, sharing, and manipulating these APIs. Join Hank and Kevin from Postman to learn how to become supercharge your REST API skillz!

Interconnecting devices is ultimately designed to allow for access to resources that can actually “do something”, e.g. the compute portion of a network. Provisioning and managing these devices and their connectivity is key to an end-to-end solution. Cisco UCS and Cisco ACI allow an organization to fully manage their data center resources. With extensive API support, these platforms can be integrated into a variety of solutions. In this session, we will be introduced to how both platforms can be integrated together as part of a multi-domain solution in Cisco Action Orchestrator.

I've no doubt you've heard of their tools, and likely you've heard the name HashiCorp. But did you know that the company behind Terraform, Vagrant, Consul, Vault, and so many other foundations of cloud-native development can also help NetDevOps teams modernize their tooling? In this episode, Hank brings previous NetDevOps Live! presenter Kevin Corbin to share what he's been up to since joining HashiCorp's network automation team!

Meraki, Cisco’s fully cloud managed network infrastructure, fits a variety of use cases from small business to enterprise networks. Backed by a robust API, Meraki is easily integrated with other platforms to create multi-functional solutions. In this session, we will review the implementation of the Meraki APIs into Cisco Action Orchestrator to provision a branch site and its devices via API as part of a multi-domain solution.

Join us to learn about our new DevNet Automation Exchange and get answers to your questions. Networking automation is one of the biggest challenges IT departments face. DevNet Automation Exchange addresses this challenge by hosting a set of shared code repositories for network automation that developers, partners and customers are using and contributing to. Automation Exchange meets the organization where they are on their journey. Those just beginning their journey can start to understand how they can get visibility and insights into their networks. More advanced professionals can begin setting policies across different network domains. Experienced professionals can find solutions to proactively manage applications, users, and devices with DevOps workflows.

What is the last thought every engineer has before pushing that configuration change? "Gee, I sure hope this works…" With Batfish you can stop relying on HOPE and push changes with confidence because Batfish KNOWS. In this episode, Hank is joined by Samir Parikh from Intentionet, the team behind the open source project that uses MATH to model network policy configurations, and lets engineers insure that the desired intent is met before deploy time.

Cisco’s SDWAN platform offers the ability to manage devices across a variety of sites from headquarters to branch to teleworker. In this session, we will look at the implementation of Cisco SDWAN APIs in Cisco Action Orchestrator to provision a branch site and its devices via API as a part of a multi-domain solution.

So you've worked out how to git clone, add, and push. That's awesome, but there's more to network automation workflows than that. Enter GitLab, a popular tool for software developers looking to bring sanity to their collaboration and code pipelines. Join Hank and Brad Downey from GitLab to learn how you can supercharge your projects with Issues, Wikis, CICD pipelines, Artifacts, and of course Code!

In IT, solutions are king, and those solutions could require a number of different platforms working in concert with each other. Join us as we cover a complimentary list of Cisco platforms that can be pieced together to solve enterprise-level WAN management for network and compute resources. We will introduce Cisco Action Orchestrator, a powerful building block for piecing together platform functionality and demonstrate the value of platform APIs in creating Multi-domain solutions.

For many, Ansible was their introduction to network automation and it continues to be a go-to choice for engineers and organizations around the world. Hank is joined by Andrius Benokraitis and Sean Cavanaugh from Ansible to learn what is new and exciting, and what we have to look forward to!

The core concepts surrounding DevOps and infrastructure-as-code have permeated into the network automation over the past several years. Some of you have probably employed these techniques to automate your firewall policy configurations in production. Often times, the administrator will poke holes in their firewalls to enable critical applications to function, but how often do we explicitly test the effectiveness of our rulesets? To address this gap, I've written a Python-based tool using Nornir and Netmiko that can rapidly test distributed Cisco ASA deployments for policy compliance. This session explores how the tools work in-depth.