Name: Enabling NetDevOps Through CI/CD Pipeline Integration with Network Automation
Start: 2023-03-08T17:00:00Z
End: 2023-03-08T17:38:01.000Z
Location: BrightTALK
Rating: 5

Itential is the only automation platform built to support both network and cloud, making it easy for enterprise organizations to maintain network compliance, reduce manual operations, and simplify network management. The Itential Automation Platform is a low-code cloud-native SaaS solution that seamlessly connects IT systems with network technologies for end-to-end network configuration, compliance, and automation.

Networking teams have been able to accelerate their ability to provide network services by focusing on new initiatives that include CI/CD pipeline integration and infrastructure as code. This has improved both their efficiency and accuracy of network changes. However, they’re now trying to take the next logical step – adopting DevOps principles and processes and applying them to their automation infrastructure components. 

As teams progress into this stage, they learn that a growing automation asset base (workflows, scripts, templates, etc.) presents the same challenges as overseeing a DevOps code base. It requires careful management, source control, versioning, and consistent deployment models to ensure the overall automation infrastructure is performing properly and in a scalable fashion. This means network teams should start managing their automation assets like DevOps teams manage their source code. 

In this webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy at Itential, and Mitch Veazy, Automation Engineer at Itential, will demonstrate a proven framework on how to implement a CI/CD approach for automation and orchestration assets leveraging the Itential Automation Platform (IAP) and open source components. They will also share and demo techniques and best practices for automation design and implementation that will enable teams to maximize the benefits of incorporating these principles into their automation development processes.

How to Apply DevOps Source Control & Promotion Principles to Network Automations

Network infrastructure has in most cases been managed using traditional, manually driven methods. This approach is poorly equipped to handle the widening demands placed upon network infrastructure to deliver connectivity at scale and speed while maintaining security. Network engineering teams who want to get ahead are looking to the robust, mature model of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), pioneered by application development teams, to improve their processes for network creation and management.

These forward-looking engineers aim to leverage pipelines to manage network code, enhance testing processes, and improve the consistency of their network management process. The adoption of CI/CD process to network engineering varies – some teams have implemented their pipelines, while others are still at an earlier stage of the journey, still looking for a roadmap to guide their implementation efforts.

In this webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy at Itential, and Joksan Flores, Solutions Engineer at Itential, will demonstrate a phased approach to implementing a NetDevOps pipeline using popular CI/CD tools and the Itential Automation Platform. They will also share tried-and-true techniques and best practices that have enabled networking pipeline innovators to achieve greater agility, consistency, and scalability in their network management approach.

How to Integrate CI/CD Pipelines into Network Automation & Orchestration

Creating programming logic to work with the tremendous amount of data that must be parsed and generated as part of an automation workflow has become one of the biggest challenges network practitioners face. As the number of systems involved is only increasing in today’s hybrid, multi-domain networks, stare-and-compare or copy-paste techniques are no longer feasible options to generate new configurations from a set of data. 

Instead of building these functions from scratch and maintaining them manually over time, network automation engineers can utilize the Itential Automation Platform’s template features that leverage TextFSM and Jinja2 to visually create automation tasks that can parse data from device output and generate new data from templates. This provides you the ability to quickly create reusable tasks that can be used to build pre- and post-check processes, create multiple device configurations, or generate formatted output for use in other systems.

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will show you step-by-step how to:

• Create, build, and test TextFSM templates.
• Create, build, and test Jinja2 templates. 
• Build pre-check and post-check processes with templates.
• Generate formatted output with data and templates in a workflow.

Creating Flexible Network Automations with Data Parsing & Templating Features

IT organizations are tasked to deliver more IT and infrastructure services to their customers in ever-shorter timeframes. The only way to rise to the task is for organizations to build end-to-end network and infrastructure automations to replace traditional manual processes. However, this also needs to take a step further to scale the use of these automations across different teams in their own platforms. 

With the Itential ServiceNow App, network and infrastructure teams can build comprehensive automations in the Itential Automation Platform (IAP) and publish them for use by users in the ServiceNow platform. This certified application streamlines a normally complex and time-consuming integration process, making it simple to configure access, dynamically discover automations, and control which automations can be accessed by different ServiceNow users.

Join us for a live demo where Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will show you how to:

• Configure access to different Itential Automation Platform (IAP) instances from ServiceNow.
• Publish automations in IAP for use in ServiceNow. 
• Discover updated and newly published automations using dynamic API calls. 
• Access and run automations in ServiceNow using auto-generated forms.

Deliver Turnkey Infrastructure Automation with the Itential ServiceNow App

New technologies and capabilities are becoming available at a rate that far surpasses the rate that IT integration teams and standard bodies can accommodate. At the same time, internal stakeholders are eager to consume new network services in a variety of ways – through systems like ServiceNow, as part of CI/CD pipelines, or in the Network-as-a-Service model. 

Itential’s ecosystem capabilities have enabled the Itential Automation Platform to become the platform of choice for organizations who wish to bring new services and capabilities to market quickly, and to enable users to consume network services in whatever model the business requires. 

In this webinar, we will discuss and demo how organizations can leverage the power of Itential’s fully integrated automation platform that utilizes integration, federation, data transformation, and exposure capabilities to execute across all technologies, domains, vendors, and platforms. 

In this webinar we will dive into: 

• The Itential ecosystem model for network automation and orchestration. 
• How to maximize the investment in existing network automation assets by leveraging the Itential platform to ingest and expose scripts, playbooks, and plans to the ecosystem.
• How to integrate with any IT system and source of truth for end-to-end orchestration across all your networks.
• How to expose northbound APIs for streamlined integration to ITSM and ticketing systems.
• How to easily kickoff automations within Itential through northbound triggers such as applications, events and alarms, IT Systems, BPMN tools, or humans needing to make a change.
• How to deliver self-service network capabilities to IT teams as well as integrate within your CI/CD pipelines.

Maximizing the Power of Your Network Through Integrated Ecosystem Capabilities

Maybe you’ve heard about the “shift left” in technology infrastructure and development, but what exactly does it mean to shift left in networking? How do we build networking functionality directly into an application, making networking part of the software development process itself and treating network infrastructure as code?

Join along in this live discussion with Scott Raynovich, Founder and Chief Analyst at Futuriom Research and Chris Wade, CTO of Itential as they explore how IT leaders can enable a true shift for networking by adopting automation as an operational model.

The Shift Left Movement & What it Means for Networking

BPMN tools fall short in automating and orchestrating network operations functions as they are designed for graphically representing business processes, not network changes. However, there are added benefits of integrating the two together. 

Network automation tools like the Itential Automation Platform are designed to represent network and orchestration processes with features and functionality not provided by native BPMN-based platforms. Itential can easily integrate with existing BPMN environments to expose these capabilities to BPMN users. By integrating the two, teams can choose which platform is best suited for each of their specific use cases.

In this live webinar, we’ll explore:

• The difference between BPMN and network automation tools.
• The unique capabilities of the Itential Automation Platform that are not provided by a native BPMN-based platform.
• The 4 different integration options to choose from based on what provides the most for your business.
• The added benefits of integrating BMPN with Itential’s network automation capabilities.

The Benefits of Integrating BPMN Tools with Network Automation

Network teams are all too familiar with the burden of needing to make a configuration change, searching for the backup in multiple places, only to find out that it hasn’t been backed up in months. To avoid these network inconsistencies and eliminating the time-consuming manual process, teams are turning to automation.

The biggest challenge network engineers face is how to do automation at scale, while also making it accessible by all. In this demo, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer, Rich Martin, will be joined the gang on The Art of Network Engineering to take them on automation journey with Itential and show them how easy it is to go from simple scripting to self-service.

See how you can leverage the Itential Automation Platform along every stage of the journey:

• Onboarding and using existing automations.
• Automating configuration standardization.
• Integrating a federated source of truth.
• Enabling scalable enterprise automation.

Automation Journey for Network Engineers: From Simple Scripts to Self-Service

Network as a Service (NaaS) is gaining momentum as cloud service consumers have come to expect their network providers and teams to offer the same simple level of accessibility they’ve become accustomed to in the cloud world. However, many have learned that delivering networking capabilities as a service presents significant challenges that don’t exist in cloud networking.

Exposing network services based on functionality like IP layer 3, core networking, optical, and functions like firewall and load balancing depend on a network infrastructure that can be managed and orchestrated across silos and domains with consistent, predictable capabilities that are robust enough to be exposed as services.

In this webinar, Itential’s Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy, and Travis Nicks, Solution Architect, will discuss the challenges of providing true hybrid, multi-cloud Network as a Service along with lessons learned from NaaS implementations in some of the most advanced service provider and enterprise networks in the world.

Join us to learn: 

• Key capabilities required to deliver robust NaaS.
• Challenges of orchestrating exposable hybrid network services.
• Lessons learned in enterprise and service provider NaaS initiatives.

Deliver Network as a Service Capabilities Across Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Most network teams are limited by traditional network automation methods that require them to learn complex programming languages and development environments. This high skills gap means they are limited in what they can automate and how much they can automate, further hindering the widespread deployment of network automation. 

To help network teams overcome this burden, Itential’s low-code network automation platform provides network-centric features such as command templates that remove the programming and development requirements of traditional methods. Itential’s command templates give teams what they need to provide immediate value by expressing existing networking knowledge and processes in a simple format that replicate their existing manual processes. 

In this live demo, you will see how to:

• Transfer existing network knowledge into command templates.
• Quickly build automated pre- and post-check tasks.
• Execute a series of complex network commands over multiple devices.
• Automate processes to determine network configuration and state.

Automating Tribal Network Knowledge with Itential’s Command Templates

Applications are a critical component of every business and ensuring their responsiveness and availability has become an unnecessarily difficult task for network teams due to today’s manual processes. As the rate of application changes is only increasing, so are the network infrastructure changes that focus on load balancing needed to support them. Network teams simply cannot keep pace without automation. 

By leveraging automation with Itential, you can easily coordinate the necessary changes to the infrastructure with an application change request and reduce the end-to-end-time to complete these changes to minutes instead of days or weeks. The Itential Automation Platform provides unique capabilities for end-to-end automation of load balancer management that enable teams to define pre- and post-checks processes, the ability to integrate with your entire IT environment, and support for load balancing on ANY device or service, whether physical or virtual. 

In this live demo, Mike Elrom, Senior Solutions Architect at Itential will showcase how to create an Itential automation that can:

• Update load balancing devices to remove old applications from an existing pool.
• Add new applications to an existing load balancing pool.
• Query load balancer status to verify device configuration and operation in a pool.
• Integrate with MS Teams for real-time notification of network change status.

How to Rapidly Automate Load Balancer Management

Due to the rapid deployment of applications, enterprise networks teams today are faced with an increasing number of network change requests that must be completed in a short period of time. When these applications are deployed on a cloud platform like AWS, the rate of change requests and expectation for immediate results only increases which only puts more burden on network teams.  

To meet these demands, network teams need the ability to rapidly create automations that can operate with both traditional on-prem networks and newer cloud-native network infrastructure. By leveraging the Itential Automation Platform, you can easily integrate with any cloud platform at the API level to build automations that can provision and manage ANY cloud network infrastructure or service.

In this live demo, you will learn how to:

• Rapidly integrate Itential with AWS and other cloud platforms.
• Understand cloud APIs and documentation for automations.
• Create and modify foundational network elements like VPCs.
• Create and modify interconnect services like Transit Gateways.
• Query and update network services like DNS and Load Balancing.

Automating Cloud Network Infrastructure Provisioning & Management

To keep up with the needs of complex network systems, many network teams have turned to script-based tools and programs to automate manual day-to-day network changes. However, these solutions can be limiting for building end-to-end network automations quickly, as they require significant programming and coding knowledge. Network teams need a simple and elegant way to integrate their existing scripts into a flexible automation solution so they can be leveraged together without the need to replace or re-create. 

Itential’s Automation Platform enables network teams who are already using Python, Ansible, and other automation tools to rapidly leverage and integrate those assets in a low-code automation workflow. The integration process starts with onboarding and testing the scripts, then decorating them by defining valid inputs with a JSON schema, and finally publishing the automation through an API to be used within an automation workflow and shared across the team. 

Applying Itential’s integration and decoration capabilities to these assets gives users the ability to further refine how automations are executed with initial input validation. This helps to ensure the scripts are executed correctly within acceptable constraints. As business logic evolves, these decorations can be quickly adjusted without the need to re-write complex validation logic, effectively building an automation strategy for today's and tomorrow’s network needs. 

In this demo we will showcase how to:
• Onboard existing automation assets in Itential’s Automation Gateway. 
• Decorate assets like scripts for input validation. 
• Test assets using API methods. 
• Integrate assets into an automation workflow within the Itential Automation Platform

Supercharge Python Scripts & Ansible Playbooks for Advanced Network Automation

In the previous demo sessions covering Itential Data Transformations, we’ve discussed the burdens that both NetOps and DevOps teams are faced with when trying to automate across multiple networks and IT systems, the basics of JSON schemas and objects, and how to create and utilize Data Transformations in the Itential Automation Platform.

In this demo, we will spend more time looking at the variety of methods available to the user when building Data Transformations, and how to build more advanced Transformations within Itential using these methods.

In this demo, you will learn the following:
- Inferring and testing JSON schemas
- Using multiple input and output schemas
- Formatting human readable output
- Running queries and regular expressions

Advanced Data Transformation Techniques for Network Automation & Orchestration

Slack is a very popular communications tool for many IT teams. For teams managing large networks, communication between network engineers, network operations, and management is incredibly important for broadcasting changes in network status, coordinating resources, and resolving disruptions. However, communicating detailed information in real-time becomes a secondary function, especially when making changes during a maintenance window or troubleshooting a network problem. This oversight can negatively impact how efficiently network teams manage and address network events.

With Itential, integrating team notification systems like Slack is a simple process and once integrated into the platform, Slack APIs for posting messages to channels can be used in an automation workflow. This workflow can integrate with sources of truth to gather data for a network change, execute the network change, and utilize the same data in a message sent in a Slack channel while the automation is in execution. This can provide detailed information regarding network devices being changed, the nature of the changes, and when the changes begin and are completed. All within a Slack message that is broadcast to network teams, making them aware of the entire process. This alleviates the need for network engineers to manually stop the work they are doing to post an update in Slack so they can focus on getting more work done in less time.

In this demo, you will learn how to use the Itential Automation Platform to:
• Integrate with Slack using APIs. 
• Understand the Slack API calls for communication.
• Create a network change automation.  
• Transform data for use by the Slack API. 
• Post network change details in a Slack channel.

Building Network Automations with Slack Integration for Real-Time Communications

There are a wide variety of solutions available today to help network teams move beyond using text files and spreadsheets as the preferred tool to manage IP address allocation for network devices. These solutions range from open source tools to commercially available software with features that provide more than IP address management. One popular commercial solution is Infloblox, which provides IP address management, along with DNS, DHCP, and more.

Network teams who are moving forward in their automation journey will eventually realize that they spend a considerable amount of time in Infoblox managing resources, like IP addresses, and accessing that data so they can copy and paste it into other applications or automations. With Itential, network teams can automate this manual process, saving more time, reducing errors, and ensuring the entire end-to-end process is more efficient. By integrating the Itential Automation Platform with the Infoblox REST API, network teams can reference these DDI features directly and transform that data so it can be used to make changes to the network, update trouble tickets, or send notifications to the network team — all inside an automation workflow.

In this demo, you will learn to:
• Investigate the Infoblox DDI features using APIs.
• Automate IP address reservations and queries. 
• Build a Data Transformation task for managing data from Infoblox.
• Create an Itential automation workflow that utilizes this data to make a network change.

Integrating Infoblox into Network Automation for DDI Management

Many enterprise data centers have been engineered to handle the demands of highly virtualized, dynamic workloads. Under the management of intelligent systems, like hypervisors or controllers, these application workloads have the ability to automatically grow, shrink, and shift across different compute platforms in response to demand, outages, or any number of other factors. This has forced network protocols to evolve to support network connectivity for constantly shifting applications. 

Protocols like VXLAN and BGP-EVPN have been widely deployed to provide a reliable and efficient network environment that can keep pace with the rate of change with applications, but many teams are still using manual processes to access data from IT systems to make VXLAN CLI configurations changes on data center devices. The high rate of change for applications requires more changes to the data center network, creating a significant backlog of work for network engineers who are stuck with these manual procedures.

The Itential Automation Platform enables network engineers to turn this manual process into a start-to-finish automation, including steps for gathering data from different sources, executing VXLAN configuration changes on the network, and documenting and reporting the results.

In this demo, you will learn how to build an automation workflow that can:
• Query a source of truth for IP and VLAN details.
• Transform data from different sources to generate CLI configurations. 
• Automate VXLAN configuration changes for VLAN to VNI mapping.
• Send notifications of changes to your messaging systems.

How to Rapidly Automate Data Center VXLAN Changes

In the quest to accelerate application deployment, development teams are investigating ways to incorporate more sophisticated networking into their CI/CD pipelines. This enables them to move from a siloed model, where DevOps and NetOps activities were performed by different teams or tools, toward an integrated NetDevOps approach. 

Network teams, looking to simplify their toolsets and eliminate manual bottlenecks in their workflow, are leveraging the Itential Automation Platform in their toolchain to expose and provide network automation and orchestration functionality to their CI/CD pipelines. 

In this webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy at Itential, and Dan Sullivan, Principal Solutions Engineer at Itential, will discuss the options emerging NetDevOps teams can explore to incorporate a network services platform into their pipelines and demo how the Itential Automation Platform enables advanced networking functionality and streamlined application deployment across complex, multi-domain infrastructure.

Enabling NetDevOps Through CI/CD Pipeline Integration with Network Automation

CI/CD

NetDevOps

DevOps

Integration

Automation

Network Automation

NetOps

IT Infrastructure

Deployment

Network Architecture

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Enabling NetDevOps Through CI/CD Pipeline Integration with Network Automation

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