Chatops using Salt and NAPALM

Network orchestration with Salt and NAPALM - Part 3

Posted on May 24, 2017

There are many common misconceptions around Salt, and very often people seem to miss that Salt is more than a configuration management product, while it is a rich orchestrator with configuration management capabilities. Yet another interesting assertion I heard recently was: “In Salt is very hard or impossible to setup... [Read More]

Cisco IOS-XR: the buggy XML API

And how Cisco does not give a damn

Posted on April 14, 2017

The XML API is a proprietary software written by Cisco, that is leveraged only on IOS-XR. Its goal is to facilitate the configuration or retrieval of operational data from the router. Althought NETCONF existed long time before they have introduced the XML agent, and already deployed by few network vendors,... [Read More]

Installing SaltStack and NAPALM

Posted on March 14, 2017

During the live session of the NANOG tutorial, I have expanded on the installation side. However, among the feedback received from the readers that have been following the slides, people suggested that I should have included more details. This is why today I am going to provide more information for... [Read More]

Network automation at scale

Up and running in 60 minutes

Posted on February 14, 2017

Last week I have presented at NANOG a tutorial about Network Automation at scale: up and running in 60 minutes. The slides are available below (PDF version): [Read More]

Configuration management

Network orchestration with Salt and NAPALM - Part 2

Posted on December 15, 2016

In the first post we have been introduced to the very basic command syntax and features. As previously said, Salt is much more than a configuration management system - it is a data-driven software built on a dynamic communication bus. Given the number of possibilities provided (now also for network... [Read More]