The Future of Network Engineering in the AI/ML era

It seems like yesterday when I saw my first network automation presentation at a conference. I remember it very well; it was in 2015 at the Cisco Network Innovation Summit in Prague. Mr. Tim Szigeti was presenting the first version of the Cisco APIC-EM, the future Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA) controller. I talked already about it in a previous article, written in 2018, about my journey toward network programmability and automation. After its presentation, and for many years afterward, the question was on everyone’s lips:

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First steps with pyATS

Have you ever wanted to compare the operational state of a bunch of network devices between two specific times? Not only if the interfaces are up or down, but the number and status of BGP peers, the number of prefixes received, the number of entries into a MAC-address table, etc? This is something quite laborious to do with classical NMS or Do-It-Yourself scripts. And this is where pyATS can become a real asset. Here are my first steps with pyATS: Network Test & Automation Solution.

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Automate file uploads to your Cisco Nexus switches

If you have more than three Cisco Nexus switches in nx-os mode, and you are not using Cisco DCNM or any other similar tool, you probably already have encountered this question: How to automate file uploads to your Cisco Nexus switches? Here is a turnkey Python script using Netmiko’s SCP function to do this.

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