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guide.yml
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guide.yml
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# Landscape2 guide
#
# This file allows defining the content of the landscape guide.
#
# Reference documentation: https://github.com/cncf/landscape2/blob/main/docs/config/guide.yml
categories:
- category: "Introduction"
content: |
Welcome to the Network Automation Landscape, a place scared with battles between network engineers and developers, waging war over text files and apis. Join us fellow traveler on the Journey that is Network Automation, and please take care to dodge the land mines.
subcategories:
- subcategory: "What is Network Automation"
content: |
The debate rages, so a clear definition evades the community. Perhaps a clearer question to ask yourself is: What is Network Automation for me? You here because you probably meet some of the following criteria:
* You have some amount of scale/size that justifies the effort required to add tools to avoid manual work
* You are interested in learning about new tools to get more work done
* Software development for network engineers doesn't scare you
* Steinzi harassed you to visit this website
- subcategory: "Where do I start?"
content: |
The Network Automation Landscape is a broad set of tools, and starting out can be daunting. Network Engineers are used to editing config and applying changes, and ultimately you need to start with a technology choice that lets you do just that. Many people start with ansible, if only to demonstrate a layer of abstraction and techniques. There are also many introductory courses and videos/talks online that you can use.
- category: "Source of Truth?"
content: |
One of the first things to grasp with automation is understanding what you have. There are many tools that populate a source of truth, interact with the source of truth and then read for the source of truth to apply your changes. This for many is the journey of getting started with network automation, and once you have finally read from a source of truth and applied the config, you have reached the end of the beginning on your journey.
subcategories:
- subcategory: "Discovery"
content: |
Discovery is the process of reading data or config from the network, to populate a source of truth. This can be used to reconcile, manage, monitor or boast about network devices. Tools can scan devices, use SNMP, SSH, or APIs to gather data and config. Higher maturity tools will let you stage changes, to avoid polluting your source of truth.
- subcategory: "SoT - actually kinda a Datasource"
content: |
Any organization with a network also has physical locations, or people or names of things, that have outside authoritative sources. For example, sites come from the Facilities Dept, People are in the HR system. This means that inevitably the core database in network automation needs to be useful for automation, but isn't as Truthy as its title might deserve. This is an integration problem, and the various datasources and databases in this Landscape handle this in a variety of ways. The more mature tools recognize that integration is key, and lower the barrier of entry to input and output of data, at a machine level.
- category: "Monitoring and Observability"
content: |
Networks are connections between computers that deliver (mostly important) data. So we need to care if they are working as designed. Monitoring solutions that can integrate into the Landscape tools are more mature here. This includes mapping configuration to monitoring tools, and feeding back status and metrics to close the loop. Operational teams will need monitoring information, metrics, logs and config snapshots to deliver a gold standard of service delivery.
subcategories:
- subcategory: "Monitoring"
content: |
The tools that run tests against the network and return, alert, graphs those test can be broadly considered monitoring. This also covers tools that actively ask the network questions like SNMP, Ping, SSH and API requests.
- subcategory: "Observability"
content: |
Observability is a slightly different approach where existing or additive metrics are parsed and digested into an easy to understand form. Alerts and graphs can then be applied according to rules that match or collate these metrics.