Get Hands-on Experience with Real Life Network Automation Use Cases

In our efforts to reach the Cisco DevNet and DevRel community in as many places and on as many platforms as we can, I’m super excited to announce that I will start streaming on Twitch on April 12th 2023. That’s right, we are bringing back to life the Cisco DevNet Twitch channel!

Live stream demos every Wednesday at 9:00AM PT

The plan is to stream hands-on technical content one hour per week. Every Wednesday at 9:00AM PT, I will be streaming on the following channel: https://www.twitch.tv/ciscodevnet. The purpose of streaming on this channel is to showcase real life use cases of how to use Cisco technologies and APIs, as well as third party tools and products, to apply automation and programmability concepts in your own workflows and infrastructure automation efforts.

The content will be almost exclusively hands-on. (There will be no death by PowerPoint allowed as part of my streams!) I also plan to record the sessions and have them available for later viewing in case you miss the live stream. Joining the sessions live will give you the opportunity to ask questions or follow along with the use case that I’m going over in that session. I like to make my streams interactive so don’t be shy to join in and ask questions and interact with the other folks on the stream.

Building a CI/CD pipeline for infrastructure automation… from scratch!

We will start the streaming with building a CI/CD pipeline for infrastructure automation from scratch. No previous knowledge about CI/CD is required, but familiarity with Linux environments will be beneficial. I’ll go over all the steps necessary to build the pipeline including

installing CentOS in a virtual environment
installing and configuring GitLab CE
building a Docker container containing the tools and applications needed to run the pipeline
using Ansible and pyATS as part of the pipeline, and defining stages in the automation pipeline for each of them
installing and using Cisco CML as a test environment
bringing everything together and making sure we can use the pipeline end-to-end as part of any environment.

Since this is a complex project, I foresee it will take us 5-6 sessions at a minimum. But rest assured, we will get it done and have our pipeline running smoothly before you know it.

Following these initial streams, I plan to bring on other projects that I’m working on, and I would also like to have guests sharing what they are working on with a focus on hands-on demos and coding as much as possible.

I’m super excited to get this project going and I’m looking forward to seeing you. I hope you’ll join me on the DevNet twitch stream starting Wednesday, April 12th at 9:00am PT! And if you can’t make the live stream, don’t worry. We’ll record each streaming session to you can catch up with episodes you might miss.