It’s Monday 4th March 06:00, my alarm is going off and it is time to get that much required cardio in. Whilst I am peddling away on my exercise bike like a hamster on a wheel, I am thinking of my day ahead. Most of my planning is done whilst I exercise in the morning. I like to think of the goals I want to achieve that day. I switched up thinking recently that my days are not busy, but productive. I am also thinking I should have had coffee before starting my exercise this morning too! 🙂
On the exercise bike this morning I’m thinking about the sessions I’m planning for DevNet Create. Create is coming up soon (April 24-25), and bringing the best content, workshops, and demos needs planning out. If the content of these sessions is of interest to you, I hope you’ll register to attend DevNet Create and join me there.
Learn How to Leverage BGP Automation to Execute Python Code Directly on an End Device
Do you manage a plethora of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) sessions? If you have any BGP peering’s with a service provider (ISP) and/or peering at IXP (Internet exchange point), are you using BGP down to your servers? Event data is the recording of data at specific times triggered by a specific monitored state change. The state change could be a boolean value, such as an interface being up or down, or an exception triggered by exceeding a limit on a metric like a BGP peer exceeding its received prefix limit, which can have potentially unintended consequences to existing BGP sessions.
BGP is an important component of Internet routing and is responsible for exchanging information on how Autonomous Systems can reach one another. When BGP issues occur upstream, your internet traffic can be affected, from packet loss, latency, complete loss of internet connectivity, and even route withdrawal.
At DevNet Create, I’ll be leading a session on how we can leverage automation to execute Python code directly on an end device as part of the application hosting capabilities provided by GuestShell. We will cover CLI, and the Python library specifically designed to be able to run CLI commands in Python. Here’s a preview of what we’ll be covering in a nutshell:
- To demonstrate IOS-XE’s Guestshell capabilities, we will executed a Python script that runs as an agent on the router to detect any BGP changes or packet loss / latency upstream
- Upon detection, the device will automatically decide what to do for us!
- We will look how as an admin you can be alerted with ChatOps – from warning to critical problem
- How this script can be modified to create service tickets for critical issues
- Tie this to event-driven telemetry, see how Peering event telemetry data is ideally sent when an event occurs on the device
At DevNet Create you’ll be able to get your hands really dirty with this session. You’ll experience how this works in real time and configure this from day one. You’ll see how Guestshell is a virtualized Linux-based environment designed to run custom Linux applications, including Python, for automated control and management of Cisco devices. It’s all about taking on problems and solving them with automation.
Register for DevNet Create and join me for this session.
Getting Started with Golang
At DevNet Create I’ll also be leading a session on “Getting Started with Golang.” The Go Programming Language (Go) is an open-source programming language sponsored by Google that aims to simplify systems programming and to make programming fun again. This workshop is designed to introduce developers, Network Architects and Engineers to Go, and give you enough information to try it out for yourself.
In this workshop we start at day one for those whom want to get started with learning a new programming language just as i did. It’s a steep learning curve, but in this session we will work this out, have fun and see you can get started with Golang.
Sound interesting? My previous blog post – Why Did I Start to Learn Go(lang)? – will get you started. Then of course don’t forget to register for DevNet Create and join me for this workshop.
ProTip: Bring some coffee with you! Oh yea, and don’t forget to get your cardio in 🙂
Want to learn more?
DevNet Create will take place April 24-25, 2019 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. If you cannot attend I will publish the slide deck and code after the event on Code Exchange also.
Get your free DevNet account for free access to application development resources, learning labs, and sandboxes.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a question or leave a comment below.
And stay connected with Cisco DevNet on social!
Twitter @CiscoDevNet | Facebook | LinkedIn
Visit the new Developer Video Channel
Good stuff, Stuart! See you there!
You got it Paul, we can turn this up to 11!
And when it's 6am for you, it is midnight for me. I finally crawl into bed and dream sweet dreams while our global DevNet team works diligently to deliver the best content around the world. Thank you for your hard work Stuart!
Thank you for all your support!
Hope this will come to the Europe theater as well!
Thanks for reading Wolfgang, yes sir i hope to bring this to CLEUR too!
This is ground breaking for network engineers. I am looking to bridge the gap with my career with these types of automation innovations.