This week I will dive more into a network programmability topic. I will show you a practical use case for the Cisco NX-API. It provides an interface to communicate with a Nexus device using HTTP/HTTPs using JSON or XML. Because of the reliable request-response nature of the HTTP protocol, it is usually more preferable than scraping Telnet/SSH outputs.

I will show you this week how to use Vagrant to run the python scripts from my examples repository without any changes on your working environment. The only thing that you need are two tools: VirtualBox and Vagrant. I think that VirtualBox is quite common today to host VMs on your laptop. Vagrant is primarily a tool to create and provision these machines based on a single configuration file. It is very useful if you need to share it e.g. for development purpose.

This week, I will show you how to build a simple python based configuration generator using the Jinja2 library with CSV and JSON based parameters.

The goal of this post is to give you a practical introduction to HTTP based REST APIs, or RESTful APIs. Many applications in the (networking) world are providing APIs based on a REST architecture. I think you should have at least an basic understanding what it is, how to interact with it and why it can be helpful for you.

With this post, I’ll like to share with you my thoughts, why programming may be relevant for network engineers and why I named it as the first learning area for network programmability and automation in my “how to start” post.