Introduction

Purpose of the project

This is a very simple compilation of several OpenSource packages, which by using scripts custom scripts help to start the journey of network automation and orchestration, without having to learn from the very beginning how to configure all of them.

Why? Because I believe that the most important factor in the adoption of any new methodology is to make it easier to start using them.

So, the scripts won’t be nice, they are very simple and they work fine, in fact, they are very easy to read. They catch some typing errors but pay attention when you write. Anyway, do not worry, you won’t break anything at this point.

The tools that integrate at the moment are:

• Ansible
• Salt
• TinyDB
• Slack

As I move forward I will try to integrate other packages and functionalities.

This project is only to help start using Ansible and Salt, in order to see what you can get out of them, and after that, you should start learning about those two projects which are amazing.

Motivation

After trying several network tools that claim to be essentials to networking, as you already may know, there is no tool that will really work as you need, or even as they claim. They may be useful for some tasks, but at some point, I always ended quitting after hours of trying and talking with the official support. Every tool is beautiful in the PPTs and demos, but then when you deploy it is when the adventure starts.

Having real support from providers is so slow and even sometimes you don’t have time to wait and you do it on your own. (THIS TOOL WILL NOT BE DIFFERENT, but at least is fun to learn and develop in an OpenSource environment) :)

A couple of years ago I started to learn Python and I love it, I used it to create a couple of scripts that helped me a lot to support several network-related projects deployments.

Later on, I learned about Ansible and it was “wow” I really love this!

In the path of learning network automation and orchestration with Ansible and Salt, I found my self having to configure different files in different locations and in a completely different manner. There are great tutorials on how to lear and use them, but nothing to help you to integrate them, in order to make it easier to start experimenting.

Because to be honest, both Ansible and Salt are great. Ansible is simple to start using it for simple things, but Salt from my point of view is incredible, has similar functions and a lot of very cool capabilities but at the beginning it is hard to start.

Last but not least, add an integration with Slack, now you can “chat” with your infrastructure!

So, as I love to learn and to build things, I decided to start this adventure of learning and develop a personal tool using Python, in an OpenSource manner.