Automation in Optical Networking

If you are reading this you can do this!!!

Google , ChatGPT, Stackoverflow and your little efforts will do it.No worries!!!

This article is not for professional automation engineer but for the enthusiastic professionals who just want to start but  need some guidance to do .

This article is purely  written on the basis of my personal experience through out my career and the intention involved  is to help my friend and folks in understanding the basics and get a glimpse of automation in networking world , so that they can feel motivated and don’t get scared with jargons used for automations.

In my terms:

***Automation is not replacing jobs but enabling you to live life more efficiently and with freedom.It is just an act of kindness by technology to give back to the its users and the creators.***

The scale with which networking communication devices and its usage is  increasing, we need lot of network bandwidth and automation in place to operate, configure, predict  and manage it.Also to have a more robust  ,scalable and reliable network we need agnostic and low latency automations that can help grow the network .

Why automation is needed? Out of 1 million reasons few are as:-

• It will make your life simpler and cheerful from monotonous and boring pieces of job.
• It will give you time to think something more creative .
• It will give you more flexibility as automation can be enabled or operable from remote places.
• You can spend more time with your loved ones .
• It can give you sense of security and confidence.
• It can lead you to be a successful entrepreneurship  .
• It improves efficiency and reduces errors that can be made by human.

What are the things you can automate? Out of 1 billion reasons few are as:-

• Everything that you do is sooner or later can be potentially automated.
• Device logins and configurations can be automated.
• Metrics polling can be automated to fetch some values from device.
• Network Management can be customised or scaled.
• Encryption key rotation can be automated.
• Capacity monitoring , planning or network design could be automated.
• Fault Alarming can be automated.
• Link routing and restoration can be automated.
• Network self healing and fault remediation could be achieved.
• Reporting and metrics evaluation could be achieved.
• Multiple cronjobs could be done and automated.
• Network discovery could be automated.
• Regression steps can be automated.
• On weekends, device/feature runs based testing tasks can be automated.

*This is just an idea that whatever you are doing in your routine job being and network engineer, almost everything can be automated.

Now the most important question:

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO?

*THINK THAT YOU CAN DO IT.

We are blessed to have all the resources that we need to learn and groom ourself at this point of time which are available free of cost. So, even if you don’t know how to start and you have never done or written any automation till now in your career still you can do with just a believe that “YOU CAN DO IT”.

*RECALL THE DAYS WHEN YOU LEARED TO EARNED

WE  all have studied at some point of time from books ,newspapers, magazines ,videos etc and have achieved some benchmark in life.So at this point of time too with just a small efforts you can learn and enhance your skill using few of the greatest tools that are available free of cost which I personally recommend are:-

• GOOGLE  : The best piece of technology platform  that a human kind have .(will recommend first to search “how to search in google search in a best way”
• Stackoverflow  : Best spot to shadow programmers and learn new things.
• w3schools.com  : Online school with playground to play.
• Booksc  : The heaven for book lovers .free to download.

*ANY LANGUAGE WILL HELP BUT CHOOSE LATEST AND IN DEMAND

Automation  just needs an idea—>Steps to do it ——>ALGORITHM——> and any automation language will do it.

Never think that Automation is something which is so big that you can do it but always look for the simplest thing which you can automate and that’s the best way to start writing any automation.AUTOMATION is collection of SCRIPTS,TOOLS,PACKAGES,LIBRARIES organised in a efficient manner to collaborate and give some user consumable or readable data.

• AUTOMATION LANGUAGES/TOOLS THAT CAN HELP NETWORK ENGINEERS
• Python
• TCL/Perl
• HTML/JINJA/ANSIBLE
• JAVA
• NETCONF/YAML
• SNMP/TL1/TELEMETRY /CLI
• LINUX
• TELNET/SSH
• FTP/SFTP/WINSCP
• KIBANA/GRFANA/DATABASE
• PYCHARM/VISUAL STUDIO/SUBLIME TEXT/NOTEPAD++

Note: Do search in internet the terms if you are not aware so that you can learn more.