Chapter 10. OpenFlow Basics

Up to this point in the book, we have been working with an existing networks and automating various tasks using Python. We started with basic pseudo-human automation using SSH, interaction with the API, higher-level abstraction with Ansible, network security, and network monitoring. In the previous chapter, we also looked at how to build our own network API with the Flask framework. The book is structured this way by design to focus on working with the network engineering field as it is today with the dominating vendors such as Cisco, Juniper, and Arista. The skills introduced so far in the book will help you fill in the gap as you scale and grow your network.

One point of this consistent theme is how we are working within the realm of vendor walls. For example, if a Cisco IOS device does not provide an API interface, we have to use pexpect and paramiko for SSH. If the device only supports Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) for network monitoring, we have...