Itential’s NetOps Pipeline & API Services


DevOps has become the latest aspiration for technology companies everywhere, and the networking space is no exception.  Unfortunately, for network engineers, the network industry presents challenges that don’t necessarily align with pre-existing patterns that software engineers use to implement those methodologies.

At Itential, we’ve been working to overcome these problems for our customers, and in order to help customers embrace Network Infrastructure as Code methodologies, we are building services that better enable network engineers to achieve these goals.  We also understand that you can’t just up and change everything you do to conform to some new paradigm.  Our services attempt to align with traditional software engineering practices, while staying flexible enough for customers no matter their level of automation.  In order to do that, we’ve tweaked the traditional pipeline slightly as the NetOps Pipeline for Network Infrastructure as Code.

Itential’s NetOps Pipeline Capabilities

Build

Create the building blocks of your infrastructure

  • Dynamically render configurations from a library of expert built templates TemplateIDE >
  • Combine reusable chunks of configuration to create composite configurations
  • Transform data from one format into another
  • Run optimizers to eliminate redundant or poorly designed config

Test

Ensure your infrastructure change does what you intend it to do

  • Simulate the change before you make it
  • Compare simulation outputs to known desired outcomes
  • Check to see if your change affects any pre-existing functionality

Validate

Ensure that your changes are safe

  • Check that a configuration is error free, before you deploy it to a device Config Validator >
  • Run a security scan to see if you’re running compromised software
  • Run a security scan to see if your exposed to network threats

Deploy

Deploy your infrastructure changes to your network

  • Leverage tools like Ansible and Terraform to push changes Automation Gateway >
  • Update operational support systems to stay in sync with your network changes
  • Keep track of your changes by tagging and versioning them when you deploy

Itential’s Developer Tools to Help Leverage API Services


TemplateIDE

TemplateIDE is an interactive templating environment that simplifies the use of templates for automating network operations. TemplateIDE enables NetDevOps teams to create, edit and update multiple types of templates (TextFSM, Jinja2, Mustache) to both intake network device output for key points of data as well as generate network configuration input. In addition, Template IDE provides a dynamic library of the most commonly used templates, mitigating the need to write templates from scratch (parsing and rendering).

JSONtoSchema

Itential’s JSONtoSchema is a tool that intelligently and dynamically creates JSON Schema based on user provided JSON objects. This JSON Schema inference tool makes it easy to quickly visualize and update changes to the JSON Schema.

Config Validator

Config Validator enables NetDevOps teams to find and catch configuration errors before they are pushed to the network. Easily determine if a device configuration is syntactically correct by verifying and validating it before trying to apply the config to a device, minimizing the risk of outages.

Policy Analyzer

Assess your network policies such as ACL and Firewall for correctness, overlap, and performance. With PolicyAnalyzer evaluate MAC, IPv4, IPv6 for validity and calculate CIDR block optimization.

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