Rick Donato

A common question that arises in the area of network automation is: What’s the difference between Ansible and Nornir? I mean, they are both frameworks that can manage and automate groups of network devices, right? They are also both built on top of Python. So what is the difference

Today I want to share with you a small tip that I regularly use to prevent having to write multiple else-if statements within my code. You may now be asking, what's wrong with writing multiple else-if statements? Well, to be fair, nothing. However, I will show you an

Learn the basics of Nornir and why it is a great alternative to Ansible for network automation.

For those of you who are new to SuzieQ, its an: open-source platform that polls your network stores the data in a DB, allowing you to query and analyse your data in lots of cool ways. Think troubleshooting and config compliance testing. One of the biggest releases to date has

After presenting the latest Packet Coders tech session in our membership last night, around Python OOP (recording here) there was one feature that I wanted to share with you, that is super useful for preventing code duplication when working with Python classes. This feature (technically a Python method) is called

Today I want to share with you some behaviour that I learnt the other day that you might find helpful when working with Batfish. This behaviour is based upon the following: When working with impact analysis and using layer1 topologies in Batfish. Don't use named references within your

If you are new to Python, you may have heard of type checking and type hinting, and wondered what they are all about. Within this post we will provide a 101 to explain what type checking and type hinting are and the problem they look to solve. Let's

Over the years, I've learned a few things when it comes to automation, not so much related to coding but general tips and methods that I've found helpful when building out successful network automation projects. Here they are: Workflow When it comes to automating a manual

Learn how to build a network automation stack using the open-source tools, Nornir, Napalm and NetBox.