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This part of the challenge will cover the setup of the infrastructure at AWS with Terraform, and since I’m a fan of Python I will use/learn FastAPI for web front server effect, plus a picture embedded in the served web page will come from a secured S3 bucket. All of this was part of this great training course Networking in Public Cloud Deployments. We will create all the basic infrastructure from your PC just to follow the training course and gain the fundamental knowledge that we will need for what is to come. ...

I found my next challenge while I was defining the Lab exercises for Networking in Public Cloud Deployments training course. Honestly, I didn’t know much about what was ahead, but I had a great learning idea and the will to go through the challenge. I’m not saying that this is correct nor complete, is my first run exploring the whole thing, so I’m just saying “hey! I can do this!, and this is the Proof of Concept. ...

In the previous post we set up the infrastructure at AWS and we stored the states at GitLab. Now let’s go for the most fun part, integrate everything. We will modify a security group to allow HTTP access to the FastAPI app, and we will have all kinds of notifications and requests for approvals sent to Slack. Every step will be logged and stored in the form of messages in Slack and in a DevOps fashion at GitLab: terraform states, artifacts (which are specifics output that you want to store), logs for each run of the pipeline, etc. This will give you incredible traceability of your IaC. ...

Not so long ago a customer asked me for help on how to block IP addresses on their regional firewalls infrastructure. They needed a solution urgently, since lately there were some severe attacks on other companies in the region, and they didn’t want to be “on the news” too. Having a network engineer available 7x24 to block IP addresses on all the firewalls is not timewise efficient nor effective. It is simply not realistic to get him to work at any time (like midnight) and configure everything in less than 1 hour without errors and back and forths while chatting in the middle of the crisis with the rest of the organization. ...

Even if you don’t fully understand what is an API, it is really easy to leverage their power to have some useful information directly sent to a collaboration platform and receive it on your mobile or PC in real-time. All the tools in use are Free: Python, Slack, and WebEx Teams. In this post, I will show you how to send Cisco ACI faults and events to messages straight to Slack and WebEx Teams. ...

In my previous post, I showed you how easy it is to have a network configuration backup with a GUI and messaging and keep it synchronized with GitHub to see the changes, and also sending messages to Slack and emails when it runs. For this post, I modified the scripts to use a cool Open Source tool named Gogs (Thanks Nikolay Ryzhkov for bringing this tool to my attention). With Gogs you will have a local repository system with the same functionalities as GitHub, so you don’t need to worry about sending your configs outside of your own infrastructure. ...

Continuing with the development of my previous post where we made a very simple and complete solution for local network device configuration backups, including alerts via Slack or email. Now we are going to do some modifications to have a free complete GUI and messaging for Cloud Network configuration backups including the history, comments, and actionable buttons. In the end you will be a simple click away to a full online historic track of all the configuration changes, including comments per line of changed code. Take a look at this short video! ...

Now we are talking about Infrastructure Analytics. Elastic is a tool that can ingest any (and I mean it, any!) kind of information from multiple sources, correlate them all together, and create some beautiful and fully customizable dashboards. To give you an idea of what you can achieve, I will show a couple of use cases that I discovered while exploring the tool. Automation chatbots code insights While doing integration tests of my chatbot automation project and going through logs manually, I found that it just didn’t scale and was inefficient in time and precision. ...

Start using Ansible Vault is pretty easy. As usual, there is no magic here, you keep the key in mind or a file somewhere. If you keep it in mind doesn’t sound very practical because you are trying to automate tasks without human intervention and either way you don’t want to type that long key each time. (You can use this method for any kind of file, Ansible or not, for a picture is you like.) ...

I’ve been asked about how to automate a network configuration backup and I read a lot of articles on the internet, but I didn’t find a simple, quick, complete and free setup. So, I made this one. You only need a Linux with Python3 (installed by default) check your version with: $ python3 --version or easy upgradable with: $ python3 --version $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install python3.6 and Ansible, very easy to install. ...