Cisco Systems, the 800-pound gorilla in the networking space, have not missed out on the trend of network automation. In their push for network automation, they have made various in-house developments, product enhancements, partnerships, as well as many external acquisitions. However, with product lines spanning routers, switches, firewalls, servers (unified computing), wireless, the collaboration software and hardware, and analytic software, to name a few, it is hard to know where to start.

Since this book focuses on Python and networking, we will scope this section to the main networking products. In particular, we will cover the following:

• Nexus product automation with NX-API
• Cisco NETCONF and YANG examples
• The Cisco application-centric infrastructure for the data center
• The Cisco application-centric infrastructure for the enterprise

For the NX-API and NETCONF examples here, we can either use the Cisco DevNet always-on lab devices or locally run Cisco VIRL. Since ACI is a separate product and is licensed with the physical switches for the following ACI examples, I would recommend using the DevNet labs to get an understanding of the tools. If you are one of the lucky engineers who has a private ACI lab that you can use, please feel free to use it for the relevant examples.

We will use the similar lab topology as we did in Chapter 5, Low-Level Network Device Interactions, with the exception of one of the devices running nx-osv:

Let's take a look at NX-API.