In this chapter, we looked at various ways to communicate and manage network devices from Cisco, Juniper, and Arista. We looked at both direct communication with the likes of NETCONF and REST, as well as using vendor-provided libraries such as PyEZ and Pyeapi. These are different layers of abstractions, meant to provide a way to programmatically manage your network devices without human intervention.

In Chapter 7, The Python Automation Framework – Ansible Basics, we will take a look at a higher level of vendor-neutral abstraction framework called Ansible. Ansible is an open source, general purpose automation tool written in Python. It can be used to automate servers, network devices, load balancers, and much more. Of course, for our purpose, we will focus on using this automation framework for network devices.