What's the big fuss over IT automation? Well, more than anything, the excitement is about the sorts of things that you don't have to do when automation is on your side. Things like not having to either copy and paste configuration changes to dozens (maybe hundreds) of different systems or repeat the same click, click, click, click, click-through-the-UI marathon over, and over, and over...every single time there's a need to make a bulk change 😡.

To automate configuration and management workflows for network devices, we need to learn to write some form of automation-specific code, and the NETCONF protocol makes that possible. NETCONF provides a programmatic way to automate the network device workflows based on the predictable data structures found in YANG models.

This guide will walk you through some hands-on exercises that help teach and give you a place to practice using Python to automate workflows with NETCONF. You'll get the most from these exercises if you have some familiarity with:

• 🐍 Python fundamentals.
• 📜 Managing and transposing structured data between XML and Python objects.
• 🖥️ Interpreting YANG models.

Navigate to https://wwt.github.io/devasc-netconf-intro and follow the guided walkthrough instructions.