Heavy Networking 578: When Your Homegrown Tool Becomes Essential To The Team

Today’s Heavy Networking is about what happens when an automation hobby really takes off. Lots of network engineers create scripts and develop tools to help them automate common tasks. What happens if you build a tool so useful that it becomes essential to your organization? Ivan Del Rio, Senior IP Engineer at DQE Communications, stops by the podcast to talk about a tool he built to automate some of his tasks. When the company builds new customer devices, those devices have to be staged. This tool runs through a variety of steps to get the devices pre-staged automatically. It is now being widely used in the organization by Ivan and his colleagues. He talks about the responsibilities he has to maintain and develop this tool, and how it’s affected his role and day-to-day networking responsibilities. We discuss: * Why Ivan built his own tool instead of a commercial product * What he might have done differently at the outset now that he sees how it’s grown * Why Python out of all the other options? * Design considerations * How the tool works and its dependencies * More Sponsor: CBT Nuggets CBT Nuggets is IT training for IT professionals and anyone looking to build IT skills. If you want to make fully operational your networking, security, cloud, automation, or DevOps battle station visit cbtnuggets.com/heavynetworking. Show Links: Ivan Del Rio on LinkedIn Heavy Networking 571: Network Automation Workflows With Jenkins – Packet Pushers