ipSpace.net » Building Network Automation Solutions » Validation, Error Handling and Unit Tests

GIGO (Garbage-In-Garbage-Out) is one of the major sources of automation failures. A good automation solution should always validate the input data before starting automation tasks. It should also check the actual device state before making changes to the device configuration unless you’ve fully automated the configuration deployments.

This module describes various approaches to data validation and error handling. We’ll also focus on unit tests - simple tests that verify the correctness of your code, and stress-test it using as many invalid inputs as possible - and figure out how to automate them as part of your deployment process.

Hands-on Exercises

In the hands-on part of this section you’ll add data validation and error handling to the configuration-generation playbook you created during the previous module, and create unit tests to test your new code with a variety of invalid inputs.

Guest speakers

The guest speakers in this module include:

• Gabriele Gerbino showing how to build a simple testing pipeline by using Travis-CI and VMs/containers;
• David Barroso explaining how you can use NAPALM to validate whether the actual state of a network device meets its desired state;
• Pete Lumbis describing CI/CD concepts and the Continuous Integration pipeline he set up with GitLab and Vagrant.
• Kristian Larsson introducing network automation testing methodologies
• David Barroso explaining how to write scalable and reliable software

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