A structured path from fundamentals to professional automation

Reliable Automation

Retry policies, pre/post-check validation, dry-run mode, and structured results — making the Netmiko Fundamentals project genuinely reliable.

Configuration & Template Automation

Structured data, rendered through Jinja2 templates, into reviewed and validated configuration — extending Reliable Automation's safe-deployment pipeline.

Ansible for Network Engineers

Declarative, agentless automation — the same VLAN deployment problem from Configuration & Template Automation, now orchestrated with real Ansible inventory, playbooks, and check mode.

APIs and REST for Network Engineers

The HTTP request/response model, the requests library, JSON responses, and safe read-before-write API automation — the same VLAN health-check lineage since Phase 2.6, now over HTTP instead of SSH.

Network Controllers

Controller-centric automation — centralized inventory, asynchronous tasks, and observed-state validation, illustrated through a vendor-neutral mock controller and a real Cisco Catalyst Center example.

Advanced Python Automation for Network Engineers

From one-off script to reusable tool — dataclasses, custom exceptions, classes, logging, unit testing, bounded concurrency, and a real CLI, built around the automation capabilities already learned.

Nornir for Network Engineers

Python-native, inventory-driven automation — the framework version of the inventory, task execution, and concurrency built by hand in Advanced Python Automation, plus filtering and a nornir_netmiko integration.

NAPALM for Network Engineers

Vendor-neutral network state -- normalized getters (get_facts, get_interfaces, get_interfaces_ip), a real candidate-configuration workflow, and NAPALM's own built-in mock driver for testing without real devices.

Multi-vendor Automation

Nornir orchestration + NAPALM normalized state, combined through nornir_napalm -- one workflow running unmodified across a mixed-vendor fleet, with driver selection resolved automatically from inventory.

NetBox / Source of Truth

Inventory as external, structured data -- pynetbox as a real REST client, safe reads and writes, and a real Nornir inventory plugin that builds your fleet dynamically from NetBox instead of a static YAML file.

Git / NetDevOps

Version control for network configuration and automation artifacts -- real Git and GitPython, a branch-diff-merge review workflow, and versioning rendered configs and source-of-truth snapshots over time.

Production Automation

The bridge from an already-reviewed change to a safe production rollout -- staging blast radius with nr.filter(), a real threshold gate that decides expand or abort, and automatic rollback when a stage fails.

Real-world Projects

Three end-to-end projects combining previously-separate modules -- config backup with drift history, a multi-vendor compliance report sourced from NetBox, and a Git-reviewed change driving a staged, gated rollout -- plus guidance for scoping and presenting a project of your own.

Capstone

One cumulative system, not a new tool: an NTP server migration, from a NetBox-sourced fleet through detection, generated remediation, Git evidence, and a staged, gated rollout with rollback -- closing the original curriculum roadmap.