Network Automation for Network Engineers: Stop Doing Things the Hard Way

Right, so if you’ve been in networking for any length of time, you’ll have had that day. You know the one. You’ve got a change window on a Friday night, you’ve got forty switches to configure, and you’re copy-pasting the same block of config into every single one while your family’s watching a film without you. Again.

That’s what network automation is about. Not some theoretical computer science concept. Not something only developers care about. It’s about stopping that kind of thing from happening quite so often.

This post is aimed at you – working network engineers who are curious about automation but maybe haven’t dived in properly yet. We’re going to cover what it actually is, why it matters, the tools and approaches you’ll come across, and where to start. No fluff, no generic IT content. Just proper networking context.

Split image showing a network engineer manually SSHing into multiple devices one by one on the left, versus a single script running against all devices simultaneously on the right. Clean, professional diagram style showing the contrast clearly. Prompt: "split image illustration showing manual SSH network configuration on left versus automated script running on multiple network devices simultaneously on the right, clean professional technical diagram style

What Network Automation Actually Means

Network automation is using software to do configuration, management, and monitoring tasks that you’d otherwise do manually. That’s it.

It doesn’t mean your job disappears. It doesn’t mean you need a computer science degree. It means you write something once – a script, a playbook, a template – and then you use it over and over again instead of repeating the same work by hand.

Think about what you actually do day to day. VLAN changes. Interface descriptions. ACL updates. Firmware upgrades. Compliance checks. Generating reports. A lot of this is repetitive. Automation handles the repetitive stuff so you can focus on the work that actually needs your brain.

The reason network automation has become so important recently comes down to scale. Ten years ago, a medium-sized network might have had a hundred devices. Now you’ve got campus switches, WAN routers, firewalls, wireless controllers, SD-WAN nodes, cloud connectivity – the number of things needing managing has grown massively while the team sizes haven’t kept pace. Doing it all by hand simply doesn’t work anymore.

The Difference Between Automation, Orchestration, and Programmability

These three terms get thrown around together and it causes a lot of confusion.

Automation is getting a task done without manual intervention. One script that connects to SW1-ACCESS and updates the VLAN configuration – that’s automation.

Orchestration is coordinating multiple automated tasks in a specific order. Your VLAN change needs to happen on the distribution switch first, then the access switches, then you need to verify connectivity, then update your documentation. Orchestration manages that sequence across multiple systems.

Programmability is a broader concept – it means network devices expose interfaces (like APIs) that let software interact with them. Instead of logging into a device and typing commands, you send structured data to an API endpoint and the device responds with structured data back.

You don’t need to master all three at once. Most network engineers start with simple automation and build from there.

Why This Is Different From What You Learned in Your CCNA

Traditional networking was built around the CLI. You log in, you type commands, you verify with show commands, you log out. That’s how Cisco, Juniper, and everyone else designed things to work. It’s fine for working on individual devices, but it doesn’t scale and it’s prone to human error.

Network automation introduces a different way of thinking about device management.

Instead of imperative configuration – “go to this device, type this command, now type this command” – you move towards declarative configuration. You describe what you want the network to look like, and the automation tooling works out how to get there.

Instead of one-off changes, you start thinking about idempotency – running the same operation multiple times should produce the same result. Push your config once or push it ten times, the outcome is identical. No accidental duplicates, no inconsistencies.

Instead of tribal knowledge living in people’s heads, configuration becomes code. It lives in version control. You can see what changed, when, and who changed it. You can roll back. You can compare your current state against a known-good baseline.

This is a different mental model from pure CLI work, and getting comfortable with it takes a bit of time. That’s normal.

clean professional comparison table diagram showing traditional CLI network management versus network automation approach, highlighting speed scalability error rate and consistency differences

The Tools You’ll Hear About

There’s a lot of options in this space. Here’s what they actually are and when they get used.

Python

Python is the most commonly used language for network automation. It’s relatively readable, has massive library support, and there’s an enormous amount of networking-specific tooling built around it. Libraries like Netmiko, NAPALM, and Nornir are Python-based.

If you’re going to learn one thing, learn Python. Not because it’s the only option, but because the community, the tooling, and the job market all favour it heavily for network automation work.

Ansible

Ansible is an automation platform that uses YAML-based playbooks to describe what you want to happen. You write a playbook that says “these devices need these VLANs configured” and Ansible connects to each device and makes it happen.

It’s agentless – nothing gets installed on your network devices. Ansible connects over SSH or API, does its work, and disconnects. For network engineers who don’t want to write full Python scripts for every task, Ansible is a very accessible starting point.

NETCONF and YANG

NETCONF is a network management protocol. It runs over SSH and uses XML to communicate with devices. YANG is a data modelling language – it describes what configuration data looks like on a device.

You won’t write NETCONF by hand very often, but understanding what it is matters because it underpins a lot of modern automation tooling. When you’re using Python with ncclient or working with modern APIs, NETCONF is often what’s happening under the hood.

RESTCONF and REST APIs

REST APIs use HTTP. Send a GET request to get configuration or state data. Send a PUT or POST to push configuration. The data comes back in JSON or XML format rather than raw text.

Most modern network platforms – Cisco DNA Centre, Meraki, NSO, cloud networking platforms – expose REST APIs. Querying an API and working with JSON data is a core skill for modern network automation.

Terraform

Terraform is infrastructure as code tooling from HashiCorp. It’s more commonly used for cloud infrastructure but it has provider support for network vendors. You describe what your infrastructure should look like in Terraform configuration files and it handles the deployment.

More relevant if you’re working with cloud networking or SD-WAN platforms than if you’re managing traditional campus switching.

Git

Git isn’t an automation tool in the same way, but it belongs in this list because you can’t do automation properly without version control. All your scripts, playbooks, templates, and configuration go into Git. You get history, you get collaboration, you get the ability to roll back. Non-negotiable part of the toolkit.

Traditional vs Modern Network Device Interfaces

Network devices used to give you one way in – the CLI. Type commands, get text back, parse it yourself if you needed to process it programmatically.

Modern devices give you multiple interfaces.

Interface Type	Protocol	Data Format	Best Used For
CLI	SSH / Telnet	Unstructured text	Interactive troubleshooting
NETCONF	SSH	XML	Structured config and state
RESTCONF	HTTPS	JSON / XML	API-driven automation
gRPC / gNMI	HTTP/2	Protobuf	Streaming telemetry
SNMP	UDP	MIB objects	Monitoring (legacy)

The shift from CLI to API-driven interfaces is the fundamental change in network management. CLI is still there and always will be – you’ll use it for troubleshooting. But for automation, structured APIs are far more reliable than parsing show command output.

Trying to extract information from show interfaces output using regex is painful and brittle. The output format might change between IOS versions. Specific fields might be in different positions depending on the device type. A NETCONF or REST API call gives you structured, predictable data every time.

A Practical Look at What Changes

Let me show you what the same task looks like manually versus automated.

The task: Check the current VLAN configuration on SW1-ACCESS, SW2-ACCESS, and SW3-ACCESS.

Manually: SSH into each device. Run show vlan brief. Read the output. Write it down or copy-paste it somewhere. Repeat for each device. Three SSH sessions, three commands, manually comparing the output.

Automated with Python and Netmiko:

from netmiko import ConnectHandler

devices = [
    {"host": "192.168.100.11", "device_type": "cisco_ios", "username": "netadmin", "password": "Linux123!"},
    {"host": "192.168.100.12", "device_type": "cisco_ios", "username": "netadmin", "password": "Linux123!"},
    {"host": "192.168.100.13", "device_type": "cisco_ios", "username": "netadmin", "password": "Linux123!"},
]

for device in devices:
    connection = ConnectHandler(**device)
    output = connection.send_command("show vlan brief")
    print(f"\n--- {device['host']} ---")
    print(output)
    connection.disconnect()

One script. Runs against all three devices. Same command. Same output format. Takes seconds instead of five minutes of manual work.

Now scale that to thirty switches. Or make it run every night and email you a report if anything has changed. That’s where automation pays off.

terminal screenshot showing Python network automation script output connecting to multiple Cisco switches and displaying VLAN brief information, one of the first scripts used in Network Automation for Network Engineers

The Challenges – Let’s Be Straight About Them

Any post that only tells you how great automation is and glosses over the downsides isn’t being straight with you. There are real challenges.

The learning curve is genuine. If you haven’t done any scripting before, Python is going to feel uncomfortable for a while. The syntax is unfamiliar, error messages can be cryptic, and there’s a lot to learn beyond just the language itself – Git, APIs, data formats, tooling. It takes months to get comfortable, not days.

Vendor inconsistency is a pain. Not all vendors have equally good API support. Some have excellent NETCONF and REST API implementations. Others have partial support, inconsistent data models, or bugs in their implementation. Writing code that works consistently across multiple vendors is harder than it sounds.

Legacy environments don’t cooperate. Got switches in the network that are ten years old running IOS versions from the dark ages? They might not support NETCONF. They might have quirky CLI output that’s difficult to parse. Automation works brilliantly on modern platforms and can be a nightmare on legacy gear.

Errors at scale can hurt. When you copy-paste a wrong command into one device, you break one device. When your script has a bug and runs against forty devices simultaneously, you can break forty devices at once. Automation amplifies both efficiency and mistakes. Testing properly before you run anything in production matters enormously.

Organisational resistance is real. In a lot of teams, there’s resistance to automation from people who see it as a threat or who are uncomfortable with the change. Managing that is a people problem, not a technical one, and it’s often harder to solve than writing the actual code.

None of these challenges should put you off. They’re just things to go in with your eyes open about.

Where Network Automation Fits in Modern Networks

Network automation isn’t just for big enterprise networks. It scales right down.

If you’re managing a small network with twenty devices and you find yourself making the same change repeatedly, automation helps. A simple Python script that connects to your devices and runs your standard hardening checks saves time even at that scale.

As networks grow, automation becomes less optional. SD-WAN deployments with hundreds of branch sites, campus networks with thousands of access ports, data centre fabrics with complex overlay networking – managing these manually isn’t feasible.

Cloud networking changes the picture further. AWS, Azure, and GCP don’t have CLIs in the traditional sense. You manage networking through APIs and infrastructure-as-code tooling from day one. Network engineers moving into cloud roles need automation skills as a baseline, not an add-on.

Intent-based networking platforms like Cisco DNA Centre wrap automation underneath a GUI, but understanding what’s happening underneath – the YANG models, the APIs, the orchestration logic – makes you far more effective when things don’t behave as expected.

How to Actually Get Started

This is the question I get most often. With all the tools and concepts out there, where do you actually begin?

Start with Python basics. Not everything – you don’t need to understand decorators and metaclasses before you automate a network task. Learn variables, loops, conditionals, functions, and how to read and write files. That’s enough to start doing useful things.

Then install Netmiko and connect to a device. Get show command output. Print it. Save it to a file. That first script that actually talks to a network device is the moment things start clicking.

From there, get comfortable with Git. Even if you’re working alone, version controlling your scripts builds the habit and protects you from accidentally breaking something that was working.

Then look at structured data. Learn how JSON works. Learn how to parse it in Python. Once you can pull structured data from a device API and process it in your script, a whole world of automation possibilities opens up.

After that, explore Ansible if you’re interested in a more playbook-driven approach, or go deeper on Python if you prefer writing code. Neither is wrong – it depends on what problems you’re solving and what suits your working style.

The key thing is doing it with your own network in mind. Don’t follow generic programming tutorials using irrelevant examples. Use your actual device hostnames. Use your IP addressing scheme. Automate tasks you genuinely do manually today. That context makes everything stick far better.

The Career Angle

Network automation skills are increasingly expected rather than optional at senior levels. Job adverts for senior network engineer and network architect roles commonly list Python, Ansible, API experience, and sometimes Terraform as requirements. Five years ago that wasn’t the case.

That’s not a reason to panic if you don’t have those skills yet. It is a reason to start building them deliberately rather than hoping it’ll sort itself out.

More importantly, these skills make you more effective right now. Not in some hypothetical future job – in your current role. Every hour you save through automation is an hour you can spend on more complex problems, better documentation, or just getting home at a reasonable time on a Friday.

That’s the real value of it. Not career positioning. Not keeping up with industry trends. Actually getting your time back and having more capacity for the work that genuinely needs your expertise.

External Link: Network to Code – Network Automation Forum – active community of network engineers working on automation, with resources, tools, and practical guidance across all experience levels