Setting Up the Network Lab Environment

We now have a fair idea of how to write and develop Python scripts, the building blocks to creating programs. We will now move on to understanding why automation is an important topic in today's network, and then we will build our network automation lab using one of the popular pieces of software, called EVE-NG, which helps us to virtualize network devices.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• When and why to automate the network
• Screen scraping versus API automation
• Why to use Python for network automation
• The future of network automation
• Lab setup
• Getting ready: installing EVE-NG
• Building an enterprise network topology