Impact of Network Automation

Running a network efficiently requires a lot of time and effort. Provisioning resources and configuring networking devices often relies on many manual processes and requires highly trained and skilled engineers. Using automation saves time and helps maintain consistent configuration across many networking devices.

In this talk, I will discuss how we, a small network engineering team, started using automation to build and maintain the Squarespace network. We began our move towards orchestration by aggregating small Ansible roles and playbooks. For example, when we migrated the internal routing protocol from OSPF to BGP, we created an Ansible role to fully control the internal routing. Now we run Ansible playbooks when we need to move traffic away from devices before performing maintenance.

I will also describe how we use route servers to minimize configuration changes on network devices. BGP Route Servers is an elegant and sophisticated tool that we use to shift internal or external traffic without impact. We integrated Route Servers with our CI/CD tools to do BGP traffic engineering in the internal and external network. I will provide an example of how we route traffic onto a DDoS mitigation service with the click of a button.