Understanding Network Configuration Management

At the opening of this chapter, we discussed automation and how it helps network engineers work more efficiently when configuring, deploying, and troubleshooting issues on a large network. An important factor with network automation is it saves us a lot of time from performing manual tasks on our network devices. In becoming a network developer, it is important to understand how various configuration management tools can improve how we automate configurations on our switches, routers, firewalls, and many other network devices.

In a traditional scenario, a network engineer will access and manage a network device, such as a router or switch, via a command-line interface (CLI). This is how everyone learns to manage their devices. If there is a change on the network, you would need to log in to the CLI and manually make the change. As this method has worked for many years, and it is the primary method that is used, it is also vulnerable...