APRICOT 2023 | Network Automation | APNIC Hackathon

Anurag Bhatia
update

Next month will be APRICOT 2023 which is exciting. The last in-person event of such kind was in Feb 2020 in Melbourne. Later APRICOT 2021 & 2022 were completely online (similar to other NOGs). This year’s APRICOT will be in Manila, Philippines. On the agenda will be meetings with network operators, CDNs and internet exchanges in the region. Along with that, I will be doing a 5-day long workshop on “Network Automation for Network Engineers”. This will be a step-upgrade from the last one I did at SANOG 38. One day extra gives me the option to add a CRUD-based app besides REST APIs. Plus I think 5 days will be the longest ever I have ever done in past.



Network Automation workshop

The goal of this workshop is to enable system/network engineers with the skillset required to automate over 90% of their day-to-day tasks. The detailed schedule for the workshop is published on the APRICOT 2023 site here.

Broadly it will be:

  • Day 1 - Docker
  • Day 2 - Ansible
  • Day 3 - Git & Gilab CI/CD pipelines
  • Day 4 - Creating a basic CRUD-based app & understanding REST APIs
  • Day 5 - Integrating it all

So by day 5 one should be able to trigger a change in a server, router or switch etc via a web interface as well as via some sort of detection i.e “if rule 1 is breached, execute job x” automatically.



APNIC Hackathon

APNIC will be conducting Hackathon during APRICOT 2023. This should be fun. I think for a workshop like mine there will be good interest in workshop participants as they would have skills required at the hackathon to things up. If you are attending APRICOT, like playing with datasets, tools, and systems then I will strongly recommend attending it to build something up.

With the hope that all goes well time to finalise slides, wiki and lab for the workshop. 😄