ONUG Training: Modern Network Automation with GitNops

Spring 2023

GitNops is an operational framework that takes DevOps best practices used for application development, such as version control, collaboration, compliance, and CI/CD and applies them to network operations and network automation. A Zero Trust implementation of GitNops is GitZT. Both are heavily influenced by the Fast Systems Thinking approach. It teaches network engineers an approach to automation that provides security, extensibility, scalability, reliability, and reparability. 

The GitHub platform provides GitHub Actions, a CI/CD system that can run containerized applications such as Postman or Terraform in your network management LAN. The Postman and Terraform runtime environments download code directly from GitHub, where it is managed collaboratively by you and your team. The benefits of an operational framework like GitNops are repeatability, automation, agility, scalability, disaster recovery and reassurance (documentation). 

In this workshop at ONUG Spring 2023, participants will learn DevOps best practices and principles, such as:

  • Configuration Management with Git and GitHub
  • Continuous Integration of the Terraform HCL and Postman JSON
  • Automatic Testing of Terraform code with the Super-Linter and security scanner Snyk
  • Infrastructure as Code modeled through Terraform HCL and the Postman UI and CLI
  • Continuous Delivery to an on-premise data centre’s management LAN with the Kubernetes-based GitHub Actions Runner Controller 
  • Continuous Deployment of network engineering techniques and how to implement them
  • Continuous Monitoring concepts for a network engineering workflow management system such as GitNops and GitZT
Speakers:

Since childhood, Thomas has prioritized and emphasized human service and has always had a genuine passion for technology. He is adept at recognizing and personally investing in open-source market-leading platforms. He uses this insight and sincere desire for service to help his customers with their most challenging development and delivery problems.

Thomas has focused much of his career on computer networking. He focused on Wireless networking in graduate school at Bentley University and was able to build long haul WiFi networks in East and West Africa while working at Booz Allen Hamilton for USAID. He has worked in application delivery, product management, and pre-sales at F5 Networks and NGINX. He most recently has been focused on CI/CD, which subtlety is a traffic routing problem and has required an in-depth understanding of multi-cloud and Kubernetes networking.

Social:

GitHub – github.com/mcgonagle

LinkTree – linktr.ee/mcgonagle

Calendly – calendly.com/mcgonagle

Blog – infraswarm.io

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