In this section of the course,
we're going to discuss orchestration and automation.
Now, due to the increasing complexity
and scale of our modern networks,
orchestration and automation are not just
a nice thing to have anymore,
but they really have become a necessity
in our modern workplaces.
Automation is used to reduce the risk of human error,
it speeds up repetitive tasks,
and it frees up your network administrators
so they can focus on more strategic tasks and projects.
Orchestration, on the other hand,
will bring together this higher level of stuff
by coordinating many automated tasks
across various interconnected systems
to ensure that complex workflows are being executed smoothly
and in the correct order.
Both of these practices allow organizations
to respond swiftly to new business requirements
and market changes,
so you can maintain competitive in the marketplace
and ensure that you are providing
a consistent level of service delivery.
Now, in this section, we're going to be focused on domain one,
networking concepts, and specifically on Objective 1.8.
Objective 1.8 states that you must be able
to summarize evolving use cases
for modern network environments.
Now, first, we're going to look at infrastructure as code.
Infrastructure as code, or IaC,
is a key practice of DevOps that involves managing
and provisioning computing infrastructure
through machine readable definition files
rather than physical hardware configurations
or interactive configuration tools.
Then we're going to discuss when you should automate
and orchestrate your functions within your network.
The decision to automate and orchestrate
really should be made when tasks become repetitive, complex,
or critical enough to require consistent accuracy
and efficiency that a manual process simply can't guarantee.
Next, you're going to learn about the benefits
of using automation and orchestration.
Automation and orchestration provides significant benefits
by streamlining our processes,
and this helps reduce human error,
improve your response times,
and enable higher levels of scalability
in the management of your network.
After that, we're going to explore playbooks
and their use in our networks.
Playbooks are essentially automated sets of instructions
that carry out specific processes such as deployment,
scaling, and self-healing of our applications and systems
within a given network.
Then we'll cover upgrades and compliance
and how automation and orchestration can help us with that.
Automation and orchestration will facilitate
upgrades and compliance by ensuring that our changes
are being implemented consistently
across all of our systems
to ensure that we're adhering to any regulatory standards
without the need for additional manual oversight.
Next, we're going to look at how we can
automate our network inventories.
Automating network inventories
allows for the real-time visibility
and tracking of our network resources
to minimize the risk of discrepancies and outdated records.
After that, we're going to explore integrations and APIs
and how they're used in our networks.
Integrations and APIs allow for disparate systems
to better communicate and work together
through the exchange of data
and being able to execute cross-system workflows or tasks.
Then we'll discuss source control.
Now, source control, also known as version control,
is the practice of tracking
and managing changes to your code,
and this allows multiple users
to work on a project simultaneously,
and this helps prevent conflicts when you're doing that.
Because source control is such an important function
in automation and orchestration,
I'm also going to provide you with a brief demonstration
of how you can get started using something like Git,
which is a source control software
to oversee any changes to your source code, your scripts,
and your orchestration files.
Finally, we'll take a short quiz to see what you learned
during this section of the course,
and review your answers to ensure
you know why the right answers were right
and the wrong answers were wrong.
So if you're ready, let's get started with our coverage
of orchestration and automation
in this section of the course.