Howdy out there in Automation land! Hopefully everyone is staying semi-cool during this long summer. I know we are going through pretty normal SE Texas weather with lots of humidity and highs in the mid to upper 90s! Gross! But that does not keep us from doing great things in the landscape of automation. I was recently asked about any videos or trainings I had on Command Line Interfaces or CLIs and I got to thinking and since I did not have one, I said, "bout time I did a blog on that!". So here we are. CLIs give us the ability (similar to web services) to construct demi adapters and automate scripting and commands. In this instance Orchestrator becomes the driver of the bus or a traffic cop directing the flow of traffic. I believe it's all about CPO sitting at the middle of your giant IT diagram and it directing the flow of data to your applications.
We can use a bunch of CLI pieces to make our automations happen. We can also use them to fill in some gaps we might see in functional calls in the product. On the windows side of things you can fire off commands at windows (ping for example) or you can write scripts in powershell or VBS. Using the terminal adapter we can automate all kinds of scripts and command into SSH or Telnet based devices and systems. We can do automations against Unix/Linux, Cisco IOS, Telepresence devices, or anything we can connect to via SSH/Telnet. The possibilities can be endless! So in helping you on your quest to automate command line components, I have a VOD below that will talk you through some of the finer points and show you some examples from scratch. I hope it is informative and gets you going on the right track. As always, my email is open or the forums on the CPO site are always open for help or guidance. Enough jibber jabber....
Onto the video!!!
https://ciscosupport.webex.com/ciscosupport/lsr.php?RCID=685b45d0a4f6a275a7a408c193e398fb
Shaun's Weekly Q/A
No questions this week! Hopefully we'll get some in to answer for next week!
Ever week I will pick a handful of questions from you, the reading CPO public, to answer in this part of the blog. Please post comments/questions below. I will no longer be using the external e-mail from previous blogs.
Please also let me know if you like the format of this blog and what else you would like to see/know about. Feel free to give any ideas as to future blog posts, etc and I will be happy to post them. I hope to do more how-tos, best practices, tips, tricks, and hopefully some interviews of the important people behind the scenes of CPO.
WEEKLY AUTOMATION BLOG DISCLAIMER: As always, this is a blog and my (Shaun Roberts) thoughts on CPO, my thoughts on best practices, and my experiences with the product and customers. The above views are in no way representative of Cisco or any of it's partners, etc. None of these views, etc are supported and this is not a place to find standard product support. If you need standard product support please do so via the current call in numbers on Cisco.com or email tac@cisco.com
Thanks to all for reading and happy automating!
-Shaun Roberts
shaurobe@cisco.com