Automation Options for ASA 5585 and Nexus 7000

[obrien.c.sean]

I'm trying to lay out any and all automation (remote) possibilities for our networking team.

The basic scenario is an onboarding setup

- Creating a context on the outer (5585)

- Creating two NATs (from 5585 to the VLAN on the 7000)

- Creating same NATs on the 7000

- Punch a number of ingress and egress rules into the same 2 devices for that context

This can all be done manually now by logging in and running CLI.

What are my options for automation for these devices, the amount of acronym hell among the various cisco APIs and solutions is overwhelming. I've read about some but ideally I'd like to use the same approach for both devices.

- Remotely executing python scripts

- NETCONF (looks like CLI commands as XML)

- SNMP (least common denominator?)

I've also read about management layers that sit about devices and provide a common API for management like APIC which exposes a REST API but I can't find any kind of matrix that shows that it can speak to these two devices.

[christer.hemgren]

Hi Sean

For the ASA you have hade the ASA rest api for some time.  Some limits still. Create context ?

And for Nexus 7000 you now have nx-api.

We are moving from netconf to nx-api and for ASA we only testing the rest api but have the same type of goal.

Christer