Recent posts

Python: Automating network health checks

October 15, 2020

I was a network engineer in a previous life. Though I’ve moved into DevOps, my love for network automation has not subsided. Recently, an engineer posted a message on one of the Slack Workgroups I frequent. He had been asked to test and document network connectivity for a large number of hosts… by close of business the next day. Given the tight...

How I passed the 3 AWS Associate exams in 1 month

October 13, 2020

Due to COVID social distancing, I’m currently working from home. As I no longer travel to and from the office each day, I figured I’d put my newfound spare time to good use - studying. As I’ve worked on AWS for many years now, I’ve always been interested in doing the certs as a professional challenge. Recently I set my sights on the Solutions A...

Creating automated, infinitely scalable labs on AWS: Part 1

August 18, 2020

As a senior Sales Engineer for Trend Micro, I regularly run security PoCs, demos, webinars, etc. One day while running one of these sessions, I had an idea: “People can learn a lot about traditional security and DevSecOps by becoming hackers themselves. Wouldn’t it be great to give them an environment to hack, and then secure?” And with that, ...

Multithreading with Python and Netmiko

June 28, 2020

If you ran the script in the previous post, you will have found it took approximately 18 seconds to run. While that may not feel like a lot of time, what if we wanted to connect to five devices? Or ten? Our execution time will grow exponentially. What originally took seconds begins to take minutes. So, how do we solve this problem? We use multi...

Network Automation with Cisco Modeling Labs (CML2)

June 26, 2020

Coming from a network engineering background, network automation has always interested me. In fact, it was network automation which spiked my interest in DevOps. The beauty of being able to make safe, repeatable and automated changes at scale cannot be overstated. But I digress. Cisco recently released CML2 (formerly known as VIRL). As per the ...