Understanding network configuration management
At the beginning of this chapter, we discussed automation and how it helps us, as network engineers, work more efficiently when configuring, deploying, and troubleshooting issues on a large network. An important factor with network automation is that it saves us a lot of time from performing manual tasks on our network devices. When becoming a network developer, it's important to understand how various configuration management tools can improve how we automate configurations on our switches, routers, firewalls, and many other network devices.
In a traditional scenario, a network engineer will access and manage a network device such as a router or switch via a CLI. This is how we all learned to manage our devices – if there is a change that needs to be made on the network, we need to log into the CLI and manually make this change. As this method has worked for many years and it's the primary method by which we do things...
