In my last post I scripted automating a standup of a KVM lab w/ vJUNOS, vEOS and some ubuntu containers.

I don’t quite like the code and it’s difficult to maintain so many ‘if’ and ‘for’ statements to reparse an inventory files key/values. There is an easy solution to this and that is using an object.

Using objects shortcuts a lot of the re-parsing of the inventory file and just parses the file once to create an object for a given KVM or container type. The drawbacks of using objects in python is that I must use Pydantic which seems to add a few more seconds of delay and Object Oriented Programming (OOP) in Python may not be beginner friendly. From my viewpoint it’s best to write code based on who is going to maintain it. Such that I wouldn’t write Object-Oriented Python and hand it off to a beginner in Python and expect them to maintain it.

I’ve begun to focus more on Python as I’ve taken on different projects this past year. I wanted to make a quick post about the different ways to accomplish the same thing. There’s no ‘wrong way or right way’ but it’s more about the given situation that each way to accomplish the same goal fits.

So let’s dive in.

I started with GNS3 and Cisco IOS as my lab virtualization tool nearly 10 years ago. And GNS3 w/ Olive before the days of vMX. These days there are many choices but I still I mainly use KVM/lib-virt for my lab and occasionally containers. Mostly due to my need to test dataplane with Juniper’s vMX. If I had no requirement to use Juniper or vMX then I would likely move to a native container solution.

I’m starting this blog to document things as I learn them and also different interop scenarios I come across. The intention is to share information and any quirks I find. Especially on topics I can’t seem to find any information about by doing cursory searches on the internet.