Network Discovery and Automation

At Comcast I was the primary architect for a massive Network Discovery Project and Network automation project that saved Comcast tens of thousands of man-hours in work.

While working with some of the engineers, I noticed a pattern of multiple Cisco and Juniper device configurations always had some kind of problem. Either duplicate IPs or typos in the config, etc. Over a 6-month project, I came up with a uniform spreadsheet that all of the engineers could use. Once they added their inventory to it, we dumped it into a database and put a web UI on it. This, coupled with an IP management system that used a SOAP API, we created an automation system that reduced redundancy and errors immediately.

The inventory database caused a maintenance issue. It was hard to keep up with all the card and interface changes across the country every night. Using Python, we built a Network Discovery engine that would connect to a primary list of 13 static routers and then it would dynamically discover all of the connected items in the network, giving a fresh snapshot of the layer 2 and 3 build out of the network topology across the country.