FACULTY OF COMPUTER NETWORKS AND COMMUNICATIONS
UNIVERSITY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, VNU-HCM
Infrastructure
Module 2
SUBJECT
Scripting for Administration, Automation, and Security
NC | NT542 – Scripting for Administration, Automation, and Security
Update 08/2025
FACULTY OF COMPUTER NETWORKS AND COMMUNICATIONS
UNIVERSITY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, VNU-HCM
Section 1.
The Trends of Infrastructure
Update: September, 2025
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NC | NT542 – Scripting for Administration, Automation, and Security
Section 1. The Trends of Infrastructure
Interactive
o CLI – Command-line Interface
▪ CLI is a text-based interface to interact with software, services, and the operating system
on a terminal or console.
▪ CLI are designed to –
• Execute commands
• Access system resource
• Automate workflows
• Custom behaviour
o CLI is no longer the norm
▪ CLI for automation is neither reliable nor cost-effective
• Configuration changes are becoming more and more complex: configuration changes involve
multiple devices, including physical networking devices, virtual machines, containers, VNF, etc.
• Humanly impossible to deal with the CLI due to the frequency of changes is rapidly increasing
• CLI is not standardised: not consistent from a syntax and semantic point of view across vendors / OS
• Dependency issues when configuring devices via the CLI, limited error reporting, and does not produce
any structured output
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NC | NT542 – Scripting for Administration, Automation, and Security
Section 1. The Trends of Infrastructure
Operation
o Reduced Deployment Time
▪ Deploying new services → growing the revenue
▪ Time to the market is key
▪ “smoke test” images, services, PoPs on virtual
devices → before the real deployment
▪ In the cloud environment, new services are expected
to be up and running in seconds
o The DevOps Time
▪ Python is a modern programming language with
powerful features, lots of available libraries, and
SDKs → develop a convenient tool for parsing tasks,
management, and configuration
Fig. DevOps
▪ DevOps = Development + Operations → unifying the
software development and software operations
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NC NT542 – Scripting for Administration, Automation, and Security
Section 1. The Trends of Infrastructure
Strategy
o Hardware Commoditization and Disaggregation
▪ Software disaggregation from the hardware
▪ Equipment vendors provide their own hardware with their own software –
• Optimized for performance, stable, and reliable
• The challenge in validation, managing, and maintaining features/services when different device types
have different operating systems, feature sets, CLIs, management, and licenses
▪ Ability to order or develop networking software
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NC | NT542 – Scripting for Administration, Automation, and Security
Section 1. The Trends of Infrastructure
Software Defined Everything
o SDN Software-Defined Networking
▪ Separate the control plane from the data plane, focus on OpenFlow
▪ Enable the network to be accessed by operators programmatically
▪ Provide centralized control and management of network devices through software
▪ Allow for automated management and orchestration techniques
o NFV – Network Function Virtualization
▪ Network elements are virtualized instances rather than physical appliances
▪ Recude the complexity and time-to-market associated with new services
▪ Provisioning, changing, and scaling dynamically on demand, in minutes or even seconds
▪ “configuring” network appliances to virtualized functions as software to be programmed
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NC | NT542 – Scripting for Administration, Automation, and Security
Section 1. The Trends of Infrastructure
Traditional Network Management Limitations
o The listed protocols are the current practical normality of the network operation that
happens today.
o What are these protocols? What limitations are these protocols facing?
CLI SNMP Syslog
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NC | NT542 – Scripting for Administration, Automation, and Security
FACULTY OF COMPUTER NETWORKS AND COMMUNICATIONS
UNIVERSITY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, VNU-HCM
Section 2.
Components of IT infrastructure
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NC | NT542 – Scripting for Administration, Automation, and Security
Section 2. System Components
Physical Versus Logical
o IT infrastructure can be depicted in two different ways:
▪ Physical infrastructure
• Consists of the physical wires and devices
▪ Logical infrastructure
• Software-based partitions, segmentation, virtualization, and connections
• Overlay on the physical infrastructure
o Hardware is inflexible
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NC | NT542 – Scripting for Administration, Automation, and Security
Section 2. System Components
Computing environment – Common Workloads
o Workloads are characterized by the amount and type of pressure on resources that
an application puts on a system
o Categorization of application: CPU-bound, memory-bound, and storage-bound
o CPU-bound applications benefit from high-performance processors:
▪ Batch processing, gaming servers, high-performance computing (HPC)
▪ Machine learning, scientific modeling*
o Memory-bound benefit from more memory:
▪ Caching, data analytics, Databases
o Storage-bound applications benefit from low-latency and random I/O operations
▪ Data warehouses, data lakes
▪ Distributed filesystems, Hadoop, log, and data processing application
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NC | NT542 – Scripting for Administration, Automation, and Security
Section 2. System Components
Computing environment – Choosing the Location of Workloads
o On-Prem
▪ Maintain own data centers with hardware to host the services
▪ Deploying different hardware specific to the application’s needs better matches the
expenditure and utility for those resources
▪ Increase the complexity required to manage the infrastructure
o Cloud Computing
▪ Cloud computing involves accessing IT resources over the Internet on a pay-as-you-go
model.
▪ Utilize technology services like compute, storage, and databases from a cloud provider.
▪ Compute options
• Serverless: cover unikernels, functions, and app services
• Containers: an isolated process with a portable runtime environment
• Virtual Machines: multiple OS instances can run on a single physical server
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NC | NT542 – Scripting for Administration, Automation, and Security
Section 2. System Components
Computing environment – Cloud computing environments
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NC | NT542 – Scripting for Administration, Automation, and Security
Section 2. Components of IT infrastructure
Storage
o Data storage effects on system durability, portability, flexibility, and consistency
o Key characteristics
▪ The underlying supported data storage of cloud computing is the same as on-prem
computing
▪ Each type of storage device (HDD, SSD,…) has varying performance characteristics,
reliability, and cost
▪ Critical characteristics: capacity, IOPS, I/O size/block size, throughput, latency
o Storage categories, including –
▪ Block Storage
▪ File Storage
▪ Object Storage
▪ Database Storage
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NC | NT542 – Scripting for Administration, Automation, and Security
Section 2. Components of IT infrastructure
Networks
o Key characteristics of the networks:
▪ Speed, Bandwidth
▪ Latency, Jitter
▪ Availability
o Physical topologies
▪ Bus / Ring / Star / Mesh / Tree / Spine-leaf
o Layer 2 connectivity:
▪ Bridge / Ethernet switching / Link Aggregation / Bonding
o Network segmentation and virtualization
▪ VLAN / VXLAN
▪ NFV / SDN / VPN
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NC | NT542 – Scripting for Administration, Automation, and Security
Section 2. Components of IT infrastructure
Networks
o Managing a Network:
▪ Firewall to filter ingress and egress traffic
▪ Gateway router to accept incoming traffic from the external traffic, steer it to internal
resources, and relay outbound traffic from internal hosts onward back to remote clients
▪ Load balancer to distribute traffic among the servers
▪ IDPS to protect the network from unauthorized external access and suspicious activities.
▪ VPN connection
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NC | NT542 – Scripting for Administration, Automation, and Security
FACULTY OF COMPUTER NETWORKS AND COMMUNICATIONS
UNIVERSITY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, VNU-HCM
Section 3.
Infrastructure Administration
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NC | NT542 – Scripting for Administration, Automation, and Security
Section 3. Infrastructure Administration
Overview
o Type of Deployment o Location of Deployment
▪ Physical server ▪ On-Prem / Private Cloud
▪ Virtualization ▪ Public Cloud
▪ Containerization ▪ Hybrid Cloud
▪ Serverless
o Components: o Operating System:
▪ Compute ▪ Microsoft Windows-based OS
▪ Network ▪ Unix/Linux-based distribution
▪ Storage ▪ Network device OS
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NC | NT542 – Scripting for Administration, Automation, and Security
Section 3. Infrastructure Administration
Administration Tasks – 1/2
o Server & Infrastructure Management
▪ Provision, configure, and maintain
▪ Apply patches, updates, and monitor performance
▪ Manage server lifecycle and documentation
▪ Manage application services
o Network & Security Operations
▪ Configure routers, switches, firewalls, and VPNs
▪ Implement security policies and access controls
▪ Monitor threats and conduct vulnerability assessments
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NC | NT542 – Scripting for Administration, Automation, and Security
Section 3. Infrastructure Administration
Administration Tasks – 2/2
o Storage & Backup Management
▪ Manage storage systems and capacity planning
▪ Execute backup/disaster recovery procedures
▪ Test and verify data restoration processes
o User & Access Management
▪ Administer user accounts and permissions
▪ Authentication
▪ Authorization
o Monitoring & Maintenance
▪ Track system performance and availability
▪ Plan and execute system upgrades
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NC | NT542 – Scripting for Administration, Automation, and Security