Network Automation Nerds NAN115: Simplifying Network Automation with Wingpy
Mar 11, 2026
Andreas Baekdahl, a network engineer and automation specialist who built WingPy, shares why he created an abstraction for messy Cisco APIs. He outlines WingPy’s auth, session, concurrency and rate-limiting features. He talks about testing, refactoring to v1.0, documentation for developer ergonomics, and practical advice for starting automation safely.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
WingPy Abstracts Diverse Cisco APIs
- WingPy is an abstraction layer that standardizes interaction with many Cisco APIs so engineers don't handle each platform's quirks.
- Andreas built it because controller-based Cisco platforms use diverse APIs with different auth, pagination, and rate-limit behaviors.
REST Is A Guideline Not A Uniform Standard
- REST is not a full standard: it only defines transport conventions, not auth flows, pagination, or rate-limit semantics.
- Andreas shows that different Cisco products implement pagination, retry headers, and throttling differently, so assumptions break across APIs.
WingPy Focuses On Housekeeping Not SDK Modeling
- WingPy isn't a full SDK modeling every vendor object; it dispatches REST requests and handles housekeeping so engineers focus on business logic.
- The package centralizes auth, session maintenance, concurrency, and rate-limiting rather than mirroring device config models.