Skillet Builder Overview

Welcome. This site contains Skillet Builder documentation, examples, and tutorials designed to expand the Builder community. This is a living set of content updated as new skillet types, examples, and tutorials are available.

This video contains a quick Skillet overview and a few demonstrations playing Skillets with Panhandler.

The purpose of Skillets is to capture knowledge and expertise into sharable units that can be consumed by users to reduce complexity. This can complement or remove the requirement to capture GUI config guides that can require hours of configuration steps, often with all users entering the same sets of data. Thus the transition from ‘show me how to configure’ to ‘give a configuration to load’.

Skillet Use Cases

Skillets are built and played to (1) simplify the burden of repeatable tasks and (2) rapidly get to an outcome using recommended practices from subject matter experts. These goals can be extended over a wide array of use cases:

Deploy

Instead of manually deploying infrastructure, skillets help with automated or semi-automated tasks. Integrating with Terraform and Ansible, skillets can provide a web UI interface to capture data and run templates and playbooks.

  • instantiate compute resources in the cloud

  • simplify licensing

  • update device software

  • perform NGFW threat and AV content updates

  • install plug-ins

Configure

Save time by levering best practice and reference configurations created by subject matter experts.

  • Day One best practice configurations

  • one-click demo and POC setup

  • mobile workforce remote access

  • SecOps recommended reports and custom signatures

  • vertical-specific use cases

  • quick config guides as skillets

Assess

Gain visibility about system and configuration state.

  • PAN-OS and Panorama configuration validation checks

  • automated Security Lifecycle Review (SLR)

  • query service information such as Prisma Access service info


Skillet Players

Skillets are open-source and extensible, ready to play using any supported application.

Supported players and utilities include:

Skillet Implementation

Skillets are implemented using the ‘Command’ Design Pattern. This allows all aspects of working with APIs to be encapsulated behind a clean, single method interface. This significantly reduces the complexity of building automation tooling that often requires access to many different APIs, vendor devices, and systems.