Getting into Cisco programming - DevNet?

Hi

First of all sorry for the bad formatting, I haven't got around the reddit way of formatting yet...

So I am working at a very big company (operating several sites in over 40+ countries) and I've got the time approval from my managers to finally start automating some of the more annoying ad hoc tasks, that haven't been automated from our developers.

Normally I'm in the 3rd level networking team providing normal troubleshoting, configurations and designing. I want to get into all this programming, the big buzzword... ;-)

I know that DevNet have so many resources (and maybe even too much, I cannot decide which way I should be going) Right now what we got it the Prime infrastructure with only our edge routers (money and licensing, but if I end up having some good PoC, upper management will pay for sure) What I want to be able to do, is basiclly being able to push variables from databases (could be SQL - this includes VLANs, IP ranges, masks etc) to specific devices and many even polling some data. I'm not sure if Prime is the correct way to do this kind of device configuration now-a-days, or if I should be focusing into the APIC style? The configurations can be done through CLI templates within Prime, but is this the wrong way of doing such big configurations? (We'll be talking over 25.000+ devices, that should be able to do bulk configurations if we end up with everything)

I'm not at all sure if this made any sense, but I hope it gives a brief summary.

TLDR: Should I move into learning configuration/programming with our Prime services or labbing up a APIC environment? Need to be able to pull variables from SQL database or similar and parse into devices. Over 25.000+ devices and over 500+ sites, each with different configurations. I know DevNet has a lot of lessons and tracks, but need to know which to follow, to achieve this.

Thank you very much.