Ansible: Up and Running, 3rd Edition

Chapter 21. Networking and Security

Network Management

Managing and configuring network devices always makes us feel nostalgic. Log in to a console by telnet, type some commands, save the configuration to startup config, and you’re done. For a long time, we had two types of management strategies for network devices:

• Buy an expensive proprietary software that configures your devices.

• Develop minimal tooling around your configuration files: back up your configs locally, make some changes by editing them, and copy the result back onto the devices through the console.

We have seen some movement in this space. The first thing we noticed was that network device vendors started to create or open their APIs for everyone. The second thing is that the Ansible community did not stop going lower down the stack, to the core: hardware servers, load-balancer appliances, firewall appliances, network devices, and even routers and specialized appliances. Red Hat coordinated Ansible for Network Automation in release 2.5 of Ansible. Between the 2.5 and 2.9 versions of Ansible, the focus was on network modules. For maintainability reasons, this idea has since been abandoned in favor of collections, and networking is maybe the best evidence that it was a good decision to follow up on JP Mens’s blog post by focusing on ansible-core with the Ansible team, as well as to delegate certified content creation to Red Hat partners and the rest to the community. Network vendors jumped on the bandwagon, ...