Network Automation with Ansible

Chapter 1. Network Automation

As the IT industry transforms with technologies from server virtualization to public and private clouds with self-service capabilities, containerized applications, and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings, one of the areas that continues to lag behind is the network.

Over the past 5+ years, the network industry has seen many new trends emerge, many of which are categorized as software-defined networking (SDN).

Note

SDN is a new approach to building, managing, operating, and deploying networks. The original definition for SDN was that there needed to be a physical separation of the control plane from the data (packet forwarding) plane, and the decoupled control plane must control several devices.

Nowadays, many more technologies get put under the SDN umbrella, including controller-based networks, APIs on network devices, network automation, whitebox switches, policy networking, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), and the list goes on.

For purposes of this report, we refer to SDN solutions as solutions that include a network controller as part of the solution, and improve manageability of the network but don’t necessarily decouple the control plane from the data plane.

One of these trends is the emergence of application programming interfaces (APIs) on network devices as a way to manage and operate these devices and truly offer machine to machine communication. APIs simplify the development process when it comes to automation and building network applications, providing more structure on how data is modeled. For example, when API-enabled devices return data in JSON/XML, it is structured and easier to work with as compared to CLI-only devices that return raw text that then needs to be manually parsed.

Prior to APIs, the two primary mechanisms used to configure and manage network devices were the command-line interface (CLI) and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). If we look at each of those, the CLI was meant as a human interface to the device, and SNMP wasn’t built to be a real-time programmatic interface for network devices.

Luckily, as many vendors scramble to add APIs to devices, sometimes just because it’s a check in the box on an RFP, there is actually a great byproduct—enabling network automation. Once a true API is exposed, the process for accessing data within the device, as well as managing the configuration, is greatly simplified, but as we’ll review in this report, automation is also possible using more traditional methods, such as CLI/SNMP.

Note

As network refreshes happen in the months and years to come, vendor APIs should no doubt be tested and used as key decision-making criteria for purchasing network equipment (virtual and physical). Users should want to know how data is modeled by the equipment, what type of transport is used by the API, if the vendor offers any libraries or integrations to automation tools, and if open standards/protocols are being used.

Generally speaking, network automation, like most types of automation, equates to doing things faster. While doing more faster is nice, reducing the time for deployments and configuration changes isn’t always a problem that needs solving for many IT organizations.

Including speed, we’ll now take a look at a few of the reasons that IT organizations of all shapes and sizes should look at gradually adopting network automation. You should note that the same principles apply to other types of automation as well.

Simplified Architectures

Today, every network is a unique snowflake, and network engineers take pride in solving transport and application issues with one-off network changes that ultimately make the network not only harder to maintain and manage, but also harder to automate.

Instead of thinking about network automation and management as a secondary or tertiary project, it needs to be included from the beginning as new architectures and designs are deployed. Which features work across vendors? Which extensions work across platforms? What type of API or automation tooling works when using particular network device platforms? When these questions get answered earlier on in the design process, the resulting architecture becomes simpler, repeatable, and easier to maintain and automate, all with fewer vendor proprietary extensions enabled throughout the network.

Deterministic Outcomes

In an enterprise organization, change review meetings take place to review upcoming changes on the network, the impact they have on external systems, and rollback plans. In a world where a human is touching the CLI to make those upcoming changes, the impact of typing the wrong command is catastrophic. Imagine a team with three, four, five, or 50 engineers. Every engineer may have his own way of making that particular upcoming change. And the ability to use a CLI or a GUI does not eliminate or reduce the chance of error during the control window for the change.

Using proven and tested network automation helps achieve more predictable behavior and gives the executive team a better chance at achieving deterministic outcomes, moving one step closer to having the assurance that the task is going to get done right the first time without human error.

Business Agility

It goes without saying that network automation offers speed and agility not only for deploying changes, but also for retrieving data from network devices as fast as the business demands. Since the advent of server virtualization, server and virtualization admins have had the ability to deploy new applications almost instantaneously. And the faster applications are deployed, the more questions are raised as to why it takes so long to configure a VLAN, route, FW ACL, or load-balancing policy.

By understanding the most common workflows within an organization and why network changes are really required, the process to deploy modern automation tooling such as Ansible becomes much simpler.

This chapter introduced some of the high-level points on why you should consider network automation. In the next section, we take a look at what Ansible is and continue to dive into different types of network automation that are relevant to IT organizations of all sizes.