Network Automation with Ansible

Chapter 4. Network Task Automation with Ansible

This report is gradually getting more technical in two areas. The first area is around the details and architecture of Ansible, and the second area is about exactly what types of tasks can be automated from a network perspective with Ansible. The latter is what we’ll take a look at in this chapter.

Automation is commonly equated with speed, and considering that some network tasks don’t require speed, it’s easy to see why some IT teams don’t see the value in automation. VLAN configuration is a great example because you may be thinking, “How fast does a VLAN really need to get created? Just how many VLANs are being added on a daily basis? Do I really need automation?”

In this section, we are going to focus on several other tasks where automation makes sense such as device provisioning, data collection, reporting, and compliance. But remember, as we stated earlier, automation is much more than speed and agility as it’s offering you, your team, and your business more predictable and more deterministic outcomes.

Device Provisioning

One of the easiest and fastest ways to get started using Ansible for network automation is creating device configuration files that are used for initial device provisioning and pushing them to network devices.

If we take this process and break it down into two steps, the first step is creating the configuration file, and the second is pushing the configuration onto the device.

First, we need to decouple the ...