Category: Ansible
Network Automation: Lego Bricks and Death Stars
One of the challenges traditional networking engineers face when starting their network automation journey is the “build or buy” decision: should I use a plethora of small open-source or commercial tools and components and build my own solution, or should I buy a humongous platform from a reassuringly-expensive $vendor.
Most of us were used to buying platforms ranging from CiscoWorks to HP OpenView (oops, Business Technology Optimization Software) or now Cisco’s NSO, so it’s natural that we’re trying to map this confusing new world into old patterns, leading to interesting discussions like the one I had during one of my workshops:
Ansible versus Puppet in Initial Device Provisioning
One of the attendees of my Building Next-Generation Data Center course asked this interesting question after listening to my description of differences between Chet/Puppet and Ansible:
For Zero-Touch Provisioning to work, an agent gets installed on the box as a boot up process that would contact the master indicating the box is up and install necessary configuration. How does this work with agent-less approach such as Ansible?
Here’s the first glitch: many network devices don’t ship with Puppet or Chef agent; you have to install it during the provisioning process.
Sample Ansible Networking Playbooks on Github
I spent the last week creating numerous scenarios using Ansible networking modules for my upcoming Network Automation workshop. The scenarios use Cisco IOS and Nexus OS modules as I used VIRL for network simulation, but you could easily adapt them to other networking devices.
All the scenarios I’m covering in the workshop are available in my Github repository; to get the them explained you’ll have to attend the workshop. Enjoy!
NAPALM: Integrating Ansible with Network Devices on Software Gone Wild
What happens when network engineers with strong programming background and focus on open source tools have to implement network automation in a multi-vendor network? Instead of complaining or ranting about the stupidities of traditional networking vendors and CLI they write an abstraction layer that allows them to treat all their devices in the same way and immediately open-source it.