Ansible for network automation is awesome!

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As a network engineer, I was used to working in a silo with whatever tool the network vendor was selling to manage the hardware. At the start of 2020, someone convinced me to try Ansible, and I wrote my first playbook in Ansible 2.9.

Fast forward, and I now use Ansible to push configuration changes, provision new network devices, patch software, and everything in between. It has become the main driver in everything I do, and the result is way better than I could have imagined.

If you are a network engineer on the fence about it, I highly encourage you to give Ansible a shot. It will be well worth your time.

A huge thanks to all the people driving the Ansible project forward :pray: You are all doing a great job :chart_with_upwards_trend:

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As industrial engineer, i tried Ansible on 2019 on Cisco device to create vlans. Now I become IT process automation engineer thanks to Ansible.
I used Ansible to automate large projects, repetitive tasks and complex integrations among diferent technologies.
Now we are migrating from Ansible2.9 to latest Ansible using Executions Environments, this tool is great!
Great job!

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If you use Ansible to manage your network, feel free to leave a few words about the automation journey by replying to this topic :point_down:

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Hi ! Here’s my feedback after almost 3 years of network automation in my company.
At the beginning : everything was done manually, with Word documentation no one cares or updates, a lot of misconfiguration mainly due to people that read documentation in a different way from one to another.

When I came to the company, I first set up a Debian based Ansible platform and create some projects and playbook to show people possibilities (mainly around Windows/Linux server + Nutanix infrastructure at first) and then, tried to escort people to write and test their own playbook cause nobody got that “scripting fiber” in my team.

It takes around 1 year to really be adopted by almost everyone and now we’re really proud to :

  • configure and upgrade many hundreds of Aruba switches with our standards (using and developing dedicated roles)
  • inventory every switches connected to our corporate network
  • backup switch configuration every week
  • (but also, a lot of stuff on Fortigate firewalls)

In the first semester of 2024, I moved forward from debian-based ansible server to AWX and we migrate around 30 projects in like 2 months.

Except technical possibilities, i’d say the most important thing for teams is really to learn, get the motivation and “think” Network as Code :slight_smile:

(Sorry for my bad english)

Gael from France :slight_smile:

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