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What is Ansible?

Ansible is a simple automation language or you can say application that can perfectly automate IT infrastructure or network infrastructure.

 Ansible is a free-software platform for configuring and managing computers or network devices which combines multi-node software deployment, ad hoc task execution, and configuration management. (description taken from wikipedia)

 It can also be used for network management. Like Puppet or Chef which requires agent to be installed on host system but Ansible does not require an agent on the host system. It uses SSH for transport to communicate with the host. When Ansible was first developed it was used primarily for server administration but in the last few years of development more and more network modules have been added to the software. Currently these Network vendor devices can be manage by Ansible. Current version is Ansible Ver 2.4 :

A10 Networks

Cisco ACI

Aireos

AOS

Aruba Networks

Cisco ASA

AVI

Bigswitch

Bigswitch

Citrix

Cloudengine

Cloudvision

Cumulus

Dell OS

EOS

F5 Networks

FortiOS

IOS

IOS-XR

JUNOS

NX-OS

Netconf

PAN OS (Paloalto Networks)

Radware

Vyos

 If you notice, above list is very long but I am interested mostly on Cisco and Juniper network devices.

 There are generally two methods to automate network devices. First is to learn Python and then automate the things. Second is to learn Ansible and do automation. For network engineer like us , learning Python has high learning curve. Whereas learning Ansible is quite easy as compare to learn Python.

 Ansible is a skill that all Network Engineers should learn and master. It will save you lot more time to automate task which you do on daily basis.

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