You're reading from Mastering Ansible, 4th Edition - Fourth Edition

Product typeBook

Published inDec 2021

PublisherPackt

ISBN-139781801818780

Edition4th Edition

Tools

Ansible Ansible

Concepts

Configuration Management

Authors (2):

James Freeman

Jesse Keating

View More author details

Best practices

All the usual best practices of using Ansible apply when automating network devices with it. For example, never store passwords in the clear, and make use of ansible-vault where appropriate. Despite this, network devices are their own special class of devices when it comes to Ansible, and support for them started to flourish from the 2.5 release of Ansible onward. As such, there are a few special best practices that deserve to be mentioned when it comes to network automation with Ansible.

Inventory

Make good use of the inventory structure supported by Ansible when it comes to organizing your network infrastructure and pay particular attention to grouping. Doing so will make your playbook development much easier. For example, suppose you have two switches on your network – one is a Cumulus Linux Switch, as we examined previously, and the other is an Arista EOS-based device. Your inventory may look like this:

[switches:children...

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Mastering Ansible, 4th Edition - Fourth Edition

Published in: Dec 2021Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781801818780

Authors (2)

James Freeman

James Freeman is an accomplished IT professional with over 25 years' experience in the technology industry. He has more than a decade of first-hand experience in solving real-world enterprise problems in production environments using Ansible, open source, and AWS. As part of this work, he frequently introduces Ansible as a new technology to businesses and CTOs for the first time. In addition, he has co-authored five books and one video training course on Ansible, facilitated bespoke Ansible workshops and training sessions, and presented at both international conferences and meetups on Ansible.
Read more about James Freeman

Jesse Keating

Jesse Keating is an accomplished Ansible user, contributor, and presenter. He has been an active member of the Linux and open source community for over 15 years. He has firsthand experience involving a variety of IT activities, software development, and large-scale system administration. He has presented at numerous conferences and meetups, and has written many articles on a variety of topics.
Read more about Jesse Keating

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