You're reading from Network Automation Cookbook Over 100 recipes to effectively configure and manage network infrastructure with Ansible

Product type Paperback

Published in Aug 2025

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781835887981

Length 566 pages

Edition 2nd Edition

Languages

Python

Tools

Ansible

Concepts

Networking

Authors (3):

Christian Adell

Jeffrey Kala

Karim Okasha

View More author details

Table of Contents (23) Chapters

Preface

1. Part 1: Getting Started with Ansible

2. Why Ansible for Network Automation? FREE CHAPTER

3. Building Blocks of Ansible

4. Advanced Ansible Concepts

5. Part 2: Managing Network Infrastructure with Ansible

6. Building Data Center Networks with Arista

7. Automating a Juniper Network Core Using Ansible

8. Managing Nokia SR Devices Using Ansible

9. Administering a Multi-Vendor Network with NAPALM and Ansible

10. Part 3: Managing Cloud Networking with Ansible

11. Deploying and Operating AWS Networking

12. Deploying and Operating Azure Networking

13. Deploying and Operating GCP Networking

14. Part 4: Integrating Ansible

15. Network Validation with Batfish

16. Building a Network Inventory with Nautobot

17. Simplifying Automation with AWX

18. Event-Driven Automation with Ansible

19. Terraform and Ansible Dancing Together

20. Index

21. Other Books You May Enjoy

Appendix - The Lab

Using Ansible collections

Ansible Content Collections are pluggable packages that are easy to distribute, manage, and share. They allow an easy way to extend the Ansible framework. Ansible hasn’t always had collections, though.

Ansible grew in popularity, support, and functionality, becoming burdensome to maintain the project as a monorepo. Thus, back in early 2021, with the release of Ansible major version 3.0, the project split into multiple libraries, as commented in Chapter 1. The main difference was the philosophy on installation, that is, the installation separation of core and community packages:

Ansible Core: This core library offers extensibility features that allow Ansible to be extended. It comes with no collections pre-installed.
Community package: Installs ansible-core, along with a long list of collections that have gone through a certification process and have been approved to be included as a community package.

Note

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