How Cisco uses Ansible?

What is Ansible?

Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.

Designed for multi-tier deployments since day one, Ansible models your IT infrastructure by describing how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time.

Ansible uses playbook to describe automation jobs, and playbook uses very simple language i.e. YAML (It’s a human-readable data serialization language & is commonly used for configuration files, but could be used in many applications where data is being stored)which is very easy for humans to understand, read and write. Hence the advantage is that even the IT infrastructure support guys can read and understand the playbook and debug if needed (YAML — It is in human readable form).

Networks are integral parts of IT enterprises, yet true automation of the network stack is nearly non-existent. When organizations are automating networks, they’re using proprietary vendor-specific tooling that requires significant training to use.

How cisco uses ansible?

Long, detailed, and complex Methods of Procedure (MOPs) have to be manually managed, and often result in delays and reduced organizational agility. The result has been that networking teams are increasingly isolated from the emerging DevOps revolution, which can slow process modernization efforts because of the manual tasks required to manage networks.

Today’s network operations teams typically do everything manually, and need automation to provide:

• Configuration automation of the network stack from system to access to core services
• Test and validate existing network state
• Continuous compliance to check for network configuration drift

Automating your network with Ansible is easy

Ansible’s simple automation framework means that previously isolated network administrators can finally speak the same language of automation as the rest of the IT organization, extending the capabilities of Ansible to include native support for both legacy and open network infrastructure devices. Network devices and systems can now be included in an organization’s overall automation strategy for a holistic approach to application workload management.

With Ansible, your network teams will:

• Use the same simple, powerful, and agentless automation framework IT operations and development are already using
• Use a data model (a playbook or role) that’s separate from the execution layer (Ansible automation engine) that easily spans heterogeneous network hardware
• Benefit from a wide variety of community and vendor-generated playbook and role content to help accelerate network automation projects

Thank you!!!