If the playbook determines a change does not need to be made, it will skip that task. Only making changes when they are actually required.
#NETWORK ENGINEER TOOLS CODE#
Ansible will confirm if the changes actually need to be made by verifying if the code is in place already. If so it will skip that task. The playbook file is written in YAML which is very human readable and also uses Jinja2 for writing templates.Īnsible works on a push methodology: you define what you want to do and push it to the nodes. Finally, there is Ansible Tower, the company’s GUI management tool, a licensed product based on the number of devices being managed.Īnsible uses the concept of a playbook in which you define a list of tasks, consisting of small items of configuration such as the creation vlans or defining interfaces. Both products are driven from the command line interface (CLI). There is also a strong community providing good support.įor corporate users who require a more formal support model, there is Ansible Engine which is a fully supported version of Ansible.
#NETWORK ENGINEER TOOLS SOFTWARE#
The software remains open source and as such is free to use. Since then, the development of Ansible for network automation has been a major focus for RedHat with the amount of network modules now over 500, with most vendors covered.Īnsible is written in Python and was previously developed to automate the management of Linux servers, but is now capable of automating most network tasks. Founded in 2013, Ansible was purchased in 2015 by RedHat for a rumored $150 million. AnsibleĪnsible deserves its place at the top of the list of network automation tools in use today. Leave a comment in the comments box below! 1. If you’re already using one or more of the tools below, I would love to hear your feedback on your experience. We’re going to review the top 5 network automation tools in use today. If you’re a network engineer looking to do the same, this will be a good post to start you on that journey. As a result of using developers’ tools for many years, network engineers are seeing the benefit of these tools for performing network administration and configuration tasks. Network automation is fast becoming a skill network engineers ought to master. However, with the scale of networks today, it is no longer practical to make these changes on a device-by-device basis. Using tools like Putty or SecureCRT, a network engineer would connect to a device using SSH (and previously Telent) and perform some configuration changes or check a device status. The tools and processes network engineers have used to manage networks have not really changed in the last 25 years.