Ansible for Network Automation

Overview

This course will train you on the fundamentals of Ansible, an open-source, extensible configuration management tool that streamlines infrastructure management in modern networking environments. You will also learn about Jinja2, a templating language that expands flexibility in automation tasks. Upon completing this course, you will have an essential understanding of Ansible and its application to network automation, enabling you to effectively automate network tasks and improve network operations. This course is primarily intended for network engineers, systems engineers, network architects, and managers interested in learning the fundamentals of network automation and Ansible. By the end of this course, you will be able to: - Construct Ansible playbooks to configure network devices and retrieve operational state data from network devices. - Build Jinja2 templates and YAML data structures to generate desired state configurations. Proficiency in fundamental network routing & switching technologies, basics of Python programming (3-6 mos exp.), and basic Linux knowledge.

Syllabus

Course Introduction for Ansible for Network Automation

In this module, we will review the topics and what you will learn in this course.

Introducing Ansible for Network Automation

In this module, you will be introduced to some of the basics of Ansible. You will become familiar with some of Ansible’s fundamental architecture and components like inventory files, variables, and, most importantly, playbooks. You will also be introduced to the ios_config module, which is explicitly built for Cisco IOS devices and makes creating plays and tasks for your Cisco devices easier. Ansible has numerous modules available for many different vendors, operating systems, and technologies, and this course will discuss how to look up more information about them. You will also be introduced to Ansible Galaxy, a 3rd party repository for Ansible.

Templating Configurations with Jinja2

Typically, network engineers perform countless manual network operations and changes. The most common workflow is to build a Microsoft Notepad file or Microsoft Word document and call it a template. However, that template is only a set of instructions for building a configuration—it is not a real template. Jinja2 is a templating engine that is purpose-built for Python. You will learn about the Jinja2 templating engine and start to build programmatic templates and command “data” with real configuration templates.