New features tame network complexity, reduce costs, improve security, and automate DDI tasks to drive rapid innovation. Uber engineer Ryan Patterson shares how data drives network automation projects, which must also be scalable, save costs, and meet user needs. Any modern appliance, including BlueCat Address Manager, as well as all next-generation network infrastructure and the Cloud, is driven by the RESTful API. The power comes with running a set of commands on many devices. A key component of infrastructure as code is the ability to work with variables. In the output, youll notice that multiple variables are set with the facts of the device. You can make sure device configurations are properly loaded and are consistent across many devices, with consistent quality of service or MPLS route target definitions.
Configuration templating is accomplished by combining Ansible with the Jinja2 templating language. First, click on the 3 horizontal lines in the upper left corner and select API Documentation-2.0, Scroll down the new window until you see the section labelled Modules, Edit Module Parameters and input a JSON module that has the required hostname and default argument, as defined by the previous decoration, Specify the module name to execute, as it appears in the list: ios_facts, Click the Execute button and scroll down to look at the output, which can now be used via an API call through Automation Gateway. The BlueCat Ansible module includes a series of standalone playbooks. This is particularly true for important information from the network such as the state of DNS. With IOS_switches.yml, we specify the Ansible module network_cli, set the OS to ios and specify the login credentials. Ansible can do many more things. Learn how the Java-based Log4j2 logging vulnerability works, how severe it is, its potential effects on BlueCat products, and what has been done to fix it. However, including the credentials in a variable file is much simpler for the demonstration below. After all, this is supposed to be automation, right? For example, get_configurations.yml returns an Address Manager entity for each configuration in Address Manager. In that row, enter default, which tells the module to send us all of the default information about the device. The key difference here is that set_fact is a stand-alone task all on its own that creates a variable while register creates a variable with the results of another task. There are many real-world examples available on GitHub and other places, my blog included. The first mistake engineers tend to makeoften to expedite development or out of pure ignoranceis to hard-code their credentials into their group_vars or directly in their playbook. This has several advantages, including not hard-coding your credentials. Fortunately, there is a way that allows you to securely hard code your credential strings inside what is known as an Ansible vault. For example, first I can generate a full IOS configuration for my network core using a Jinja2 template: In which, for example, the VLAN configuration stanzas look like this in the CampusCoreCFG.j2 file: Which look like this in the Core.cfg file generated by the template: Now, using the earlier ios_config module, we can simply push the templated intended configuration file to the device: Conversely, with received facts, I also pass the received data through a Jinja2 template to create both a comma-separated value (CSV) spreadsheet file and a markdown file with the JSON data. 11 "Protocol Address Age (min) Hardware Addr Type Interface". Another example is to track down where a device is connected in your network by searching for its media access control or IP address in saved output from show arp and show mac address dynamic commands. Jinja2 lets you apply logic, such as If, Else, End If, and even For Loops. Start my free, unlimited access. If youre getting started in network automation, youre probably asking some of these questions: In Automation Gateway, we have a tightly coupled integration with Ansible and we have made all of the network modules available within the platform in an easy way to explore, test, and run. A playbook can contain multiple plays, and each play can contain multiple tasks. Under Hosts you can enter the hostname of a Cisco IOS device in your Ansible inventory. Copyright 2000 - 2022, TechTarget First, lets take a look at all of the Ansible modules available in Automation Gateway. But prompts require human interaction. Conference rooms need to evolve as employees demand the same rich virtual meeting experience they have on desktop. Which is now in the Git repository and looks like this: And since I am partial to reading YAML, I also create another file using the | to_nice_yaml filter. We tried to collect more comprehensive solutions and articles that would help you become proficient in Ansible, and figure out how to best use Ansible in your first production-grade network automation solution: The best way to get better with any tool is to learn from the masters, and David (one of the most popular speakers in the Network Automation course is an open-source network automation legend. the ability to build, release, and monitor using Docker container images in a continuously integrated (CI) and continuously delivered (CD) pipeline. Infrastructure as code is a modern approach to managing networks, compute, storage, load-balancing, firewalls, and appliances (like BlueCat Address Manager). To proceed with these recommended modules, you will need to have Ansible installed using their pip package manager. Below, we name the play Gather ARP data, and the hosts are those listed in the IOS_switches group. To see the JSON Schema for this module, click on the Edit button in the main window. This is usually added to the end of any playbooks that have altered the configuration of the device and when you need to save the changes to memory. Below are my top 10 (plus a bonus) recommended Ansible modules that anyonefrom a beginner to a power usercan leverage to transform their infrastructure to code. Most networking-focused Ansible examples or blog posts focus on basic proof-of-concept examples. For further reading, Ansibles guides to run commands on remote devices running Cisco IOS and manage Cisco IOS configuration sections are helpful. You can also read more from me about other network automation tools and eight network automation tasks for anyone to get started. A good example is to keep copies of show version for each network device as a way to document the devices on your network and their serial numbers. A good example of this, and the next step in the BlueCat Address Manager Network Facts playbook, is to take the registered variable and create a nice (pretty) JSON file from the data. This allows for hands-free automation and containerization in which you can use Docker mount to mount the decryption file to unlock the credentials. So far, I have used this module to automate: Cisco has several APIs to get information returned in JSON format. For further reading, Ansibles interactive prompts guide is helpful. See a deep dive demo at Networking Field Day 24. These modules handle the work of speaking natively to a network device, typically using CLI as the underlying method, and captures and formats the output so it can be used in a more programmatic way. It makes for a perfect way for new users to network automation to understand Ansible network modules and experienced Ansible users to test different module functions without iterating overbuilding and modifying playbooks. After running this command, you will be prompted for a secret. For our example, we will use the following directory and file structure: The ansible.cfg file contains Ansible's configuration. Click on ios_facts-Read through the Parameter Descriptions to see what the module requires as inputs. Their complete installs package can be found in their helpful Installing Ansible guide. You can either provide it at playbook runtime to decrypt the strings orand this is the key to full automationyou can store the key inside a plain text file available to the playbook.
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