Ansible – a more declarative framework

Let us imagine ourselves in a hypothetical situation: you woke up one morning in a cold sweat from a nightmare you had about a potential network security breach. You realized that your network contains valuable digital assets that should be protected. You have been doing your job as a network administrator, so it is pretty secure, but you want to put more security measures around your network devices just to be sure.

To start with, you break the objective down into two actionable items:

• Upgrading the devices to the latest version of the software, which requires:
  1. Uploading the image to the device.
  2. Instructing the device to boot from the new image.
  3. Proceeding to reboot the device.
  4. Verifying that the device is running with the new software image.
• Configuring the appropriate access control list on the networking devices, which includes the following:
  1. Constructing the access list on the device.
  2. Configuring the access...