We've already covered a wide variety of technologies that help us reduce the labour involved with operating and maintaining our JUNOS routers and devices, but in this chapter we'll look in detail at how to integrate some of these JUNOS automation efforts with other IT systems, using the automation and orchestration software framework called Ansible.
Ansible is an open-source automation toolkit that assists with provisioning software and inventory, application deployment and configuration management. It's well suited to JUNOS because Ansible's fundamental method of communicating with elements is via SSH, which of course is the native method of managing JUNOS devices. Ansible is also supported by Juniper, who has led the open-source development of Ansible roles—vendor- or task-related plugins specific to an application environment—specifically...
