Best practices

All the usual best practices of using Ansible apply when automating network devices with it. For example, never store passwords in the clear, and make use of ansible-vault where appropriate. Despite this, network devices are their own special class of devices when it comes to Ansible, and support for them started to flourish from the 2.5 release of Ansible onward. As such, there are a few special best practices that deserve to be mentioned when it comes to network automation with Ansible.

Inventory

Make good use of the inventory structure supported by Ansible when it comes to organizing your network infrastructure and pay particular attention to grouping. Doing so will make your playbook development much easier. For example, suppose you have two switches on your network – one is a Cumulus Linux Switch, as we examined previously, and the other is an Arista EOS-based device. Your inventory may look like this:

[switches:children...