Ansible networking modules
Ansible was originally made for managing nodes with full operating systems such as Linux and Windows; then, it extended to network equipment. You may have already noticed the subtle differences in playbooks that we have used so far, such as the lines of gather_facts: false
and connection: local
; we will take a look at closer look at the differences.
Local connections and facts
Ansible modules are Python code executed on remote host by default. Because the fact that most network equipment does not expose Python directly, we are almost always executing the playbook locally. This means that the playbook is interpreted locally first and commands or configurations are pushed out later on as needed.
Recall that the remote host facts were gathered via the setup module, which was added by default. Since we are executing the playbook locally, the setup module will gather the facts on the local host instead of remote host. This is certainly not needed, therefore when the connection...