Ansible networking modules
Ansible was originally made for managing nodes with full operating systems such as Linux and Windows before it was extended to support network equipment. You may have already noticed the subtle differences in playbooks that we have used so far for network devices, such as the lines of gather_facts: false
and connection: local
; we will take a closer look at the differences in the following sections.
Ansible provides nicely written documentation on 'How Network Automation is Different': https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/network/getting_started/network_differences.html.
Local connections and facts
Ansible modules are Python code that's executed on the remote host by default. Because of the fact that most network equipment does not expose Python directly, or it simply does not contain Python, we are almost always executing the playbook locally on the control node. This means that the playbook is interpreted...