Modern large-scale infrastructures that change rapidly necessitate automation of network tasks. Fortunately, Ansible supports a wide array of network devices, from proprietary hardware such as Cisco IOS-based devices, through to open standards such as white box switches that run operating systems such as Cumulus Linux. Ansible is a powerful and supportive tool when it comes to managing your network configuration and allows you to implement changes quickly and safely. You can even replace entire devices in your network and be confident in your ability to put the correct configuration on the new device in place by virtue of your Ansible playbooks.

In this chapter, you learned about the reasons for automating network management. You then looked at how Ansible manages network devices, how to enable network automation in Ansible, and how to locate the Ansible modules necessary to perform the automation tasks you wish to complete. Then, through practical examples, you learned how to connect to network devices, how to set environment variables (and connect to isolated networks via bastion hosts), and how to apply conditional statements to Ansible tasks for network device configuration.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to manage Linux containers and cloud infrastructures using Ansible.