Chapter 1 What is Network Automation?
For diagrams, tables, or exact code formatting, .
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.6/user_guide/playbooks_tags.html
A guide to Ansible playbooks is available here: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.7/cli/ansible-playbook.html Ansible Tower
Ansible Tower is a commercially available, GUI-based, playbook orchestration system that provides the ability to scale network automation solutions to even larger deployments. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), playbook scheduling, reporting, and inventory management are all key components of Ansible Tower. Ansible Tower can make the integration of Ansible in the organization easier as it provides a more familiar GUI-based approach and includes some key components most organizations require such as RBAC, reporting, and playbook scheduling. Ansible Tower can also be integrated into the TFS CI/CD pipeline. An open source version, AWX, is available.
More information about Ansible Tower can be found here: https://www.ansible.com/products/tower/ https://docs.ansible.com/#tower
More information about AWX can be found here: https://www.ansible.com/products/awx-project/faq/ Source Control
After a successful transition from a collection of configurations to code, source control needs to be implemented. The organization’s development team likely has source control implemented which can be leveraged along with best practices and processes for changes to source code. Source control is a vital component of the new NDLC for network engineers and operations.
Treating the network as code implies strong source controls. Network configurations stored as code benefit greatly from these source controls as the given state of the network, or individual components of the network, is known at all times. Changes that are tracked using source control display the exact changes and the pre-change / post-change state of the network devices intended configuration. Strong source control means when problems occur on the network, answering the standard “what changed?” question is extremely easy to figure out.
Git Git is a free, open source, and distributed version control system created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 for development of the Linux kernel. Consider Git the glue that holds the NDLC lifecycle together tracking all changes to files using commits. These tracked changes are included in the history of all Git repositories and changes can be rolled back to any point-in-time.
