Ansible for Network Engineers: Hands-On & Capstone Projects

Discover how Ansible enables scalable, agentless network automation for rapid, consistent updates across many devices. Use YAML playbooks and ServiceNow integrations to reduce human error and streamline configuration management.

Compare Ansible with Puppet, Chef, and SaltStack to choose the right automation tool by evaluating agentless architecture, configuration languages, learning curves, orchestration, and network automation.

Master installing and comparing Ansible core and full on Ubuntu and Red Hat, and extend with Ansible Galaxy collections and vendor modules.

Master the Ansible configuration file as the control center and learn the search order—from environment variable to project and home directory—and key settings like inventory and timeout.

Learn how to replace ad hoc commands with reusable Ansible playbooks to automate Cisco iOS, NX-OS, and Arista devices, including structure, inventory, modules, variables, gathering facts, registering output, and debugging.

Explore how ansible variables decouple configuration from code to create reusable playbooks across environments. Learn variable definitions from inventory, play headers, external files, prompts, and extra vars, with precedence rules.

Explore using group_vars and host_vars to manage scalable inventories, with YAML files and folders, and learn precedence where host vars override group vars, while playbook vars override both.

Explore Ansible facts and how Ansible gathers data from managed nodes, using dot and bracket notation to access values such as hardware, IP addresses, and operating system details.

Learn how to use Ansible magic variables to make playbooks dynamic, including creating directories with the playbook directory variable and accessing inventory and host data.

Learn how the include_vars module in Ansible loads variables dynamically for vendor-specific hosts using file and name attributes, with conditions, and how it differs from static vars files.

Learn to use the set_fact module to create dynamic, runtime variables from task output. Apply regex to extract iOS details and drive upgrade decisions in a network device playbook.

Write an Ansible playbook to back up configurations for all devices in the Cisco iOS group, using device folders and timestamped filenames for version control.

Back up network device configurations with Ansible by capturing the running config and saving it to device-specific, timestamped files organized in per-device folders.

Explore Ansible loops and the loop and with_items constructs to automate repetitive tasks. Learn when to use loop, with underscore items, and until, including nested lists and dictionaries with filters.

Register the output of a looped task into a structured variable and access the results attribute to monitor changed, failed, and skipped states for each device.

Use the until keyword in Ansible to retry tasks until a condition is met, such as a network interface coming up, with retries and delays to handle network delays.

Learn to use the when condition in Ansible playbooks to execute tasks based on interface status across Cisco devices, employing and/or logic and direct variable references without braces.

Explore the Cisco iOS command module in Ansible, sending multiple commands, capturing outputs with results, and using wait for, interval, and match to verify gigabit ethernet interfaces two and three.

Shows how to configure hostnames on Cisco iOS devices using the Ansible iOS config module, emphasizing idempotency, the lines parameter, and the inventory host name magic variable in a playbook.

Demonstrate configuring interfaces with the eos config module using the parents parameter and a nested line structure. Apply configurations across devices with loops and host vars.

Learn to use the after parameter in the EOS config module to apply additional commands only after a configuration change, illustrated by per-interface updates like description, shutdown, and no logging.

Use before and match parameters in Cisco iOS config with Ansible to manage ACL entries, update configurations, and ensure precise matching through line, strict, and exact options.

Master Ansible for network engineers with hands-on labs on iOS interfaces, iOS L2 and iOS L3 modules, including gather, merge, replace, override, rendered, past, purged, and deleted states.

Apply regex filters in Ansible, including regex search, find all, and replace, to extract version numbers and interface data from network device outputs in playbooks.

This capstone walkthrough guides building an ansible playbook to add a new local username, remove old ones on a csr router, and verify changes using regex extraction and iterative removal.

Discover how Ansible filters transform data from variables, facts, and API responses, including lower, default, omit, type_debug, dict2items, and items2dict, to structure host name data and playbooks.

Learn to merge multiple dictionaries in Ansible using the combine filter, creating a unified full_config with set_fact and debugging output for network configurations.

Explore the map filter in Ansible to extract attributes across list items, using extract and attribute methods to fetch IDs, names, and host vars from dictionaries.

Explore Ansible filters two_yaml and two_nice_yaml to convert variables to YAML strings, compare indentation and readability, and save formatted output with the copy module.

Learn to use jinja2 include directives to assemble modular templates for network configs. The lecture demonstrates including basic and switchport templates to produce a full config with spanning tree.