The automation of network equipments' configuration is a common need. When we provision a new system, besides its own settings, we often need to manage switching ports to assign it to the correct VLAN, firewalls to open the relevant ports, and load balancers to add the server to a balanced pool.

It is obvious that the possibility of automating the configuration of the whole infrastructure, network included, is a powerful and welcomed point.

There are two main challenges in front of Puppet when it has to deal with network devices. They are as follows:

For the technical challenge, there is good news. Alternative approaches have been taken to manage Puppet network equipments of various natures and from different vendors: