Book Image

DevOps for Networking

By : Steven Armstrong
Book Image

DevOps for Networking

By: Steven Armstrong

Overview of this book

Frustrated that your company’s network changes are still a manual set of activities that slow developers down? It doesn’t need to be that way any longer, as this book will help your company and network teams embrace DevOps and continuous delivery approaches, enabling them to automate all network functions. This book aims to show readers network automation processes they could implement in their organizations. It will teach you the fundamentals of DevOps in networking and how to improve DevOps processes and workflows by providing automation in your network. You will be exposed to various networking strategies that are stopping your organization from scaling new projects quickly. You will see how SDN and APIs are influencing DevOps transformations, which will in turn help you improve the scalability and efficiency of your organizations networks operations. You will also find out how to leverage various configuration management tools such as Ansible, to automate your network. The book will also look at containers and the impact they are having on networking as well as looking at how automation impacts network security in a software-defined network.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
DevOps for Networking
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction to Ansible


Ansible is primarily a push-based configuration management tool that uses a single Ansible Control Host, and it can connect to multiple Linux guest operating systems via SSH to configure them and recently added WinRM support, so it can now also configure Windows guests in the same way as Linux-based operating systems. As Ansible can connect to multiple servers simultaneously, it aids operators by allowing them to carry out uniform operations across multiple Linux or Windows servers at the same time. This allows Ansible to help simplify the automation of repeatable tasks by defining them in YAML, so they can be consistently executed against target servers. Ansible can also be used as a centralized orchestration tool that can connect to API endpoints and sequence API operations.

Here, we can see an example of the way an Ansible Control Host connects to servers or acts as a centralized orchestration tool:

Every operation that Ansible carries out should be idempotent as...