The automation of network equipment configuration is a common need; when we provision a new system, besides its own settings we often need to manage switch 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 to define the configuration of the whole infrastructure, network included, is a powerful and welcomed point.
There are two main challenges that Puppet faces when it has to deal with network devices. They are as follows:
For the technical challenge, there is some good news. Alternative approaches have been taken to manage network equipment of different nature and different vendors with Puppet: