In this chapter, we covered a lot of ground. Building from our previous knowledge of Ansible, we expanded into more advanced topics such as conditionals, loops, and templates. We looked at how to make our playbook more scalable with host variables, group variables, include statements, and roles. We also looked at how to secure our playbook with the Ansible Vault. Finally, we used Python to make our own custom modules.
Ansible is a very flexible Python framework that can be used for network automation. It provides another abstraction layer separated from the likes of the Pexpect and API-based scripts. It is declarative in nature in that it is more expressive in terms of matching our intent. Depending on your needs and network environment, it might be the ideal framework that you can use to save time and energy.
In Chapter 6, Network Security with Python, we will look at...