This chapter will focus on some of the most popular networking vendors in the market today, namely Cisco, Juniper, and Arista, and look at how each of these market leading vendors have developed their own proprietary operating system to control network operations. The aim of this book is not to discuss which network vendor's solution is better, but instead look at ways network operators can utilize configuration management tooling today to manage network devices, now that most network vendors have created APIs and SDKs to programmatically control the network.
Once the basics of each operating system have been established, we will then shift focus to the hugely popular open source configuration management tool from Red Hat named Ansible (https://www.ansible.com/).
We will look at ways it can be used to configure network devices programmatically and assist with network operations. This chapter will show practical configuration management processes...