For as long as I can remember, I have always used a kind of a network template. In my experience, many of the network devices have sections of network configuration that are identical, especially if these devices serve the same role in the network.
Most of the time when we need to provision a new device, we use the same configuration in the form of a template, replace the necessary fields, and copy the file over to the new device. With Ansible, you can automate all the work using the template module (http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/template_module.html).
The base template file we are using utilizes the Jinja2 template language (http://jinja.pocoo.org/docs/). We briefly discussed Jinja2 templating language in the previous chapter, and we will look at it a bit more here. Just like Ansible, Jinja2 has its own syntax and method of doing loops and conditionals; fortunately, we just need to know the very basics of it for our purpose. You will learn the syntax by gradually building up your...