Season 1, Talk 4 of NetDevOps Live! Stuart Clark provides an introduction and overview of the open source configuration management tools for networking. The similarities and differences between Ansible, Puppet, Chef and SaltStack are explored and a demo provided (including live troubleshooting). Full details at http://bit.ly/2NV8OJh

Presenter: Stuart Clark https://twitter.com/bigevilbeard

Topics covered – Time links
– Introduction
– What are infrastructure as code and configuration management 1:46
– Principles of Network as Code 2:40
– Benefits of Configuration Management 7:45
– Recipes, manifestos, scripts, Oh My! The Tools 11:49
– Why Ansible for Network? 16:34
– Configuration management demo with Ansible 17:50
– Topology and Network Description 18:38
– Kickoff of the Ansible Playbook 20:15
– Exploration of playbook, roles, inventory and variables 22:29
– Live troubleshooting section 🙂 27:13
– Idempotency Discussion 27:13
– Look at the final network status 32:44
– Summary 41:08
– Webinar Resources 41:55
– Code Exchange Challenge 42:58
– Contact information 44:09

Episode description:
Configuration management is not just about backing up configurations in source control. Many enterprises use Open Source tools such as Ansible, Salt, Chef or Puppet to manage the configurations of their servers and application systems, and want to extend their use to the network. The goal is to communicate with network devices via abstraction and an automated framework and avoid the pitfalls of /"Finger Defined Networking./".

Scripts are a great first step towards automation, but require maintenance and strong programming skills. Configuration management tools like Ansible are powerful automation and orchestration frameworks maintained by the Open Source community. This specifies the configuration /"intent/" in a simple and consistent way, and the implementation details are handled by the tooling. In this session, we'll explore how the same tools that system administrators use to manage servers, cloud, and applications can be deployed across the network to foster a DevOps culture across organizational silos.

NetDevOps Live! is produced by Cisco DevNet. Details can be found at https://developer.cisco.com/netdevops/live and follow NetDevOps Live! on Twitter at https://twitter.com/netdevopslive

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