Arista Networks have always been focused on large-scale datacenter networks. In its corporate profile page (https://www.arista.com/en/company/company-overview), it is stated as follows:

Notice that the statement specifically called our large datacenter, which we already know is exploded with servers, databases, and yes, network equipment too. Therefore, automation has always been on their mind. In fact, they have a Linux underpin behind their operating system, then EOS has many added benefits such as having Python already built-in along with Linux APIs.

Arista's automation story consist of three approaches:

Like its network counterparts, you can interact with Arista devices directly via eAPI, or you can choose to leverage their Python library for the interaction. We will see examples of both. We will look at Arista's integration for Ansible in later chapters.