In a world where we are not locked into a single vendor, it is important to know how we might handle the different network devices in an infrastructure. We established in the last chapter that for different infrastructure providers, a similar process was established for each one in terms of getting Ansible to interact with it. This can be a little different with switches, as not all command-line switch interfaces are created the same. Some, such as on a Cumulus Networks switch, use straightforward SSH connectivity, meaning that everything we have learned about in this book so far on connecting to an SSH capable device still applies. However, other devices, such as F5 BIG-IP, do not use such an interface and therefore require the module to be run from the Ansible host, and the configuration parameters to be passed to the module directly as opposed to using host variables such as ansible_ssh_user. 

It is not expected that many of the readers of this book will have access to a wide variety of network hardware to use in the examples in this chapter. Instead, in this part of this chapter, we will go into more detail on the process to be employed when automating a new network device for the first time so that you have the knowledge to apply this to your own situation.