As more and more of our infrastructure gets defined and managed by code, it becomes ever more important that the network layer can be automated effectively by Ansible. A great deal of work has gone into Ansible since the last release of this book in precisely this area, especially since the release of Ansible 2.5. With these advancements, it is now easy to build playbooks to automate network tasks, from simple device changes to rolling out entire network architectures through Ansible. All of the benefits of Ansible relating to code reuse, portability, and so on are all now available to those who manage network devices.

In this chapter, you learned about how Ansible enables network management. You learned effective strategies for handling different device types within your infrastructure and how to write playbooks for them, and then you expanded on this with some specific examples on Cumulus Linux. Finally, you learned about some of the best practices that must be applied when using Ansible to manage a network infrastructure.

This brings us to the conclusion of this book. I hope you have found it beneficial, and that it has given you the strategies and tools for managing everything, from small configuration changes to entire infrastructure deployments with Ansible.