In this chapter, we took a grand tour of the open source automation framework Ansible. Unlike Pexpect-based and API-driven network automation scripts, Ansible provides a higher layer of abstraction called the playbook to automate our network devices.

Ansible was originally constructed to manage servers and was later extended to network devices; therefore we took a look at a server example. Then, we compared and contrasted the differences when it came to network management playbooks. Later, we looked at the example playbooks for Cisco IOS, Juniper JUNOS, and Arista EOS devices. We also looked at the best practices recommended by Ansible if you are using Ansible version 2.5 and later. 

In Chapter 5, The Python Automation Framework – Beyond Basics, we will leverage the knowledge we gained in this chapter and start to look at some of the more advanced features of Ansible.