community.network VS Ansible

Updates from Ansible networking team. * We have enabled periodic jobs through GHA for network collections. * We are working on community.ioscm collection which works for iosxe on controller mode, when the appliance is in sd-wan infrastructure! * IRC Meeting changes. * We want someone who will look into ansible-lint fixes for community.network collection.

The community.network collection versions 3.3.1 (Final EOL release, changelog) and 4.0.2 (changelog) have been released!

community.network collection 5.0.0 has been released! See the changelog for details. Special thanks to felixfontein for removing flat-mapping and other improvements!

Community Network Collection 4.0.0 has been released and is available to download! See changelog for details regarding the major changes and deprecated features!🎉

The community.network minor releases 2.3.0 & 3.3.0 have been released!🎉 Thanks to all the awesome people who contributed to them!❤️

community.network 1.3.7 & 2.2.2 & 3.2.0 have been released with some improvements and bug fixes (see changelogs 1.3.7, 2.2.2, 3.2.0 for more details)🎉

community.network collection versions 1.3.6, 2.2.1, and 3.1.0 have been released! Special thanks to felixfontein!

We are looking at reducing the maintenance for old stable branches for community.general and community.network collection repositories. We'd welcome your feedback, in particular if you think you may be negatively impacted by the change. Full details of the proposal, and the ability to record your vote can be done via community-topic#55.

Ansible is an open-source IT automation tool that simplifies application deployment, cloud provisioning, and configuration management across diverse environments. It uses a declarative language to describe the desired state of the system, and then takes the necessary actions to achieve that state. Ansible has become incredibly popular due to its simplicity, agentless architecture, and extensive community support. Document: ansible.com, ansible basics

Ansible v2.16

Ansible is a tool used to help manage software automation processes, configuration management across machines, deployment as well as remote execution of commands and scripts. In sports, Ansible operates as the coach of your team by providing strategies (playbooks), and actions, and ensuring the smooth execution of tasks across your infrastructure, just like a coach guides and directs players (Servers)during a game.

They support for-if from python, too: https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/3.1.x/templates/#loop-f... but I haven't tried the "recursive" keyword to know if ansible supports that. I say "ansible supports that" because they don't just drop jinja2 into ansible and call it a draw, they have a bunch of custom execution integrations: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v2.16.3/lib/ansible/...

To manage a VM, you can use something as simple as just manual actions over SSH, or can use tools like Ansible, Hashicorp's Packer and Terraform or other automations. For an app where there is minimal load and security/reliability concern, VMs are still a great option that provide a lot of value for the buck

In this article's context, it is simply a tool that provides a declarative way to automate your machine/OS to configure the development machine as you want (install package, modify the configuration, etc). Examples of these tools are Ansible, Puppet, etc.

Now we're getting more tangential, but for years, Ansible releases were named for Van Halen songs (see old Changelog here: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v1.8.4/CHANGELOG.md)

In the lab to follow, we'll quickly provision a 3-node kubeadm cluster (1 master, 2 workers) on the cloud provider of your choice using an automation stack comprised of OpenTofu and Ansible, then deploy Rook Ceph using the official Helm charts and confirm that we are now able to successfully create CSI volume snapshots from PVCs by reusing the MinIO example from our last article.