Members of the Network to Code team recently made their way down to sunny Atlanta for our third year as AnsibleFest sponsors. As regular users of the platform, we always look forward to hearing what’s next in the world Ansible, and this year’s Fest did not disappoint!
A few key takeaways from our team:
As early adopters, you’ll always find us evangelizing about the importance of embracing network automation. This year, however, we were pleasantly surprised to notice that we weren’t the only ones. Conversations surrounding network automation took serious hold this year. Approximately half of the attendees we talked to were interested in network automation – a big leap from years past. We were also excited (excuse us for tooting our own horn for a moment) to hear that the Network to Code community was a big part of these conversations. As we’ve said before, community is a key component of everything we do here at Network to Code and were proud to foster a community that is leading the charge when it comes to network automation.
The NTC team was glad to see that culture was getting some well-deserved attention this year. You can have everything in place you need to automate a network – the right tools, the right talent, the right infrastructure – but, if you don’t have cultural buy-in, your network automation project is going to be an up-hill battle. Thinking not just about how organizations deploy tools and solutions, but also about how they work to change hearts and minds surrounding new technology is something we here at Network to Code give a lot of thought to. We’re glad to see the conversation moving forward!
With Ansible 2.9 just around the corner, there was no shortage of conversation surrounding upcoming changes to Ansible. There was a lot of discussion around the new collection system and how the main Ansible project will be reorganized in multiple repositories moving forward. It’s a healthy change for Ansible, and will help create cleaner delineation between the core engine, the core modules and the community modules. Each one will now be able to evolve at its own pace with its own release cycle. The collection introduced in Ansible 2.9 also offers a new packaging system for Ansible role, plugin and module, making it possible to split the main Ansible repository in multiple repositories.
The team at Red Hat is putting a lot of effort into ensuring that the transition will be as transparent as possible for users. While dates and milestones have yet to be defined, it looks like things should be moving forward in the next six months or so. The Ansible core team published a very informative blog explaining the motivation behind this refactoring that we recommend you check out.
The second big topic of conversation at the Network Contributor Summit had to do with the new Resource Modules and the Resource Module Builder. In Ansible 2.9, Ansible has developed 51 new modules called “Resource Modules” that will, overtime, replace some of the existing network modules. For example ios_interface will be replaced by ios_interfaces.
These new modules will take structured data for one or more objects in a structured format. This format will be the same as what you get back from the facts module, allowing you to push and pull configs to/from a device. Last but not least, these modules will support a declarative approach and will be able to override all objects that are not defined.
We look forward to seeing how these updates come to life in the coming months. In the meantime, happy automating!
-Damien
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