Ansible Automates and Now Let’s Automate Ansible

There is enough buzz in every industry to safely conclude that automation is not only the future but is the present that’s defining the future.

Networks are no different. As one of the most complex and intricate pieces of the infrastructure puzzle, networks benefit from automation enormously. Ansible is a pioneer in network automation – it’s a simple yet extremely powerful automation engine.

Ansible is primarily a configuration management tool that pushes configuration over SSH using playbooks. Playbooks are a collection of YAML files that contains your configuration information. What is YAML? YAML is a data model, that presents data in Key-value pairs. The set of hosts that you execute these playbooks are defined in an inventory file. Modules, roles and Plugins are also part of the playbook, that does the wizardry of converting your data model into actual configurations. Let’s take a pause and BREATHE!

Not simple – but still the most powerful automation tool. The benefits of Ansible always outweigh the effort needed to climb that steep curve.

Here at Dell EMC Networking, we took it up a notch. We climb that steep strenuous curve for you.

Fabric Design Center (FDC) from Dell EMC lets you design your networks at scale and generates Ansible playbooks for the entire fabric. You can auto-generate Ansible playbooks in few clicks – you read that right, Auto-Generate Ansible Playbooks. It’s like self-driving cars but for Ansible playbooks. Like self-driving cars, you can either choose to drive it from source to destination or click few buttons to auto-pilot your ride. You can either design your network, create excel sheets, draw an automation plan, create all your playbook using 20 different modules and roles or you can click to design a fabric and download your playbooks. Now that’s simple – legitimately simple.

Fabric Design Center automates the entire playbook development process for your network fabric. We generate playbooks based on our best practices and it’s thoroughly tested. Fabric Design Center houses more than 35 network switches ranging from 10G, 25G, 100G switches that users can choose from to create a fabric. All playbooks can be downloaded as a ZIP file with an extensive readme to enable customization of playbooks according to your automation needs.

Advance your automation goals with Dell EMC Networking. Design and automate your fabric playbooks in under a minute- All your Fabrics Layer 2 or Layer 3 or BGP-EVPN still under a minute.