Ansible is an open source, general-purpose automation tool written in Python. It can be used to automate servers, network devices, load balancers, and more. In this chapter, you will learn about the principles of Ansible and how we can interact with it from Python. Ansible is used to bring structure and consistency to system deployments, implementations, and changes. In this chapter, we will explore Ansible and learn how to write a Python script to do a networking-automation task with Ansible and how to write an Ansible module with Python.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Basics of Ansible
• Ansible's components and architecture
• Automating network Python tasks with Ansible
• Writing Ansible modules with Python