Roman Dodin wrote an article describing Nokia’s Ansible assortment for SR Linux. Though I don’t use SR Linux (regardless that it was the primary container supported by netlab ;), it was nonetheless very fascinating to learn concerning the design tradeoffs they needed to make:
- Although SR Linux makes use of REST API, they determined to implement a devoted Ansible module as a result of utilizing the URI module ends in playbooks which might be too verbose (plus you would possibly get into fascinating fights in case your REST API expects you to login and use session cookies).
- Utilizing a devoted module additionally simplifies error dealing with – the module can return a cleaned-up error message, not a uncooked HTTP error.
- A devoted module may also implement diffs and idempotent operations (learn state, do a diff, ship solely the required updates).
Most apparently, they determined to construct a generic module that will be pushed by configuration information buildings (SR Linux makes use of information buildings not textual content traces to configure the machine), not a maze of dozens of tiny little modules (all alike) that will configure interfaces, IP addresses, routing protocols… like what the Ansible builders produced (Cisco IOS, Arista EOS) in certainly one of their many incompatible makes an attempt to get networking modules proper.
