It’s Time to Give up the Command Line

该博客由阿鲁巴（Aruba）的员工工程师拉贾尼·亚伯拉罕（Rajani Abraham）合着。

年代erver automation helped systems administrators reduce configuration problems, free up time for more strategic work and improve compliance. Network automation can do the same for you.

Network automation has come a long way. Administrators can finally give up the command line and use simple scripting tools to configure, monitor and manage the network. With today’s automation tools, you don’t need advanced programming skills to be successful.

年代imple, Predictable, Agile and Scalable
Network automation can enable you to:

1. 简化你的网络。Making configuration changes across the enterprise network or debugging an issue in another location via the CLI is often a daunting task. Oftentimes, network devices have slightly different configurations depending on the physical location or the admin’s style. Usually only a handful of experienced admins can make the changes. Managing siloed configurations also makes configuration and troubleshooting more difficult. Network automation can help you simplify the whole approach.
2. 提供可预测的结果。Configuring the network through a tried-and-true CLI is also prone to errors. Fat-fingering a network configuration is every administrator’s worst nightmare. Automation helps deliver more predictable behavior than making changes manually, whether you’re doing something as simple as updating an interface or more complex like creating a new VLAN.
3. 提高业务敏捷性。年代erver virtualization has made it far faster to deploy applications. But the network configuration to support these applications still depends on the CLI and manual work. Waiting hours or days for the network admin to create a new configuration gets in the way of delivering applications and digital services to customers and employees. Network automation allows the server and network teams to work together to deploy applications faster and more easily, and in a more predictable way. And that helps the business be more agile.
4. Enable you to manage device configurations at scale.As the number of IoT devices increases, the number of switch ports increases too. To manage increasing inventory as well as increasing site deployments with same manpower gets challenging and time-consuming.Automating device inventory and configuration streamlines the process and ensures that devices are configured consistently, ensuring security and compliance.

您可以自动化什么？
You can streamline many tasks over your automation journey. Here’s a quick-start list:

• 设备配置
• Configuration management
• 设备监视
• Compliance
• Troubleshooting

Aruba的Ansible Automation
There are many different ways to start your automation journey, with open automation tools as well as vendor-specific ones. One popular choice isRed Hat Ansible, which is easy to use and works across different vendors’ products.

Ansible helps network admins at multiple levels:

1. 无代理- Ansible不需要任何代理，因此您不必担心设备代码依赖性。Ansible在广泛的设备上工作。
2. Open and multivendor- 您可以在单个剧本中针对不同供应商的设备运行配置。
3. 简单易学。Programming for Ansible is not complex. No special coding skills are needed, and the Ansible playbook does the configuration and validation for you. Even advanced orchestration is simple to learn.
4. 使其敏捷– DevOps teams commonly use Ansible for server and data center automation, and a common toolset for the network makes application deployments easier.
5. Predictable– Ansible is等幂的,which means that making multiple identical requests has the same effect as making a single request. That achieves a higher level of resilience against programming errors and achieves a greater predictability for automating playbooks.
6. Easy-to-define workflows with modules- Aruba为开关和移动性控制器的常见配置和监视任务提供了Ansible Playbook，将繁琐的任务变成可重复的例程。

Many IT teams use红帽子塔为了增加功能，包括视觉仪表板，基于角色的访问控制和作业计划。借助Ansible Tower，整个IT团队都可以从一个地方管理项目，并具有一致的流程和更容易的协作。所有设备的配置都是集中式的，并且剧本仅限于适当的用户组。剧本运行结果还存储并记录以供将来参考。没有更多的狩猎配置。

Check out Aruba Ansible Playbooks on GitHub
Aruba modules use REST APIs for all configuration, which makes it faster than SSH/CLI methods. ArubaOS-Switches and ArubaOS-CX also support Ansible modules.

Get Ansible modules for Aruba,workflows like switch configurations, Zero-Touch Provisioning, firmware upgrades and much more.