Network Automation for Routing and Switching: Leveraging Tools Like Ansible and Netconf

With growing network size and complexity, service providers and enterprises face ever-increasing difficulty to keep the networks in their desired configurations with minimum latency and high availability. Manual configuration and implementation processes are error-prone, inefficient, and costly. Network automation using tools like Ansible or Netconf can definitely aid in reducing implementation errors, reduce engineering time and eventually reduce operational costs. Automation can help enterprises and service providers increase effectiveness, and optimize. This paper describes current difficulties with manual network configurations, talks about automation as a tool for reducing outages, and introduces Ansible and Netconf. This paper also provides the setup and configuration of both tools, configuration examples, and important design considerations when applying network automation tools.