Steven Carter

When I started this blog series, I had intended to present a cohesive approach to automating your network operations, eventually leading to DevOps. The intent was to take you beyond simply automating ad-hoc tasks using contrived examples to a more systematic way of automating your network operations…

Well, I had not intended to take a two-month hiatus, but it was an interesting time of holidays and head injuries for me. The good news is that my head is as good as it ever was! (For better or worse) We covered a number of topics related to automating your network operations in the first four parts…

See the entire “Automating Your Network Operations” blog series. If you are relatively new to Ansible, you might have noticed that the playbook examples in my last blog did not have any variables defined in them. Common examples often either have static values or variables specified in t…

How encoding and transport of the data-model gives you power and flexibility In the first blog, I attempted to make the point that the declarative approach of using function-specific modules in Ansible is not scalable. In the second blog, I introduced data models into the conversation to help organi…

Keeping your IT infrastructure operational Before I get into data models, I want to take a slight diversion to incorporate some of the feedback that I received from the first blog. It was pointed out that my use of the ios_config module was “naïve.” I contend that it is more accurate to say that my…

In this blog series we’ll take you beyond the hype and dive more deeply into how and why to automate your network operations. I’ve spent the last couple of years at Red Hat helping customers automate their networks with Ansible. If there is one thing that I’ve learned during that time, it is t…