Excellent article(s) Steven, I look forward to more of them! In relation to your comment "This is where Ansible enters back into the story. In my opinion, it is the best of the open-source IaC tools for delivering data models to devices. I’ll explain why and dig deeper into the power of data models in my next blog."

I'm certainly interested in seeing where this goes but I'm equally interested in you thought on Data Models + Ansible vs Data/Service Models using NSO. This is the real question for me, build it all myself or use tools that get us half way there (or more) without having to code myself. After all, for most enterprises Infrastructure is not my company's core business so I need to deliver services as easily and as fast as possible.

Seems to me that there are so many if/then/else statements, corner case support or no support at all in developing automation using Ansible (leading to custom scripting) that make me shy away from using it, especially since whatever I custom code, I have to support and update as the need arises.

I'd appreciate your viewpoint on this, especially wrt to Ansible vs NSO ;) .....