Huawei announced the release of CloudEngine switch networking modules, core components of its CloudFabric data centre network solution, for Ansible, an agentless open source IT automation framework.
Huawei’s CloudEngine networking modules can be deployed in production environments to help provide more secure, efficient and reliable automated network operation and maintenance (O&M).
Huawei noted that as enterprises focus on adopting a devops model, the upstream Ansible project is a popular open source automation project on GitHub that helps developers and IT operators to quickly deploy IT applications and environments. Ansible enables users to reduce barriers between IT teams by automating routine activities such as network configuration, cloud deployments and the creation of development environments.
Ansible’s modular code base, combined with a simplified contribution process and a community of contributors in GitHub, enables the IT automation platform to both manage modern infrastructure and adapt to changing new IT needs and devops workflows.
The CloudFabric Open Ecosystem is a project designed to eliminate barriers between vendors of cloud platforms, management tools, network devices and network services, and to combine the capabilities to improve the functionality of data centre network solution integration and support solution development. The CloudFabric ecosystem is enhanced via open source Ansible networking modules developed and maintained by Huawei, designed to allow automated deployment and configuration and to enhance network O&M.
The new CloudEngine switch networking modules for Ansible offer support for automated configuration and query for a range of network features, including basic features AAA and SNMP and Layer 2-4 features such as VLAN, VXLAN, BGP, EVPN and ACL to help improve the efficiency of feature deployment and reduce configuration error rates.
Regarding the integration, Greg DeKoenigsberg, director, Ansible community, commented, “The community introduced network automation support in the Ansible open source project to enable network infrastructure to be managed in the simple… agentless manner that systems and applications already use… this can help network teams take advantage of new deployment paradigms, including configuration automation, test-driven network deployment and continuous compliance”.
