Ansible vs Nornir: Which Network Automation Tool is the best?

hello welcome to this video in which I'm going to discuss the question ansible versus nor near or - whichever you want so my name is Roger Perkin I'm a network consultant I am CCI fifty thousand and thirty eight and in this video we're gonna be discussing ansible versus nor Nia so let's get started so why do you need another network automation tool if you are familiar with ansible you'll know it's a very good tool now if you're familiar with Python and nor Nia you'll know there are very good tools as well and if you've never heard of any of this this is probably not the right video for you to be watching from the start but I would suggest watching a couple of the other videos to get an idea of what ansible is so you know what the comparison is about but in this video I'm gonna discuss ansible versus nor Nia if you are aware of the products as they are at the moment so the main question around this is it all depends on what your end goal is how many devices you have to automate and is speed a big concern for you and the other question around the choice between ansible or Noor Nia is are you a coder and do you actually want to learn Python so what's actually wrong with ansible well to be honest nothing it's a very good tool I'm a big fan of ansible I use it most days ansible is actually the most popular network automation tool in use today as of march 2020 but it does have a few smaller issues and they are that the play books are written in Yama now if you know answer ball you know Yama it's a domain-specific language it comes with very little debugging so if you're trying to troubleshoot a play book problem within Yama it can be quite painful um it can be slower than or Nia so if you're automating 50 devices with ansible it's going be absolutely fine it's gonna rattle through those and do them straight away if however you are automating hundreds or thousands of devices ansible could struggle and Python and nor Nia are tools which will run those tasks a lot faster um it can be difficult as I said to debug those large playbooks due to it being in Yama and the other minor thing with ansible is that things do break during the upgrade releases so not major problems but sometimes when you're going between versions you had a play but that ran yesterday you upgrade ansible and then it comes up and says this features been deprecated the feature no longer works so you have to rewrite some of your playbooks so if you don't know what is nor near nor near is a Python automation framework and it already uses the already established Python libraries mainly net miko and napalm and that miko is used to provide the ssh connection into the network devices and napalm is used to abstract the configurations between different vendors and as it's written in python you can actually do whatever you want so if you know how to do it in Python you can do it in nor Nia and you of course get the full debugging within Python with everything you've written so which is best now that really all depends on you if you're happy using ansible and it does what you want it to do then stick with it it's a great tool it does what it says on the tin it's it's perfect if however you are struggling with ansible and you're finding limitations with it and then I highly suggest you explore what nor Nia can do and it also helps you learn Python and go for it and certainly if you have thousands of devices to automate maybe you should be looking at Noor Nia if speed is a concern for you so in conclusion if you know how to use a tool and it does what you wanted to do then stick with it there are many experienced carpenters who have got their very sharp tools and they can do amazing work with it they've had those tools for years and they use them very well so if you know how to use a tool like ansible and you can make it do exactly what you want it to do then use it and stick with it only change the tool when you have hit some problems or limitations so you'll know what they are when you're running ansible you'll discover there are limitations to what it can do and when you hit those then you need to look at other tools that gonna help your life be a bit easier and there's no harm in trying new tools the main thing is that Network automation is a journey and we're all on this together so you have to decide whether you are gonna be announcer below and you're gonna use ansible write your playbooks in llamo and not go near python or whether you want to dive in explore the features of Python and nor Nia and learn Python and expand your toolset now I've actually got a couple courses that I've written first one he's on ansible so my answer will for network engineers course and I've also got a course that I'm starting now called master nor Nia so if you'd like to learn any more about either of these tools and I suggest you head over to this URL learned - networking teachable com I'll pop a link in the description below for more information on any of this check at my website that's Roger Perkin co uk I'm on Twitter at Roger N Parkin and LinkedIn is Roger perk in as well so if you have any questions then please do leave them in the comments I'll be happy to answer any questions you have around ansible and nor nia please don't forget to like this video and subscribe if you would like to see some more so thank you for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next video

Channel: Roger Perkin

Views: 3,517

Keywords: roger perkin, ansible vs nornir, ansible, ansible cisco, network automation, nornir, nornir python, nornir python automation framework, nornir network automation, ansible vs python, python vs ansible, python vs ansible for network automation, ansible network automation, python for network engineers, ansible for network engineers

Id: cjHgoxEKb2E

Length: 6min 22sec (382 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 08 2020