“Automation is to modern infrastructure what blood is to the body. It is core, you cannot have modern infrastructure without it.”

About this Workshop

Cisco Nexus Dashboard (ND) is the network management platform for all NX-OS-enabled deployments. In this session, we will cover how Ansible and ND can be used to provide various automation and orchestration capabilities to operate your datacenter. We will walk through the process of getting started and installing the Ansible Network as Code (NaC) collection, and then explore the different Ansible capabilities that are available in the NaC collection to help manage your VXLAN EVPN fabric. Next, we will walk you through the IaC (Infrastructure as Code) journey by using GitLab to fully automate the network with a CI/CD pipeline.

Lab Content

During this lab you will work through the following tasks:

1. Install the NaC collection and set up Ansible connectivity to ND
2. Model VRFs and Networks for the staging fabric using NaC data files
3. Reuse the same NaC model and playbook in a GitLab CI/CD pipeline
4. Bonus Task (Time Permitting): Add template-based policy intent with the NaC policy model