Hack the Route Start free Open app Automation and APIs
Configuration management
Writing the wanted configuration down as files and letting a tool make every device match it.
Ansible keeps an inventory (devices and groups), variables (what each should have), Jinja2 templates (how variables become config) and playbooks (the tasks, in YAML). It logs in over SSH and needs nothing installed on the device: agentless, and the control node pushes. Puppet (manifests) and Chef (Ruby cookbooks) install an agent on each device that pulls its config from a server. Terraform (HCL) creates infrastructure through providers' APIs from a declared end state and records what it built in a state file. Kept in version control, the files are infrastructure as code: reviewed, repeatable, and the record of what the network should be.