Using NetBox for Ansible Source of Truth
www.ansible.com
The goal of this blog is to show some of the capabilities that make NetBox a terrific tool and will be using NetBox as your network Source of Truth for automation!

I’ve recently been investigating doing some automated zero touch deployment stuff in my lab.

I have PXE boot in my lab but I feel like I’m under utilizing it. I was thinking about exploring using ansible with netbox as right now I only use netbox as a glorified wiki.

I’m just curious if anyone here has zero touch deployment and has any interesting takes on what it is good for and what it isn’t good for (I would really like to hear about some edge cases).

Thanks!

  • Toribor@corndog.socialEnglish
    41·
    1 year ago

    I use Ansible for all my deployments and just got a PXE boot set up with a preseed file to automate the install process and get the host ready to run playbooks.

    I’ve been really pleased with this strategy overall. I think that Ansible works really well for programmatically generating config files which in turn makes moving applications between servers effortless. I control docker volume mounts with ansible variables and encrypt secrets with ansible vault so I can do everything all in one place.

    Troubleshooting issues is a lot easier and recovering from a backup is faster and a requires less effort since I can just pull down the Ansible config from git and redeploy.