Network Automation Guides
Table of Contents
Years of writing blog posts on network automation led me to a simple realization: engineers need more than scattered articles. They need a structured, hands-on path from zero to working automation - with real devices, real output, and no fluff.
These guides are lab-driven references built for network engineers who are ready to stop doing things manually. Each guide covers a core automation tool using Arista EOS in Containerlab so you can follow along and run every example yourself.
All guides are available at guides.josh-v.com.
Ansible for Network Engineers #
Ansible is one of the most widely adopted automation tools in network engineering - and for good reason. It is agentless, uses human-readable YAML playbooks, and has deep support for network devices via the arista.eos, cisco.ios, and ansible.netcommon collections.
This guide takes you from your first inventory file to templated configs, roles, facts gathering, and troubleshooting across a six-device Arista cEOS lab.
What you will learn:
- Building inventories and running your first playbook
- Configuring devices with
eos_configand understanding idempotency - Generating device configs from Jinja2 templates and variable files
- Organizing playbooks into reusable roles
- Gathering and parsing structured facts from devices
- Multi-vendor deployment patterns
- Troubleshooting and debugging Ansible runs
8 chapters • Validated against live Arista cEOS lab • $19
Coming Soon #
The following guides are in progress:
- Netmiko / Scrapli - SSH automation with Python. Script show commands at scale and push configs without Ansible overhead.
- NAPALM - Vendor-neutral network automation. Getters, config replace, config merge across multiple OS types.
- Nornir - Pure Python automation framework. Parallelism, inventory plugins, and building your own automation scripts.
- Go for Network Engineers - Build fast, compiled network tooling with Go.
Automators Subscription #
Get every guide - current and future - for one annual price.
$49/year includes all guides across all topics, plus updates as new guides ship.