Network automation: Discover Alcatel-Lucent Network module in Ansible software

By Gilbert Moisio, Senior consultant, specialist on knowledge acquisition, technologies and methodologies. He published several papers about automation, Software-Defined Networking and Wi-Fi. His website: https://moisio.fr/

In this article, you’ll find all information to use Alcatel-Lucent network module in Ansible software. 

When I worked on the alcatel_aos module for Netmiko, the idea was to allow automation using the Python language. The addition of the Nornir framework offered a structuring of the code which used certain logic from Ansible. Three years later, it is clear that a large majority of people set off more easily on the path of “Human-driven Automation” with a tool like Ansible and its pseudo language in YAML than with a direct language like Python which remains reserved for people more experienced in development.

It is to fill this gap that I wrote the ale_aos modules for Ansible, remaining as generic as possible in order to allow more flexibility in the use of these modules.

They are available in the Galaxy Ansible , and can be improve thanks to your tests and proposals, the official repository of the Galaxy modules being in a public Github . The license used allows all the improvements on the master branch of Network Modules, but does not authorize the redistribution of forks, in order to avoid losing of energy (license Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International / CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

• ale_aos_ping : Check the connectivity in SSH to a device.
• ale_aos_command : Execute a command on a device. It is possible to search for a character string in the result of the command.
• ale_aos_config : Execute a set of commands, usually to configure. All the commands can be transmitted in the form of a list or in the form of a text file containing one command per line.

To use these modules, you have to start from a Python virtual environment to install ansible in version 2.9.2 minimum and netmiko in version 2.4.2 minimum. It is very likely that everything works with earlier versions.

You will find the code to copy by following this link on Gilbert Moisio website.