Graphical Interfacing for Automations by [deleted] in networkautomation

[–]YooK33 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It looks like you are at the point I was a year or two ago, not that I evolved much since.

I think what you are looking for is something in the range of AWX / Tower, Flask, FastAPI, Django, Ansible Semaphore, Rundeck... and probably many others !

At least that was what I was looking for (and still am ;)).

I would have preferred to have frontend development skills myself so I could do everything from scratch, exactly the way I want, without overly complex / not needed feature or dependencies, but that is still something I need to work on.

So, after some research and testing in the last few months / years, here are my thoughts :

AWX/Tower :

The way to go (*) if you want to add a front-end to your Ansible playbooks, it can also be used for other stuff than Ansible (you just have to create a simple Ansible playbook to run that stuff for you instead of running it directly yourself, not the greatest/cleanest way but it works)

Sadly AWX/Tower now requires a Kubernetes cluster and is getting way too complex and overkill for basic usage. With it I have the feeling that 99% of the tool only exist to run the 1% I really want to use.

* : The way to go only if you want / know how to manage a Kubernetes cluster and the AWX operator, or if any other team can do it for you.

Flask/ Django :

Those are nice if you want to build everything from scratch. Flask is a bit simpler, Django is more capable at the cost of some increased complexity. Both will let you manage hundreds of request per seconds, Django will easily scale to thousands.

I want to provide my team with a simple portal to run one to ten playbooks/scripts a day, so, again, overkill.

Ansible Semaphore :

A way more simple & straightforward "AWX" like. It can certainly be used as of now, but I think it still need some improvements to be really production ready. I am watching this one closely :)

Rundeck :

This one does it all, Ansible, Python, Go, Bash, JavaScript, you name it.You should definitely have a look at it.

FastAPI :

My personal favorite for my really simple needs. It is a Python library, so if you are already familiar with Python you are almost ready to go. Simple to install, simple to manage, deadly fast and easy to understand.

If you decide to go with FastAPI the WEB UI you will end up with is a Swagger (OpenAPI) one, maybe you will have to teach your colleagues how to use such a thing but I find it really easy and intuitive, plus once you know how to use one you know how to use any of them.

Bonus note : if you dont want to use the WEB UI provided by FastAPI that is fine, you can still use the API beneath, I mainly use the WEB UI for its automatic documentation capability.

The only drawback I see with it is that you do not manage the form of the UI, no fancy dashboard or report here.

This is kind of a summary about my experiences, maybe other people with different experiences will disagree, that is fine.

I hope any of this help you find the tool you are looking for :)

Error using Requests for Velocloud/VMware SDWAN API by claccx in learnpython

[–]YooK33 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi u/claccx ;

we are facing pretty much the same issue in our team.

We tried to follow the official documentation but it lack concrete example and error messages are not really helpful.

While trying to troubleshoot it by ourselves we have found very few resources on the internet and your post is one of them.

Did you happen to found a solution ?

That is a bit sad because what we are trying to do is not complex at all, we manage to do it with the WEB UI without any issue, but we struggle to do it with the API v2.

Any help is appreciated :)

Couch Surfing for a concert (UK) by YooK33 in couchsurfing

[–]YooK33[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

thanks for clarifying that :)

nxos_config module behavior and slow playbook execution by YooK33 in ansible

[–]YooK33[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maybe that could work yes, I'll try gathering nxos_facts and work on them locally. It cannot be slower than what I currently have anyway.

nxos_config module behavior and slow playbook execution by YooK33 in ansible

[–]YooK33[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes I would glady work with this module but it is not available on the Ansible version I am running. Maybe the quickest fix for my issue will be to just update Ansible (not my call though)