Automation·2025·Automation Engineer

Network Automation Pipeline

Turned switch provisioning into reviewable code with Ansible and Python, cutting deploy time by ~80%.

[ CI pipeline — hero image ]

Overview

Every new switch was configured by hand from a wiki page — slow, error-prone, and impossible to audit.

The challenge

Configs drifted from documentation, onboarding a device took half a day, and there was no way to prove what was actually running in production.

The approach

I built a pipeline where NetBox is the source of truth, Jinja2 renders configs, Ansible pushes them, and GitLab CI runs syntax and diff checks on every merge request.

Results

Provisioning dropped from ~4 hours to under 30 minutes, config drift is caught automatically, and every change is now peer-reviewed like software.