Ansible vs. NSO: Unifying Both Under One CI/CD Pipeline
Final article in the series. With the fabric automated two separate ways — Ansible and Cisco NSO — this piece covers unifying both under one GitLab CI/CD pipeline, driven by a single JSON file as the fabric’s source of truth.
Covered: pipeline stages for linting, dry-run/plan, apply, and post-change validation; running pyATS/Genie test cases against the live fabric after every change; and a practical comparison of where Ansible’s simplicity wins and where NSO’s transactional model earns its added complexity.
The result of the full series: full fabric provisioning and teardown from one data file, with transactional rollback, and a pipeline that validates the fabric’s real state against intent on every run.
Read the full walkthrough, with the pipeline configuration, on Medium: