It is really amazing how fast Ansible is developed lately. Stable versions are released more often and contain more changes required by IT professionals. Many of them fill the gaps between two worlds – the developers and operations engineers. Unfortunately, some modules are not catching up as fast as they should which causes problems in developing simple tasks. I experienced such when I was working on playbook example required for my latest press articles for ‘IT Professional’ magazine. The default Ansible junos_facts module couldn’t correctly read JunOS version on some devices. Usually on devices running the older firmware release. This can be a real problem if some tasks execution depends on the firmware version on the router or switch.

Besides the official modules and lots of roles available on Ansible Galaxy repository many vendors developed their own modules and let them use for free. In many cases, it should be considered a better, more secure approach as long as the vendor repository is still maintained. In my situation it was the easiest workaround of my problem.