Experimenting with wacky projects is one of the biggest perks of a home lab, though spinning up a VM with the same ol’ OS and configuration settings can get tiresome after a while. Thankfully, certain apps like Ansible can make your life a lot easier by helping you automate the tedious virtual machine provisioning process.

Better yet, Ansible includes all the tools you’ll need to automate every aspect of your home lab – including the network devices. So, here’s a byte-sized article on why you should learn Ansible to automate your network infrastructure.

3 Ansible Playbooks are easy to configure

And just as versatile in their use cases

In the glorious Ansible ecosystem, Playbooks are the grimoires responsible for the automation magic in Ansible. Leaving their weird name aside for a moment, Playbooks include a sequential series of tasks coded in YAML syntax, providing Ansible with all the information it needs to automate specific tasks, devices, or virtual guests.

If the word "coding" sounds daunting to you, then you'd be glad to know that Playbook codes are extremely easy to understand – to the point where even novices can get up to speed with a few hours of practice. But you shouldn’t let their simple nature deceive you; Ansible Playbooks are so versatile that they can automate firewall, switch, and router configurations in addition to your entire virtual machine and container repertoire.

2 Ansible pairs well with cron jobs

With them, you can schedule your Playbooks as often as you desire

Despite their weird (yet highly functional) syntax, cron jobs are hands-down the best companions for automation enthusiasts. For the unaware, most Linux distros are equipped with the cron scheduler, which can execute “jobs” at specific intervals.

The best part? Cron jobs are highly customizable, and you can schedule anything between simple “Hello World” scripts and complex maintenance operations that are executed periodically at the precise date and time specified in the cron task. Cron jobs are fairly helpful on their own, but their utility jumps to a different level once you pair them with Ansible Playbooks. With a little bit of elbow grease, you can create cron jobs capable of backing up your entire network stack at regular intervals. While we’re on the subject of backup and recovery…

1 Ansible simplifies disaster recovery

Even if said disaster was caused by your tinkering

Creating frequent backups of your essential data goes a long way in ensuring your home lab survives your experiments. With Ansible, you can save all the firewall rules, router profiles, and switch configs to prevent accidental loss of data in case your home server projects end up bringing your network infrastructure down.

If you’re particularly concerned about the uptime of your home server, you can create a Playbook that periodically checks for network downtimes and automatically alerts you every time a service on your local network goes offline. Heck, you can go a step further and create another Playbook that automatically restores the saved profiles to your network devices when it detects downtime. Truly, the sky’s the limit when it comes to how creative you can get with Ansible automation.