[jmbwell]

There's a push and pull; ansible and terraform both have some facilities for doing what you describe, but of course if you're using both tools, then you wind up where you are, needing yet another layer of abstraction common to both.

In the book, the author presents an approach for storing the object state and organizing the repository for ansible purposes in what is at least as sensible a way as any other I've seen. For installations that might not directly benefit from additional layers of abstraction, managing object model state using ansible's native functionality might well be sufficient.

This is all a legitimate challenge, in any case. Network infrastructure and service instances have some management issues in common, but where they differ, they can differ by quite a bit, in ways that are hard to model at any level of abstraction.

[nu11ptr]

I'm not using both. The first version of my tool used Ansible. The second version used Terraform. They were written 4 years apart. My users are not devops savvy. They use runbook forms to call into my API giving them a very simple UI that requires almost zero input. The object model includes lifecycling so certain attributes can be changed, etc. and validation done to ensure only a correct network is output. This isn't required by everyone, but it wasn't done out of necessity on how I'm using the tools, but to satisfy the business problem I'm trying to solve (automate network deployment with as few human inputs as possible over the entire lifespan of a client and infrastructure).

I wasn't critiquing the author, but networks inherently have a lot of input data. Much of this is not of concern to the end user, hence why public clouds require almost zero input on the network side.

I agree that my object model is purpose built for our product. It would not work for someone else's network.

[thestepafter]

I’m currently using Ansible for something similar. Mind if I ask why you switched to Terraform?

[nu11ptr]

Faster: it uses a local state file, so it doesn't need to interrogate the devices every time.

Stateful: you don't have to manually track "present" and "absent" - you just omit and it will notice it needs to delete it

More standard: Writing HCL is very similar between providers. Every module in Ansible typically behaves pretty differently