Free CCNA | Ansible, Puppet, & Chef | Day 63 (part 1) | CCNA 200-301 Complete Course

Welcome to Jeremy’s IT Lab. This is a free, complete course for the CCNA. If you like these videos, please subscribe to follow along with the series. Also, please like and leave a comment, and share the video to help spread this free series of videos. Thanks for your help. In this video we will cover configuration management tools Ansible, Puppet, and Chef.

They are exam topic 6.6, which says you must be able to recognize the capabilities of configuration management mechanisms. So, just like with the other automation topics on the CCNA, you don’t have to actually be able to use these tools yet, but Cisco expects you to have a basic understanding of their purpose and capabilities.

Here’s what we’ll cover in this video. First I’ll introduce configuration management tools, what they are and why we use them. Then I’ll introduce some of the characteristics of the configuration management tools Ansible, Puppet, and Chef. So far I’ve introduced various automation tools, and I just want to say that these are just tools.

They are suitable for some jobs, and not suitable for others. Depending on the company you work for and its size, they might use a lot of different automation tools, or just a few of them, or none at all. Configuration management tools like these three can be useful in any network, but especially in medium to large networks with hundreds or even thousands of devices.

And make sure to watch until the end of the video for a bonus practice question from Boson Software’s ExSim, the best practice exams for the CCNA. To understand one reason why configuration management tools are useful, let me explain the concept of configuration drift. Configuration drift is when individual changes made over time cause a device’s configuration