Rohit Thakur
Principal Engineer, Ansible Networking. Works on networking content engineering, Ansible Automation Platform collections, and AI enablement in network automation.
Sessions
In network automation, reliable backups are critical but often overlooked. This session explores how to design a consistent, vendor-neutral backup and restore workflow using Ansible.
Backups that “usually work” aren’t good enough. This talk presents a battle-tested, backup/restore workflow for Cisco IOS/IOS-XR/NX-OS using Ansible and Validated Content. We’ll show how to pick the right transfer method (SCP/SFTP/TFTP), enable and secure internal file servers, and make tasks idempotent across vendors. We’ll also cover selecting device-native paths (bootflash:/, disk0:, /misc/config) to avoid path pitfalls.
We will also go through a lightweight, offline rules + ML approach that scores the severity of configuration diffs (e.g., VLAN/ACL/BGP/interface changes) to prioritize reviews and automate safe rollbacks. Live demos include copying configs, verifying hashes, ranking diff severity, and controlled restores.