Nornir, an automation framework that uses Python directly, provides an alternative to other automation frameworks that use their own domain-specific language (DSL).

The framework can dispatch tasks to devices and nodes, deal with inventory when the user has host information, and support the writing of plugins. For troubleshooting, users can use existing debug tools directly from Python.

Csco systems engineer Dmitry Figol, a Normir contributor, says Nornir is more flexible than Red Hat’s Ansible, an IT automation language that uses YAML running on top of Python. Figol claims these benefits for Normir:

Nornir can run as a standalone script and print results to the console. It also can integrate with a web framework. It does require knowledge of Python, Figol said.

Nornir requires Python 3.6 or higher. You can install Nornir with pip, the Python package installer: pip install nornir.

This story, "Normir offers Python-based network-management automation" was originally published by InfoWorld.