Question

A service provider automation team is choosing between Ansible and Terraform to manage the running configuration of hundreds of Cisco IOS XR routers. A key requirement is that re-running the same automation job repeatedly must not create duplicate or conflicting configuration if the device is already in the desired state. Which characteristic of Ansible directly satisfies this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Ansible modules are idempotent, applying changes only when the current state differs from the declared desired state

Answer

Ansible uses a persistent agent installed on each router to continuously reconcile drift

Answer

Ansible compiles a stateful graph of resource dependencies stored in a backend state file

Answer

Ansible requires a full device reload to guarantee configuration consistency after each run