Advancing NetOps-as-Code: Strategic momentum, enhanced security, and multimode automation

The 3rd quarter of 2026 has shown that network automation isn’t just a "nice to have," but rather a critical support for AI-driven workloads, edge computing, and hybrid cloud environments. Organizations are moving away from manual Day 2 operations and ad hoc solutions to a comprehensive, integrated automation platform. For network operations (NetOps) teams, this means transitioning from managing individual devices to orchestrating entire service delivery frameworks.

Ansible Automation Platform updates 

Red Hat recently made the new automation orchestrator generally available as an add-on for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.7. Automation orchestrator is a composable workflow canvas for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform that enables teams to weave their existing job templates and automation libraries together with logic nodes, event-driven triggers, and AI agent recommendations into more complex IT operations workflows. Check out our blog post to dive deeper into what this means for you. 

Recent updates to Ansible Content Collections have rolled out to make automation more security-focused, predictable, and easier to manage.

Across the core networking collections, we published 11 releases this quarter: ansible.netcommon 8.6.0, 8.6.1, and 8.6.2; cisco.ios 11.5.0 and 11.5.1; cisco.iosxr 12.4.0, 12.4.1 and 12.4.2; cisco.nxos 12.1.0; arista.eos 12.2.0; and ansible.utils 6.1.0. 3 themes ran through the work.

• More security-focused. We removed the outdated pycrypto dependency from unit test requirements across the network collections and remediated deprecated ansible.module_utils imports in cisco.ios, cisco.nxos, cisco.iosxr, arista.eos, and ansible.netcommon. Continuous integration was restructured so that secret-free jobs run against untrusted pull requests while privileged jobs stay label-gated, and ansible-pylibssh now vendors libssh 0.12.2 in its published wheels. On the device side, arista.eos now handles the enable prompt correctly under Terminal Access Controller Access-Control System Plus (TACACS+) authentication, and a series of cisco.nxos Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) corrections make credential-bearing configuration behave as written: nxos_snmp_server no longer deletes an SNMPv3 user when it should update it under state: replaced, it removes SNMPv2 community entries as expected, and it parses DES privacy on NX-OS 10.4(4) and later.
• More predictable. Most of this quarter's fixes went into resource module state handling, where an incorrect diff means an incorrect change on the device. cisco.ios saw a cluster of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) corrections covering replaced-state removal of neighbor route-maps and prefix-lists, Autonomous System Dot (ASDOT) local-AS notation, Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) as a valid Layer 2 Virtual Private Network (L2VPN) address family, and idempotency when remote-AS is specified; route-map generation was fixed for bare and continue entries. cisco.nxos improved trunk Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) handling and no longer skips switchport on new Layer 2 interfaces, and arista.eos stopped placing Access Control Entries (ACEs) under the wrong Access Control List (ACL) context on replaced state. We also cleared a run of customer-reported fact gathering crashes, including BGP global, route-map, and incremental set Multi-Exit Discriminator (MED) parsing in cisco.iosxr, route-map metric deviation and named AS-path ACL handling in cisco.nxos, and interface facts on multi-slot Nexus 9000 chassis.
• Easier to manage. ansible.netcommon and cisco.iosxr added huge_tree support for Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF), so large device configurations no longer hit the parser's default node limits. The libssh connection plugin now honors persistent_connect_timeout, resolving a long-running customer escalation in which timeout settings in the execution environment's ansible.cfg were ignored. network_cli gained optional transcript recording for troubleshooting and audit, cli_config can push configuration and detect changes on platforms that lack native diff support, and an intermittent datastore-locked error on NETCONF transports was resolved. To keep all of this from regressing, cisco.ios now runs CISSHGO-based Molecule scenarios across all 32 of its resource modules, exercising both the libssh and paramiko connection paths without physical hardware.

Fixes merged after the releases listed above will ship in the next round of collection releases.

Partner ecosystem

In close collaboration with our partners, the Red Hat Ansible Certified Content ecosystem continues to expand and deliver value to our customers. In addition to the 11 releases mentioned above, here are some other noteworthy updates to highlight.

Arista AVD 

Arista AVD is an open source automation framework built on Python (PyAVD) and packaged as a Red Hat Ansible Certified Collection: arista.avd. Arista AVD enables organizations to design, deploy, document, and validate Arista network fabrics using infrastructure as code. AVD abstracts complex network configurations into intuitive data models, automatically generating production-ready Extensible Operating System (EOS) configurations, comprehensive documentation, and Arista Network Testing Automation (ANTA)-based validation tests. 

Highlights:

• Expanded Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) support across different models
• Improved documentation search with new schema explorer
• Added optional multiprocessing to accelerate eos_designs input validation
• cv_deploy role workspace synchronization:
  • Deployment workflow now automatically replays/retries when synchronization or rebase is required, up to the configured limit.
• For a complete list of updates, see the official AVD release notes.

NetBox Labs

NetBox is the open source system of record for network infrastructure, and the netbox.netbox Ansible Content Collection is how automation reads and writes it.

The Red Hat Ansible Certified Collection on Ansible automation hub carries 88 modules, plus a dynamic inventory plugin and a lookup plugin, covering the major NetBox object types. Paired with Event-Driven Ansible, NetBox event rules fire job templates in Ansible Automation Platform by webhook, and the payload carries the full before and after state of the object that changed, so documented intent drives the change that follows it.

Highlights:

• NetBox Labs and Red Hat co-presented “Real-Time NetOps: Event-Driven Ansible meets your network source of truth” on Red Hat Partner Program Live, with Leo Gallego and Matt York walking through NetBox as dynamic inventory for Event-Driven Ansible, and how AI agents can reason about network state from NetBox data with Ansible Automation Platform as the trusted execution plane.
• NetBox Labs brought maintenance of the collection in-house, with a named product owner.
• Newer upstream releases, including v3.23.0, are queued for certification on the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog. These add modules for data sources and contact assignments, and support for NetBox 4.4 and 4.5.

The collection supports NetBox within its 2 most recent releases, and needs Python 3.10 or later and Ansible Automation Platform 2.15 or later.

Looking ahead 

As we move into the next quarter, our focus remains on helping you scale these successes across your entire enterprise. Red Hat and our partner ecosystem aim to provide you with pre-built, updated content. Our goal is to help you launch new automation projects faster and maximize your existing resources, so your team can focus on the priorities that truly drive your business forward.

In case you missed it

• Release: Introducing Automation Orchestrator
• Blog: Deep Dive: Automated NetOps with cisco.catalystcenter Ansible collection
• Webinar: Building Zero Trust Networks with Red Hat Ansible
• Ebook: Network Automation for Everyone
• Release: Automation Orchestrator
• Compiler Podcast: Network Automation
• Customer Story: One New Zealand