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@wdesmedt I wanted to check why did you decide to add host variables in each role's vars section. Why don't you put host vars into the inventory, making it a single place where host_vars are defined.

Imagine you grow your fabric from 4 leaves to 6 leaves. With the current approach you would have to add clab-xxx-l5 and clab-xxx-l6 vars to all the roles, instead of just adding the relevant nodes into the inventory.

PE-CE routing in the overlay.

@wdesmedt this looks like a leftover

Currently the intent environment is being specified using an environment environment, this is a non-native Ansible concept so isn't supported by for example Ansible Tower/AWX. Instead just use env as a fact directly as is being set in https://github.com/srl-labs/intent-based-ansible-lab/blob/dev/playbooks/roles/initialize/tasks/main.yml#L11.

This is what we have changed in our internal fork to make it work with AWX.

I would like to be able to specify the commit message that gets used in the JSON-RPC call to the device. That way we can use the Git commit message as commit message on the device when integrating it with our CI/CD pipeline.

Automated testing of playbook roles (ansible-test?)

Intent validation with e.g. custom filters + pydantic or builtin jsonschema criteria.

Coding in Jinja/YAML is error-prone and difficult to troubleshoot. Proposal to move to custom filters (l2vpn, l3vpn) to generate low-level device configuration from high-level intent.

Often, lookup vars that match the full version is not feasible. Instead, a generic version lookup logic can be introduced:

1. first lookup vars from the full version match (as it is done today) - e.g. 23.3.3
2. if not found, lookup vars from the major version - 23.3
3. if not found, lookup vars from the year release - 23
4. if not found, lookup vars from the default location - e.g. default/vars.yml

Rather than specifying individual interfaces or network-instances, use labels as properties to resources that can be referenced by other resources/services (e.g. l2vpn with interfaces tagged with label xxx, l3vpn with interfaces and macvrfs tagged with label yyy, ...

Define high-level fabric intent model that gets transformed in the custom low-level per-device intent (=device abstraction layer), currently used for underlay via the infra role. Still support input into the per-device intent to suppport configuration that is not covered by the fabric intent.
Fabric intent should define a.o.

• 'ASN range' for BGP-underlay
• roles: spine, leaf, bleaf, dcgw
• external access handoff: vlan, vxlan
• underlay-routing: OSPF, ISIS, BGP, BGP-UNNUMBERED - blueprint currently defines BGP only
• ISL prefix: from which inter-switch links are getting addresses from: ipv4, /31
• VTEP prefix: from which system loopback interface gets address from (/32)
• ISL ports (leaf, spine, bleaf)
• ACCESS or DOWNLINK port (leaf)