A municipal campus team must push IOS XE interface and VLAN changes with an agentless playbook that SSHes existing switches. Which tool matches official DEVCOR 5.3.a construction?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Think of Ansible as the city’s field crew with a shared checklist—SSH into boxes that already exist and run the tasks. Puppet was a leftover v1.0 path, not today’s 5.3.a playbook answer, and Terraform belongs to the separate 5.3.b workflow.
Full Explanation
DEVCOR 5.3.a construction for agentless network automation centers on Ansible playbooks that SSH to existing devices and apply network tasks. For a municipal campus team pushing IOS XE interface and VLAN changes without installing agents, an Ansible playbook targeting the inventory over SSH matches the official construction: reuse SSH reachability, express ordered tasks, and avoid on-box agents on switches.
A Puppet manifest applied as the official 5.3.a playbook replacement fails the numbered skill—Puppet is not the agentless playbook answer here. A Terraform plan file used as the playbook for the same SSH task list confuses Terraform’s resource/plan model with Ansible plays (Terraform appears in 5.3.b). A Chef recipe that replaces the playbook requirement similarly misses the Ansible-focused construction.
Exam caveat: Ansible can use network CLI or resource modules; the exam point is playbook-over-SSH agentless automation, not installing Puppet agents. Inventory and secrets handling remain part of a safe municipal rollout.
Operational check: run the playbook with --check against a lab switch inventory, then apply, and confirm VLAN/interface changes match the task list without any agent package on IOS XE.