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Southwest Airlines has adopted the Ansible Automation Platform to streamline network management, achieving a reduction of at least five months in the building and testing of NAC configurations, which now takes six weeks instead of up to twelve months. The platform allows for the simultaneous execution of 100 Playbooks, improving scalability and efficiency, particularly for Cisco IOS upgrades, which can now be completed on 100 devices per night.

Engineers have utilized the Cisco IOS update Playbook over 2,500 times, with plans to refresh 3,000 switches this year using the platform. Standardized configurations help prevent outages caused by misconfigurations, reducing human error. Automation enables engineers to concentrate on more complex projects, including exploring network analysis tools.