Nornir is an automation framework written in python to be used with python. Most automation frameworks hide the language they are written in by using some cumbersome pseudo-language which usually is almost Turing complete, but lacks tooling to debug and troubleshoot. Integrating with other systems is also usually quite hard as they usually have complex APIs if any at all. Some of the other common problems of those pseudo-languages is that are usually quite bad at dealing with data and re-usability is limited.

Nornir aims to solve those problems by providing a pure python framework. Just imagine Nornir as the Flask of automation. Nornir will take care of dealing with the inventory where you have your host information, it will take care of dispatching the tasks to your devices and will provide a common framework to write “plugins”.

Just a note to myself since I searched the internet for a long time to make this work…

I needed to test a really trivial change to the scsi tape driver code, but didn’t want to reboot an actual machine that has a tape drive. So I thought, maybe QEMU can pass-through an arbitrary device?