Chapter 13: Choosing the Right Python Collection for Network Automation

Confused between lists, sets, tuples, and dictionaries? This article breaks down when to use each, specifically for network automation.

Author

Leonardo Furtado
August 04, 2025

Comparing Python Collections in Network Automation

Introduction

In network automation projects, data must be structured, manipulated, and accessed efficiently. That’s where Python’s built-in collection types, lists, tuples, sets, and dictionaries, come in. Understanding when and how to use each one is essential for building reliable and readable scripts, especially when you're dealing with large amounts of device metadata, interface states, BGP neighbors, configuration diffs, or telemetry datasets.

In this guide, we’ll compare these Python collections, not only through theoretical characteristics but also by showing how each one applies to network automation scenarios.

Let’s explore them by analyzing their properties, mutability, ordering, indexing, use of duplicates, and data access patterns, all with examples relevant to automation engineers.

The Comparison Table

Collection

Ordered

Mutable

Duplicates

Key Feature

Network Use Case

List

✅

✅

✅

Sequences with duplicates

Interface logs, neighbor lists

Tuple

✅

❌

✅

Immutable sequence

Device coordinates, versioning

Set

❌

✅

❌

Fast membership, no duplicates

IP filtering, inventory dedup

Frozenset

❌

❌

❌

Immutable set, hashable

Fixed policies, hash keys

Dict

❌

✅

❌ (on keys)

Key-value storage

Device maps, config templates

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