As we bid farewell to another transformative year, the team at Network to Code is thrilled to share our major achievements across the three pillars of Nautobot: the core platform software, our cloud offering, and application development for the Nautobot app ecosystem. Each of these pillars promises to empower NTC clients and the community, representing another significant step toward a future in which every network benefits from network automation and NetDevOps practices. All of these strides were only possible with the unwavering support of our clients and community. As we reflect, we invite you to join us in celebrating the advancements made this year and the innovative solutions that are reshaping the landscape of network automation.

Nautobot v2

NTC’s open source platform, Nautobot, has undergone its most significant update to date and represents a substantial step forward. Nautobot v2 is the result of the collective expertise and dedication of the NTC team, with a sole focus on providing the open source community with an unrivaled network source of truth and automation platform. The latest version of Nautobot is packed with new features, including:

• An enhanced IPAM model that introduces namespaces to allow for more nuanced use cases, such as duplicate IP addresses
• IPAM performance improvements, especially when dealing with nested prefix hierarchies
• Consolidated location model that enables custom hierarchies and eases management constraints
• Data import/export improvements with standardized field names and enhanced file accessibility
• A new generic role model replaces DeviceRole, RackRole, IPAMRole, and IPAddressRoleChoices models. New roles can be associated with one or more content types.
• Full compatibility with our application ecosystem

Transitioning from Nautobot 1.x to 2.x is a straightforward process. The migration guide provides an easy-to-follow procedure paired with tooling to ensure that the transition is successful. Specifically, it verifies the compatibility of existing data with the data model changes and provides guidance on necessary adjustments. The result is a seamless transition with minimal administrative overhead.

Looking ahead, our future plans include a complete UI overhaul with a dedicated focus on enhancing the user experience and streamlined workflows, ensuring users can achieve their objectives efficiently and intuitively. We highly encourage users to provide feedback as we continually improve the UI.

For those interested in exploring Nautobot 2.0, there is a demo instance available at demo.nautobot.com. Feel free to experiment and make changes, as the server resets to a fresh state daily.

Nautobot Cloud

This year saw the debut of Nautobot Cloud, a revolutionary release designed to streamline the Nautobot adoption process by eliminating the administrative complexities associated with on-premise deployments. By doing so, Nautobot Cloud not only simplifies but also expedites the automation delivery process, providing every organization with the opportunity to leverage the power of NetDevOps practices. Moreover, it opens the door to maximizing value by allowing teams to concentrate on new development efforts rather than the overhead of infrastructure maintenance.

Nautobot Cloud boasts a myriad of additional benefits, leveraging its cloud-native architecture to offer:

• Effortless creation of production-ready Nautobot instances with just a few clicks
• The flexibility to create as many Nautobot instances as required
• Rapid upgrades to new minor versions of Nautobot within minutes
• A self-service marketplace facilitating the addition of applications to any Nautobot instance
• Enterprise-grade dashboards providing comprehensive situational awareness
• Robust APIs tailored for NetDevOps pipelines
• Effectless capture and restoration of database snapshots
• The creation of production-ready AWX instances
• Generation of diagnostic reports

To discover how Nautobot Cloud can enable your team to supercharge their pursuit of Network Automation, visit https://networktocode.com/nautobot/nautobot-cloud/.

Nautobot App Ecosystem

NTC’s leading application, Golden Configuration, has been instrumental in standardizing environments since its inception. The latest update has elevated its capabilities, introducing three new features:

Configuration Remediation

• The big news is the release of configuration remediation. This functionality generates the necessary commands to bring a device back into compliance. The application achieves this through two methods. The first leverages the open source library Heir Config to automatically generate the required commands. The second, known as custom compliance, enables users to create their Python methods for generating remediation commands. Furthermore, these methods can be applied based on individual compliance rules.

Configuration Plans

• Configuration plans establish governance around the process of remediating configurations and generate configurations based on type. When remediation configurations are generated, an object is created containing the commands, change control IDs, URLs, and approval status. Plans offer added flexibility through scoping, allowing the generation of intended, missing, remediation, and manual (with flexibility to support Jinja2 templating) configurations.
• Configuration plans provide the robustness to support single and bulk deployments of one or multiple features/snippets. They also provide a business the capability to schedule these configuration plan deployments.

Configuration Deployment

• This step involves taking the configuration plans generated in the previous stage and deploying them into the environment. This allows for deployment to a single device or multiple devices. Governance features ensure that only approved plans can be deployed into the environment. Furthermore, Nornir serves as the back-end framework, offering users the flexibility to opt for sensible defaults in deployments or tailored settings to meet their specific requirements.

Interested in learning more and seeing the solution in action? We recommend watching our recent Golden Config Webinar.

Reflections on a Year of Progress

As we reflect on the milestones achieved in the past year, the Network to Code team is thrilled to highlight the remarkable progress we’ve made. The release of Nautobot v2 stands as a pivotal achievement, underscoring our dedication to providing the open source community with an unparalleled foundation for NetDevOps solutions. NTC’s venture into the cloud with Nautobot Cloud streamlines the adoption process, empowering every organization to leverage the transformative capabilities of network automation. The Golden Config update augments our most popular application in our app ecosystem with compelling new features, making it easier than ever to maintain a standardized global network.

As we celebrate these accomplishments, we express our deepest gratitude to our clients and community whose unwavering support has been instrumental in realizing these innovations. NTC warmly invites you to join us in shaping the path forward by engaging with the NTC community. Your participation is valued, no matter the form it takes.

Community Resources:

Webinars

NTC Blog

Slack

YouTube

LinkedIn

NTC GitHub

Nautobot GitHub

-Chris M

Effective configuration management is the backbone of a well-maintained network, but it’s a daunting task given the complexity of today’s networks.

Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just getting started, Nautobot’s Golden Config app can help you streamline your network configuration management and remediation. In this article, you’ll learn how to use Nautobot to plan, deploy, and remediate your network device configurations so you can take control of your network.

What Is Network Configuration Management?

Network configuration management is the process of planning, deploying, and maintaining changes to network devices to promote reliability, security, and scalability. It helps organizations improve their network security and reduce the risk of outages.

Why Is Configuration Management Important in Networking?

Configuration management is important in networking because it enables organizations to identify and fix misconfigurations that could lead to outages or security breaches, configure networks more efficiently while reducing the risk of human error, and maintain accurate records of configurations for compliance purposes.

Nautobot Golden Config Features

Nautobot is the leading open source network source of truth and automation platform. Its Golden Config app was originally designed to perform basic analysis and reporting on your intended state and actual state configurations by:

1. logging into devices, collecting their configuration backups, and saving them to version control;
2. querying source of truth data from Nautobot and saving it to version control; and
3. comparing the two and generating reports.

A three-step process that gave administrators absolute confidence that their network was configured exactly as it should be, a critical goal in achieving Intent Based Networking (IBN).

New features in Golden Config take these network configuration management capabilities to the next level. We’ve broken them down into three main elements: remediation, configuration plans, and the actual deployment of those configuration plans.

Configuration Remediation

Remediation is the process of taking the backup and intended configuration of a device, as we just mentioned, then figuring out what’s missing from the intended state and coming up with a plan to get that device into compliance. Nautobot now intelligently identifies these discrepancies between intended and actual network configurations, making it a breeze to stay compliant.

By default, Nautobot accomplishes this by using hier_config, an open source repository that consumes the running configuration of a device, compares it to its intended configuration, and builds the remediation steps to bring it into compliance. But it’s also flexible enough to meet any custom business requirements; you can use Python to tell Nautobot about your own business requirements and how you want to remediate certain configurations.

Golden Config now gives you the ability to enable or disable remediation on a per-compliance-rule basis as well, because there might be certain configurations that you do not want to remediate for whatever reason.

Additionally, Nautobot’s content-aware compliance diff feature helps you spot missing or extra configurations — even on diverse device types such as routers, switches, and firewalls.

Configuration Plans

While it’s great to be able to press a button and deploy corrective actions, effective network configuration management needs to have review and approval processes to ensure the correct changes are made and done in the needed order and times. Because Golden Config generates each change as its own object, the objects can be reviewed and scheduled independently. This allows configuration plans to be used to schedule deployments at the most appropriate future times. Nautobot then enforces your internal approval steps and change control processes.

The app can also push out more than just remediation plans; it supports intended state and missing plans, so you can push configurations to support the rollout of new and replacement devices. Additionally, the app allows you to make manual changes on an ad hoc basis.

Configuration Deployment

As the name suggests, this feature allows you to deploy the configuration plans that you created in the previous step. And you have the flexibility to deploy one or many plans across one or many devices.

Configuration deployment follows a lot of the same concepts and frameworks that Golden Config as a whole does; it uses Nornir as a framework, which allows for easy adoption, usability, and flexibility. If your business requires very strict compliance to a certain configuration standard, for example, you can now create your own Nornir dispatcher for that through Golden Config.

Network Configuration Management and Remediation with Nautobot

Nautobot’s Configuration Remediation Engine takes your intended and actual configurations and tells you, for example, how to get rid of a specific command or how to use a specific operating system’s configuration replacement option. Not only does it know what’s extra and what’s missing, it uses that information to help you fix your configuration and, in turn, bring your device into compliance.

By providing intelligent configuration remediation, content-aware compliance diff, versatile device compatibility, and customization options, Golden Config empowers professionals to take control of their network configuration management, ensuring compliance, security, and operational efficiency.