Over seven years ago, I had the opportunity to cowrite what would be the first book on network automation. It was an amazing experience getting to share and do what was needed to move the industry forward. The book no doubt has helped many organizations on their network automation journey and many individuals in their career progression. It is still humbling to see by the day. For those tracking, the second edition of Network Programmability & Automation was released last year too!

Fast forward to today: I am humbled and pleased to announce another book! In partnership with Glenn Matthews, Josh VanDeraa, Ken Celenza, John Anderson, Brad Haas, Christian Adell, Bryan Culver, Gary Snider and technical reviewers Tim Fiola, Cristian Sirbu, and Eric Chou, we and everyone at NTC are delighted to announce Network Automation with Nautobot: Adopt a network source of truth and a data-driven approach to networking.

With the advent of artificial intelligence, there is nothing more important than for enterprises to have quality data that can be trusted and acted upon to drive automation and future generative AI applications. Nautobot is the open source data platform for networking. Full stop.

Three years ago, we forked NetBox and launched the Nautobot project because we saw the gap in the market. There was no platform or company that saw the relationship between data and automation—and treated both as first-class citizens. And now, over the last three years, we’ve deployed Nautobot at some of the world’s largest organizations across verticals, from enterprise financials and higher education institutions to high-growth tech companies and government entities. And we’ve done it together with a welcoming community, transparent and in the open, while creating over two dozen Nautobot Apps (all open source, by the way). We even launched Nautobot Cloud for those organizations that don’t want to deal with the hassle of managing applications and want the elasticity of cloud.

We’ve seen firsthand what works and doesn’t work and where people spend time learning. While Nautobot is an open source project and docs are publicly available, we knew we needed to share even more about how Nautobot can be used as a Network Source of Truth and automation platform to transform those teams that have been stuck doing network management the way they’ve done it for years.

In the book, you’ll learn how to deploy, manage, and integrate Nautobot as a Source of Truth and network automation platform by better understanding the relationship between data and automation. By the end, you’ll be able to design and manage Nautobot deployments, understand its key features, and extend them by creating custom data models and apps that suit your network and your team.

The book is broken down into 4 major parts with 16 chapters and 3 more appendixes.

• Part One: Introduction to Source of Truth and Nautobot
• Part Two: Getting Started with Nautobot
• Part Three: Network Automation with Nautobot
• Part Four: Nautobot Apps
• Appendix 1: Nautobot Architecture Deep Dive
• Appendix 2: Integrating Distributed Data Sources of Truth with Nautobot
• Appendix 3: Performing Config Compliance & Remediation with Nautobot

We want as many teams as possible to have the knowledge and skills necessary to build a strong foundation for a network automation stack.

The book takes you on the Nautobot journey, starting with understanding the problems around network automation, data, and Source of Truth. It then reviews navigating the UI and its extensibility features. From there, we dive into all of the automation goodness, looking at its APIs, Ansible collection, pynautobot, and later looking at network automation architectures powered by Nautobot. Finally, we have several chapters dedicated to developing Nautobot Apps. From there, we have great reading in the appendixes, diving into the Nautobot architecture and then into two of the most popular Nautobot Apps: Single Source of Truth (SSoT) and Golden Config (which performs configuration compliance and remediation).

One of the book’s main points is that non-technical skills, such as an understanding of the value of data, are crucial when deploying network automation. But the right technical skills are important too. We wrote the book under the assumption that readers would have some background knowledge about network automation, such as familiarity with using Python or Ansible, plus knowledge of networking. As long as you have one to three years of networking experience and six to twelve months of using Python or Ansible, you’ll be sure to get value from the book on your network automation journey.

The book will be published by Packt, and we are targeting a May ship date. You can find it on Packtpub and Amazon.

At Network to Code, we continue to evolve every day—always driven by the community and our customers. This led us to launch Nautobot almost 2.5 years ago. It’s been a wild ride to say the least. Over these last few years, we’ve supported hundreds of Nautobot installs and learned so much in that time. It has become evident that users are looking to spend their time where it maximizes value for their organization. And this is not on application & infrastructure designs and deployments, but rather on consuming data in Nautobot, using Nautobot, and building network automation driven from Nautobot.

Enter Nautobot Cloud

Cloud and its operational models have transformed the IT industry over last 15 years and continue to do so. Users want SIMPLE. They expect SIMPLE. While we live in a world of DevOps, Automation, and CI/CD pipelines, users and operators continue to evaluate where they need to spend their time to maximize outcomes for their team, department, and company. Is it good to focus on deploying and designing highly available applications, or is better to simply click (or POST) to deploy a new application? While each organization is unique in their own right, we are seeing the numbers grow in adoption that want simple. These are the observations and discussions that led to our latest product in the Nautobot family—Nautobot Cloud. Check out the press release, if you haven’t seen it already.

Nautobot Cloud Overview

Nautobot Cloud is a SaaS platform that offers self-service management for Nautobot. You can simply log in to Nautobot Cloud, click “Create,” and a few minutes later, you get access to a Nautobot instance. The goal is to keep things simple. Better yet, each deployment is a highly available instance of Nautobot built for Enterprise production environments. You need multiple Nautobot instances to support different environments? Sure, just spin them up. This eliminates the need for operators to have to think about containers, Docker, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, load balancers, and the list goes on. Users of Nautobot Cloud do NOT need to think about sizing and cloud resources at all. It’s all abstracted away for simplicity. Operators can now focus their time on consuming Nautobot and therefore focus more time on their data and building network automation with and around Nautobot.

Some features worth noting in the launch of Nautobot Cloud include the following:

• One-click deployments of Nautobot
• One-click upgrades for minor and patch releases
• Marketplace that allows self-service to easily install Nautobot Apps
• Integrated dashboards that allow users to understand the data in Nautobot
• UI-driven configuration for SSO, VPN, and Secrets Management
• One-click database snapshots and restores

Nautobot Cloud Supports Ansible AWX

In the world of open source network automation, another major blocker for organizations has been in the production-grade application design and deployment of Ansible AWX. Over the last 5+ years, Ansible AWX has been one of the most commonly deployed tools for network automation. Given the hurdles and skills needed (containers, k8s, etc.), we thought it was best to also add support for AWX inside Nautobot Cloud. Yep, that’s right. Nautobot Cloud also offers self-service access to create and manage your AWX instances including easy SSO configuration directly from the UI. Just as with Nautobot, AWX is deployed in a highly available and redundant design that’s ready for Enterprise environments.

Going Forward

We are so excited to bring Nautobot Cloud to market. It is going to allow access to Nautobot for even more people and truly accelerate network automation, allowing users to focus on consuming and building automation without worrying about tools and infrastructure deployment and ongoing maintenance. We plan to bring many more services to market through Nautobot Cloud, so consider this only the beginning. Think about Nautobot Cloud as The Network Automation Cloud.