Hello, Nautobot Cloud!

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.