Nautobot Community Meetings

Network to Code (NTC) conducted the first monthly Nautobot community meeting on September 30th, 2021 in the #nautobot channel the NTC public slack workspace. The community meetings are the latest in NTC’s efforts to engage with the community of Nautobot users, and those who want to learn more. Here are the highlights, for those who missed it!

This event was staffed by Jathan McCollum (Nautobot Co-Lead & Core Developer), Glenn Matthews (Nautobot Co-Lead & Core Developer), and Tim Fiola (Developer Advocate).

The First!

This being the first meeting like this, no one was really sure what to expect. That, and the dynamic of the meeting being held entirely on Slack, made for an exciting time!

This was the agenda we followed:

• Announcements & Reminders
• Overview of Issue Intake Process & Community Contributions
• Stale Pull Requests Review
• Q&A about Upcoming Features
• New Ideas/Proposals that need traction/attention (that already have an Issue or Discussion Open)
• Open Discussion & Forum

Announcements and Reminders

We started out with a call to action for the community: we want your bug reports! No matter if they are for the code or for the documentation, your community bugs (and hopefully pull requests!) make Nautobot better! Jathan also told the community that we are working on lowering the barrier to entry for those who want to contribute.

Overview of Issue Intake Process & Community Contributions

We also showed the workflow intake process diagram and the feature request template personas. The personas are meant to reflect the different types of roles around Nautobot, how people in each role use Nautobot, and the features useful to each. Using these personas helps the Nautobot team to understand whom a feature is for and how it would provide value to that role.

Community Pull Requests and Upcoming Features

The community pull requests section is meant to bring to light any stale pull requests (PRs) waiting on the community. There were no PRs waiting on the community so we moved on!

Eric Jacob, one of the community members, offered up several feature topics for discussion here:

• The future of the UI (consideration for client-side JavaScript frameworks like Vue or React)
• DCIM missing features like floor plan
• Ansible and Terraform runners for jobs
• Secrets (Initial model, UI, and REST API for Secrets nautobot#868)
• Firewall objects (Firewall Object Model – Possibly Plugin nautobot#904)
• Scheduling & Approvals for jobs (Scheduling & Approvals for jobs nautobot#805)
  • This is coming in Nautobot 1.2!

This post won’t cover all the detailed discussions, but those can be found in the community meetings repository!

We very much appreciate the great questions and conversation around these topics.

New Ideas/Proposals That Need Traction/Attention

This section is meant to discuss the ideas posted in Nautobot’s GitHub repository.

The conversation here focused mostly on token creation from API.

Open Discussion/Forum

Think of this section as similar to a Reddit AMA.

Discussion here mainly focused on databases we plan to support in the near future and removing the Nautobot Admin’s ability to view user tokens.