New Book Announcement—Network Automation with Nautobot

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.