Beyond Boundaries: Exploring 2023 Breakthroughs in Nautobot’s Core, Cloud, and App Ecosystem

Hey good morning good afternoon good evening folks as you’re joining. We are just going to wait about 1 minute as we let people filter into the webinar so please just hang tight we’ll get started here in about 1 minute. Thank you for those just joining we are just waiting about 1 minute as we wait for the room to populate just hang tight we’ll get started here very shortly all right thanks everyone that was able to join us this morning this afternoon this evening wherever you are in the world welcome today we are going to be going over the 2023 highlights in Nautobot’s core cloud and app ecosystem three pillars with one goal: simplified network automation.

The agenda we’re going through today we’ll do some introductions go over that three-pillar strategy and introduce that um then start diving into each of those pillars. So looking at Nautobot V2 the app ecosystem Nautobot Cloud we’ll have some time for some Q&A and here as we are going through the session please do use the Q&A section down there on the bottom of your Zoom screen please um it it’s better that way that we can track the questions and share them with everyone versus if you try to send us a chat

so please do use the Q&A for questions as we go through um and we will try to pepper those in throughout the session as makes sense and any those that are left over we will address there at the end little review there then that three-pillar strategy in action and finally conclusion for our agenda today next up some intros or first up some intros here so joining us today we have Jason Edelman our founder and CTO myself Tim Schreyack the director of sales engineering John Anderson principal consultant and Nautobot about product owner and

finally Jeff Kala our senior architect that will be be presenting here throughout the session so the three-pillar strategy let’s kind of take a look at what that means and and what we intend here the goal is really about how are we removing those barriers to adoption of Automation in your environment so you can really focus on what your priorities are um starting off with Nautobot V2 the core platform right so we’re going to go into the details of that and what we have done there the differences

all of the benefits that we we’ve brought in Nautobot V2 and and all of the great things that we’re doing in that area um coupled to there then is that app ecosystem how we can use applications on top of the Nautobot core in order to drive faster more efficient outcomes to get us to the goal we’ll go through some of the great work that we’ve done over the past year on those apps and give you some details there and finally something that we were really excited about in 2023 Nautobot Cloud really allowing

you to have that quick easy deployment of the use and consumption of Nautobot and Nautobot applications so with that we’re going to go into Nautobot V2 and I’m going to hand off to John here who will take over and give you those details all right thanks Tim yeah lovely to be here John Anderson I’m the product owner for Nautobot so let’s dive in so for anyone that that may be unfamiliar Nautobot is our platform and Network to Code for two primary sets of use cases it’s an open source source of Truth and it’s a network automation platform

so on the source of Truth side you know this is really about collecting and curating all of the data that is critical to network automation needs right this is things that can be as simple as tracking your inventory of devices that in interfaces and so forth right but it’s so much more right it’s all of the rich relationships between that data right it’s being able to connect those interfaces together um know put the layer three addresses on those interfaces track vlans you know asns other bgp data

and that kind of thing right and it’s a very extensible platform in that we have things like user definable relationships and additional attributes through custom Fields right so you can tailor that Network source of Truth to your organization specific needs and on the automation platform side right we build on top of that fundamental set of data requirements and build in a an extensible platform through additional applications and other capabilities that enable tremendous amounts of automation use cases

you know we’ve got things like golden configuration that we’ll go through today for for managing your network at scale things like the data validation engine that build on top of that Network source of Truth to ensure that you know we’ve got our organizational specific data constraints you know well at hand the floor plan app that that you’ll be able to see here today for you know tracking how racks and devices are physically you know laid out in our data centers and

so forth right we’ve got a rich ChatOps ecosystem as well that um creates some really both fun but extremely useful ways to interact with the platform you know quick access to our data Within than the areas where our Engineers are already talking right and from an Enterprise standpoint right We’ve Got Deep Integrations with lots of other systems you know Secrets management platforms so that you know we are adhering to Enterprise best practices for how we manage you know confidential and and

you know proprietary data for things like credentials for connecting to devices and so forth right um circuit maintenance you know there’s just there’s so many apps built on top of this platform but you know it’s really the combination of these two primary use cases that make Nautobot you know the premier you know Network automation source of Truth and automation platform in the ecosystem today so 2023 was a really big year for Nautobot we launched our version two

and that’s really kind of culminated in in two really big releases for us the 2.0 train and then the the 2.1 train towards the end of the year um and that is the you know current stable release is is that 2.1 release frame but in those set of releases you know we we’ve had a lot of work specifically some improvements to the user interface that we’ll go through in a demo today um we have made some substantial improvements to the ipam data model so for users that are tracking you know prefixes and IP addresses and

so forth you know You’ definitely be interested in what we’ve done there from a performance and usability standpoint we have made also some pretty big improvements to the location data model that we’ll go through that um you know again hearken to the the the flexibility in the platform allows you to create um you know organizational specific location hierarchies and you know really get as granular as you need to from a location tracking standpoint

um jobs we’ll talk a little bit about but you know we we you know could spend days talking about jobs that is one of the foundational components of the automation platform side of Nautobot but we have added some capabilities there that allow job authors to produce files know really any type that you want as output from jobs and then users have an elegant way in the interface to download those files so enables a lot of you know really Advanced reporting use cases um maybe config generation for example and

so forth and that also backs some changes that we’ve made fundamentally in the platform for exporting data and this will also help with importing data in the future as well the external integration model is something new that came in the 2.1 release and that is going to be the foundation for how we build um automated Integrations with other systems down the road but you know this is a standardized way for specifying you know parameters for connecting to external systems and

so forth that we can then consume in jobs or you know single source of Truth Integrations and so forth and you know unfortunately there’s there’s just so much that’s included in in V2 that we couldn’t possibly cover it all here today um you know we have done a specific webinar in the past on Nautobot v2 and I’m sure the team can paste that link in the chat here for anyone that hasn’t had a chance or or opportunity to check that out um you know when we close out here today you can you can certainly check that out

um but with that I will jump into a short demo here of some of these new features in Nautobot V2 I’m over here in our demo environment and if we go back to the homepage here you know this is the first thing that you would see when you log in to Nautobot just a kind of overview of all of your data and different assets that you’re tracking within Nautobot here the first thing that let’s take a look at is the enhanced ipam functionality so if we go over here in the nav menu and take a look at everything

that you know we can track in ipam you know obviously IP addresses right um but prefixes and Nautobot the prefix hierarchy right but one of the brand new things in Nautobot v2 is this concept of Name spaces so Name spaces are um maybe a little more advanced um topic but what they enable at their root is namespaces now Define the the sole uniqueness boundaries for address space so you know we can imagine if we’re a larger organization and we have a lot of overlapping or duplicate address space because

you know we’ve done a lot of mergers or Acquisitions or you know we’re maybe a managed service provider that deploys a lot of cookie cutter types of you know Network segments um that all look the same right and maybe have the exact same addressing schemes right name spaces enable us to basically put that those parts of the ipam name ipam you know address space in buckets that don’t conflict with one another right so that we can properly and effectively document the network

um but you know do it in a in a sane way here so we assign those name spaces to prefixes and IP addresses and so forth as you might imagine right but if we look at our prefix hierarchy one of the the biggest things that has changed in Nautobot v2 is we have um specific and explicit relationships for parents and children um apologize the demo environment is running a little bit behind today but yeah here we are so we have direct relationships between parent and children um prefixes now so

um in the past that relationship was kind of derived on the Fly based on you know an understanding of the natural hierarchy that exists with um you know ipv4 and IPv6 networks um but by explicitly you know declaring that relationship you know between a sl6 and its parent sl8 in this case right um we gain a lot of performance improvements when we have a lot of data at scale here so users with you know even moderate data sets um in the ipam real we’ll see a lot of improvements and performance gains

for you know migrating up to Nautobot V2 here right but what we’re able to do with specifying different types here is really create um three different categories of networks right so we’ve got containers which are basically just ways that we carve up the network right so this sl8 may not actually exist out on the network somewhere right it’s just a container that we allocate other networks from right so then we’ve got this sl6 and then a sl8 that are also containers underneath there

finally we get to what we call call a network which is just a sl24 in this case as we’ve defined it and this is a network is a prefix or subnet that would actually be deployed on the network right so this is a prefix that may you know be that you would actually find in a configuration on a devices interface for instance right and you can see that it has a relationship to a VLAN here and to a you know location that it um is assigned to as well and that’s a good transition over to the enhancements to the location hierarchy that we’ve got here

so if we look at you know this hierarchy of locations you know imagine we are a higher ed institution that’s you know being exemplified here and we want to designate the different campuses that we’ve got the different departments that exist throughout that campus and then ultimately the buildings that that you know make up our institution we can create that location hierarchy if we go over here to the specific building this is the representation you know for whatever Cedar Grove Hall is at this institution right

um and you notice we have these different types and this is really the foundation of the enhancements that we’ve made to the location hierarchy if we click on that type the building here we can see what the definition of these quote unquote location types are so we’ve got a type called campus and we’ve got a type called department and then a building lives within a department right um so obviously you know these aren’t real locations we’re just defining the hierarchy that makes sense to our organization again imagining

that we’re a a a a university in this example right and so each type of location can have specify the types of of data that can be Associated to it so we’re saying that buildings can have devices or racks or prefixes assigned to those locations so this is actually really powerful because it helps Ensure sure that our data is accurate and correct in the system because we’re going to prevent people from saying that a device you know can’t belong to just a department or just a campus

right it has to be assigned to a building right the system will not allow us because we’re not we we haven’t said that a device can be assigned to a department here and we’ll see that the the nestable attribute is is checked here on department and you know we see the the the that flag here as well if we hover over it what that means is that we can have departments nested under other departments and you know if we went back to our locations list view here we can see exactly that right

so we had a we had a campus and then we have the you know College of Arts and Sciences which is a department and then we have the specific anthropology department that lives within that college right and we have the the building for that department and so you can see that you know here we have two departments and that’s because because we’re saying that that particular type is nestable um so that you know can definitely be helpful in like data center environments right where you want to say like I’ve got

um cages in my data center and then I’ve got rows inside of my cages and you know maybe those are kind of nestable right like maybe there’s cages inside of cages right for for different tenants that that kind of thing um and that’s a good point to to mention too right so this example shows kind of the physical side of it location hierarchy it is perfectly acceptable to even go down to the logical side right so you could model a data center down to

um you know the the the rows or you know specific racks obviously within that data center but you could go even further into a logical sense of saying you know these are um you know maybe the zones that exist within my data center from a you know logical networking perspective you can you can definitely do that with the location hierarchy as well um so yeah that you know obviously there’s a lot more that you can see um from a UI perspective that we have spent a lot of time on in our in our version two release here

um you know kind of cleaning it up and and giving a a new look and feel to Nautobot and you will continue to see more of that through 2024 especially as we get into our um you know 3.0 realm U much later in the year in 2024 I’d love to spend some more time here but I do have to you know um give some time for everyone else that has other exciting things to show but I will pause here and ask Tim you know are there any questions that I can answer this time yeah we’ve had a few come in

um and for those in the audience please do feel free to use the Q&A as as we go through if you have specific questions um but for John here one of the things um you were talking about Name spaces you introduced that concept um for those maybe familiar with tenants like how does tenants compare to namespaces yeah so great great question so you know if we move zoom out of the way here um you know if we looked at the devices that that live here as as you brought up for anyone that’s that’s unfamiliar

we have this concept of tenants that can be attributed to um different objects so these devices have been Associated to a tenant prefixes are the same way they can be Associated to a tenant and now a namespace in the past the tenant was a part of the uniqueness bounds from a a prefix standpoint so if we go back to prefixes we can kind of see that that tenant relationship um so moving forward Nam spaces as I mentioned form the totality of the uniqueness boundary for the address space the tenant is still available but what we’re going to be

moving tenant to is more of a of a business label right so you’ll be able to continue to use the tenant model as you have in the past associating tenants to object and so forth but really what it’s going to be is just a way to label something as being owned by that tenant so forth right so it’s actually probably a little more flexible kind of going forward and we want to expand the usage of the tenant model to more objects in the future um through the the the 2.x train but certainly into 3.0 as well in the future

so you’ll see more usage of tenant but it is going to be less confusing because it is going to be more of just an ownership label going forward got it so tenant isn’t going away but we are repurposing it and giving it a new identity I guess if you will in the as we move forward another question came in as you were moving on to the idea of locations and this New Concept can can you explain um kind of locations and maybe give some real world examples comparing that that’s to the traditional regions and sites like maybe folks might be used to

um and kind of like how you might transition from regions sites over to the location model right yeah good good good question yeah so so what what you’re mentioning with regions and sites right those were the two kind of location entities that existed in Nautobot V1 or you know even further back for for those that that have migrated um so what we have done with in the introduction of locations and their enhancements in 2.0 is removed region and site and so the location scheme is the only location entities that we have in Nautobot

so it’s much easier to keep up with from that perspective and it’s much more flexible so regions in the past allowed you to do kind of recursive trees so you could create um you know the the same parent child relationships but regions didn’t have a type before right so we couldn’t say that locations have the specific type like in the example you know that I’ve created with um with the you know University campus here you know we can’t say that this is our campus and this is our

um you know buildings and departments right so it’s kind of ambiguous in that sense and then also the location types that we’ve introduced allow those data constraints now where you can say that devices can only be assigned to these types of objects at this specific part of the location hierarchy so so so that is nice if you are um upgrading from Nautobot V1 you don’t have to worry about recreating your data or doing anything with it we will automatically recreate whatever you have from an existing region hierarchy in

all of your sites those will be converted automatically and what you’ll wind up seeing is if we go look at just our location types here obviously the example I’ve created with campus and buildings and departments you’ll see something like this for these two records here for region and site the day that you upgrade to to Nautobot V2 you’ll you’ll your location types will just be region and site as they exist did previously and then going forward you’ll be able to to take advantage of these new capabilities right

so unlike the tenant which is remaining just repurposed regions and sites is going away we are migrating to the location types if I understand what you’re saying correctly yes yes and and importantly um there’s you don’t have to worry about that data we are taking care of it for you automatically as a part of the upgrade yep it’s part of that migration that’s going to happen but don’t be surprised for those maybe that are doing that upgrade that it is going to look a little different as

you move transition from regions and sites over to locations okay great I think that is all the questions we have here on this section if we can move on to the next section we’re going to be talking about the Nautobot app ecosystem we’re going to go through a few of these apps here in detail today so we can go to the next slide jump currently today we’ve got 13 applications and always growing We are continuing to add to this very robust ecosystem as it is today

um we are going to go through golden config configuration application and the floor plan application here today and give you some a little bit updates on what we’ve done there um as we as as well as what was occurring in 2023 so on the floor plan application this was a new and exciting app that we introduced this year allowing you to visualize um your space whether that’s a data center or maybe a Colo um giving you that bird’s eye overhead view of your floor plan allowing

you to lay out what your data center or Colo looks like this is a great addition to the already data that we have down there in the source of Truth now you’re able to visualize that data in a really consumable fashion and in a really flexible fashion so we are able to have the consolidation of our documentation in one place in Nautobot and in a standardized format so we’re not having to go to different databases or different tools to maintain this information and of course as with everything

that Network to Code does very very customizable extensible so that you can take and make it work in your environment that the the RAC tiles are Dynamic um we can scale this to any size floor plan we can have multi-tile objects you know whether those are your your ps’s or maybe your crack devices over on the side that sometimes will take up multi tiles or even maybe particularly large racks um we have here available as well doing custom tile dimensions and custom status colors

so as you can see here in the example showing off you know the hot aisle and the cold AIS in red and blue for example and then maybe you have some racks Tile locations that are unusable so those are you know maybe they’re marked in Gray or or for future use really being able to model plan and understand your floor space um as as you work through your environment jump we go to the next slide and then how how do the relationships occur out there in the real world compared to what we’re modeling in the data

so being able to understand those relationships those connections rack elevations device information site information and the way all of this is tied together in one visualization so for example you know I could start here on the top of my support plan I can drill into a rack I can now see what’s in that rack um so here you see that example here hey we clicked on that um cdg2 101 rack um clicked into it now we’ve got that visualization and ah I’m looking for that specific device down there in somewhere around u20

um I’ll double click on on that and and then I’m now I’m in that edge router right and I can Traverse the entire tree very seamlessly and easily as I move down into those details of the UI so that is a good overview of floor plans and Rex um I we are going to move off here on hand over to Jeff to be able to start talking about the golden config app and while he’s doing that we do have a question coming in here from the audience we probably will address it coming up

next but about importing Dynamic DM data into the Data Center app in Nautobot so the floor plan app in Nautobot we’ll get to that in the end here we we’ll go cover that topic there for you Justin but for now we’re going to hand off to Jeff and talk about the golden config thank you Tim yeah as Tim said um earlier at the beginning my name is Jeff Kala I am a senior architect at Network to Code and today I’m going to be just introducing some of the new feature sets that came into golden config over the last year

so I’m very excited about all these I’m one of the maintainers of the project so I was a lot of hard work by the team and I’m excited to show them similar to what John had said me mentioned earlier there actually was an entire webinar previously that was dedicated to these features so if you have an urge to get a little bit more information and actually see a full end to end demo I encourage you to go find the that recording on YouTube so yeah so we’re going to cover Nautobot gold config app

and what’s new with it of the 2.0 release really a lot of these features did go in in the 1.6 train of golden config right at the end before we switched over to 2.0 so they are available there as well and so we’re going to talk quickly about what pieces were added so Nautobot had already had a lot of the data available for everybody to utilize to do configuration management Nautobot and and golden config specifically expanded that to really be able to identify misconfigurations

and find extra missing configurations that were currently out there on the network but we had always heard and we had always strived to provide this as well is okay great I know now what was missing the extra config that I have on my on my devices but how do I actually remediate those so that’s one of the biggest pieces that was added to the new feature set of golden config was is being able to generate remediation commands and then also finally the ability to actually deploy those remediation commands as well

so I’m going to quickly cover the existing features that everybody was was used to so obviously the existing features from all the way back when golden config came out you were able to do backups of your configurations if you wanted to do that within Nautobot or the app was also f ible enough to be able to actually take in a a git repository and actually utilize that so if you had another tool like rancid or or any other of the other tools out there that were already doing your backups and

you didn’t want Nautobot and golden config to do that as well you could just link that instead another piece that already existed was being able to generate intended configurations which is very powerful you could specify templates and now you’re using your source of Truth data alongside templates to actually create your intended configurations for devices you could do that at an iterative level so maybe you didn’t want to try to tackle generating an entire configuration for for a switch you could do

that on a per feature level or do just what you care about at that given time and expand upon that going into the future and the final piece that was the initial feature set was actually being able to take your backup configuration and also your intended configuration that you had generated in inside golden config and do a diff and a comparison to really do compliance reporting on your configurations out there so you can see in this slide there’s an example of what your intended configuration

for a given feature in this case interface should look like what it actually looks like and it was powerful enough to determine out of those two dips what was missing and what was extra so we got to this point and the natural progression of the app was okay now we have everything we need how do we take this to the next step create a remediation config and be able to actually deploy that so moving on to the new features we did this in in kind of three different perspectives from the application

so we didn’t want to just blindly be able to remediate configuration and we also wanted to be flexible enough if you had another tool that maybe you wanted to use Golden config to generate that remediation config but perhaps you prefer to use ansible to actually deploy it so we came up with the concept of a config plan and a config plan is basically taking a configuration compliance result and you have multiple different types and I’ll cover that shortly in a demo and you can generate an actual configuration plan for that

so you can see here on the left hand side we have this configuration plan that configuration plan is exactly what you need to run on your device in order to um get your device into compliance so the the other reason we wanted to introduce the configuration plan is actually for that approval step nobody wants to be able just to configure their their plans or or make changes to their Network without some type of human approval process so configuration plans get created and a non-approved

and then there’s a requirement there that the plan changes into an approved State and lastly we also added the ability for Golden config to actually deploy a configuration plan which has been very powerful as well so that’s kind of the slides I have for today um and I’m going to move into a short demo so you can see similar to what John was showing before here’s kind of the homepage of Nautobot 2.1 with the new UI skin on it um I’m going to spend most of my time today here in Golden config

so this application again has some new feature sets to it but this is what you’re tend to used to this is looking identical to what it always has you can see here you have some backup statuses intended statuses compliance statuses so if we focus on what was added to the next the next train was specifically remediation so remediation gives you the ability to actually have your plan to take your configuration from out of compliance and bring it into compliance

so that’s what this remediating config figuration does here is it takes your intended your actual and your extras and comes up with a plan for you to um to generate and and how to get that device into complaints so you might be asking okay how does it do that um so let’s quickly jump into your remediation settings so we built this very flexible um the default remediation type supported in golden config is using H config which is a open source Library out there written in Python and that is

the overall background of how it can actually take those configurations and come up with a plan and know when I have child configuration and I need to know it out or maybe you’re in Juniper and you have to do a disable and or a delete so it has all the functionality there to actually be able to support the ability for the app to know how does this specific operating system and its specific configuration act and how do you negate a command and how can you overwrite a command

so within here I have everything set to hire config but there is also the ability to come in and actually do a custom mediation which is very powerful and gives you the ability just to write your own custom python code in the back end and reference it and then you can actually have have your own custom remediation plans be generated from something that maybe your business logic determines um that maybe higher config doesn’t do natively you can also see there’s some remediation options here

so whether you’re using customer mediation and you have some inputs into your into your forms or if you’re using higher config you can actually overload some of the default settings there so that’s how remediation and the settings work and the final piece to that is simply the ability to turn on and off remediation per Rule and we found this to be something that was definitely a requirement for for this there might be certain configurations specifically maybe B bgp where

you don’t want remediation to ever run it’s perhaps too risky if you have your connection to your ISP and your down downloading the the internet IP table maybe you would never want to run any type of remediation on it so you could turn it off and and kind of keep that out of scope so it is flexible enough you can turn on and off that feature based on your not only your platform but also the specific rule for that platform so let’s go into configuration plans because that is kind of the bulk of where a lot of this logic works

so as I mentioned before configuration plans were our way to be able to represent this is what is going or what is planned to be done on this device and give you a status whether it’s approved or not approved you can also see you can link change controls and URLs perhaps to service now or any other change management tool but you also have the flexibility here to create a plan type so plan type for intended missing and Remediation are all directly going back to that compliance that was run

so I showed that detail view before where you have all of your compliance information you have your intended you have your actual you have your missing and it’s using these based on your last compliance run to actually generate configurations that you would need to run on your specific um on your specific ask the last one I wanted to touch on is manual manual gives you the ability to access directly the object that you’ve selected in your plan and generate basically an ad hoc perhaps a break fix type of change

so I’m going to use kind of a a basic example here and I’m actually going to use ginger templating here to say for the given object that I’m generating this plan for I want you to go into that object and I want you to pull in your actual hosting so again this gives you the great ability to be able to start utilizing your source of Truth data your trusted data to actually start configuring your network based on that data so if I go in here and I look you can see it generated a ton of different config plans

one per device and if you click on the config set you can see the interpolation happened where now it actually took the device name and put it into a command syntax that you would then be able to deploy even if you were trying to do something as simple as get every host name on your network to match your source of Truth data so finally I’ll just quickly cover the other plans I had purposely generated some of those beforehand just to avoid waiting and you can see here I have a remediation example again in

this case I was saying I wanted to I want want to do a remediation plan I want to do it on this specific feature for this specific device and I’m wanting to see what commands I need to run to get that into compliance so you can see you have a config set it has your negation command it has your new command and this is what could be deployed using golden config so that’s the last piece that I’m not going to touch on today is the actual deployment again as I mentioned at the beginning

we have an entire webinar dedicated to these new features where we actually did make changes to live devices so I encourage you to check that out if you’re interested so that is um a remediation plan and then as as I mentioned before the intended plans and missing plans do the same functionality where they can go you can reference features and you can actually generate specific commands based on that so again here’s a little bit bigger of an example this wasn’t intended for every single feature

and you can see what it would actually spit out for you to configure on your device to um match it up with what it’s intended to be there so that’s that’s the demo again the last piece that I’m skipping today is is just simply deployment and that deployment like I said would literally take a config plan use the config generated and it would configure that device so um that’s what I have for the demo Tim was there any question questions today yeah actually there there were a few that came in

one was about that the notion that it seemed like actual State and config plan were the same that question did come in earlier so hopefully as Jeff went through and explained What conflict plan does hopefully that became clear that they are not the same just to reiterate though in case it’s not clear the conflict plan is essentially the series of steps that we need to go through in order to get from the current state to the desired state so it’s how do I take what my my intention is and make sure that the device actually reflects that

um and on your traditional device that is not necessarily A straightforward path um and creating that config plan can actually be quite complicated um and that’s a lot of what we’ve done here in this work is to make that as easy as possible and to be able to streamline that process so you can get consistent reliable results out of this type of solution we did have another question Jeff um coming in around what products does config plan currently support and and maybe is there a road map for

the future maybe if you could just talk a little bit kind of about how we go from this Theory into practical real world of I’m using n xos or I’m I’m using Arista or I’m using Juniper sure yeah so as far as the current supportability it is if you want out of the boot supportability that would be if higher config supports it then this would be able to generate plans based on it off of it so that’s a lot of the hierarchy hierarchal I can never say that word config out there your aristas your cisos

but I know just recently H config had a merge request going for Juniper as well to be able to do set and um delete commands so again super flexible as far as out of the box um but I I just want to make sure I reiterate that you do have the ability to write your own custom compliance and custom remediation functionality just with regular python so perhaps you have a platform that’s not just supported out of the box you can write your own logic in Python and basically golden config can inject that in

and read from it and generate your plans based on your own custom python so you’re saying basically out of the box we support anything that is In hoc config project open source very heavily community-driven project um and then of course there’s also the custom option if for some reason it’s not in higher config or you want to do something maybe that’s just a little unique to your business correct yeah and like I said earlier even within H config you have your own options within this application inside of

the remediation settings to overload and overwrite some of its default functionality so if H higher configs defaults don’t quite work for you and you just need to tweak a things um it’s actually as simple as just putting those into your remediation settings right within golden config and you can overload some of that functionality great thank you let’s see I think our next section up here will be coming is Nautobot Cloud so we are going to transition over to Jason who will talk about that we’ll just give Jason

one second to get his screen share going for those that do feel free to keep the questions coming into us and looks like Jason’s ready to go so cool thanks T thanks thanks Jeff I’m going to shift gears a little bit and dive into it’s Nautobot cloud and Tim alluded to it earlier I think now is a good time to kind of build upon what John and Jeff have been saying around all the goodness within Nautobot itself we call Nautobot Core Nautobot apps we have gold the config we have floor plan

next logical question is how do you how do you quickly get started as an Enterprise to consume Nautobot consume apps right into into production and when when we look at the past couple years Nautobot Nautobot is turning three actually next next month and over the past three years we’ve worked with a lot of customers on Nautobot deployments infrastructure deployments upgrades monitoring and all those things that you would expect right in a in a production application and things take time

right when when you’re engaged in larger organizations you have security teams data center teams Cloud teams network teams database teams right it it takes weeks to months or longer to be able to get a new application into into production right let alone start bringing up things like albs and load balancers right for for high availability and Nautobot cloud is really the creation right within 2023 that we launch launched to simplify the consumption of of Nautobot

so think about Nautobot on demand or think about Nautobot apps on demand you want to try an app out let’s quickly go to Marketplace and get it installed and try it Nautobot upgrades on demand the end of the day you want to think about you know we want to think about infrastructure we want you to think about infrastructure less so you can focus on things like consuming data and Nautobot consuming Automation in Nautobot and then building more more and more automation right leveraging

all that rich data that’s stored inside Nautobot it’s kind of what Nautobot cloud gives us and what I’m going to do now is I’m going to skip this one slide to save to save a minute or two and go right into Nautobot cloud right high level high level demo and similar to what team has alluded to you there’s a prior webinar on Nautobot cloud you haven’t seen it feel free to to take a look at it online or even better reach out we can do a live one-on-one demo to really poke around look at every nook

and cranny right in in the UI see what Nautobot cloud has to has to offer but the first thing is that you know that if you kind of look at the workflow of getting Nautobot up and running right the first thing that we would see when you log in is our landing page we get to see some active Nautobot’s that have been deployed if you want to deploy a new one right we see the create the create button up here or in our organization Mega Corp we click create the first thing that we would see is

now a delineation of Nautobot and Ansible right and now again product Nautobot Cloud so a key highlight for us is all those things I was alluding to around Nautobot but there’s also Ansible support within Nautobot Cloud as well right so if I were to click either one of these Nautobot or Ansible within within minutes we would have a new instance or a new server booted up this could be a production Dev test whatever it might be if you want to be able to have an isolated an isolated instance you can

now get that instance up to start start doing more more testing right in Nautobot or answerable so for now if I click through to Nautobot we’ll see to get an instance we call it a resource in Nautobot Cloud up and running there’s really minimal inputs that are required we give it a name give it a description we pick an image which is really a version of of Nautobot we click an image we get to see some some preferred or defaults and then many more based on

all the iterations of minor and Patch releases that have come out right over the past several months we assigned a project the project is really an encapsulation of resources and servers so I can have my own project we can have a Dev project right things like that and ultimately choose access type private or public right based on the setup and deploy architecture could be public on the Internet or it could be private right if there’s private connectivity between Nautobot Cloud right

and a client a client environment if we look at some other tabs here settings this is where if you’ve seen Nautobot already or deployed Nautobot a lot of the environment variables you might want to tweak um for deployment you have full access to do that within a new resource getting created as well there’s some shortcuts here to pick and choose which apps you might want to deploy right today we’ve discussed floor plan and golden config so it wouldn’t be too hard if we checked these click create

right within a few minutes we would have a brand new Nautobot created with those with those apps so to create is kind of like that that first step that would happened within Nautobot Cloud right if we were to click in one of these this is version 20 206 we might not see a full deployment full upgrade because of the time we have on the webinar but the second step might be an upgrade right we have a two we have version 206 deployed right now for Nautobot if we wanted to upgrade Nautobot

all we would need to do is click this drop down pick a pick a new image type click save we’re going to get prompted if we want to restart Nautobot and do the upgrade now or do it later and for the demo I’m just going to say you know we’re going to restart this later restart now the upgrade takes anywhere from you know four to 6 to eight to eight minutes to fully to fully boot back up and we do see that state has has changed as well so this is pending an update if we were to update Nautobot then when it kind of restarts

we would have version two do 2.1 there third thing I’m going to show is the market place in Nautobot Cloud right just kind of saw the shortcut if you’re already familiar with the apps and you’re creating a new a new instance you can just check check check the apps that you want to install here’s kind of where you can kind of browse to learn a little bit more right about those apps that are that are available right in the cloud Marketplace again mentioning golden config

and floor plan to name those because they were highlighted previously right in the last half hour or so but any other app here you can kind of spin up a new personal or Dev instance you want to play around with floor plan or gold the config maybe production is just s of Truth with bgp models and Fireball models and you can create a brand new a brand new resource get new apps installed and if they you know if they work um to your liking then you can now migrate them into into into production

okay if I Circle back here to look at our our list let me go into maybe demo data look at some other things that we can that we can show um one of them is is Trends and there’s a lot of data that is inside each instance within Nautobot cloud right so Trends starts to allow us to visualize some of that data right it could be racks it could be sites right locations device counts all the all these things there’s a number of dashboards that are that are built in continuously adding new

um you know new new charts new graphs and things like that to better understand all the data right that is kind of locked away inside Nautobot with Nautobot itself you kind of get access right to the table of used and things like that this is really to bring it to life and start to understand right some of those some of those Trends snapshots right another key feature this is where you can trigger a snapshot to be able to really a database snapshot if you want to do a DA or or a recurring snapshot to make sure

um if you’re going to prepare for an upgrade or just do a point in time snapshot to be able to maybe restore a snapshot for a Dev instance right to the use case earlier if you have your production instance production data but you want to stand up maybe a new app or do testing on a new release you can do a production a snapshot and then use that use that as a foundation for for a new Resource as as well um finally to save some time to save some room for questions at the end

and to let us finish up there are a number a number of number of other settings right Within within the organization to be able to configure things like single signon for Nautobot and dancable to be able to have self-service VPN connectivity between Nautobot cloud and nonpr right to do things like private network connectivity between an Enterprise or infrastructure Network and and Nautobot Cloud if we Circle back you know by and large you keep in mind that the overall the overall premise

and really thesis that we have is like there is there is a lot of time that is spent in managing infrastructure this is everything from cloud infrastructure or could be servers on Prem where Nautobot and Ansible typically live the monitoring for that infrastructure as well as the upgrades to maintain them going from release to release especially in open source right for both of these platforms right when you look at you look at Nautobot you know there’s patch releases happening every few weeks minor releases every few months major releases

right a little less frequence but to be able to simplify to simplify the time um and and all the energy that it takes to be able to do all of that and really just keeps keeps your time focused on using using the tools using Nautobot using the data driving Automation and really less less worry and less concern about all the let say infrastructure and the processes that have to happen right under the covers to to bring to life I I’ll pause I’ll pause there on the cloud and we’ll allow the him to close it up for us

yeah great thank you Jason um we did have a couple questions related to Cloud as well as an earlier one that came in about the DC floor plan application and how I might get Dynamic data into that app and I think what’s kind of interesting here and I’ll let Jason give this answer but that the idea that actually it isn’t specific to the the DC floor plan app as far as the way that you might bring data into Nautobot right I can probably show that a little bit in the marketplace this list you know a couple of

the apps right that that are available ssot is is a really a primary app that we deploy quite a bit in our customer engagements this application called single source of Truth is really a a predefined framework in a pattern that allows us to synchronize data to Nautobot or from Nautobot right so if you have thirdparty system that has DM dsim data then we’ be able to use the framework to be able to synchronize that data into those objects be it racks or any really any data in Nautobot and

that could be scheduled on a recurring on a recurring basis or if those other systems have some sort of event driven automation right when those systems have changes then clearly you know we could use aut body apis as well to start to populate that data and in Nautobot right so I think if I understand correctly basically the single source of Truth app is the way in which we can bring data into Nautobot or from Nautobot and it’s regardless of what the underlying application is whether it’s DC th plan or other data

that you might be wanting to synchronize in and out of Nautobot exactly one more question for you on cloud he if if I have custom applications maybe that I develop in house can I use those in Nautobot Cloud oh good question just going to show that so these these apps right are all readily available right all open source too and so we get that question a lot is can you know can customers use custom or tailored specific apps in Nautobot Cloud short answer is yes we can actually show

that here they wouldn’t be seen in the marketplace if we go to create a new Nautobot instance we would see this example here like citrus Nautobot this is is an example of a demo where this has a packaged bundle of some custom apps that are packaged in the version 211 of Nautobot so we would work with we would work with um you know the clients onboarding them into Cloud to be able to onboard their their custom apps as well got it so the custom applications are absolutely possible in Nautobot Cloud

um they aren’t going to be in the marketplace but in cooperation with Network to Code on our side we’ll be able to make those available to any client as needed so anything you do custom absolutely can be included exactly okay looks like we just have a few minutes left here so we’ll move into the final stages of the webinar we did some Q&A there had a few questions thank you folks for in the audience that were asking us things as well um and just a quick review of

the three-pillar strategy wanted to give a little overview of what that means in practice or in action right so as we take a look at this flow if you think about hey starting from nothing where I don’t don’t have Nautobot or good source of Truth in my environment and what could that look like um so we start off in in week one right with Nautobot cloud is deployed um perhaps maybe you need an automation or orchestration engine in your environment and so then you might also deploy a WX

um we’re going to load that data into Nautobot using any of the number automated methods that we have within Nautobot and the applications to go out find data in your environment whether that’s coming from a source of Truth or or actually from your live Network and you know we have now a functional source of Truth deployed in weeks not months or years um and from there now we can start to take advantage of all those amazing applications that we have out in the environment available whether that’s golden fig or

the floor plan app like we talked about um but now we have this amazing Foundation from which we can now drive and really begin the adoption of devops methodologies and infrastructure as code in our environment as we manage our Network infrastructure so in conclusion we went a little overview of 2023 and what happened at Network to Code and all the amazing things that happened in Nautobot land specifically across these three major areas Nautobot core itself Nautobot cloud and of course

the app ecosystem Jason if we could move to the final slide and so thanks everyone for attending we have some links here for you they were also some links in the chat to previous webinars um please do go out and check them out reach out to us for a demo if you’d like to see deep dive into say the config plan or maybe golden config or floor plan app and you want to learn more about those things or something that we didn’t talk about today on the webinar please do reach out to us we’d love to have a demo

for you customize it to what you’re looking for thanks everyone for attending and we look forward to seeing you on the next webinar thanks everyone