We announced some exciting news today with Red Hat. NetBox Labs and Red Hat are collaborating to support and certify the hugely popular NetBox Ansible Content Collection on RedHat Ansible Automation Platform.
Here’s what Dafne Mendoza, principal product manager leading network automation strategy in the Ansible Business Unit at Red Hat, has to say about the collaboration:
“Enterprise network automation initiatives fundamentally change how network teams operate through standardization and collaboration.Red Hat’s collaboration with NetBox Labs enables network organizations to move faster – in a simplified and more consistent manner – to centralize network resources and orchestration capabilities across multiple domains and vendors.”
You can read more about the collaboration on the Red Hat blog. Here, I wanted to dig in and give you more insight into why NetBox Labs is excited about this initiative.
Our Big Tent philosophy
You’ve heard me say it before, but it is worth repeating that one of our core company values is that we are community first. We serve the NetBox and network automation communities in everything we do. When our community wins, we win, and we further our mission to make complex networks easier to build and manage. That’s one of the reasons we embrace a Big Tent” philosophy to guide our broad investments in the technology ecosystem around NetBox: we believe part of being community first is working well with others and enabling choice for NetBox Labs customers and users. Every network is unique, and NetBox Labs is steadfast in our belief that the future of network automation is open and composable, an ecosystem where multiple tools fit for your needs work seamlessly together to meet the goals of your networking team.
It’s in line with that “Big Tent” vision for open, composable network automation architectures that we announce our collaboration today with Red Hat and our commitment to supporting and extending this Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for NetBox (docs and GitHub repo). It’s available for download through Ansible Automation Platform, as well as for community users via Ansible Galaxy. Customers of both NetBox Labs and Ansible Automation Platform will receive commercial support for the collection as a result of the certification. And in keeping with our community-first commitment, features and fixes to the NetBox Ansible collection will all continue to be made available in the community collection, ensuring that this collaboration benefits all members of our communities.
Together NetBox and RedHat deliver powerful network automation capabilities driven by NetBox’s source of truth and Ansible Automation Platform’s flexible and extensible automation architecture. The combination of these two great tools is already widely in use today in many of the world’s most critical network infrastructures.
About the NetBox Ansible Collection
The Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for NetBox is a great proofpoint of the power of the NetBox community we know and love. The collection was first created by Mikhail Yohman in 2019, and more recently has been maintained by Martin Rødvand. The collection has seen contributions from nearly 100 NetBox community members, while becoming a core component for thousands of networking teams that combine NetBox with Ansible to accelerate their network operations. In fact, the NetBox Ansible Content Collection is among the top 5% of all Ansible collections by adoption and usage!
We are deeply grateful for all the efforts these NetBox Heroes have put into the Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for NetBox. As part of this announcement, multiple NetBox Labs team members have joined the project as co-maintainers alongside Martin, Sean Collins, and Ryan Merolle. The NetBox Labs team is committed to supporting the development of future modules along with maintaining ongoing compatibility and quality of the current collection to keep pace with the rapid innovation happening in the NetBox and Ansible Automation Platform ecosystems. NetBox Labs and Red Hat customers can rest assured the network automation tools they know and love will be reliably maintained now and in the future.
The Red Hat collaboration
Lastly, today’s announcement with Red Hat represents a significant addition to our rapidly expanding array of technology alliances. In line with our Big Tent strategy, NetBox Labs works with many of the most innovative and trusted names in network management and automation, truly placing NetBox at the center of a powerful and trusted ecosystem. We work well with others, and that sets NetBox apart. Visit our partnership page to explore some of our other technology alliances.
We will have more news to share this week, especially for partners who work closely with enterprise customers to design, build, deploy, and operate networks. Stay tuned: the NetBox Labs Big Tent is about to get even bigger!
