Evolving Open Source Operations for the NetBox Ecosystem

Big things are happening here at NetBox Labs! You might have noticed some new faces (well, avatars) around the GitHub repo lately as our team has been growing quickly, and more people have been getting involved with the day-to-day work of building NetBox and related projects. I wanted to take a moment to share some key developments with the NetBox community.

What’s Changing?

• Growing the team: The full-time team working on NetBox and adjacent projects like NetBox Branching, pynetbox, and others is growing. Known internally as our Core Applications Team, this cohort now comprises four full-time developers (myself included) in addition to product and engineering managers. The team will continue to expand through 2025 and beyond. We’ve come a long way from just a few volunteer maintainers and me!

• Expanding open source operations ownership: We’re in the process of expanding responsibility for day-to-day maintainer duties – triaging feature requests, reviewing pull requests, etc. – from just a couple NetBox Labs employees to the entire team. Our product manager from NetBox Labs will lead product planning efforts, and our engineering manager will lead project execution efforts with the support of our growing full-time team, and in coordination with our community maintainers.

• Evolving my focus: As a co-founder and Chief NetBox Officer at NetBox Labs, I’ll continue to lead many efforts in the NetBox ecosystem as part of our Core Applications Team, with much of my capacity shifting toward technical efforts and away from day-to-day management of the project itself.

• Broadening release scope: As the ecosystem around NetBox continues to expand rapidly through branching, discovery, assurance, and other areas, the scope of NetBox’s scheduled releases (e.g. v4.3, v4.4) will expand beyond the core project. NetBox’s release notes will begin to encompass new features and functionality unlocked by complementary plugins and integrations in addition to new additions to NetBox itself.

What’s Driving These Changes?

Very simply, you are. As more and more organizations around the world adopt NetBox and tools in the NetBox ecosystem, we’re ramping up our investment in its development. The project has now grown far beyond the point where a single lead maintainer can keep up with it, and that growth is accelerating fast. And at the same time, the surface area of the application has continued to expand, bringing new features and functionality with each release.

NetBox Labs is committed to both scaling our investment in NetBox and continuing to meet the needs of its community. To succeed at these goals at this stage, I’ll be distributing many of my current responsibilities across my team. This will enable us to scale more rapidly, and it affords me an opportunity to share the lessons I’ve learned as a maintainer over nearly a decade with others eager to contribute.

A second driver of these changes is the shift from a singular focus on NetBox itself to an ecosystem of complementary applications and plugins with NetBox at the center. Adopting a more distributed approach to the development of all these products is crucial to unlock our next phase of growth, in both the commercial space as well as in our open source initiatives.

Quantifying Success

As part of our renewed focus on the open source community, we’ll be measuring several important metrics in our open source operations going forward. Beyond just growth of the community and adoption of NetBox, as activity in the core and surrounding projects grows, we’re measuring and investing in:

• Being responsive to incoming issues (initial “triage”)
• Quickly addressing high priority bugs and security reports
• Ensuring speedy review of new pull requests – we value and are thankful for contributions from the community
• Maintaining a strong release cadence of patch, minor, and major releases as NetBox has always done

What’s Next

I’m sharing this today because I want the NetBox community to have context for shifts you may see in day-to-day project activity in the coming weeks and months. The benefits of these changes may take some time to manifest and we anticipate some challenges and friction in the interim. We’ll evolve our approach based on what’s working well and what isn’t. We appreciate your feedback, and we’re open to ideas of how we can better manage the open source projects in the NetBox ecosystem.

There’s an amazing ecosystem around NetBox that’s having a major impact on the way networks and infrastructure are built and managed. If you haven’t already, subscribe to our mailing list so you don’t miss what’s coming next. Thank you for being part of the NetBox community!