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.
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.
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:
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!