Introducing NetBox Designs: Declarative Infrastructure for NetBox

Organizations have long struggled to bridge the gap between high-level network designs and the detailed, granular data that lives in NetBox. Network architects create thoughtful designs—whether for a single rack, a complete data center, or an entire reference architecture—but translating these designs into hundreds or thousands of individual NetBox objects has traditionally been challenging.

This challenge is only becoming more acute as organizations around the world leverage NetBox to deploy AI infrastructure at unprecedented scale, a challenge we’re facing head on with our recently unveiled AI Data Center Acceleration Program. The need for a solution that can quickly and reliably populate large amounts of design data into NetBox has never been greater.

Today we are excited to announce that NetBox Designs is ready for wider adoption—and we’re looking for design partners to help shape its evolution.

What is NetBox Designs?

NetBox Designs enables teams to create structured, reusable designs that define everything from individual device configurations with specific modules, to complete rack deployments with all their cabling, to entire reference architectures and vendor validated designs. These design files can then be applied to NetBox, automatically creating or updating all the necessary objects to match your intended state.

At its core, NetBox Designs takes a declarative approach to managing infrastructure data—allowing you to describe what your infrastructure should look like, and letting the tool handle the implementation details.

Design-Driven Network Automation

NetBox Designs embraces the emerging paradigm of design-driven network automation, sometimes referred to as “design automation”. Rather than managing individual network objects in isolation, design-driven approaches recognize that network architects already think in terms of standard patterns, reference architectures, and reusable designs. By codifying these designs and making them the primary unit of work, teams can operate at a higher level of abstraction while maintaining all the detailed accuracy that NetBox provides.

When network designs are treated as first-class artifacts—versioned, tested, and validated—they become a powerful foundation for the entire automation lifecycle. Changes to the design automatically flow through to the infrastructure, keeping your high-level intent and low-level implementation perfectly aligned.

Why NetBox Designs?

Composable

Build libraries of design components that can be combined for specific deployments. Define a device design once, then reference it in multiple rack designs. Create modular configurations that work across different device types. NetBox Designs allows you to avoid duplication and build up reusable infrastructure patterns.

Customizable

Generic designs can be tailored to specific deployments at deploy time through variables. The same “compute rack” design can be deployed to multiple sites with different names, IP addressing schemes, or hardware configurations—all without duplicating the design logic.

Idempotent

NetBox Designs maintains a relationship with the infrastructure it creates. Run the same design twice, and the tool recognizes that everything already exists and matches your intent. Modify a design, and only the changed elements are updated. This makes it easy to evolve designs over time and verify that yesterday’s high-level designs are still accurately reflected in NetBox today.

Versioned

Designs exist as flat files that can be version-controlled alongside other upstream artifacts. Track changes over time, review modifications through your standard git workflow, and maintain a complete history of how your network designs have evolved.

Device Type Library Integration

NetBox Designs includes built-in support for the NetBox Device Type Library, a constantly growing, community-maintained collection of device types, module types, and rack types. This allows you to focus on designing your networks without laboriously mapping out the hardware specifics of every device, module, or rack you want to use.

Whether you’re deploying Cisco, Juniper, Arista, Dell, or dozens of other vendors’ equipment, chances are the device type already exists in the library. NetBox Designs seamlessly integrates these definitions into your deployment workflows.

Call for Design Partners

NetBox Designs has been in use by a handful of NetBox Labs customers to date and we’re now ready to learn from a broader set of use cases. We’re seeking design partners who will get early access to NetBox Designs, share their real-world design challenges, and help shape the future of the tool through direct feedback and collaboration.

If you’re responsible for managing networked infrastructure in NetBox—whether you’re building greenfield data centers, standardizing branch office deployments, managing multi-tenant environments, or implementing vendor reference architectures—we’d love to hear from you.

Applicants will be prioritised based on the scale and relevance of their use cases. Please provide as much detail as possible in the form below.