NetBox Integration with Kubernetes Enters Private Preview
NetBox’s position as the definitive network source of truth continues to expand, and as containerized workloads become central to modern infrastructure, the demand for seamless integration with Kubernetes has never been greater. Today, we’re excited to announce the Private Preview of our newest integration: a direct connection between NetBox and Kubernetes.
As container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes become increasingly prevalent in enterprise environments, network and infrastructure teams need visibility into where workloads are running, how IP addresses are allocated, and which teams own which resources. Organizations using NetBox to manage their network infrastructure have long sought better ways to bridge the gap between their physical and virtual infrastructure documentation and their dynamic container environments.
Bridging the Infrastructure Gap
Today’s IT environments span traditional infrastructure, virtualization platforms, and container orchestration systems. Without proper integration between these layers, teams often struggle with visibility gaps—not knowing which physical nodes are hosting critical workloads, losing track of IP allocations across cluster networks, or being unable to quickly identify which team owns a particular service when issues arise.
This new Kubernetes integration addresses these challenges by synchronizing key infrastructure data from Kubernetes clusters into NetBox, providing a unified view of your entire stack. Network teams maintain oversight of IP space allocation and can see how cluster resources map to physical infrastructure, while platform teams benefit from having their resource ownership and networking clearly documented in the organization’s source of truth.
It’s also worth noting that the NetBox Community are already busy (as always) figuring out ways to work with NetBox and Kubernetes, in particular, SwissCom released their Kubernetes Operator for NetBox a while back and later showed it off at KubeCon London. The awesome work the Swisscom team have done is focussed on using Kubernetes to both put data into NetBox, and also to manage that data over time. A related, but different use case to the NetBox Kubernetes integration.
A Practical Approach to Kubernetes Visibility
Like our recently announced integrations with Microsoft DHCP, Cisco Catalyst Center, and VMware vCenter, this Kubernetes integration embraces NetBox’s role as a comprehensive infrastructure source of truth. The integration focuses on the most valuable and stable aspects of Kubernetes infrastructure that align well with NetBox’s existing data model.
The initial integration captures essential cluster topology—representing each Kubernetes cluster as a NetBox cluster object and ensuring every node appears as a device with proper IP assignments and role designations. This immediately provides infrastructure teams with clear visibility into which physical or virtual machines are participating in each cluster and their network configurations.
Additionally, the integration synchronizes critical networking information, including cluster IP ranges for pods and services, helping prevent IP conflicts and enabling better capacity planning. Service endpoints, particularly those with external IP addresses, are tracked in NetBox’s IPAM system, providing clear documentation of how applications are exposed to users.
To maintain organizational clarity, Kubernetes namespaces can be represented as NetBox tenants, enabling teams to filter and view resources by ownership or application boundaries—a crucial capability for multi-tenant clusters.
Looking Ahead: Enhanced Modeling with Custom Objects
While today’s integration provides immediate value using NetBox’s existing data model, we’re particularly excited about the future possibilities. NetBox Custom Objects, currently in development, will enable far richer modeling of Kubernetes concepts without requiring custom plugins or code changes.
With Custom Objects, we envision creating first-class representations of Kubernetes resources like pods, services, persistent volumes, and deployments—complete with their relationships and dependencies. This would enable NetBox to answer complex questions like “Which applications will be affected if this rack goes offline?” or “Show me all the infrastructure components supporting this critical service.”
This enhanced modeling capability represents a significant evolution in how NetBox can serve as a bridge between traditional infrastructure management and modern container orchestration platforms.
What’s Next? Join the Private Preview
The NetBox Kubernetes integration has been evolving within the NetBox Labs Experimental stage, with initial feedback helping to shape its direction. Now, as we enter Private Preview, we’re inviting organizations to help us refine the integration and collaborate on the future roadmap, particularly around how Custom Objects should model Kubernetes resources.
We’re especially interested in hearing from organizations that can help us understand:
- Which Kubernetes resources are most critical to track in NetBox
- How teams want to model application dependencies and relationships
- What questions you need NetBox to answer about your Kubernetes infrastructure
- How the integration should handle multi-cluster environments
If you’re using NetBox alongside Kubernetes and want to influence the future of this integration, we’d love for you to join the Private Preview. Please complete the form below to express your interest in participating. We’ll prioritize applicants based on use cases.
We look forward to working together to create a more unified approach to infrastructure management, spanning from physical data centers to containerized applications, with NetBox at the center.
