A little less than five years ago, NetBox added support for custom plugins as a way to extend its core functionality. Developers responded by creating hundreds of NetBox plugins enabling use cases from ACLs to ZTP, and NetBox users enthusiastically adopted those capabilities. Plugins now occupy essential niches in the NetBox ecosystem, and users need to know that they can use plugins with confidence. Today we’re throwing the weight of NetBox Labs behind a set of key plugins that qualify for commercial support as part of the new NetBox Labs Certified Plugin program.
The NetBox Labs Certified Plugin program defines quality, maintainability, compatibility, and other criteria for certified plugins to ensure NetBox administrators can leverage the power of plugins with confidence. In addition, NetBox Labs engineers are partnered with the maintainers of certified plugins to assist in ensuring ongoing compatibility of plugins with new NetBox releases, address urgent bug fixes, and aid plugin maintainers and the community.
The first certified NetBox plugins are here today
The initial set of certified plugins and their maintainers includes ACLs (Ryan Merolle), BGP (Nikolay Yuzefovich), DNS (Peter Eckel), Floorplan (NetBox Labs and Tony Nealon), QR Code (Nikolay Yuzefovich), Secrets (Abhimanyu Saharan of OneMind Services), and Topology Views (Niels Dutry and Mattijs Vanhaverbeke of e-BO Enterprises). Rounding out the initial cohort are plugins and integrations from NetBox Labs’ discovery and assurance partners Forward Networks, IP Fabric, and Slurp’it. More candidate plugins are already incubating, and we plan to expand the program to cover many more plugins of key importance to users.
The first certified plugins are available immediately in all NetBox deployments, and customers of NetBox Cloud and NetBox Enterprise can access commercial support and implementation assistance for these plugins. You can see the full set of certified and supported plugins, along with a variety of other high quality plugins from the NetBox community, by visiting the NetBox community plugin catalog.
The virtuous circle of investment in NetBox just got wider
Beyond bringing commercial support for plugins to our customers, our goals for the Certified Plugins Program include extending NetBox Labs’ commitment to open-source investment beyond NetBox OSS itself. All users of NetBox benefit from our collaboration with plugin authors and maintainers to assure ongoing compatibility of certified plugins with new releases of NetBox. Because we understand that most plugin maintainers are volunteers with day jobs and busy lives, we also stand ready to step in and make emergency bug fixes should the need arise.
Going beyond the boon to end users, we’re investing now to deliver a variety of additional resources to all NetBox plugin developers. Building and maintaining a plugin is hard, and our mission includes making that journey easier. We’re seeing renewed interest in the NetBox Plugin Bounty Program and will be opening new bounties soon, with certification baked into the process. We’re improving our plugin development docs and starter projects so that new projects start out on the right track for certification by default. We’ll also provide additional help throughout the development and maintenance lifecycle for certified plugins, including automated release testing to assure ongoing mutual compatibility of NetBox and all certified plugins. All these facilities combine to build upon the compatibility assurances of the Certified Plugins Program.
Let’s do great things together: we’re hiring to grow the entire NetBox ecosystem
The demand for assurances around NetBox plugins is substantial, and scaling the Plugin Certification Program will take a lot of hard work from skilled and dedicated people. To enable this and other recently announced initiatives, we’re growing our team quickly. NetBox Labs has multiple open roles across customer support, sales, and engineering. We’re seeking folks with a passion for creating and supporting technology that plays a key role in moving networking forward, by building products that are foundational to a huge and enthusiastic community. If that sounds like you, and if you like the idea of having fun and accelerating your career in the process, check out our current openings!
