Update: Since this blog was posted by NS1 in 2021, a new business, NetBox Labs, was born from the company’s investment in NetBox. Read about the launch of NetBox Labs in February 2023.
As we’ve rapidly scaled our enterprise footprint over the last several years, especially with our Enterprise DDI products, one open source project – NetBox – has been mentioned by our customers with increasing frequency and now appears in many of their networks. NetBox was started by Jeremy Stretch while he was building networks at DigitalOcean, and the project turns 5 next week. NetBox is a fully open-sourced platform for modern network automation and infrastructure resource management, with feature rich, API addressable functionality for IP address management (IPAM), datacenter infrastructure management (DCIM), and more.
Earlier this year I met with Jeremy several times and I was deeply compelled by his vision, the philosophy of the NetBox project, and the incredible community that has formed around NetBox – as evidenced by its over 8,000 stars on Github, active discussion group, and busy Slack. Most importantly, when I met with NS1 customers who use NetBox, what I found was excitement at the incredible potential they saw for the software in their networks, and a strong sense of NetBox’s value for their network automation strategies compared with other tools.
We decided to invest in NetBox because of its deep alignment with our mission to connect the world’s applications and audiences, in this case by unlocking powerful network automation for increasingly distributed and dynamic enterprise network footprints. Jeremy joined NS1 Labs as a Distinguished Engineer, where he will focus all of his efforts on NetBox and its community.
Our top priority at NS1 with respect to NetBox is to support the community and open source NetBox project in ways that align with the community’s philosophy and values. As a software engineer for over 20 years, I truly believe in the power of open source to change the world. I myself have made a number of open source contributions and open sourced quite a few projects. Building what Jeremy and the NetBox community have built is no small feat, and our first rule at NS1 for NetBox is: don’t break what’s working well – support it!
We will also work with the NetBox community and our customers to find ways to more tightly integrate NS1’s products with NetBox, and we will seek strategies to meet the needs of our enterprise customers for support, enterprise grade features, and ease of management that align to the goals of the community and enable NS1 to increase our investment in NetBox over time.
Here’s how you can get engaged with NetBox:
- Try out NetBox firsthand using the public demo instance
- Sign up for NetBox community news and events
- Join the #netbox channel on the NetDev Community Slack
- Peruse NetBox’s documentation for a complete accounting of its feature set
- Watch the project on GitHub to keep up to date on new releases
