Public preview: NetBox Designs cuts the manual entry out of new builds

Most teams already know what their standard rack, store, or cell site should look like. It lives in a spreadsheet or diagram, and every new build is entered by hand, hundreds of objects at a time, until copies of the same standard drift apart.

NetBox Designs puts that standard to work. It enters public preview today on the SaaS edition of the NetBox Labs platform and turns a team’s standard builds into reusable designs: a rack, a store, a cell site, or a point of presence. An operator picks a design, fills in a few variables, and reviews a plan of every change. Applying the plan creates the build in the system of record, with every object related the way the standard describes. A rack that took hundreds of hand entries becomes one reviewed apply, and the automation that reads the record renders from consistent data. Afterward, an on-demand drift check shows whether the deployment still matches its design.

Why we’re building this

One rack can mean entering a site, the rack, dozens devices & modules, hundreds of interfaces, cables, prefixes, and IP addresses. Every mistake in that entry lands in the system of record, and the automation that renders config from it inherits each one.

Many teams have built their own tooling for this: templates, variables, a rendering engine, and the system of record as the output. NetBox Designs brings that pattern into the NetBox Labs platform as a supported product, so the standard no longer depends on the one or two engineers who maintain a homegrown pipeline. For infrastructure leaders, that means rollouts keep pace with the buildout, the standard holds as more people deploy, and a drift check shows whether any site still follows its reference design.

One build, start to finish

This is how one build moves through the NetBox Designs preview, using the chain store design from the stock catalogue.

Start from a design

An architect opens the catalogue and starts from the stock chain store design, one of the reference designs that ship with the preview, alongside other reference designs like an NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 rack pair. To write a new standard instead, a Claude skill drafts a design from a plain-language description for the architect to refine. Designs nest, so a store or rack design reuses the device designs it references, and every build gets the same definition of each device. Device types can come from the community-maintained Device Type Library, pinned to a version.

Deploy it from a form

An operator who never writes YAML picks the design and fills in its variables in a form. NetBox Designs checks the build against the data model for the target’s NetBox version and shows a plan of each object the apply will create, update, or delete, so most problems surface before anything is written. The plan only deletes objects the design created, so records entered by hand stay untouched.

Review it in a branch and apply

Where NetBox Branching is enabled, the operator names a branch in the form, and the apply goes to that branch for the team to review and merge. If the record changes between plan and apply, the apply stops for a re-plan, so edits made in between survive. After the apply, and the merge where a branch is used, the store exists in the system of record with every object related the way the standard says. The deployment records who deployed which design, with which variables, so an audit can trace the store back to its standard.

An apply changes the system of record only. Config rendering and device provisioning stay with the team’s existing automation, which reads the same data it always has.

Check it for drift

Weeks later, someone changes the store’s record by hand. An on-demand drift check re-plans the deployment against its design and lists each field that differs, with both values, so the team can decide whether to update the record or the design.

Where it goes next

NetBox Designs will add a CLI that CI pipelines can use to plan and apply designs. A design will also pre-populate its bill of materials in NetBox Asset Lifecycle, so the team can order hardware straight from the design instead of retyping the parts list. Asset Lifecycle then tracks it through purchasing, shipping, and installation. NetBox Designs will also gain the ability to read Device Types, Modules Types and Rack Types from NetBox Data Exchange.

Availability and access

The preview runs on the Professional and Premium plans of the SaaS edition. Contact your account team to get access, and start with one small build your team repeats often.

Not a NetBox Labs customer yet? Request a demo and we’ll walk through Designs alongside the rest of the platform.