Nautobot overview
Nautobot is an open source network SoT and automation platform that launched in February 2021. Being an open source company-sponsored project, its maintainers are from the official sponsor – Network to Code. Network to Code is a network automation solutions provider that helps clients around the world build and deploy network automation technology.
It’s now been over 2 years since the launch of Nautobot and there has been significant growth, traction, and development by the Nautobot core team, as well as the community. There have been nine minor releases since inception with the second major release, 2.0, that just launched in September 2023. Nautobot 2.0 is a major milestone for the project bringing many new features and improved usability to Nautobot.
Nautobot forked NetBox in February 2021. This was due to the industry’s need for a network SoT that had an immense focus on network automation with great flexibility and extensibility capabilities. Nautobot was also created to foster an ecosystem around an open source network automation platform. The details of the fork can be found at https://blog.networktocode.com/post/why-did-network-to-code-fork-netbox/.
Some statistics, as of March 2024, regarding the project and community are as follows:
- Over 120 releases, including two major releases, nine minor releases, and 100+ patch releases (on a defined biweekly cadence)
- Over 1,600 members in the #nautobot channel in NTC Slack (self-signup at https://slack.networktocode.com)
- Over 110 Nautobot blog posts on the NTC blog (blog.networktocode.com)
- Over 60 Nautobot YouTube videos in the All Things Nautobot playlist on the Network to Code YouTube channel
We’ll highlight several key Nautobot features in this chapter but will spend a lot more time on them throughout this book.
