Rise of NetDevOps – Kris Beevers, NetBox Labs

This is techstrong tv. We have the great pleasure of being joined by Chris Beavers. Chris is co-founder and c e o at NetBox Lab.

Welcome, welcome, Chris. Yeah, thanks for having me, Mitch. Really excited to, uh, to talk with you.

Yeah, This, I'm excited about this topic. So tell us about yourself, introduce yourself, and also tell us about, uh, NetBox Labs For sure. So, um, first, hi, uh, I'm Chris.

I'm the, as you said, the co-founder and CEO here at NetBox Labs. Um, this is a pretty new business actually. Um, NetBox Labs was formed from a spinout of, uh, my last company, which was called NS one.

I was also the founder, ceo, e o there. Um, we just, uh, just did a transaction, uh, where Ns one was acquired by I, IBM m and we spun out NetBox Labs. Um, and, you know, NetBox first and foremost is an open source project and community.

Um, NetBox Labs is, you know, the new commercial backer of that community and that open source project. And obviously we're building products around NetBox and it's community to, to support that ecosystem. Um, uh, and, and what NetBox is, uh, we call it the network source of truth, right?

It is the system of record for what is on the network. Um, for, for folks who are familiar with DevOps terminology, um, you might, you, you might think of the term, uh, like a configuration management or, um, uh, or the like, right? But this is the, the repository for all the data about, uh, the intended state of your network.

So that's what we're doing. Fantastic. Fantastic.

I'm, I'm excited to talk about this because I was sharing with you before my own kind of journey of helping network engineers understand, you know, the decade or more ago of these boxes are going away, the way we think of 'em, and you need to learn scripting, Python or orchestration, or Yes. All the things you know, now plus mm-hmm. Those things.

And that kind of came to fruition, and you know, what you've been doing here. So tell me a little bit about, um, I'd love to know more about the open source project, how that got started. Was that already underway before you spun out of, of I B M then?

Yeah, it was, and, um, you know, there's a, there's a fun little history here. So, NetBox was not created at NS one. It was created originally at Digital Ocean, the cloud provider, when they needed to manage and operate their very complex, very dynamic network and automated, right?

And, um, uh, and they needed a system or record for everything that was on the network that was built for that purpose for automation, right? Um, so, so they built NetBox, but obviously this technology area for those who know Digital Ocean. Um, and this is in core to their business model, right?

They're selling cloud services to developers. So they open sourced it, which is, which is wonderful, right? And an ecosystem and a community grew around NetBox over years.

Actually, the project's about seven years old. Um, and we discovered it, uh, at my last business, n s one, because we were bringing other technologies, um, into the enterprise network, um, for D D I, for those who are familiar with that, D N S D H C P I, Peters management and so on. And it was a few years ago now, everywhere we went, uh, our customers would ask us, what's your NetBox integration?

And at some point, you know, I, as an entrepreneur, I said, well, what's a NetBox? Now let's find out about this thing. And, you know, what we learned was this open source project was pervasive.

It's just widely deployed and installed in all kinds of networks, big and small. It's well loved, right? Network engineers, network operators really love NetBox and spend their day-to-day interacting with the software and using it as the centerpiece of both their management strategy and their automation strategy if they're moving that direction.

Um, and y you know, I too fell in love with the project. And ultimately at NS one, what we did was we brought the founder, the project, a gentleman named Jeremy, uh, who, who built the software originally, uh, into the company. And we began to invest.

Um, we just wanted to see this open source project succeed. We also began to ask ourselves, are there opportunities for us to build kind of a symbiotic, um, commercial business, um, around NetBox that helps us continually reinvest at bigger scale mm-hmm. Into this open source project and community?

And the, the short version of that is yes. Um, and, uh, so much so that when IBM came knocking on NS one's door, uh, you know, late last year, um, uh, the opportunity we decided to pursue was to spin out NetBox, um, into its own business and, uh, you know, really focus here. And that's what we're doing now.

Very cool. Uh, I'd love to get your perspective on automation in the network, the kind of the state of that today. Um, you know, we were, we've talked before about, um, net DevOps and net ops and maybe the differences between those perspective, but I think it's all, you know, certainly operations is part of it, but the automation is also, I think, where it's at.

I mean, things change, scale everything so quickly. Now. You, you have to automate many things in order just to keep up.

I think you've really hit the nail on the head there mentioned that obviously the obvious difference between net DevOps and ops is the dev, right? And what does that mean? That's about automation, right?

And we see an explosion in activity around net DevOps today, network automation today, um, because of exactly what you just said, networks are becoming more complicated. They're becoming more dynamic, more distributed. There's more devices, there's more resources on the network.

Uh, what isn't getting more resources, uh, are networking teams, right? Um, so y y you know, we're seeing conditions now in networking that, you know, my, my background is DevOps actually, and, and, you know, application infrastructure and cloud and so on. Uh, the conditions now in networking are very much what we saw in i, in, in, in infrastructure operations, uh, in system administration, you know, 15 years ago or so.

The Petri dish right now feels very similar to what led us down the path of DevOps. And thus net DevOps, right? Like, um, you know, networking teams need now, as you said, to begin to automate in order to manage that complexity.

Um, manage the rate of change, meet the, or like stringent requirements that businesses have around the network, uh, in no small part because everything is connected now, right? Um, so businesses can't work anymore if you can't get connected to each other, to your SaaS applications, to the cloud services, to the data centers, whatever it is. And managing all that, uh, to your point, requires automation now, thus the emergency net DevOps.

I'm curious then, um, is there a connection between what happens in a DevOps workflow tool chain process and then net DevOps? Um, or is it just really more about automating all the activities that it takes to care and feed and build and run a modern day distributed network? Well, so of, I, I think certainly to the first piece of your question that there is, um, you know, a relationship or interconnectivity between DevOps processes and what's happening in network automation and net DevOps processes.

And in part DevOps, the adoption of DevOps and the sort of move to, uh, cloud and hybrid cloud and more complex application architectures that's driving complexity in the network, which is driving the need for net DevOps and network automation right now. Um, I'm gonna bring a new idea in here, which is, you know, my point of view, both with respect to DevOps and with respect to net DevOps, is, um, these, these trends, these emerging practices are as much about culture change in an organization as they are about technology and tools and so on, right? Um, and as net DevOps emerges and becomes more important to the networking community, most of what that's about is moving through a maturity curve, um, from a place where we manage everything by hand.

We log in to the, to the CLI on our switch and, you know, update configs, um, or keep track of our IP addresses in a spreadsheet to a place where we have, um, closed loop automation. I'd call it. Like, we have a point of view of the intended state of the network, and that is the purpose that NetBox most often serves.

We are able to observe what's happening in the actual network, the operational state, and then we're able to close the loop between those things with automation tools. And we don't have to do it all at once, right? We do not have to do like some big bite, automate the whole network, get it all in NetBox and, um, and write a bunch of code and push a big button.

Um, that will never work, right? The culture change comes gradually, the introduction of these tools and net devs practices comes gradually. Um, but it's a journey almost everybody is on in some way right now.

What makes sense too then that you do have to have a place where it all comes back to of, you know, whether you're trying to secure it, we're trying to operate it, manage it, it's the what, what, what do we have? And particularly if it's dynamic and it's changing and evolving and, you know, platform engineering is happening, the software stack is changing, whether it's, you know, from the app level or the app down. Um, and that makes sense, a lot of sense that, you know, you need something like a NetBox there.

What are, what are the kind of things you're doing, um, in addition to what's happening in the open source part of NetBox? What is NetBox Labs doing? Yeah, that's, uh, a great question.

Thank you for asking. So first of all, I totally agree with your point of view, and one of the ways I talk about this a little facetiously is, um, everybody wants to get to the holy grail of network automation. It starts, um, you know, with, call it the gateway drug of getting control of your dataset, understanding what is on the network and what it should look like, right?

Um, and, and that is the purpose. NetBox serves all in at NetBox Cloud. One of the things, or sorry, NetBox Labs, one of the things that we realized as we began to spend time and engage with this community is networking teams wanna build an architect and run networks.

They don't wanna run software, right? That's not, that's not, that's not their mo, that's not their skillset necessarily, and it's not the high value use of their expertise and time and energy, right? So, uh, you, you know, the only product we have at NetBox Labs is NetBox Cloud.

Um, and it is exactly what it sounds like. We, we run NetBox in the cloud for you so that you can get the value of this thing without dealing with the operational headaches and maintenance lifecycle and security and reliability and all that other stuff, because this thing serves a critical purpose as you modernize your network and as you move down that net, net DevOps journey. Um, the other thing that we really care about and are investing really hard in is making sure that NetBox itself, both in the open source capacity and the in the cloud capacity, um, really meets the needs of these teams that are going down that network automation path.

Because that is our belief, right? We believe everybody is somewhere on that journey. We have some customers who are incredibly automated and doing millions of API calls a day, and we have other customers who are just trying to get their data out of Excel, but all of them are on that path, and we wanna make that path easier, more approachable for everybody.

Some of that is about making it easier to use the tool. Some of that is about making the tool, um, uh, well aligned with helping, helping our customers and our community go down that, that journey. Yeah.

You kinda have to meet people where they are, right? Mm-hmm. I mean, you may be mm-hmm.

Down that path of automation and be pretty sophisticated, or you may be like, we're just looking for the first shovel to start, you know, getting ourselves out of this hole. Um, and, and those are very different environments. Um, you know, I'm thinking kind of back in the day when I was doing more network operations kind of stuff, you know, the heavy lift of just installing like an HP open view was massive, but what you, you know, there are lots of things you got from it.

One of 'em was discovery, just finding out mm-hmm. What was on your network. And those are really, you know, static old, old traditional style networks.

And, uh, uh, how, how does, how does, uh, how does NetBox and, and I'd love that you're doing it in the cloud, um, how, how does Net Bo NetBox keep up with that? Then the other question I have is, um, the trend now is kind of doing take really a true open source project, not just kind of fake open sourcing it, um, and then, and offering the cloud, uh, operational environment mm-hmm. Of that end, but still doing the innovation in the open source and that kind of holding the, the good stuff back for a, uh, for a different service level or something.

I don't know Yeah. What model you're following, but, Well, I have, uh, a million thoughts on these topics, but just a, a couple, let's capture a couple, right? So you, you broached the topic of discovery, and you're right, like the, the most interesting and hard challenge, um, you know, at the outset of a network automation journey is just getting the data in order and in the NetBox, right?

Um, and you know, the real answer here is it depends, right? How best to do that. Everybody's coming from a different starting point.

Mm-hmm. You gotta meet them where they are, to your exact point. Some, some very large enterprises in, in fact, I've been on calls today with banks who are using Excel to manage their data center infrastructure, their IP address infrastructure, um, or resources, right?

And, um, and others are using tools like Ansible and config files and so on, or old d i appliances, whatever it is. But step one is getting that data into a form that you can work with, right? And we work on building tools that are open source, um, for discovery.

We also work, um, uh, in, we call it kind of big 10 style with anybody who does discovery and builds discovery tools. We wanna make that as easy as possible, um, so that practitioners can begin that path. Uh, tiny, you know, kind of personal side note, my son's in karate, right?

And it's, he's five, right? And it's wonderful to see these, these young kids get started with karate, and they have this ceremony where they give the child a white belt, and the instructor always says, this is the hardest belt to earn in karate, because you have to do it by yourself, um, from nothing, right? You have to decide to come here and get started.

And I think that's, that's what starting the network automation journey is like for a lot of folks. Mm-hmm. Like the hardest part is getting started.

Once you get started, you do a little bit here, you automate this system, this other system, it becomes this spiral and it changes the culture and the practice. Um, you know, in, in, back to your question on the open source side, um, we share the same belief, right? We, uh, I am lucky to have been an investor and partner with a lot of great open source businesses, and what does not work, what never works is faking it, right?

Like, uh, we've got this incredible community around NetBox and network automation all in, and they are hungry to contribute. They're hungry to be part of it. Um, you know, they love the open source ethos and one cannot strip by that.

So to deliver commercial products, they have to be symbiotic with that. There are, there are kinds of capabilities that are much easier to deliver, uh, in a cloud delivery model than they are if you're shipping software that people have to run on, on premise. So for example, um, you know, something I'm personally very passionate about, everybody is these days, ai, machine learning, those kinds of capabilities are much easier to incorporate with, uh, technology like NetBox in a cloud delivery model than they are to ship on-prem.

All right? So, um, the right tool for the job is the way we think about it. We always want open source NetBox to be progressing and to be valuable to the, honestly, the majority of the, of the community around NetBox is going to use it that way.

But for those who need more advanced capabilities, who want to relieve themselves of the operational burden, that's what NetBox cloud is for. Fantastic. Yeah, that's definitely the trend in, you know, just like developers can snip out salespeople a mile away, I think.

Mm-hmm. You know, operations, developers, et cetera, can snip out a Yeah, that's not really, you're not truly bought into open source. You're, you're in it only for the money.

Well, And just A brief, you gotta make money as a business, but you want to keep that community going and not feel like you've taken it away from them. A hundred percent agree with that. I think, you know, I'm very lucky here to be an engineer, right?

And someone who's contributed a lot to open source, and so I get it right. And, um, it feels natural to me to build a business that way, but I recognize that's not the norm, right? Like the norm.

And what people have a lot of experience with is, I call it strip mining, um, of open source communities and value. And, um, that's just not our ethos. We wanna build the community because we all win that way.

Very good. It's fantastic. I really learned a lot talking with you, Chris.

It's been a lot of fun. Um, where can folks try stuff out, kick the tires, learn more, all of that good kind of thing? Oh, thanks Mitch, for asking that.

Um, a couple things I'll point people at. So first of all, easiest way to get started with NetBox or kick the tires is certainly, uh, NetBox Cloud, right? That's why we made it, right?

com, um, and there's free trial, easy to sign up and, and, and try it. Um, but if you want to check out the open source, um, uh, that's out there too. dev is the open source site and community.

It's easy to find everything on GitHub. There's a great Slack, uh, channel with thousands of people talking about NetBox all day, every day. Um, and we have meetups.

I just had a community meetup today. So a lot of ways to check it out, get involved, get a sense of what's going on in this community. Very Cool.

It's again, a lot of fun talking with you. Well, wish you the best. Come back and talk with us.

I'd love to hear more about what's happening in the community with NetBox Labs, um, you know, kind of the adoption, right? You're, it, it is a, it is a big change. You just don't see, oh yeah, learn.

Let's learn Python. And we're good. We're good.

No, I'm quite that simple. That's, yeah. And probably not everybody wants to do that.

You know, I've given that advice, I may not have been the best advice, but good chatting with you. Thanks again. Please visit, uh, NetBox Labs and check 'em out.

Thanks Again. Thanks so much. Cheers.