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nautobot#

Nautobot: Atomic Jobs

In the first release of Nautobot all of the Jobs were Atomic by default. This was from the previous focus of the legacy source application that assumed that scripts/reports would only be run on the data locally, so by that nature, the jobs should be atomic. As more and more Jobs started to interact with other systems, it became apparent that there needed to be a control mechanism provided (as I understand). So the introduction of a context manager and decorator was brought to the table to provide the same previous functionality while changing of the default behavior in Nautobot 2.x+.

Redux: WAN Design

In this post, we'll dive into WAN design and address a common question that I was provided with in the 2000s: "My home internet costs only $35 per month. Why do we spend $xxx per month per circuit?"

One of my favorite features of Nautobot that may not be well known is the capability to put a button on pages that take you to other locations. This can be helpful when lining up the source of truth as that first place that you go, the idea of adding custom links will just help to enforce that as the first place to go. When you look at the idea of a source of truth to help feed other systems, you start to see the topology like below.

Nautobot Source of Truth for Other Systems

Nautobot App Baking Cookies

Just recently released at the beginning of 2024 is a project that I am super excited to see in the open source by Network to Code. This is the Nautobot App cookiecutter template. This may already be the biggest thing to become available for Network Automation in 2024. I know, its fresh at this point in the year, but this is something that is going to make getting started with your own Nautobot Application so much quicker.

2023 Automation Review: Top 3

The year of 2023 I think may have had some of the biggest leaps in the Network Automation capabilities that are being delivered by some of the best in the business. With Nautobot's Golden Config App adding the ability to complete configuration remediation and Ansible release Event Driven Ansible, there are a couple of powerful tools to help you with your Network Automation. And all with a great new conference addition specific to Network Automation.

Nautobot: How I Use Tags For VMs

In my home environment I am leveraging Nautobot as my source of truth. This is for the network, which is probably not all that interesting in my home environment, and my virtual machines. Why am I tracking my virtual machines in Nautobot? Simple, to help automate them. I think that this is a clever methodology to help use tags and to get automation working within the environment. This same type of thing may be applicable to your network environment as well.

Nautobot Environment File

Within Nautobot there are many ways to be able to get the Nautobot environment running. Environment variables are used quite a bit in the Docker environment following best practice principles set forth in the 12 Factor App. The use of environment variables is helpful for working through the various stages of an application to production. The installation instructions leverage a single environment variable NAUTOBOT_ROOT and that is set in the SystemD files shown below.

Upgrade Nautobot Python Version in Virtual Machine

One observation lately is that Python is moving along quickly with new versions and new EOLs. Along with needing to make these updates, the applications that Python uses will also need to be moving along. Nautobot is my favorite, and in my opinion the best SOT platform available in the open source ecosystem today. So let's dive into the updating of the Python version.

For this post, I've created a new Rocky 8 Virtual Machine to be the host. See the note below for the reasoning. This will start off with a Nautobot install from the Nautobot docs. I won't dive into all of that, assume that is the starting point with a fresh Nautobot application.