NetBox as the Source of Truth for Cisco NSO Configurations

NetBox “knows” how the network is supposed to be configured, and Cisco NSO can ensure that configuration is actually applied. In this talk we’ll look at an example of how this can be done, and is used in production to manage the DevNet Sandbox Network. In DevNet Sandbox we are on a journey to adopt NetDevOps design and operational principals throughout our platform. And “journey” is the right word. Like many of you, we have to balance the innovation and modernization of the approach with day to day “keep the lights on” activities and priority projects. But one of the first things we tackled was to adopt NetBox as our Source of Truth. We knew this was critical to being able to move forward in any meaningful way. As part of making NetBox the Source of Truth, we knew we needed to drive the network configurations pushed out to the network from NetBox directly, having a second “Source of Truth” maintained in our configuration management tool, was counter to the goals of our project. Our network configuration management tool is Cisco NSO, and it has a “Configuration Database” or CDB that could be seen as a “Source of Truth” as well. What we worked on was a way to populate the relevant parts of the CDB from NetBox. This talk will share how we approached this challenge and how we leverage the magic of Python to bring them together. And the work isn’t done yet or perfect. A few thoughts about areas we need to improve and how we plan to move forward will also be discussed.