In the previous chapters of this book, we described network infrastructure using Ansible variables stored in YAML files. While this approach is perfectly acceptable, it is not the optimal solution for adopting automation across an organization. We need to have our network inventory, IP addresses, and VLANs in a central system, which will act as the authoritative source of truth for our network. This system should have a robust and powerful API that can be queried by other automation and OSS/BSS systems to retrieve and update the network inventory.
NetBox is an open source inventory system for network infrastructure, which was initially developed by the network engineering team at DigitalOcean to document their data center infrastructure. It is a simple yet powerful and highly extensible inventory system, which can act as a source...
