Introduction

Network Control, shortened to nectl, is an end-to-end Python-based Infrastructure as Code framework for network automation and orchestration.

The motivation behind developing this tool was born from the frustrations of the tools available today for network automation. A project today will use YANG for modelling, YAML for instance data, Jinja for templating, Ansible for playbooks, Python for any custom logic or validation as well as many other additional tools. These different tools and languages can make pipelines slow, require more time invested before you can confidently get any real value and ultimately increase complexity which makes projects fragile and hard to troubleshoot.

So I asked myself:

What if there was a way to do it all in Python?

Project Goals

• Easy: Invest your time in a single language, Python.
• Flexible: Python end-to-end allows you to easily extend functionality.
• Fast: Avoid any slowdown caused by parsing non-Python files.
• Simple: Reduce your dependency tree and toolstack.

Unique Features

Facts

• Facts are defined in a data tree structure which implements inheritance.
• Facts can use functions to pull data from external sources, eg: netbox.
• Use pydantic and dataclasses to define your data models and validation.

Templates

• Templates are simple to read and write, defined as functions with print statements.
• As simple or complex as necessary with if statements, loops and imports.
• No need to create custom Jinja filters using Python, as templates are already in Python.