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So you want to build your own data center

(blog.railway.com)
596 points dban | 4 comments | 17 Jan 25 20:41 UTC | HN request time: 1.061s | source
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jdoss ◴[17 Jan 25 23:16 UTC] No.42744258[source]▶
This is a pretty decent write up. One thing that comes to mind is why would you write your own internal tooling for managing a rack when Netbox exists? Netbox is fantastic and I wish I had this back in the mid 2000s when I was managing 50+ racks.

https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox

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1. matt-p ◴[18 Jan 25 00:41 UTC] No.42744734[source]▶
It is not that difficult to build it into your app, if you're already storing information about hosts, networking etc. All you're really doing is expanding the scope, netbox is a fine starting point if you're willing to start there and build your systems around it, but if you've already got a system (or you need to do anything that doesn't fit netbox logic) you're probably better off just extending it.

In this case railway will need to care about a lot of extra information beyond just racks, IP addresses and physical servers.

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2. ca508 ◴[18 Jan 25 01:34 UTC] No.42744989[source]▶
correct; I think the first version of our tool sprung up in the space of a couple of weekends. It wasn't planned, my colleague Pierre who wrote it just had a lot of fun building it.
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3. walterbell ◴[18 Jan 25 11:45 UTC] No.42747682[source]▶
Were there any promising OSS alternatives to Netbox?
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4. ca508 ◴[18 Jan 25 16:23 UTC] No.42749415{3}[source]▶
There's a fork called nautobot that tries to add-in automation. Most things we wanted to do with either meant we had to go writing django plugins and trying to interface with their APIs (and fight with the libs). Overall just hammering together a small custom service ended up being way faster/simpler.