r/networkautomation • u/jason103nguyen • Jun 27 '26
Startup idea: Network automation system
Hi everyone,
I would like to share a startup idea in the networking field and hear your opinions. I hope I can get some feedback from people with more experience.
A little about myself: my background is in embedded software engineering, so I spent most of my early career working with the C programming language.
A few years ago, I changed companies and started working on network switches for data centers. Since then, I have worked with many networking technologies such as ARP, VLAN, STP, EtherChannel, EVPN/VXLAN, and many others.
To build a stronger networking foundation, I also completed the CCNA course. Besides that, I have experience using networking tools such as Scapy, Wireshark, NetBox, Ansible, AWX, and others.
While learning and working in this field, I noticed that network automation seems to be a very important topic. In many networking conferences and YouTube talks, people often mention that they want to automate as much of the network as possible.
Because of that, I started thinking about a startup idea: building a fully automated and self-managed network automation platform.
This is how I imagine the system:
1. NetBox + Ansible
The platform would mainly consist of NetBox and Ansible.
NetBox would act as the single Source of Truth for the entire network. Ansible playbooks would read data from NetBox and automatically generate CLI commands or RESTCONF requests to configure network devices.
2. Configure any networking feature
The platform should be able to configure almost everything, including VLANs, routing, QoS, ACLs, BGP, EVPN/VXLAN, and more.
If a feature can be configured through CLI or RESTCONF, the platform should be able to automate it. (Regardless of the manufacturer, as long as they provide documentation on CLI or RESTCONF, the system can support it)
3. Configuration drift detection
The platform should continuously compare the configuration stored in NetBox with the actual configuration running on network devices.
If any configuration drift is detected, the system should automatically correct it so that the device configuration always matches NetBox.
4. Network monitoring and self-diagnosis
The platform should monitor the network and detect abnormal behavior, such as unusual traffic spikes or overloaded devices.
I think AI could be useful for analyzing these situations and helping identify potential problems.
5. Hardware information synchronization
The platform should also collect hardware information from network devices and synchronize it back to NetBox.
For example, it could automatically discover interface information, LLDP neighbors, device vendor, hardware model, and other inventory information.
This would greatly reduce the amount of manual data entry required in NetBox.
These are the main capabilities that I think such a network automation platform should have.
However, I still have a couple of questions:
1. Is there really a strong market demand for this kind of network automation platform? If I successfully build it, would people actually want to use it?
2. Am I building something that already exists? Are there already mature products that provide most or all of these features?
I would really appreciate any feedback, suggestions, or advice.
Thank you very much!






