alembic dev log, june 2026

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
alembic, network automation, newsletter

a monthly log of what moved in alembic and the tools around it. this first issue sets the baseline.
cargo install alembic-cli

i’m starting a monthly note on what moved in alembic and the tools around it, published the first day of each month. this first issue is a baseline: where things stand at the end of june 2026, so from july on i can just report the delta. i’ll keep these short.

what alembic is

i’ve written and talked about alembic, but since then, almost 3 months have passed, and that’s about fourty-five years in alembic time, so let’s pretend this is a first unveil.

i’ve taken to calling alembic the connective tissue of your network automation pipeline or the edges between your boxes. what does this mean?

most systems in the network automation space are boxes. they are sources of truth, or orchestrators, or observability tools. those are important, but we tend to forget about the arrows between those boxes when we draw the diagram: how does data actually flow from one system to the next?

this is what alembic does. it’s the layer between the elements of your stack, the aether that flows between your components. and it speaks your own data model, not that of any vendor.

sounds pretty cool, right? i think so.

where it stands

cliff’s notes:

alembic transforms data from a source of truth into a canonical, vendor-neutral ir, validates it, and converges that model onto one or more backends. it works on the edges between systems, not inside any one of them.

latest release: 0.5.0, on crates.io (cargo install alembic-cli).

the loop is the same every time: validate → import → map → plan → apply. pull, map, and plan are read-only; apply is the only step that writes, and it writes a deterministic plan you’ve already seen.

map is the powerhouse that transforms and shapes the data on the way.

i have case studies of migrations between ipam/dcim systems (infrahub<->netbox) and full pipelines (data->netbox->containerlab,ssh,prometheus,grafana). it just works.

the engine today

map is a pure ir→ir transform layer: rules select objects by type and predicate, reshape them through ${...} templates, rewire references across renames, and can call user-defined starlark transforms. it also does group_by aggregation and lookups across refs. because it’s pure, maps chain.

plan --report prints a read-only drift report (changed / missing / extra) without writing anything.

apply is deterministic and topologically ordered; deletes stay gated behind --allow-delete.

state lives in a local state.json or postgres, mapping stable uids to backend ids so renames don’t churn.

adapters

open core, in the repo: netbox, nautobot, infrahub (read + write), generic rest, peeringdb (read-only), and django (emit) if you want your own dcim api.

commercial ops layer (alembic-ops): emitters that carry the same ir out to ansible, nornir, dns, prometheus, ssh, containerlab, and graphviz/mermaid diagrams. it’s a separate, paid layer, so i’ll only mention it here where it touches the open core¹.

extension: any of the above can also be an external adapter, a process alembic spawns that speaks json over stdio (protocol version 1). this month i shipped two front doors for writing one: a python sdk (alembic-adapter-sdk) and a rust template repo. and to prove that it works, i wrote a full adapter in carp, a programming language i co-maintain, in less than 250 lines of code.

people

one professional contributor works on alembic alongside me, and we’re onboarding two more. yes, people get paid to work on alembic.

erik svedäng works across the engine and the ops layer. he built the journal-backed resumable apply: an apply that dies partway through resumes from where it stopped instead of redoing its writes, alongside a run of correctness and performance fixes (including turning an o(n²) path into o(n)). in the ops layer he wrote the containerlab connector and “erratic”, a fault-injection adapter whose whole job is to make the resumable-apply machinery prove itself.

health

june was the biggest month so far: 0.4.0 and 0.5.0 both shipped. 0.4.0 retired the old raw-yaml→ir compiler and replaced it with map; 0.5.0 taught the netbox adapter to handle generic foreign keys in both directions (a breaking change to a few ir field names).

the “one source, many artifacts” fabric pipeline runs as a golden-file e2e in ci: it boots a real netbox, runs seed → import → map → emit, and diffs every generated file against a committed baseline. that’s the regression net behind the claim that one model feeds every tool.

on deck

public demos, case studies, and war stories are being prepared as we speak!

from the unreleased changelog: format validation for cidr/prefix/mac/ slug fields, stricter checks that schema ref targets name a real type, and map rewiring references nested inside list/map fields.

more reference external adapters, now that the two sdks make them cheap to write.

next issue at the end of july.

1. the split is deliberate: the ir, the engine, and the dcim/ipam connectors are open source under apache-2.0; the fabric and ops connectors are where the commercial side lives.↩︎