What's Next for Nornir: Project Update and Roadmap#

Speakers: Damien Garros (OpsMill)

• Why: Nornir is one of the two mainstay frameworks for pure-Python network automation (≈100K PyPI downloads/month, 8 years in production at enterprises, ISPs and research networks). The stewardship just changed hands — OpsMill, whose Infrahub product is a source-of-truth platform — and the roadmap that follows has direct consequences for how the PM's teams automate network operations. It also signals where the field is heading: agents replacing orchestrators, with the execution layer standing alone.
• What: A project-state talk covering the stewardship change (OpsMill became steward in June 2026, with core maintainer Patrick Ogenstad and nornir-netbox author Wim Van Deun already on the team; creator David Barroso becomes Technical Advisor), the explicit commitments (stays open source and community-driven, ecosystem plugins stay with their maintainers), and a published roadmap proposal: (1) native async support, (2) enhanced runners (streaming, timeouts, cancellation, detach), (3) typed multi-vendor "Operations", (4) documentation overhaul, (5) support for agentic development. Target is version 3.7 — no breaking changes, no migration guide.
• How: The architecture rules are notable: small core with every implementation as a plugin, additive-only evolution (no signature or entry-point changes). Async arrives as an opt-in sibling runner (nr.arun()) since Nornir.run() delegates all concurrency to the runner — so async transports and non-blocking processors are new plugins, not core rewrites. Runners gain partial result streaming, per-host timeouts, in-flight cancellation and detached submit/reattach. "Operations" are a new typed task class (Pydantic input/output, per-vendor drivers registered via entry points) for cross-platform actions like get_config. Agentic development support means writing the unwritten maintainer knowledge down in machine-readable form (AGENTS.md, .agents/, SpecKit spec-driven development) so AI agents can contribute reliably — deliberately opt-in for human contributors.
• Where applicable: Broadly applicable to any Python-based network automation practice, multi-vendor by design (netmiko/napalm/scrapli/netconf plugins). The Infrahub–Nornir pairing is a natural consequence of the steward (OpsMill's positioning: Infrahub holds intent/source of truth, Nornir executes), but the framework works with NetBox, Nautobot, Ansible, and plain YAML inventories too. Everything shown is a proposal under active public discussion — the roadmap is explicitly "nothing final yet", so don't plan migrations around it today.