OpsMill Infrastructure Automation and AlOps, Built on Data You Can Trust

Damien Garros of OpsMill presented the company’s vision for simplifying infrastructure automation through Infrahub, its platform for capturing infrastructure intent. The session covered the evolution from imperative to declarative and GitOps automation, a three-layer model of business, technical, and component intent, native version control, and the schema, transformations, and generators that let organizations build custom automation on a common foundation. The talk opened OpsMill’s appearance at Networking Field Day 41 and set up a multi-domain orchestration demo from Alex Gittings.

Garros described OpsMill as a company of about 35 people, founded almost four years ago, that builds Infrahub and recently took over the Nornir project. Using the Network Automation Forum’s framework, he placed Infrahub in the intent block and Nornir in orchestration and execution. He argued that network automation remains stuck between imperative and declarative approaches because existing tools can’t capture desired state well. In his model, the business layer describes services and designs, the technical layer holds IPs, VLANs, devices, and interfaces, and the component layer contains device configurations. Today these live in separate places: NetBox or Nautobot, Ansible, and custom tooling. Infrahub unifies all three with native branching and version control. Its extensible schema supports transformations that render configurations for any vendor, and generators that turn business requests into technical data. Answering delegate questions, Garros said existing networks can be imported through tools like IP Fabric or Slurp’it, while greenfield customers generate full configurations before devices arrive on site.

Garros called build-versus-buy a false choice, since every successful organization in this space has ended up building its own business layer, often creating a maintenance bottleneck. Infrahub aims to supply the foundational 80 percent (data access, permissions, and version control) so teams build only the 20 percent unique to their business. By his account, this cuts projects from years to months or even weeks. He said AI alone doesn’t solve this hard problem, but it sharply reduces the effort of building on Infrahub. OpsMill is designing for a future where agents both run infrastructure from trusted intent data and help build the platform itself. For understaffed enterprises, he pointed to professional services, partners, and AI-assisted development as ways to get started.