Platform Engineering - Building a CMDB Foundation

Description

What does a strong Platform Engineering foundation actually look like? In this video, I walk through why a robust CMDB (Configuration Management Database) should be one of the first foundational components of your Internal Developer Platform (IDP). Before you automate application delivery, infrastructure provisioning, DNS, or other platform services, you need a single source of truth that tracks what exists in your environment, how it changed, and how to reconcile drift over time. Using NetBox in my production Kubernetes environment, I show how I’m building a GitOps-driven CMDB workflow that allows infrastructure and device records to be defined in YAML, committed into GitLab, automatically reconciled into NetBox, and preserved as part of a broader audit trail. In this walkthrough, I cover: 🛠️ Why CMDB matters in modern Platform Engineering 🛠️ Why a single source of truth is critical for production maturity 🛠️ How I’m using NetBox as the CMDB foundation 🛠️ How I built a custom GitOps application to watch a repo and reconcile YAML-based records into NetBox 🛠️ How device roles, platforms, device types, VLANs, IPAM data, and infrastructure objects are modeled 🛠️ Why audit-ability, drift detection, and compliance need to be designed in from the beginning 🛠️ How this CMDB foundation will support other IDP services like DNS, logging, and future automation This video is part of my ongoing Platform Engineering Series, where each video builds on the last as I construct a practical, production-oriented IDP architecture in my own environment. 📺 Watch the full series playlist: 💡 Don’t forget to: ✅ Like this video if you find it helpful. ✅ Subscribe to the channel for more home lab, cloud-native tutorials and project showcases. ✅ Drop a comment with your thoughts or questions about the project. Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to CMDB as the foundation 01:14 Why CMDB mattered at scale in the enterprise 02:32 Single source of truth in Platform Engineering 03:52 NetBox deployed in Kubernetes with Argo CD 04:42 Custom NetBox CMDB GitOps application overview 06:31 How the GitOps sync process works 08:14 NetBox UI walkthrough and initial site setup 09:33 YAML change sets and CRUD operations 12:12 Modeling networks, VLANs, and IPAM data 13:44 Creating device and interface records 15:35 Committing records into the GitOps repo 17:02 Watching Argo CD process the changes 19:24 Audit trail, compliance, and archived records 21:19 Reviewing the new records in NetBox 23:14 Auditing NetBox against vCenter inventory 24:21 Why CMDB must come first in an IDP 25:40 Next video: logging layer with Loki and Promtail 26:07 Final thoughts, memberships, and where to connect If you’re building a Platform Engineering practice, standing up an IDP, or trying to improve operational maturity through GitOps and automation, this is one of the most important places to start. #PlatformEngineering #CMDB #NetBox #GitOps #InternalDeveloperPlatform #IDP #Kubernetes #DevOps #InfrastructureAsCode #ArgoCD #CloudArchitecture #DeveloperPlatform #SRE #PlatformOps #VirtualElephant