NetworkManager has become the de facto standard for network management across many Linux distributions, known for its reliability and broad feature set. Originally designed with the desktop user experience in mind, it introduced “connection profiles” as a convenient abstraction for managing Wi-Fi and VPN connections.

Over time, NetworkManager expanded to support server and edge use cases. With the rise of declarative configuration engines like Kubernetes and Ansible, nmstate was developed as a declarative wrapper around NetworkManager to allow these engines to plug into it easier.

However, this translation isn't perfect. Moreover, the design of NetworkManager makes it hard to add new features and refactoring a mature C codebase is difficult.

Join us for this talk as we explore how we’re designing network management solutions from the ground up to better serve a wide range of environments—including Kubernetes and containerized systems. We’ll walk through our design approach and conclude with a short demo of our project.