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. However, this evolution introduces friction for system administrators: behaviors like automatic connection activation can be surprising, and managing multiple connection profiles for a single device can feel unintuitive.

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.