Frequently asked questions

Here are the key details about Infrahub:

About Infrahub

What is Infrahub?

Infrahub is an open-source platform that enables infrastructure as code by providing a unified system to model, store, version, validate, and generate infrastructure data and configurations. It acts as a centralized source of truth for all infrastructure resources across an organization.

What are the main features and capabilities?

• User-Defined Schema: Build and update data models to support business requirements for infrastructure resources.
• Unified Storage: Version control for data and files
• Versioning: Track current state and future intended state of the infrastructure with built-in peer review and a CI pipeline for validation.
• Immutable Database: Go back in time to view the state of infrastructure at any point.
• Artifact Generation: Transform infrastructure data into any format (text configurations, XML, JSON, etc.) using Generators and templates.
• Data Lineage: View the source and owner for each piece of infrastructure data.
• Multiple interfaces for each team and need:
  • Web UI: View and manage all infrastructure data, configurations, and CI/CD pipelines through a user interface.
  • Query Engine: Powerful API and support for GraphQL and REST to query and retrieve infrastructure data.
• Git Integration: File storage for code and templates
• Integrations: Integrations with tools like NetBox, Nautobot, Ansible, and Nornir. Ability to build custom integrations.
• Python SDK: Programmatically interact with Infrahub using a Python SDK.

For more information, see our Infrahub overview.

I'm just getting started with infrastructure automation. Do I need Infrahub?

If you're new to infrastructure automation, Infrahub is a great place to start. It lets you store the intended state of your infrastructure, this is a crucial foundation for any automation you build later. From this intended state, you can generate configurations directly within Infrahub, and also use the data for resource planning, service deployment, invoicing, and more.

Check out the blog section on our website to learn more about our vision and dive deeper into infrastructure automation.

How can I see Infrahub in action?

You have many options to quickly try out Infrahub, please refer to the Explore Infrahub page for more details.

Here are some quick ways to get started:

• Infrahub Sandbox - Instantly login to the UI of a demo environment of Infrahub with sample data pre-loaded.
• Getting Started Lab - Online lab to see all Infrahub fundamentals in action.

What are the deployment options for Infrahub?

Infrahub is a platform-agnostic solution that can be deployed on cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP, as well as in on-premises data centers.

Common deployment types include:

• Docker Compose — A virtual machine running Docker, with Infrahub and its dependencies deployed via Docker Compose.
• Kubernetes — A high-availability setup using a Helm Chart to deploy Infrahub.
• Bare metal — Infrahub Enterprise supports direct installation on physical servers without containerization, for environments where containers are not an option.

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Infrahub depends on several supporting services that must be installed either within the same environment or externally. See the What is Infrahub page for more details.

Each deployment option comes with trade-offs. It's important to also consider your existing tools and processes when choosing the best fit.

For production deployments that require high availability, Kubernetes with the official Helm chart is the recommended topology because it provides the cleanest upgrade path and native handling of component failover.

We're also working on a managed cloud SaaS version of Infrahub. Please subscribe to our mailing list to stay updated.

How can I install Infrahub?

Check out the Installing Infrahub guide for detailed setup instructions.

I deployed Infrahub, now what?

Once Infrahub is deployed, you can start using it to manage your infrastructure resources and begin your automation journey.

Visit the Next Steps section for practical examples.

What is the status of the project? Can I deploy Infrahub in production?

Infrahub is production-ready and has been deployed in a number of organizations as a central component of their automation workflows.

If you are planning to deploy Infrahub in a critical environment we recommend reaching out to our customer success team via Discord, [email protected] or Online Meeting.

For teams preparing a production rollout, the production deployment guide collects the hardening recommendations we apply in customer environments.

How much data can Infrahub handle right now?

Capacity depends heavily on the schema you define, so we publish sizing tiers rather than one number. The Community vs Enterprise page documents recommended resource allocations across deployment profiles, from moderate environments up to tens of thousands of device-class objects. Production deployments today manage datasets well into the hundreds of thousands of managed objects on a single instance.

If you want to evaluate Infrahub against your own schema and dataset size, reach out on Discord or at [email protected], and we happy to help.

What does a high-availability Infrahub deployment look like?

A production Infrahub deployment runs as a single clustered instance with component-level redundancy: database clustering with automatic leader election, cache failover, and mirrored message queues. This is the default topology we recommend for most organisations, and it is what the Community vs Enterprise page describes under the HA tiers.

Running a single logical instance means one schema, one resource allocation authority for IPs, prefixes, and identifiers, and one target for monitoring and upgrades.

Can I run multiple Infrahub instances?

Yes. Infrahub supports deploying multiple independent instances, each as a fully autonomous deployment with its own database, schema, and resource allocation authority. Instances do not share state or synchronise data between them, making them suitable for:

• Organisations with distinct governance domains or regional operational boundaries, where each domain is authoritative for its own infrastructure data.
• Regional deployments requiring data residency within specific geographies or regulatory jurisdictions.
• Failure isolation: an outage or maintenance in one region has no impact on others.
• Canary upgrade patterns, rolling out new versions region by region before global rollout.

Each instance functions as a complete, independent source of truth for its domain. Use this model when your organisation already manages separate operational boundaries.

Can a single Infrahub instance span multiple regions?

No. A single Infrahub instance is designed as one clustered deployment in one region. To operate Infrahub in multiple regions, you deploy independent instances per region. See Can I run multiple Infrahub instances? above.

How do I back up and restore Infrahub?

Database backup is a routine, automated operation, with native support for S3-compatible object storage. Compressed backups for large production deployments typically fall in the single-digit to tens of gigabytes range. See the database backup and restore topic for step-by-step guidance and scheduling recommendations.

What are realistic recovery targets for Infrahub?

With hourly backups, the recovery point objective (RPO) is one hour. The recovery time objective (RTO) for restoring a large instance is also about one hour, mainly driven by restoring the task manager database.

In deployment patterns where data-plane agents enforce their last-known desired state rather than querying Infrahub directly, the effective data-plane RTO during an Infrahub outage is zero — running infrastructure keeps operating, and only the build pipeline pauses until Infrahub is available again.

How do I upgrade Infrahub?

The infrahub upgrade command handles schema and database migrations. On Kubernetes, Helm runs the upgrade as a job during the release update and manages rolling pod updates. For VM-based deployments, documented procedures define the stop/upgrade/restart sequence with safety checks.

We recommend a full database backup before every upgrade and validation in a staging environment that mirrors production topology. The upgrade guide has the detailed steps.

What monitoring and observability does Infrahub provide?

Infrahub exposes a metrics endpoint by default, and the Infrahub Exporter provides Prometheus-format scraping and OTLP push to monitoring systems such as Prometheus and OpenTelemetry collectors. Workflow orchestration runs on Prefect, which provides task-level observability.

In production, the most commonly monitored signals are API request latency, task manager queue depth, database connection pool usage, and disk utilisation.

How does Infrahub handle authentication and access control?

Infrahub supports OAuth2 / OIDC single sign-on (see the SSO guide) and token-based API authentication (see managing API tokens).

The RBAC model provides pre-configured roles (Admin, Standard User, Anonymous User), custom role creation, global permissions, and namespace-scoped object-level permissions with configurable decision types. Enterprise adds workflow-based approval processes with configurable approval thresholds and enforced approval gates. All changes are tracked immutably with actor attribution. Full details are in the permissions reference and the change approval workflow guide.

If I start with Community, can I move to Enterprise later?

Yes. Community and Enterprise share the same core engine, data model, and APIs, so moving from one to the other does not require a data migration or re-architecture — your schema, data, integrations, and Generators carry over. Enterprise capabilities are enabled on top of the same platform.

See the Community vs Enterprise comparison for the full breakdown of what each edition includes.

What drives Infrahub performance at scale, and what can I tune?

Across production deployments, we have found that Generator execution is more often the build-pipeline bottleneck than GraphQL query latency. The two highest-impact tuning levers are using targeted field selection in your queries rather than eager relationship loading, and increasing pagination size where appropriate. These are the same query patterns any downstream build system should use.

Core engine performance is an ongoing investment, not a fixed milestone — recent work in v1.8 moved branch-merge logic into the database layer, delivering about a 4x improvement in merge times on datasets ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands of objects.

How can I get involved?

We develop Infrahub for customers and with the community. There are a few different ways to get involved with Infrahub:

• The best place to engage with the community and OpsMill team is the Discord server.
• As you use Infrahub, please submit bugs and feature requests directly on GitHub.
• Reach out to OpsMill to set up a user feedback session to share your thoughts with us.
• If you are a developer, we are open to pull requests. Please refer to Contributing Guidelines to learn more.

How do I get help with Infrahub?

If you need assistance with Infrahub, you can reach out to the community and the development team through the following channels:

• Discord: Join the Infrahub Discord server to ask questions, get support, and engage with other users.
• GitHub Issues: Submit issues or questions on GitHub.

Is Infrahub free? Is there a paid support option or an Enterprise version of Infrahub?

Infrahub is built on an open source foundation to allow for broad community access and code transparency. However, many customers want and need higher performance and software QA validation, as well as enterprise support. That's why we offer Infrahub in two distinct versions.

• Infrahub Community - Infrahub is an open source project that delivers a unified system to model, store, version, validate, and generate infrastructure data and configurations.
• Infrahub Enterprise - Get SLA-backed support, advanced integrations, and enhanced performance and high-availability. Gain the benefits of mature infrastructure automation with greater velocity and quality assurance.

For a detailed comparison of features, use cases, and decision guidance, see our Community vs Enterprise documentation.

You can find pricing and feature details on our website.

Does Infrahub handle network discovery or configuration deployment?

No, and it's not part of our vision. Infrahub is focused on being the best infrastructure data platform.

We believe in open source and, rather than reinventing the wheel, we provide solid integrations with existing tools like Ansible, Nornir, IP Fabric, Slurp'it, NetPicker, and more.

See the Integrations dropdown on the documentation website.

I already have an existing source of truth, can I use Infrahub?

Yes, Infrahub is built to integrate with existing sources of truth. We offer infrahub-sync, a tool that lets you synchronize data from other systems into Infrahub.

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This synchronization can be set up as a one-time migration or as a recurring task. This is useful in scenarios where part of the data remains in your current system and is synced to Infrahub in a read-only format to serve another purpose.

Does Infrahub send telemetry? And how can I disable it?

Infrahub collects anonymous usage metrics and sends them to OpsMill servers for analysis and improvement purposes. No personally identifiable information is collected. If you prefer to opt-out of telemetry collection, you can do so by setting the INFRAHUB_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT environment variable to true:

export INFRAHUB_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT=true

What telemetry does Infrahub send?

The following information is included in telemetry:

• Infrahub version
• Platform information
• Anonymous counters about the graph and the schema

This information is used as aggregated analysis to better understand what and how to improve the project. All information collected is anonymous and the implementation is open source on GitHub.

About OpsMill

Who is behind this project?

Infrahub is sponsored and developed by OpsMill, a startup focused on infrastructure management. The OpsMill team is distributed across Europe and the United States, with members who have extensive experience in managing infrastructure and building automation solutions.

You can learn more about the OpsMill team and the company on our website.

Why is OpsMill's mascot an Otter?

Otters are really cool, and they are considered a keystone species, meaning they have a disproportionately large impact on their natural environment relative to their representation.

Similarly, Infrahub aims to be a keystone platform for managing and automating infrastructure, providing a central and influential role in shaping and maintaining your infrastructure ecosystem.

What is the name of the otter?

The OpsMill mascot is an otter named Otto.

You can send fan mail to Otto at [email protected]!

Can Infrahub make me as cool as Tony Stark?

Almost! You'll definitely feel like a tech genius managing your infrastructure with Infrahub!

Made it this far? We'd love to hear from you

If you've made it this far, please feel free to reach out on the Discord server to share your thoughts or schedule a customer interview session. The Infrahub team is always eager to receive feedback and engage with the community.