Great blog post. Thanks for sharing this. It is great to see how you were able to break down this massive task into usable and implementable chunks, each adding value along the way. A lot of teams get stuck at the beginning, since the vision is too grand and they can't break it down into bite-size chunks.

Would love to here about the follow-on work you are planning with Nornir. BTW, have you played with Batfish? It is an open-source configuration validation tool, that would fit nicely into your automation pipeline.