On 14 Aug 2014, at 12:19, James Bensley <jwbens...@gmail.com<mailto:jwbens...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Is anyone here using Netconf and Yang? Yes (to Netconf), and extensively. As you are probably aware, everything that we (www.allegro.net<http://www.allegro.net>) sell is provisioned fully automatically and can be done directly from our portal by customers. There is quite a lot more to it than ‘getting a portal to spit Netconf at your routers’, the client is separated by several layers of business and security logic before a request lands at a workflow manager and the netconf happens. The reason that there have to be layers between a business requirement (“Hey, sell me some bandwidth!!”) and configuration (“conf t, interface blah”..) is that the trick you are trying to pull off is configuration of the network rather than configuration of any single device. The best possible outcome you have is that the network will consistently and definitively go from one state of “production rest” to another state of “production rest” and not have part configured services as you move between the two states. Netconf helps you achieve this pretty well thanks to the fact that build into the protocol is the concept of candidate and running configuration - you can lock the code, propose a change, test a change — on every device — before then committing that change to running config. All of this in an atomic manner too. (You don’t think we would effectively give our customers enable without such safeguards, right ? :-) ) Slides 20 to 27 of http://www.slideshare.net/andy.d/network-automation-interconnection-tools show some actual real XML in case you want to see some on-the-wire nuts and bolts information that describes what I am talking about. This presentation is quite interconnection focussed because it was especially written for peer2.org<http://peer2.org> last week in the US, but you will get the idea. So, why do you ask ? Andy
