Device provisioning
In Chapter 6, Configuration Management, we discussed applying the desired configuration state on a network device. Network engineers routinely have to log in to network devices to provision new services, bring up new connections, or remove outdated configurations. We covered the different transport options available to configure network devices such as SSH or HTTP in the same chapter, and in Chapter 8, Network APIs, we added gRPC as another option.
We briefly touched on modeling network device configurations with a data modeling language such as YANG, so we could move from configuring networks with semi-structured vendor-specific CLI syntax to a model where we exchange structured data with the network to change its configuration state.
OpenConfig defines a gRPC service specifically for configuration management called gNMI. It aims to provide a common gRPC protobuf definition that any vendor can implement, alongside their existing proprietary gRPC services...
