Employing NETCONF
The Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF) is a network management protocol developed and standardized by the IETF in 2006. It provides mechanisms to install, manipulate, and delete the configuration of network devices.
NETCONF operations are implemented on top of a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) layer. The NETCONF protocol uses Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based data encoding for the configuration data as well as the protocol messages. The protocol messages can also be exchanged on top of a secure transport protocol such as SSH (RFC 6242) or using TLS (RFC 7589).
Motivation
Up until the early part of the 21st century, the only management protocol available from IETF was SNMP, which was developed in the late 1980s. It became clear that despite what was originally intended, SNMP was not being used to configure network equipment and was mainly being used for gathering network device information (as we have seen previously). The reasons are various, but mainly...
