Declarative versus imperative configuration

In this section, you will learn about approaches to, and tools for, configuring your edge-connected networks that will increase deployment velocity while removing barriers and bottlenecks. We will give an example from the emerging field of application-centric, or application-directed, networking. By the end, you will be able to explain the benefits of this paradigm and consider when to use it for your distributed edge application architectures.

Comparing the two approaches

Cloud Foundry and other platforms introduced, and Kubernetes popularized, the idea of marrying declarative configurations describing the desired outcome state to the concept of eventual consistency, thus bringing a system gradually into alignment from the current state toward the eventual goals. The declarative paradigm is a way of stating (with configuration files or a higher-order language) the outcome that you would like to achieve without needing to specify how...