Operating with gNMI
As we saw before, gRPC is probably the most appropriate protocol for working with devices in terms of performance. However, it is actually a generic protocol to be used in any client and server interaction – not only network devices but also computer servers. For this reason, gRPC Network Management Interface (gNMI) was created.
gNMI is an open source protocol specification created by the OpenConfig working group that is used to communicate to and from network devices using YANG (discussed in the NETCONF section). In other words, gNMI was created to utilize the good work done by people defining the network specification data using YANG but with a more modern protocol such as gRPC instead of NETCONF.
Protocol layers
gNMI uses gRPC. For that, it has to translate the YANG data description into Protobuf to serialize the communication, as illustrated in Figure 3.9. At the bottom of the diagram is a normal gRPC connection over HTTP/2 and TLS. The gRPC...
