RESTCONF

The IETF designed RESTCONF as an HTTP-based alternative to NETCONF that offers Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations on a conceptual datastore containing YANG-modeled data. It may lack some NETCONF features, such as different datastores, exclusive configuration locking, and batch and rollback operations, but the exact set of supported and unsupported features depends on the implementation and network device capabilities. That said, because it uses HTTP methods and supports JSON encoding, RESTCONF reduces the barrier of entry for external systems to integrate and inter-operate with a network device.

RESTCONF supports a standard set of CRUD operations through HTTP methods: POST, PUT, PATCH, GET, and DELETE. RESTCONF builds HTTP messages with the YANG XPath translated into a REST-like URI and it transports the payload in the message body. Although RESTCONF supports both XML and JSON encoding, we will only focus on the latter, with the rules of the encoding defined...