Other libraries

We'll finish this chapter by mentioning that there are several excellent efforts in terms of vendor-neutral libraries such as Nornir (https://nornir.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html), Netmiko (https://github.com/ktbyers/netmiko), and NAPALM (https://github.com/napalm-automation/napalm). We have seen some examples of them in the last chapter. For most of these vendor-neutral libraries, they are likely a step slower to support the latest platform or features. However, because the libraries are vendor-neutral, if you do not like vendor lock-in for your tools, then these libraries are good choices. Another benefit of using these vendor-neutral libraries is the fact that they are normally open source, so you can contribute back upstream for new features and bug fixes.

Cisco also recently released their pyATS framework (https://developer.cisco.com/pyats/) as well as the associated pyATS library (formerly Genie). We will take a look at pyATS and Genie...