The Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF) standard, defined most recently in RFC 6241, allows a network management application to access a JUNOS OS (or other vendor) network element through the use of a series of Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) carried over a serialized XML transport.
For programmatic access to JUNOS OS devices, this method is preferable for the use of raw command-line processing, since the data format is structured, precise, and suitable for unambiguous machine reading.
In this chapter, we investigate how to setup NETCONF access to JUNOS OS devices and then look at how to make use of that from common programming platforms.
