Network APIs
As the ways we build, deploy, and operate networks evolve, new protocols and interfaces are emerging to ease machine-to-machine communication—a primary enabler of network automation. In this and the following chapters, we’ll navigate through some of these new capabilities and explore how to take advantage of them in the context of the Go programming language.
The network Command-Line Interface (CLI) is what we, network engineers, have used for decades to operate and manage network devices. As we move toward a more programmatic approach to managing networks, simply relying on faster CLI command execution might not be enough to deploy network automation solutions at scale.
Solutions that don’t have a strong foundation are brittle and unstable. Hence, when possible, we prefer to build network automation projects based on structured data and machine-friendly Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The target use case for these interfaces isn&...
