- The Beginning: A New Set of Requirements
- Network Management Is Dead, Long Live Network Management
- YANG: The Data Modeling Language
- The Key to Automation? Data Models
- The Management Architecture
- Data Model-Driven Management Components
- The Encoding (Protocol Binding and Serialization)
- The Server Architecture: Datastore
- The Protocols
- The Programming Language
- Telemetry
- The Bigger Picture: Using NETCONF to Manage a Network
- Interview with the Experts
- Summary
- References in This Chapter
Summary
This chapter is by no means a complete account of everything you can do in YANG, but it aims at providing you a good grasp of all the most important concepts, what problems YANG solves, and how to go about making new YANG models.
In particular, you learned about the data model–driven management architecture and components. YANG is an API-contract language that creates a specification for the interface between a client and server (configure, monitor status, receive notifications, and invoke actions). The most common protocols used are NETCONF, RESTCONF, and gNMI, for which you understand the pros and cons in light of the tooling environment. Those protocols support different encodings: XML, JSON, protobuf, and so on. In the end, those data models generate APIs to be used directly in programming, thus hiding the low-level details of a YANG model or an encoding.
Even though “Overview of the 2002 IAB Network Management Workshop” (RFC 3535) is 15 years old, the requirements in this document are still applicable and relevant today. Therefore, this document is a good read for anyone wanting to understand the issues faced by operators.