Beyond the Command Line: Programming Network Devices with gRPC and OpenConfig

We are living in a new age that empowers network engineers to create the building blocks for the future of intent-based networks. The rising wave of network APIs and data models have changed the way w …

We are living in a new age that empowers network engineers to create the building blocks for the future of intent-based networks. The rising wave of network APIs and data models have changed the way we consume networking operating systems. For this reason, Telecom companies such as Cisco, Juniper, and Arista are already taking advantage of gRPC, a project hosted by the CNCF, one of the Linux Foundation’s largest sub-foundations, to stream telemetry data and configure networking devices. gRPC is a modern open source high performance RPC framework that can run in any environment, which allows users to program network elements via a single interface/connection. In this session we will demonstrate how to achieve this, in order to generate a closed-loop system that validates the intent of network configurations. All this, using OpenConfig vendor-neutral YANG data models.