OpenConfig sounds like a great idea, but unfortunately only a few vendors support it, and it doesn’t run on all their platforms, and you need the latest-and-greatest software release. Not exactly a set of conditions that would encourage widespread adoption.

Things might change with the OpenConfig data models supported in NAPALM. Imagine you could parse router configurations or show printouts into OpenConfig data structures, or use OpenConfig to configure Cisco IOS routers running a decade old software. Yes, you can do all that, and David Barroso explained the magic behind the scenes in Episode 79 of Software Gone Wild.

Totally irrelevant: We couldn’t avoid mentioning the wonderfully forgetful Nexus OS behavior, which should be solved by now.

More information

• OpenConfig + NAPALM @ dravetech.com
• NAPALM/OpenConfig demo
• NAPALM documentation
• YANG support in NAPALM
• David Barroso talked about NAPALM in Ansible for Networking Engineers webinar and in Building Network Automation Solutions online course, and he’ll cover OpenConfig in NAPALM in the autumn 2017 session of the online course.