Found on the Web: Your CLI Should Be a Server
Guess what I found: a software developer trying to persuade his peers that they need an API version of their CLI tool. Yes, I checked and it’s still 2018, and the year CLI dies seems to be a bit further out than some people thought.
I’d guess this proves that the rest of the world is not so far ahead of us lowly network engineers as blabbering pundits and vendor marketers would have us believe.
Needless to say, the engineers architecting Junos knew this almost 20 years ago.
I recently heard someone parrot "This is where IaC saves us" - not realizing that code isn't magical. I do think that Cisco's declarative model (Opflex) is step in the right direction because it allows implementation to be separated from design - not because you can use a mouse. Just stop caring if it's a gui or a cli and start caring if it's consistent and helps to clarify how things work in principle.