Yet Again: CLI or API
Carl Montanari recently published an interesting blog post on the punditry of network APIs (including hilarious fact that “SNMP is also an API”), and as someone sent me a link to that post he commented “it reminds me of a few blog posts you wrote a while ago”.
Speaking of those blog posts… last July I was getting bored and put together a list of interesting blog posts I published on that topic. Enjoy!
"We don't need no CLI".
The CLI will never go away. As a developer of routing-software the CLI is necessary. You want to quickly change your config. Quickly look at show commands. A developer can easily introduce new temporary show-commands. Or enhance existing commands. Or create new hidden commands. Easy tools while developing new code. If she/he had to do that via a GUI or some API, it would be harder to implement. And clumsy to use for quick testing and troubleshooting. So IMHO there will always be a CLI.
That doesn't mean APIs or GUIs are not useful. Or not necessary. Of course they are. But that doesn't mean the CLI will go away at any time.