Network Programmability and Automation Fundamentals

Introduction

For more than three decades, network management has been entirely based on the command-line interface (CLI) and legacy protocols such as SNMP. These protocols and methods are severely limited. The CLI, for example, is vendor specific, lacks a unified data hierarchy (sometimes even for platforms from the same vendor), and was designed primarily as a human interface. SNMP suffers major scaling problems, is not fit for writing configuration to devices, and overall, is very complex to implement and customize.

In essence, automation aims at offloading as much work from humans as possible and delegating that work to machines. But with the aforementioned legacy interfaces and protocols, machine-to-machine communication is neither effective ...