NETCONF is another configuration management protocol, and continues to be developed as an IETF standard. The NETCONF protocol defines a simple mechanism through which a network device can be managed, configuration data can be retrieved, and new configuration data can be uploaded and manipulated.

The NETCONF protocol uses remote procedure calls for communication. The data payload is encoded within XML for NETCONF RPC calls. The data is sent to the server over a secure, connection-oriented protocol - secure shell (SSH) is an example of this. The server response is also encoded in XML. The key part of this mechanism is the request, and both the request and the response are fully described in an agreed upon communication model, meaning both parties understand the syntax that is being exchanged.

NETCONF has a set of transport protocol requirements which include:

• Connection-oriented communication
• Authentication
• Connection data integrity

Although Cisco and NX-OS platforms have extensive support for NETCONF, it will not be discussed in detail in this book.

CLI and SNMP have presented challenges for network automation. To address these limitations, Cisco has introduced NX-API with the launch of the Nexus 9000 Series. The following section introduces NX-API CLI and the NX-API Sandbox. This provides a new way to interact with the network - using APIs and programmability paradigms.