Cisco has released Basic ConfD, a free version of its ConfD management agent framework with a rich set of APIs for developers of physical and virtual networking devices, to accelerate the adoption of programmability for the broader networking industry. ConfD provides the industry-leading implementation of the NETCONF protocol driven by the YANG data modeling language.
Tail-f, now part of Cisco, provides two products, ConfD and NCS. NCS, a multi-vendor network service orchestrator for traditional and virtualized networks is transitioning to the Cisco portfolio and will be marketed under the name Cisco Network Service Orchestrator enabled by Tail-f.
Cisco claims that by implementing an end-to-end programmable network based on open standards, service providers can reduce configuration and management costs by nearly 50 percent over a five-year period, and currently in use by more than 75 network equipment providers. The no-cost Basic ConfD is feature-rich and will be available for production use without additional fees for NETCONF. The premium version of ConfD, including a complete set of north-bound interfaces including CLI, REST and SNMP, continues to be commercially available.
Fredrik Lundberg, Director of Strategy and Planning, Cisco’s Cloud and Virtualization Group
We continue to see strong demand from networking vendors, as they sharply ramp up their efforts to provide standardized programmatic interfaces to their virtual or physical network devices. ConfD dramatically reduces the time and resources needed to develop network management interfaces. Networking vendors leverage Basic ConfD to rapidly develop products that are fully NETCONF- and YANG-compliant.
Ihab Tarazi, Chief Technology Officer, Equinix
As we increase the number of services provided by cable MSOs over our networks, we want to reduce the complexity of the service enablement, fulfillment, management and operational ecosystem. With NETCONF as the management protocol and YANG as the modeling language, we may now have the building blocks to create scalable and maintainable catalogs using elastic and programmatic network elements, without needing to significantly increase investments in legacy BSS and OSS systems.
