Re: [Taps] Potential alternatives to YANG

["Scharf, Michael" <[e-mail]>]

> On Fri, 29 Mar 2019, Scharf, Michael wrote:
> 
> > As mentioned on the mic: There are quite a number of solutions to
> "rigorously" specify APIs. Some of these general-purpose techniques are
> IMHO also used for configuration/provisioning tasks in the networking
> industry, i.e., as alternative to YANG.
> >
> > In a former life, I had quite some discussions on the role of YANG as
> compared to, for instance:
> >
> > * swagger.io (https://swagger.io/)
> >
> > * gRPC, gNMI and protocol buffers (see e.g. draft-openconfig-rtgwg-gnmi-
> spec-01 in the IETF)
> 
> I thought gRPC and gNMI was equivalent to netconf, not to YANG?

Yep, but I have mentioned protocol buffers, too. And I haven't mentioned other solutions in that space, such as Apache Thrift. By no means my list was meant to be comprehensive. BTW, I won't argue that other solutions indeed solve exactly the same problem like NETCONF/YANG - in fact, they do not.
 
> > In both cases there is are tooling eco-system that are IMHO widely used
> > by app developers (and often preferred over YANG). The YANG tooling
> that
> > exists in industry, e.g., for code auto-generation, is quite specific to
> > network management, as far as I can tell.
> >
> > To me, whether to develop models in YANG or in other data modeling
> > languages depends a lot on the use case and the target software
> > developer community. Of course, in the RTG and OPS area YANG is the
> > default data modeling language.
> 
> My experience is that people typically will take whatever there is lots of
> tooling for and it's "easy to use". Then as they use it more and more
> extensively, they discover all limitations and demand the tool is
> extended/enhanced. People will say "oh, JSON is so easy to work with" and
> after a while they discover that data models is good for
> defining/validating what goes on the wire, and now all of a sudden after a
> while you've invented all the "complication" of YANG.
> 
> Personally it's not super important to me that NETCONF is used, but I do
> think using a good data modeling language is important, thus I think YANG
> modeling is important.

If one is not using NETCONF, YANG may not be the only data modeling language one could use. Having said this, YANG is clearly an *excellent* data modeling language, and probably the only relevant one in some areas of industry (e.g. on routers).

Personally, I am perfectly fine with using YANG.

Michael

 
> The same way a huge amount of work has gone into XML, a huge amount of
> work has gone into YANG, to make sure it's well defined and works from
> lots of aspects.
> 
> --
> Mikael Abrahamsson    email: [e-mail]