Open Networking Summit 2017

NETCONF's use of strongly-typed YANG to describe device configuration makes safe and robust device configuration possible, but also exposes complexities in operation. Most deployments choose to use a controller or management system to help with issues of inventory and credential management. Further, this controller often does sanity checks to ensure that operations are likely to be successful on devices and, if not, there is useful debugging information. Frustratingly, this exposes trade-offs between relying on strict enforcement of YANG to catching errors early and more relaxed behavior to enable compatibility with imperfect NETCONF implementations in the real world. We show how we navigated these trade-offs to provide a flexible, open-source NETCONF solution that is strongly-typed and enables simple configuration changes for compatibility with imperfect NETCONF implementations.