APIs: Open or Na?

The Network Automation Journey

In this episode I talk quickly about whether APIs should be standardized.

Pretty much all APIs are open in that the vendors allow anyone to access them and the specifications on how to interact with them are public. But using NX-API from Cisco and eAPI from Arista means using two different sets of commands to do that same thing. Projects like OpenConfig/gNMI are meant to provide a single way to configure parameters no matter the devices through a single data model.

While this is useful, in the data center it's not so much a problem we tend to have. Working with one API is OK, since data center networks are typically built using only one vendor.