Every network engineer wants to automate their network. Automation is our pride. Working automation is proof of good architecture — and in large setups, an operational necessity. Yet I've always felt that switch vendors aren't exactly helping us.

Networking is a conservative world. Every time I dove into automation, I ended up frustrated by how far behind it is. First, there are the archaic protocols that nobody truly understands and that — at least everywhere I've worked — never delivered in practice: SNMP in write mode, NETCONF, RESTCONF, screen-scraping over SSH. (Yes, OpenConfig and gNMI exist; if your vendor mix supports them well, I envy you.) Right next to them stands a long parade of revolutionary proprietary management systems from the vendors themselves. The trouble with those is always the same: they're heavyweight, they integrate poorly with anything else, and above all they have the lifespan of a mayfly.…