SDN in the Management Plane: OpenConfig and Streaming Telemetry

The networking industry has made good progress in the last few years on developing programmable interfaces and protocols for the control plane to enable a more dynamic and efficient infrastructure. Despite this progress, some parts of networking risk being left behind, most notably network management and configuration. The state-of-the-art in network management remains relegated to proprietary device interfaces (e.g., CLIs), imperative, incremental configuration, and lack of meaningful abstractions.

We propose a framework for network configuration guided by software-defined networking principles, with a focus on developing common models of network devices, and common languages to describe network structure and policies. We also propose a publish/subscribe framework for next generation network telemetry, focused on streaming structured data from network elements themselves.