Cisco has released Basic ConfD, a free version of its ConfD management agent framework with a rich set of APIs for developers of physical and virtual networking devices, to accelerate the adoption of programmability for the broader networking industry. ConfD provides the industry-leading implementation of the NETCONF protocol driven by the YANG data modeling language.
Tail-f, now part of Cisco, provides two products, ConfD and NCS. NCS, a multi-vendor network service orchestrator for traditional and virtualized networks is transitioning to the Cisco portfolio and will be marketed under the name Cisco Network Service Orchestrator enabled by Tail-f.
Cisco claims that by implementing an end-to-end programmable network based on open standards, service providers can reduce configuration and management costs by nearly 50 percent over a five-year period, and currently in use by more than 75 network equipment providers. The no-cost Basic ConfD is feature-rich and will be available for production use without additional fees for NETCONF. The premium version of ConfD, including a complete set of north-bound interfaces including CLI, REST and SNMP, continues to be commercially available.
