Re: 2025 State of Network Automation Survey - Requesting Your Participation

[Saku Ytti via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

On Mon, 22 Sept 2025 at 21:11, Tom Beecher via NANOG
<nanog () lists nanog org> wrote:

> - Current tooling usually gets written with current languages and
> frameworks.
> - Older tooling stays around until it's required to be replaced.
> - Everyone automates some things , nobody automates everything.

Coworker was looking at Ariasta AVD and it made me realise how little
will any of this ever help the type of networks I work with.

This higher-level provisioning addresses well the needs of DC nodes,
but not DC edge or SP.

And even cloudy shops don't care much about DC edge, as even
hyperscalers largely write things like BGP policies by hand. Because
you touch them very rarely, and for most they are very simple, there
is not much to be won for a problem that is much harder to solve than
bringing up interfaces.


Does the community have any appetite for some type of gRPC BGP policy API?

I'm thinking of a streaming API, with concerns for latency, possibly
concerns for being SIMDable (otoh that may be ridiculous
micro-optimization, as long as the API pipelines).

The API would send pre-policy adjribin prefixes to some host over
gRPC, and gRPC would respond with action that the device should take
for that prefix (reject, accept, prepend, add/remove community etc).

Of course we should recommend that vendors offer the ability to run
the gRPC server on the local RE as well, so you can keep this entirely
distributed without circular dependencies forming.

I think very few would extract a lot of value from this. For us
particularly almost all our config complexity is in BGP policies, and
there is no work happening to reduce pain here. This would allow you
to write your own policy engine in whatever language you want and then
drop that server in any any-vendor RE for platform agnostic BGP
policies.
The alternative option, having some common policy language is far more
unreasonable ask.



-- 
  ++ytti
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