NETCONF Actions: Imperative Configuration Made Declarative

Problem Statement

Network operations often need imperative NETCONF actions (reboot, commit/confirm, upgrade, custom RPCs) that don't fit the declarative GitOps model. Today these are handled by ad-hoc scripts outside Git, for example using Argo workflows.

Description

The teams working on SDC.io are currently designing the CRDs around NETCONF actions. There are considerations like how to control the order, what to do on failed actions and how to handle rollbacks. Based on the progress, the hackathon will be able to play around with this feature and directly provide feedback to the developer team, and participate in the design and implementation details for this feature.

Project Details

Leaders:

  • Swisscom (Alex North, Fabian Schulz)
  • Nokia (Wim Hendrickx, Markus Vahlenkamp)

Hackathon Objectives

  • Evaluate proposal made by SDC and help find solutions to bring imperative NETCONF actions into the cloud native world.
  • Refine the Action / ActionSet CRD to make SDC usable for the configuration of all CNF's.
Aspect Description
Action CRD definition Schema for a NETCONF action (RPC, edit-config, commit)
Ordering How actions run one after the other
Failure handling What happens when an action fails
Retry How and how often an action is retried
Rollback How to revert to a known-good state