Cisco is releasing a free, basic version of its ConfD management
agent software to the industry with an unlimited, perpetual license with the goal of accelerating the adoption of network programmability.
ConfD, which was developed by Tail-f (now part of Cisco), is a management agent framework with a rich set of APIs for developers of physical and virtual networking devices. ConfD is the leading implementation of the NETCONF protocol driven by the YANG data modeling language. It is currently used by more than 75 network equipment providers.
Cisco said its 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.
Tail-f's other product is NCS, a multi-vendor network service orchestrator for traditional and virtualized networks. This product is transitioning to the Cisco portfolio and will be marketed under the name Cisco Network Service Orchestrator enabled by Tail-f.
"We continue to see strong demand from networking vendors, as they sharply ramp up their efforts to provide standardized programmatic interfaces to their virtual or physical network devices," said Fredrik Lundberg, director of strategy and planning, Cisco's cloud and virtualization group. "ConfD dramatically reduces the time and resources needed to develop network management interfaces. Networking vendors leverage Basic ConfD to rapidly develop products that are fully NETCONF- and YANG-compliant."
Basic ConfD is available now and can be downloaded from the Tail-f website.
In June 2014, Cisco agreed to acquire privately held Tail-f Systems, a leader in multi-vendor network service orchestration solutions for traditional and virtualized networks, for approximately $175 million in cash and retention-based incentives.Tail-f, which is based in Stockholm, Sweden, is known for its multi-vendor configuration management and network automation software. The Tail-f Network Control System (NCS) provides a single network-wide interface to all network devices and all network applications and services, as well as a common modeling language and datastore for both services and devices. Engineers can use NCS to gain fine-grained control over multi-vendor equipment using a single tool.
The Tail-f ConfD software for on-device management provides automatic rendering of all northbound interfaces. It implements the NETCONF protocol and YANG modeling language.
