Subject: [Taps] Potential alternatives to YANG

From: "Scharf, Michael" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2019 11:52:56 +0000

As mentioned on the mic: There are quite a number of solutions to "rigorously" specify APIs. Some of these general-purpose techniques are IMHO also used for configuration/provisioning tasks in the networking industry, i.e., as alternative to YANG.

In a former life, I had quite some discussions on the role of YANG as compared to, for instance:

* swagger.io (https://swagger.io/)

* gRPC, gNMI and protocol buffers (see e.g. draft-openconfig-rtgwg-gnmi-spec-01 in the IETF)

In both cases there is are tooling eco-system that are IMHO widely used by app developers (and often preferred over YANG). The YANG tooling that exists in industry, e.g., for code auto-generation, is quite specific to network management, as far as I can tell.

To me, whether to develop models in YANG or in other data modeling languages depends a lot on the use case and the target software developer community. Of course, in the RTG and OPS area YANG is the default data modeling language.

Michael 
(as somebody who attends RTG and OPS working groups)