All is fair in 💔 and #NANOG Hackathons — refurbishing NAPALM 🔥 drivers to build a multi-vendor #gNMI plug-in 🔌

Multi-vendor NAPALM driver based on gNMI

We’re in Austin, Texas this week where the 84th North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) convention is taking place. Preceding that, during the Super Bowl ⅬⅤⅠ weekend (in which another blue team is about to win big), there is a Hackathon in which the teams are challenged to prepare for the networking equivalent of an epic halftime show.

Yours truly figures it would be a good idea to use this opportunity to kick-off the creation of a multi-vendor NAPALM driver. Most (if not all) NAPALM drivers to date are single vendor, see for example the Nokia SR OS NAPALM driver and the SR Linux variant. However, there is significant overlap in functionality and logic, and so I’d like to see if there is a possibility to “share the burden” by collaborating on some of the more basic (and — quite frankly — boring) parts of the drivers.

My (rough) plan is to clone the best current NAPALM driver code base — eos has been suggested — remove whatever logic it uses to talk to its vendor specific device APIs, and replace that with pyGNMI. To demonstrate this can work for multiple vendors, we’ll be targeting both Nokia SR Linux and Arista cEOS (as provided for the Hackathon infrastructure).

We’ll see how far we will get — given that many of us would also like to see that other blue team beat the Bengals — but as a Minimal Viable Proof-of-Concept:

• Load/replace configuration
• get_interfaces
• get_bgp_config