NETCONF Vs RESTCONF

Hello friends, last week many of my colleagues asked me about Netconf, Restconf & gRPC, specifically what is the difference among them. 

At a high level, my colleagues understand that these protocols were developed to minimize "vendor-lockin" and build vendor-agnostic network management & monitoring applications for a specific technology. 

Let me try to summarize(as succinctly as possible):

1. Both NETCONF and RESTCONF have CONF in common, which means these interfaces can be used to retrieve the device configuration and manipulate the device configuration. 

2. Both NETCONF and RESTCONF use YANG data models which define the schema/template of the information that is pushed and retrieved from device/s.

3. Why do we need RESTCONF: RESTful APIs were very famous in the software industry, many processes, and integration were already done using RESTful APIs, keeping this in mind RESTCONF was promoted as another technique(apart from NETCONF) to work with YANG data models.

Let's compare the major difference/s:

A quick summary of major differences

Comparison of operations between Netconf and Restconf:

Netconf  layers(from RFC):

gRPC in another post and will link it to this post, Happy reading! 

References:

RFC Netconf(6241)

RFC RESTCONF(8040)