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Embracing NETCONF#

RIPE 93 digest Program Core pick 26–30 October 2026

Abstract Slides Recording

Maria Matejka, BIRD | CZ.NIC

  • Why: Twenty years after RFC 4741, NETCONF/YANG/RESTCONF are the default network-automation interfaces — and this is a practitioner's fine-print audit of whether the zoo of protocols, formats and schemas can actually be relied on.
  • What: A critical tour of the ecosystem: NETCONF's datastore and locking semantics, RESTCONF's HTTP mapping and its quirks (it cannot manipulate NETCONF locks, and auto-commits the candidate datastore after every successful edit — silently committing other sources' staged edits), YANG modeling with XML and JSON encodings (RFC 7951), and where canonical vs. alternate representations diverge.
  • How: Quote-the-spec analysis: each claim is anchored to the exact RFC text, contrasting what the documents promise with what implementations deliver — the "have you read the fine print?" framing from the abstract.
  • Where applicable: Anyone consuming NETCONF/RESTCONF/YANG in automation or tooling; the practical constraint is vendor support variance, which is precisely what the talk surfaces.