If NETCONF is the powerful, ceremonious way to do model-driven management, RESTCONF is the friendly one. It exposes the same YANG models over ordinary HTTPS, with the REST verbs every engineer already half-knows: GET to read, PATCH to
NETCONF is the protocol that replaced screen-scraping. Instead of sending CLI commands and parsing the text that comes back, you exchange structured XML over an SSH session, against a formal YANG data model. The result is automation that does
Before Python and NETCONF, before Ansible and Terraform, Cisco routers already had a way to automate themselves: the Embedded Event Manager. EEM runs entirely on the device, watches for events, and takes actions when they occur, no external server, no
By the time you have read this cluster, you have four different ways to segment a network: VRFs, VLANs, VXLAN, and LISP. They overlap, they are often used together, and choosing the wrong one (or reaching for a fabric when
A network engineer in 2026 spends a surprising amount of time on networks that have no physical cables. The server team's hypervisor has a virtual switch inside it that your VLANs terminate on. The cloud VPC is entirely
Nobody builds a greenfield campus. You have an existing network with real users, real applications, and real uptime requirements, and any move to SD-Access has to happen alongside it, not instead of it overnight. The interesting engineering in SD-
SD-Access is Cisco's intent-based campus fabric, and it is where the two protocols from earlier in this cluster stop being academic. LISP is its control plane, VXLAN is its data plane, and Catalyst Center is the
VXLAN gives you the data plane: a way to wrap Ethernet in UDP and route it across a fabric. But an encapsulation is useless until the ingress switch knows which remote switch a destination lives behind. The original answer was
Every modern data centre fabric, and the campus fabric of SD-Access, is built on VXLAN. It is the technology that lets you stretch a Layer 2 segment across a routed network, put a hundred thousand tenants where VLANs gave
An IP address is doing two jobs at once, and that overload is the root of a surprising number of networking problems. It is an identity ("this is my server") and a location ("here is where it
The management plane is how you reach and control your devices: SSH sessions, SNMP polls, NTP syncs, the VTY lines an engineer logs into. It is also the softest target on the box, because it is the one part of
Network automation is no longer optional, and every automated network is driven by APIs: RESTCONF on the routers, the Catalyst Center intent API, the SD-WAN Manager API, cloud provider APIs. Each of those is a new door into your