onePK

[Seittit]

Cisco's onePK can be used on ASRs, ISRs, and CSRs.

That's it.

Am I missing something here, or am I supposed to be excited about this limitation? Is there any real-world use for network engineers, or is onePK just pie-in-the-sky stuff?

[deanwebb]

What's it supposed to be used for, asked the guy that didn't bother to Google it.

[Seittit]

 One Platform Kit (onePK) is a cross-platform application programming interface (API) and software development kit (SDK) that enables you to develop applications that interact directly with Cisco networking devices. It provides you with the ability to access networking services using a set of standardized APIs.

[wintermute000]

Its far from pie in the sky stuff. JunOS has had an equivalent API for years, and its a major selling point of Arista (just ask AspiringNetworker).
This is the first time Cisco has let you directly manipulate its entire enterprise routing range via API (no, screen scraping/pexpect or netconf does not count).

Most notably APIC-EM will plug directly into this meaning they want you to start writing python/java scripts and apps pointing to APIC-EM as an abstraction layer for the 'network'. So you can either target individual devices directly/manually or register everything through APIC-EM then script/program against APIC-EM - kinda like SDN middleware controller.

I've been to more than one pre-sales dog an pony shows and am in the middle of spinning up an APIC-EM image @ work (got it spun up but throwing weird errors... we think its domain/cert based issues, so we have to go the back-channels again to obtain an updated image and/or attempt a certificate re-signing). One of my colleagues has managed to do basic interaction via python to onePK e.g. pull a routing table or interface table so I know for a fact it works. If I wasn't so tied up with JNCIS-SP / CCIE studies I would be pythoning away at this right now (need moar class expertise!).