Get Ready to Explore gRPC in the DevNet IOS XR Always-on Sandbox

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We are always looking to deliver more at DevNet. Our fierce developer community is always learning, always coding, and we want to help them grow and learn the skills that will equip them in their roles now and for the next five years. Our DevNet sandbox has been a success for many developers, to get hands-on and explore Cisco platforms and APIs. So, when we asked to enable gRPC on our IOS XR always-on sandbox, of course, we said, ‘let’s do it’.

What is gRPC?

gRPC is a modern, lightweight communication protocol from Google. gRPC is a high-performance, open-source, universal RPC framework that can run in any environment.

Protocol buffers, or Proto, are Google’s language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. It is based on protocol buffers, an open-source mechanism for serializing structured data, which is language and platform-neutral. You define the structure using protocol buffer message types in .proto files. Each protocol buffer message is a small logical record of information, containing a series of name-value pairs. XR devises ship with the YANG files that define the data models they support. Using a management protocol like gRPC, you can programmatically query a device for the list of models it supports and retrieves. gRPC encodes requests and responses in binary. gRPC is extensible to other content types along with Protobuf. The Protobuf binary data object in gRPC is transported over HTTP/2.

gRPC supports distributed applications and services between a client and server. gRPC provides the infrastructure to build a device management service to exchange configuration and operational data between a client and a server. The structure of the data is defined by YANG models.

Efficient: Protocol buffers are verbose and descriptive. But they are smaller, faster, more efficient, and provide high performance.
Machine Readable: Protocol buffers are binary or machine-readable and can be used to exchange messages between services and not over browsers.
Generators: With a compiler, Protocol buffers can be easily compiled to source code along with runtime libraries for your choice of programming language. This makes serialization or deserialization easier, with no need for hand parsing.
Supports Types: Unlike JSON, we can specify field types and add validations for the same in the. proto file.

Getting started with gRPC on the DevNet Sandbox

Always-on Sandbox we are mapping the inbound port 19399 to 57777. The first thing we need to do is ensure that the IOS XR sandbox has gRPC enabled. Here is the configuration required with `tls` disabled.

To make this simple you can clone this sample code and install the requirements. The package contains a library with the methods that are available to use over gRPC with IOS-XR boxes after 6.0.0. The API has several methods which allows a user to send simple RPC commands such as get and push using YANG and JSON.

The repo consists of two main components:

The compiled pb2 file from the proto definition.
A Python module accessing the pb2 file with the library bindings.

To get all the interfaces from the Always-on Sandbox IOS-XR device, we can run this small piece of code derived from OpenConfig YANG models, and serialize this as JSON. Change to into the examples directory and run the following code, this uses the YANG model. https://github.com/YangModels/yang/blob/master/vendor/cisco/xr/653/openconfig-interfaces.yang and will print all the interface from the Always-on Sandbox IOS-XR device in the `json` format.

Code Example “Configure, update, and delete BGP”

This next code uses the JSON below and is based off the YANG model provided by Cisco: https://github.com/YangModels/yang/blob/master/vendor/cisco/xr/653/Cisco-IOS-XR-ipv4-bgp-cfg.yang You can walk through the hierarchy using pyang, and create a JSON model similar to the example below. https://github.com/mbj4668/pyang/wiki/TreeOutput This JSON model is for a BGP configuration. We can see that it is defining a BGP instance and a single neighbor.

This code uses Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). This is a programming paradigm where different components of a computer program are modelled after real-world objects. An object is anything that has some characteristics and can perform a function. All args used in the running of the code are handled using Click. Click is a Python package for creating beautiful command line interfaces in a composable way with as little code as necessary. From the example’s directory run the following:

GetConfig – Retrieves configuration data. Takes model path in JSON format as input argument. Returns configuration data in JSON format and an error string.

MergeConfig – Merge’s configuration data. Takes modelled data in JSON format as input argument. Returns error string.
DeleteConfig – Deletes configuration data. Takes modelled data in JSON format as input argument. Returns error string.
ReplaceConfig – Replaces configuration data. Takes modelled data in JSON format as input argument. Returns error string.

Start with a ‘get.’ This will look at the Always-on Sandbox IOS-XR device configuration and return that BGP is not configured (note that this is an Always-on Sandbox and that other users might be using this or there could be stale configurations on the device).

Next, add a base BGP config using the JSON file we looked at before, using python grpc_cfg.py replace

If we logged into the Always-on Sandbox IOS-XR device, we would now see one neighbor configured.

However, we can use the ‘get’ function once again to see this.

If this worked correctly you should see the JSON file we looked at, and the response from the get should be identical. Now, use a merge request to add another neighbor with the second JSON file.

The resulting config should be the first config plus the second. Or in other words, there are two neighbors defined. This can also be seen by running the python grpc_cfg.py get file once more.

To delete the configuration, we can send an empty JSON file, followed by the get file to confirm that BGP is no longer configured/active.

Try the IOS XR sandbox today – FREE!

Head over to IOS XR Always-on Sandbox. And, why not combine the use of your sandbox when trying out some ready-to-go code from DevNet Automation Exchange!

Hopefully, this code will keep you innovating, integrating, and automating no matter what area of technology you’re interested in! It’s great to see the community growing and it’s fantastic to be able to provide access to this world-class technology to see what you’ll create next. We’re working on more exciting releases coming in 2021, too.

Have a comment or question? Please leave me a note in the comments section below.