Learn, Test, and Adopt YANG Programmable Interfaces

This blog is co-authored by Han Trieu, a Software Engineering Leader with Cisco

What is YANG Suite?

Cisco YANG Suite provides a set of tools and plugins to learn, test, and adopt YANG programmable interfaces.  YANG Suite was released earlier this year, but it’s no stranger to Cisco Engineering teams.  It has already been leveraged within Cisco for many years for YANG model development.

How has Cisco been using YANG Suite?

Cisco devices provide many features through YANG models. Feature experts have in-depth understanding of the functionality and are in the best position to develop the corresponding YANG models. This means that many engineers across the organization need to understand, develop, and test YANG models. YANG Suite has played an instrumental role in this.

Development and test engineers use YANG Suite to learn and develop YANG models.  YANG Suite provides a nice tree view of the YANG models, through a GUI.  The user can drill down to explore the attributes on each node.  While browsing the model, the user can quickly generate a NETCONF payload with nodes of interest, and try it out live on the device.  gNMI and RESTCONF are also supported.  More details available on the Cisco YANG Suite release blog.

YANG Suite has also played a critical role in testing of the YANG models.  YANG Suite test functionalities have been recently incorporated into pyATS Blitz yang action and available through DevNET.  This provides a framework for teams to build simple unit tests to more complex feature and scale tests.

YANG Suite’s Test Generation capabilities

As a first step of YANG testing, engineers need to verify the CRUD operations on each YANG leaf. Cisco models provides many features and can contain thousands of leaves. Creating CRUD tests for each leaf is very time consuming and error prone activity. YANG Suite provides a capability to auto-generate these tests. The user can select any node in the tree. With 1-click, YANG Suite crawls through the entire tree under the node and generate CRUD tests for each leaf. This has saved engineering teams huge amount of testing time. The resulting pyATS tests can be easily integrated into regressions.

By leveraging YANG Suite, Cisco Engineering teams have been able to drastically improve productivity. YANG Suite has accelerated learning time and greatly reduced the time needed for development and test of YANG models.

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