I think this sort of thing plagues many industries. Ask a mechanic what they think of the engineers in Detroit. You'll get an earful. For some reason (probably money), companies as a whole have divorced the people that design the product\service from the people that use or maintain the product\service, but still expect them to make acceptable products\services. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com Midwest-IX http://www.midwest-ix.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Måns Nilsson via NANOG" <nanog@lists.nanog.org> To: "North American Network Operators Group" <nanog@lists.nanog.org> Cc: "Måns Nilsson" <mansaxel@besserwisser.org> Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2025 5:12:24 AM Subject: [NANOG] Re: The Network CLI -- Love it ? Hate it? Needed? Subject: [NANOG] The Network CLI -- Love it ? Hate it? Needed? Date: Tue, Mar 18, 2025 at 03:05:33PM -0400 Quoting Mark Prosser via NANOG (nanog@lists.nanog.org):
Hi NANOG community,
I posed this question in several chat groups, but I'd like to get your opinions.
Do you love the CLI? Do you hate the CLI? Would you -- or do you already -- enjoy a world where you never need to touch the CLI, to manage your network?
If there was such a world, I would quickly invent CLI tools to do the things I need. Do note I would not automatically set those tools to actually login to boxes and do things, but perhaps use the command line to rationally poke at the infrastructure serving web pages, and make it do stuff. In the present, not quite so perfect world, the ability of the available commercial management solutions to present a concise and detailed picture of errors is severely vectorised -- it is quite good at some things while it is right horrible and smash-the-keyboard-in-the-screen-rage-inducingly bad at others. Probably they excel the most in helicopter view ability: You can see and sometimes do things to a lot of systems in parallel. Further, all management solutions I've seen, no exceptions, are severely constrained in what solutions they can support. In effect, the management platform works like a T-Ford; you can build any network you want, as long as it is a spine-leaf model and you connect the yellow cables to the leftmost port. And a host of similar stupid but understandable constraints. Finally, given the extraction of truth source from the network element into the management layer, you basically are requiring the management platform to be 100% available. Any local fault mitigation at the network element layer will add an inconsistency between the phantom image of network state in the management layer, and the actual state in the network. Adding those together, most network management systems give you pinhole 20/20 vision on some things while lying to you in other directions, and also tying your hands in both planning and operations. This leaves us with a mixed picture. (yes, I am an optimist!) I would rank my desired improvements thusly starting with the most important: * The network must be the source of truth, once configured. * The management systems must support all the quirky things we can do at the command line. On the "router". * Management systems should have their own CLI. Following the simple Unix rules of powerful, understated, automatable, and incomprehensible. The source of truth is the most important because if it is done right, we can leverage all kinds of tools and all systems will be aligned to the actual state. It also is not trivial. By far. The full support includes things like "I want to manage my transition in this brownfield by setting up a connection that not only is sub-par and ugly, but also necessary." Much of the niceties will happen under bullet no 1 above, because I can do all specials on the CLI and the system should follow suit -- but if it could be done in any management channel there could be a wider adaptation. Finally, a management solution aimed at professionals must be extendable and the command line still has the lowest threshold there. Especially if you are trying to onboard greybeards in your new shining world. </soapbox> -- Måns Nilsson primary/secondary/besserwisser/machina MN-1334-RIPE SA0XLR +46 705 989668 I want another RE-WRITE on my CEASAR SALAD!! _______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog@lists.nanog.org/message/TDQC4JJO...