grpc

Ansible Collection - nokia.grpc

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This collection for Ansible by RedHat provides connection plugins and modules to interact with devices that support gRPC API services.

Status of this project

This collection implements the gRPC Network Management Interface (gNMI) service. The gRPC PROTO interface definition is available from GitHub. The gNMI specification can be found here.

Please be aware, that the gNMI connection plugin establishes a dedicated, persistent gRPC session. Therefore transport, connectivity and API service are all collapsed into the connection plugin without the need to have a loader for any sort of vendor specific sub-plugins.

Even this project is supposed to be agnostic to vendors and device families, this collection has only been validated against Nokia SR OS running the 19.10 release.

As of today, the gNMI modules of this collection only suppport JSON_IETF (preferred) and JSON encoding. The implementation will run a Capability request during session setup, to determine the list of encodings supported by the networking device (acting as gNMI server). The encoding auto-discovery can be disabled, by setting the required encoding in the playbook, host file or using an environment variable.

Installation

Distribution is via ansible-galaxy. To install this collection, please use the following command:

ansible-galaxy collection install nokia.grpc

If you have already installed a previous version, you can upgrade to the latest version of this collection, by adding the --force-with-deps option:

ansible-galaxy collection install nokia.grpc --force-with-deps

Usage

To use the gNMI modules from this collection, please make sure to set ansible_connection variable to nokia.grpc.gnmi. Due to the nature of gNMI being vendor agnostic, the network_os does not have any impact to the function of this module.

Requirements

• Ansible 2.9 (or newer)

Supported vendors

Tested with Nokia SR OS 19.10

Playbooks

• gNMI_Capabilities.yml
• gNMI_GetConfig.yml
• gNMI_Backup.yml
• gNMI_Restore.yml
• Nokia_SROS_gNMI_ConfigDemo.yml
• Nokia_SROS_gNMI_GetConfig_SubOnce.yml
• Nokia_SROS_gNMI_StreamingTelemetry.yml

Modules

• gnmi_capabilities
• gnmi_get
• gnmi_config
• gnmi_subscribe

Roles

None

Plugins

• connection: gnmi
• action: gnmi_config

Next Steps

• Validation for other vendors, device families and Nokia SR OS releases
• Validation for private keys and certification chains
• Add logic to capture gRPC-level debug logs (improve trouble shooting)
• Add connection plugins and modules for OpenConfig gNOI API services
• More testing/sanity for various error scenarios
• Add support for DryRun/Preview (check-mode) with compare (diff-mode)