Ryan Tischer, a technical services architect at Cisco Systems, is the author of Programming and Automating Cisco Networks. Networks consist of distributed nodes — routers, switches and the like — that ...

Some network teams are finding power and simplicity in the shift from telling devices what to do, using imperative programming, to describing what they should be, using declarative programming.

Networks consist of distributed nodes — routers, switches and the like — that systems administrators and network engineers have, for the most part, managed individually via command line interfaces.