APIs and Interfaces

Within this post, I’ll dive deeper into the python code example, where I use the Cisco NX-API on Nexus 5500. We will have a closer look at the HTTP/HTTPs calls using the python requests library and on the interaction with HTTP based interfaces.

This week I will dive more into a network programmability topic. I will show you a practical use case for the Cisco NX-API. It provides an interface to communicate with a Nexus device using HTTP/HTTPs using JSON or XML. Because of the reliable request-response nature of the HTTP protocol, it is usually more preferable than scraping Telnet/SSH outputs.

The goal of this post is to give you a practical introduction to HTTP based REST APIs, or RESTful APIs. Many applications in the (networking) world are providing APIs based on a REST architecture. I think you should have at least an basic understanding what it is, how to interact with it and why it can be helpful for you.