So hopefully, the picture is starting to come together.
It doesn't feel as fuzzy as it did a few Nuggets go
when we were beginning.
We now understand that there is the northbound API, which
is where we talk to the management
plane or the software-defined networking controller
and tell it what our intent is in the first place.
Now it's time to talk about the southbound direction, which
is where we can talk directly to the devices
and send configurations and changes and statistics
down to those devices too.
Let's keep going talking about those outbound APIs. WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
Let's keep going talking about those outbound APIs.
So I left the drawing on the diagram
because that's really the purpose here
is we're just adding pieces to the puzzle
so that you can see the entire workflow of how
working programmatically with these devices works.
And now our objective is to talk about the southbound API.
In the last Nugget, we introduced the northbound API,
which is where we're pushing our policy or our intent
into Firepower Management Center or any software-defined
networking controller.
Now we're talking about what does
Firepower Management Center do with this business WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
Firepower Management Center do with this business
intent or policy.
Once we've deployed our policy and our business intent
to Firepower Management Center, it's now on FMC here
to push these policies down to the actual devices themselves.
This is where Firepower Management Center
is going to be programmatically communicating to all
of the impacted devices in sending the configuration
changes that need to happen.
And this happens in the southbound direction.
Now, you could absolutely write your application WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
to go straight to each one of these devices
and communicate changes to them that way.
But of course, that adds a lot of unnecessary overhead
when you have something like a software-defined networking
controller.
In this case, we could create one interaction here with FMC,
and then FMC handles the heavy lifting
of communicating to each one of these devices,
using again REST APIs or network automation protocols
like NETCONF or RESTCONF.
So the southbound API is all about interacting directly
with the network devices themselves
in implementing the actual granular changes and commands WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
in implementing the actual granular changes and commands
that need to happen in order to implement our policy
or our intent that was described in the northbound API.
So that sets up what the southbound API is.
In the next couple Nuggets, we're
going to add this in the east-west directions,
have some fun.
I hope this has been informative for you,
and I'd like to thank you for viewing.