Network Management Datastore Architecture Published

The definition of a network management datastore architecture (NMDA) has been published [RFC 8342]. We believe this is one of the more important RFCs we have worked on since it tells us how to think about configurations and their relationship to operational state. A few more RFCs will appear during the coming weeks providing the technology extensions that allow us to use the new framework in practice. Work on this document started with a trip to Stockholm in May 2016 but the discussions have a much longer history. We have run repeatedly into problems because the values of configuration objects may mean different things at different processing stages and we hope that the new network management datastore architecture allows us to be much clearer about the semantics of configuration objects in the future.