Network s API

Often, your network consists of network devices that do not change a lot once put into production. For example, you would have core devices, distribution devices, spine, leaf, top of rack switches, and so on. Each of the devices would have certain characteristics and features that you would like to keep in a persistent location so you can easily retrieve them later on. This is often done in terms of storing data in a database. However, you would not normally want to give other users, who might want this information, direct access to the database; nor do they want to learn all the complex SQL query language. For this case, we can leverage Flask and the Flask-SQLAlchemy extension of Flask.

Note

You can learn more about Flask-SQLAlchemy at http://flask-sqlalchemy.pocoo.org/2.1/.

Flask-SQLAlchemy

Of course, SQLAlchemy and the Flask extension are a database abstraction layer and object relational mapper, respectively. It's a fancy way of saying use the Python object for a database....