John Herbert of Lame Journal writes:

In my last post  I discussed the problems with managing configurations from multiple vendors, both from the perspective of parsing the configurations for my own nefarious purposes and that of configuring those network devices. The aim would be to configure the network devices using an abstracted (descriptive) configuration — that is, something describing  what  we want to configure rather than  how  to configure it on a particular platform, and letting an underlying layer convert that into an actual implementation, much in the same way that Puppet describes what you want to have happen, but it’s up to the Puppet Agent to figure out how to make that happen on a specific platform.

John has some great thoughts about Tail-f and their Networking Field Day 7 presentation.

Read more: Configuration Management the Tail-f NCS Way