What is a benefit of a model-driven approach for infrastructure automation?

A core benefit of model-driven automation is its ability to automatically translate a high-level, declarative definition of the desired state (the model) into the specific, imperative actions or scripts required to achieve and maintain that state across various infrastructure components.

Model-driven approaches aim to abstract away the need for extensive manual script generation, focusing on the desired state rather than enforcing the generation of all imperative scripts.

While some model-driven tools can simplify specific tasks, the overall learning curve for understanding complex data models, schema languages (like YANG), and the automation tools themselves can still be substantial.

Model-driven automation's primary goal is often to abstract away low-level coding details, not necessarily to expand system administrators' direct coding knowledge, by focusing on declarative configurations.