Glossary

Terms used throughout the guides and reference pages. For resource fields and workflows, use the CRD reference and reference overview.

Term	Meaning
App-Hosting	Cisco's on-device container platform. Runs .tar container packages on IOS-XE devices.
CDP	Cisco Discovery Protocol, used for Layer 2 neighbor discovery.
CR / CRD	Custom Resource / Custom Resource Definition, Kubernetes' API extension mechanism.
gNMI	gRPC Network Management Interface, used for model-driven telemetry and optional config transport.
gNOI	gRPC Network Operations Interface, used for read-only probes, file operations, reboot, factory reset, and software upgrade flows.
IOx	Cisco's on-device application hosting framework, including App-Hosting.
Network as Code	Declarative intent shape consumed by IOSXEConfig, NXOSConfig, and, with a registered adapter, controller-centric NetworkControllerConfig.
OTEL / OpenTelemetry	Vendor-neutral observability framework; this project emits OTEL traces and metrics.
RESTCONF	HTTP/JSON management API for network devices, defined by RFC 8040, modeled by YANG.
Virtual Kubelet	Upstream project letting any system appear as a Kubernetes node.
VK	Short for Virtual Kubelet.
VPG / VirtualPortGroup	A logical L3 interface on IOS-XE used to bridge app-hosted containers into the device network.
YANG	Data modeling language used to describe configuration and state.