Policy driven zero touch provisioning of network devices

A method comprising:

• receiving, by one or more processors of a system, a request from a first network device of a plurality of network devices, the request including network device identification information that identifies the first network device;
• identifying, by the one or more processors, a matching provisioning policy from among a plurality of provisioning policies, the plurality of provisioning policies having a priority order, based on the network device identification information contained in the request, wherein the matching provisioning policy has a highest priority out of one or more matching provisioning policies, and wherein the network device identification information includes one or more of a Media Access Control (MAC) address for the first network device, a serial number of the first network device, a subnet of the first network device, a vendor of the first network device, and a model of the first network device;
• and
• generating, by the one or more processors, a response to the first network device, the response including address information assigned to the first network device and boot information corresponding to the first network device as defined by the matching provisioning policy.

A network device comprising:

• memory;
• and
• one or more processors configured to:
• generate a request to a system, the request including network device identification information that identifies the network device from among a plurality of network devices, wherein the network device identification information includes one or more of a Media Access Control (MAC) address for the network device, a serial number of the network device, a subnet of the network device, a vendor of the network device, and a model of the network device;
• receive a response from the system, the response including address information assigned to the network device and boot information for the network device, the response generated by the system based on a matching provisioning policy identified by the provisioning system based on the network device identification information included in the request, the matching provisioning policy having a highest priority out of one or more matching provisioning policies from a plurality of provisioning policies having a priority order;
• automatically generate, based on the boot information included in the response, at least one of a configuration pull request to the system and an image pull request to the system;
• and
• automatically perform a bootstrapping operation of the network device based on at least one of a boot configuration received in response to the configuration pull request and a boot image received in response to the image pull request.