If your device has a Cisco-like CLI and you would like to use ConfD in order to add a NETCONF interface, then ConfD provides a useful CDB API that can be used to ease the integration effort.
Normally, a CDB subscriber receives a notification when the configuration changes that to which it is subscribed. The subscriber has a number of different strategies it can follow. One is to read the configuration from CDB that it is interested in. Another strategy is to iterate through the changes and process the changes one by one. Another strategy is to get in one shot the set of changes structured as a tagged value array.
In ConfD 5.4, a new way of receiving the changes was added, and this is to return in one shot the set of changes as a sequence of CLI commands. The API for this is cdb_get_modifications_cli(), and this can be a simple way to integrate ConfD with an existing CLI. Your device’s YANG model would need to follow the structure of your CLI, but once the model is completed, then ConfD can convert changes received via the NETCONF interface into a series of CLI commands that can be fed into your existing CLI.