We are looking to implement NETCONF on our platform and in looking at the models, there seem to be both IETF and openconfig models for most things. What do most platforms support? i.e. For control of the switch, what will most controllers support? What models are supported in most surveillance platforms? Don’t want to implement the wrong models and end up having to do it over.
This is a tough decision obviously, and we can hardly tell what is the best option for you; in the end, you should investigate what your (potential) customers use or are willing to use. My view is that IETF models are well written, adhering to standards and best practices, reflecting needs of the industry; but most of them are relatively new and less used. On the other hand most OC models are older and do not use important recent standards, such as NMDA or YANG 1.1; some of their design choices are at least a bit dubious and they occasionally violate standards - but at the same time, they appear to be used more frequently than IETF models.
But I would like to point out that it is not true that if you choose one, you are doomed to stick with it forever or rewrite everything from scratch. With ConfD’s transformations you can have one data model as the “real one”, that is used by your managed objects, and put another data model as a facade in front of your system. It still requires quite some effort to write a well-behaving and performant transform for a sizeable data model, but the effort is definitely smaller than adapting the whole system to a new model; plus, the real data model is still there.