A controller device manages a plurality of network devices. The controller device includes one or more processing units implemented in circuitry and configured to determine that one or more stateless intents of a deployed graph model including a first set of stateless intents used to manage the plurality of network devices have changed, wherein stateless intents comprise fully declarative descriptions of an intended state of a network including the network devices, state of one or more of the network devices, or state of storage for the network; maintain both the deployed graph model and an undeployed graph model including a second set of stateless intents including the one or more changed stateless intents; compile the changed stateless intents of the undeployed graph model to generate low-level configuration data for the network devices; and configure the network devices using the low-level configuration data.