Sunday 11 September 2022

Scale security on the fly in Microsoft Azure Cloud with Cisco Secure Firewall

The release of Microsoft Azure Gateway Load Balancer is great news for customers, empowering them to simply and easily add Cisco Secure Firewall capabilities to their Azure cloud infrastructure. By combining Azure Gateway Load Balancer with Cisco Secure Firewall, organizations can quickly scale their firewall presence across their Azure cloud environment, providing protection for infrastructure and applications exactly where and when they need it.

With applications and resources hyper-distributed across hybrid-multicloud environments, organizations require agile security to protect their environment at each control point. This integration empowers organizations to dynamically insert Cisco’s security controls and threat defense capabilities in their Azure environment, removing the clunkiness of provisioning and deploying firewalls, as well as the need to rearchitect the network. Organizations can now enjoy highly available threat defense on the fly, protecting their infrastructure and applications from known and unknown threats.

Securing cloud infrastructure while reducing complexity


Combining Secure Firewall with Azure Gateway Load Balancer offers a significant reduction in operational complexity when securing cloud infrastructure. Azure Gateway Load Balancer provides bump-in-the-wire functionality ensuring Internet traffic to and from an Azure VM, such as an application server, is inspected by Secure Firewall without requiring any routing changes. It also offers a single entry and exit point at the firewall and allows organizations to maintain visibility of the source IP address. Complementing these features, organizations can take advantage of our new Cloud-delivered Firewall Management Center. It enables organizations to manage their firewall presence 100% through the cloud with the same look and feel as they’ve grown accustomed to with Firewall Management Center. With Cloud-delivered Firewall Management Center, organizations will achieve faster time-to-value with simplified firewall deployment and management.

Benefits of Cisco Secure Firewall with Azure Gateway Load Balancer


◉ Secure Firewall lowers cloud spend with Azure Autoscale support – Quickly and seamlessly scale virtual firewall instances up and down to meet demand.

◉ De-risk projects by removing the need to re-architect – Effortlessly insert Cisco Secure Firewall in existing network architecture without changes, providing win/win outcomes across NetOps, SecOps, DevOps, and application teams.

◉ Firewalling where and when you need it – Easily deploy and remove Secure Firewall and its associated security services, including IPS, application visibility and control, malware defense, and URL filtering as needed in the network path.

◉ Greater visibility for your applications – Simplify enablement of your intended infrastructure by eliminating the need for source and destination NAT. No additional configuration needed.

◉ Health monitoring – Ensure efficient routing with continuous health-checks that monitor your virtual firewall instances via Gateway Load Balancer.

◉ Included Cisco Talos® Threat Intelligence – Protect your organization from new and emerging threats with rapid and actionable threat intelligence updated hourly from one of the world’s largest commercial threat intelligence teams, Cisco Talos.

Use-cases
Inbound


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Figure 1: Inbound traffic flow to Cisco Secure Firewall with Azure Gateway Load Balancer

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Figure 2: Inbound traffic flow to a stand-alone server

Outbound


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Figure 3: Internal server is behind a public load balancer. Flow is the same as outbound flow for an inbound connection.

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Figure 4: Outbound flow where the internal server is a stand-alone server.

Azure Gateway Load Balancer support for Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual is available now. To learn more about how Cisco Secure Firewall drives security resilience across your hybrid-multicloud environment, see the additional resources below and reach out to your Cisco sales representative.

Source: cisco.com

Saturday 10 September 2022

Get Hands-on with the Meraki API in the DevNet Sandbox

One of the strongest components of the Meraki platform is the consistent and simplified operational management of the network. The modern API, as an extension to the cloud managed service, makes it amazingly simple to programmatically control and manage all aspects of your network. There are customers that fully automate the onboarding of devices via the Meraki portal using routine automation scripts. Or, front-end systems or operational teams with lookup tools that pull analytics or data from the API. Thus, greatly streamlining operational processes required to support an organization.

This blog will showcase some of the techniques that can be used and built upon to integrate the Meraki API programmatically. To do this we will use the DevNet always-on sandbox lab. With this we will only be making read (get) requests into the always-on sandbox. And to make this easy to use, we are going to use the Google Collaboratory environment, which allows you to use Google cloud to run these examples.

Explore the Meraki API using the DevNet Sandbox


To begin exploring the Meraki API using the DevNet Sandbox, I have created a Collaboratory on Google at the below link. To use this, you will need a few things,

1. A personal Gmail account. This will share a copy of the example that you can modify in drive. If you use your corporate account, it will only allow this if your corporation has drive access.

2. You will then access the link below and file/save a copy into drive, from which point a read only copy will become writable, and modifiable to you.

Here is the link:


The first thing we will do is save a copy of this read only sheet into your drive, which will make it read/write. From the file menu you can click “save a copy to drive”

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Once this is done you can evaluate the sheet. Within this sheet there are text blocks, code blocks, and results blocks. The code blocks are fully modifiable, and represent code running in a real python environment located in the Google cloud. To execute the code within a block, you can click the play button to the left of the block. When you do this, any results will show up.

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Where this becomes particularly interesting is when we pair this cloud based development environment with the DevNet always-on Meraki Sandbox. This is a functional Meraki instance sponsored and managed through the DevNet organization. For a list of all Sandboxes, you can evaluate devnetsandbox.cisco.com.

For our particular sandbox, we will be using the always-on sandbox. This is available at the below link, but should this link change, you can find it by selecting networking sandboxes from devnetsandbox.cisco.com. (or searching Meraki, or many other ways :)).


Setting Variables


What we will do in the below code segments, is we set a few variables we can use further on in the code. This makes it so that you can take your real Meraki environment, and change a few URLS, and search for meaningful information in these variables (such as YOUR device, or YOUR network), and use the code to create tables and graphs that you can modify as you see fit.

After setting the variables, we do a very simple get request from Meraki, that we will do many times for different information throughout the sample on Colab.

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We then print the results, which will show up in a text string of JSON data.

To translate this into real JSON we can use, we use the below command and then print it so we can see.

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This is exceptionally useful as we have useful data formatted as JSON. Building upon this, we can use a library called Pandas which is well known in the data science and ML communities, and is essentially “Excel on Steroids for Python.” What becomes interesting is its native support for reading in our JSON, into a table.

Using the Pandas module


Below we load the Pandas module as the name pd, which we can reference. We then import the JSON, and print out a table with the columns we are interested in. What is elegant about this is the simplicity, we import the module, read in the JSON in a single intuitive command, and create a table with the headings we are interested in.

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After doing a few more operations in the code, following through the colab sheet, we make a few more get requests, store as a few different tables, and do different things. (You can explore the sheet.) We search out the network in the organization that we referenced at the outset of this sheet, and we get the top talkers for this via doing a get on the URI and storing it as JSON. Then importing into Pandas (like below), and spitting out the table.

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We now have a list of clients and their bandwidth usage. We can then very easily create graphs for usage. This can also all be done easily via a webapp for your network teams. We do this using the Pandas built-in graph capability, as well as an example of using Seaborn, which is used for data visualization.

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This is just a high level of some of the capabilities that can be exposed easily via the Meraki API. The purpose of the colab sheet that was created, as well as the DevNet sandbox, is to enable you to be able to play with and evaluate the API. The examples in the colab sheet are intended to be functional code, and stepping stones that reduce the barrier to leveraging programmability to create meaningful results.

I hope this blog was helpful. It explored using the Meraki API via using the always-on DevNet Sandbox. When you have an always-on sandbox, creating, sharing, and reusing examples in Google Colaboratory is a natural fit.

Source: cisco.com

Thursday 8 September 2022

Quick automation wins with Cisco DNA Center

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With the investment into today’s modern and agile networks, many IT organizations are searching for intelligent tools that can help simplify the complexity that comes with the advanced capabilities of today’s networks and keep up with the business demands. Topping off the complex challenges, many organizations are facing challenges on how to bridge the growing IT skill gap and automate various aspects of their network management.

In a recent Gartner article regarding the State of Network Automation, according to the article:

◉ 41% of network activities are less than 10% automated.
◉ 31% of network activities are 11% to 25% automated.

Essentially 72% of network activities are less than 25% automated. Separately, Gartner has also identified 4 IT personas (AIOps, NetOps, SecOps, and DevOps), stating that NetOps2.0 is the evolution of network operations towards automation.

Attributes of NetOps 2.0 include an Automation-first approach, embedded analytics, SecOps integrations, and Turn-key DevOps tools.  IT organizations that embrace this approach can achieve increased IT agility, Proactive network operations, and an increased level of collaboration between common silos in IT organizations. An additional outcome is minimized friction between the NetOps, SecOps, and DevOps personas.

When it comes to automation products, the Inventor’s paradox states, “It is easier to solve a more general problem that covers the specifics of the sought-after solution”.  Organizations who transitioning to AIOps, NetOps2.0, and automation platforms, are faced with common challenges and limitations such as:

◉ Automation products are often not bi-directional with network equipment
◉ Third-party products lack Cisco’s deep understanding of the network and platforms
◉ Lack of tight integration between the hardware and software platforms
◉ Lack of cross-domain visibility between the campus, data center, and the cloud
◉ Reliance on legacy SNMP protocol which provides limited visibility and control
◉ Limited AI capabilities due to lack of data quality and domain specialization

Out-of-the-box automation with Cisco DNA Center


While there are various barriers to network automation, there are some pragmatic methods by iterating on non-change and/or non-production automation activities, leading to some “quick automation wins.” Below are some “quick automation wins” examples available out of the box with Cisco DNA Center automation.

◉ Network Device Configuration Backup and archival of all network devices.
◉ Integration with ServiceNow, which automats auto-population of trouble tickets.
◉ Automated creation of network availability baselines and compliance reporting.
◉ Automated creation of user experience baselines and reporting.
◉ Maintenance mode to enable/disable monitoring during change windows.
◉ Automated network performance testing with MRE (Machine Reasoning Engine) and features such as Truetrace and path trace to automate and expedite troubleshooting.
◉ Automated packet capture for network anomalies.
◉ Redundant Link Monitoring.
◉ RMA Automation workflows.
◉ Automated creation of application health and reporting.
◉ Software Upgrade Cycle

Granular Automation Control


In looking at Cisco DNA Center’s automation suite, Cisco DNA Center not only provides automation features but also provides the granular control to enable workflows and actions from manual to AI-assisted to selectively autonomous change management. Let’s look at the three modalities of automation possible with Cisco DNA Center:

Manual (clickOps) is where many organizations are today; all administrative actions are performed by or initiated by an operator. Numerous automated workflows need manual initiation, but they still automate numerous repetitive steps such as SWIM for software updates. Additionally, some of these can be automated through templates and EEM (Embedded Event Manager) triggers.

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Figure 1. Cisco DNA Center (SWIM) Software Image Management Cycle

AI-Assisted is where leveraging the depth of knowledge, streaming telemetry, and Cisco’s vast knowledge and experience in running networks; Cisco DNA Center can identify issues and use the MRE to suggest troubleshooting steps and possible remediation. MRE is a network automation engine that uses AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) to automate complex network operation workflows. This feature encapsulates human knowledge and expertise into a fully automated inference engine to help you perform complex root cause analysis, detects issues and vulnerabilities, and either manually or automatically perform corrective actions.

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Figure 2. Cisco DNA Center Compliance automation with configuration drift

Autonomous Change Management (ACM) provides for Cisco DNA Center to be enabled to perform and enforce automated actions on the network under predefined conditions and events. As today’s networks grow at incredible rates with new demands, manually managing all aspects of the network is no longer feasible for humans. Nor do most organizations have staff watching alerts every second of the day. The integration of AI/ML into the automation engine enables Cisco DNA Center to regularly tune the network based on predictions and models, which can greatly optimize the user experience and network performance.  Compare human intervention as the ax vs. AI-driven automation doing it with a scalpel.  This can be the difference between a system taking proactive measures vs. correcting an issue after it occurred.

Doing a left shift and taking automation to the next level, depending on the intents and architecture of the network, there are several highly automated deployment models, such as the Software-Defined Access (SDA), User Defined Networking (UDN), and AI-RRM, which are highly ACM deployments within the Cisco DNA Center solutions suite.

Focusing on automation outcomes and benefits


Focusing on outcomes, as organizations embark on network automation, there are various success metrics and business outcomes that can be tracked, such as:

Tangible Metrics Intangibles 

Faster moves adds and changes
Consistent Configuration
Quicker MTTR
Reduction in network issues
Improved security posture

Team Agility
Ability to scale at speed
Bridging the IT skill gap


Source: cisco.com

Wednesday 7 September 2022

Cisco DevNet Associate DEVASC 200-901 Exam: Resources You Can Use to Prepare

Earning Cisco Certified DevNet Associate certification confirms your skills in developing and managing applications created on Cisco platforms. To obtain Cisco DevNet Associate certification, you pass one DEVASC 200-901 exam that includes the basics of software development and design for Cisco platforms.

Cisco 200-901 DEVASC is a 120-minute exam. This is the only exam you need to pass to earn the DevNet Associate, and the exam is available in English and Japanese. You should also know that you will have to make an account on the Pearson VUE platform to register for it and pay $300 as an exam fee.

Cisco DEVASC 200-901 Exam: Resources You Can Use to Prepare

Official Training Course

This is one of the most useful exam preparation options. Cisco official training course “Developing Applications and Automating Workflows using Cisco Platforms (DEVASC)” takes five days. You can interact with other exam-takers and the instructor in the Instructor-led training course, and this suggests that you can get explanations from the instructor and get an immediate response. This course is recommended for anyone who wants to pass the DEVASC 200-901 exam and become an in-demand professional.

Online Videos

There are plenty of videos available online for the Cisco DevNet Associate certification exam preparation. These videos incorporate thorough explanations of exam topics. But make sure you check the content before relying on them.

Cisco DEVASC 200-901 Practice Exam

Practice tests are of great help handy when one is preparing for a Cisco exam. Practice tests help you identify your strengths and weaknesses. Practice tests simulate Cisco 200-901 exam questions that familiarize you with the core exam topics. This can also boost your confidence. Nwexam is a leading provider of Cisco practice exams.

Also Read: How to Pass Cisco 200-901 DEVASC Exam Practice Test

Books and Study Guide

Books and study guides are essential because they provide essential information that other study resources may not provide. You can buy relevant study guides and books on the Cisco press store or from amazon.

Tip to Pass Cisco DevNet Associate DEVASC 200-901 Exam

Have the Right Study Resources

It will be of no benefit if you learn from the wrong study resources. Authentic and updated study resources like an online training course, study guides, and practice tests will enable you to achieve crucial exam skills and real-life mastery. But, it should be accessed from trusted platforms.

Familiarize Yourself with Cisco DEVASC 200-901 Exam Content

Before beginning your exam preparation, make sure that you have an idea of what the exam evaluates, the skills needed, and the exam objectives in detail. This will help you carry out your preparation in an organized way.

Practical Experience

Having practical experience will allow you to soak up important concepts in your exam prep. The Cisco DevNet Associate exam objectives need to be done practically to get real-life skills.

Do Active Revision

It is not always assured that you will memorize everything you have been learning, and revising is the perfect way to soak up what you have learned. A great tip for doing a quick revision is to take short notes while studying.

Effectively Manage your Time

The exam is 120 minutes long, and you are expected to answer 90-110 questions within this time. Time management is crucial to passing Cisco DEVASC 200-901 exam. Most exam-takers fail, not because they have not learned appropriately but because of poor time management. In your exam, take as little time as possible when answering Cisco 200-901 exam questions. Answer the easy questions first; only then come to the tough ones. That will save you time.

Don’t be Afraid of Failure

Fear is the greatest enemy of applicants. Fear of failing makes you nervous and anxious. Your wish to pass the exam should be driven by enthusiasm instead of fear. During your Cisco DevNet Associate DEVASC 200-901 exam, try to stay calm and believe in yourself. If you do not crack the exam on the first attempt, take it as a challenge to make you study harder and qualify to be the best.

Conclusion

It is amazing to strive to get a flying score in Cisco 200-901 certification exam, but don’t ignore that the score you receive decides what you will achieve. Moreover, keep in mind that this is not just about passing the exam; it’s also about acquiring the best professional skills and knowledge you will require to thrive in your career. So, give your preparation the dedication it deserves and make sure you become a sought-after professional by passing the Cisco DEVASC exam.

Wednesday 31 August 2022

Showcasing Cisco’s Commitment to Openness: VXLAN BGP EVPN with OpenConfig

The world of data center networks is evolving at an ever-increasing pace. Businesses are being faced with the growing complexity of scaling data center fabrics, while also ensuring the isolation and security of customer data. Fundamental to this isolation of customer traffic is network virtualization, of which Cisco has been a constant innovator. Over the recent years, VXLAN with BGP EVPN has emerged as the de-facto industry standard for network virtualization.

For as long as networks and virtualized networks have existed, the manageability and observability of these fabrics, have been critical concerns for network operators.

Standardization across platforms and vendors is critical to enabling network operators to achieve these goals. SNMP and syslogs have been widely used to gather data, to monitor and manage network devices. However, SNMP lacks the ability to capture the fidelity of data that operators require. Syslogs are unstructured and while easily human readable, are not easily interpreted by automation and monitoring systems.

Besides being at the cutting edge of architecting network fabrics and network overlays, Cisco has also been an innovator in open and programmable networks. The open NX-OS philosophy began with the ability to run on-switch applications, natively in NX-OS or in the isolated Guestshell environment, later adding off-switch automation solutions such as Puppet and Ansible which have seen widespread adoption. More recently industry standard APIs, models, and transports such OpenConfig, NETCONF, RESTCONF, and gNMI have become a core part of the open NX-OS strategy.

These two areas that Cisco has long been an innovator in, namely network virtualization and open programmable interfaces, came together in the most recent enhancements to the OpenConfig models, which now support VXLAN EVPN and as part of our most recent NX-OS 10.3(1)F release. Cisco built these enhancements in conjunction with industry partners, to provide simplified monitoring and automation capabilities to our customers.

EVPN: A brief explainer


In the context of an EVPN overlay, an EVPN Instance (EVI) is a Virtual Private Network (VPN). With the Cisco NX-OS VLAN-based approach to EVPN, this results in a single broadcast domain per EVI, and with this VLAN-based approach, the tenant VLAN is mapped to a single EVI. With this 1:1 mapping, the single broadcast domain or tenant is represented by a VLAN or a VNI.  The VLAN/VNI is associated with an EVI which provides the most granular control for importing routes.

What is OpenConfig?


OpenConfig is an informal working group of vendors and network operators collaborating together, to define declarative model-driven solutions for the management, monitoring and operation of networking devices. A core tenant of OpenConfig is focused on defining vendor-agnostic YANG models based to deliver a programmatic interface to achieve these goals.

EVPN with OpenConfig


Within the existing OpenConfig network-instances model, an EVI and associated constructs are now part of the existing network-instance/fdb hierarchy. The enhancements Cisco contributed to the l2rib container consists of a new container within the parent Forwarding Database (FDB) container. The L2RIB has 2 primary containers, the MAC table and the MAC-IP table as shown in Figure 1.

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The MAC table represents the operational state for MAC address information, pertaining to each domain of the L2RIB. This consists of stateful leaves such as the MAC address, VLAN, EVI, and L2-VNI for a locally significant broadcast domain as well as the next hop data, such as an interface, or sub-interface.

The second container within the new L2RIB is the MAC-IP table, which consists of remote MACs learned via the control plane. Like the MAC table, it has stateful leaves such as MAC address, VLAN, EVI, and L2-VNI, but in addition, it also contains an L3-VNI and host-IP for the MAC-IP entries as shown below. This L3-VNI is used solely in the context of inter-subnet routing.

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In addition to these enhancements within the L2RIB, there are also additional enhancements within the L2VPN container of the BGP Address Family Indicator/ Subsequent Address Family Indicator (AFI/SAFI) network instance, which together provide deep visibility into the overall state and routing of a Cisco NX-OS BGP EVPN fabric.

Better Together: NX-OS with OpenConfig


Cisco is excited to announce new capabilities within its VXLAN BGP EVPN solution with contributions to an opensource and industry standard solution such as OpenConfig. Cisco has a long-standing focus on industry standards and openness in mind. Together, Cisco NX-OS tied with these OpenConfig enhancements, provide deep visibility into both the routing and forwarding of an NX-OS VXLAN fabric and the applications that the fabric supports. These innovations and expanded capabilities are just the first set of results based on our contributions to OpenConfig.

Source: cisco.com

Monday 29 August 2022

How to Prepare for Cisco 700-680 CSaaS Certification?


Cisco 700-680 CSaaS Exam Description:

This exam will test the knowledge of Account Manager/Presales engineers on the foundations of Cisco’s Collaboration SaaS solutions in order for them to effectively sell these cloud-based services. This exam is a requirement for the Cisco Collaboration SaaS Authorization Program.

A great way to start the Cisco Collaboration SaaS (CSaaS) preparation is to begin by properly appreciating the role that syllabus and study guide play in the Cisco 700-680 certification exam. This study guide is an instrument to get you on the same page with Cisco and understand the nature of the Cisco Collaboration SaaS Authorization Exam exam.

Cisco 700-680 Exam Overview:

Cisco 700-680 Exam Topics:

  • Webex Market Overview- 5%
  • Webex Meetings, Webex Teams, Webex Devices, and Webex Edge- 30%
  • Webex Calling- 5%
  • Webex Control Hub, Webex security, compliance and Webex for developers- 30%
  • Collaboration Flex Plan- 20%
  • Overview of Ordering, Smart accounts and Webex Try and Buy- 10%

Related Article:-

 

Sunday 28 August 2022

New Learning Labs for NSO Service Development

Getting started with network automation can be tough. It is worth the effort though, when a product like Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) can to turn your network services into a powerful orchestration engine. Over the past year, we have released a series of learning labs that cover the foundational skills needed to develop with NSO:

◉ Learn NSO the Easy Way

◉ Yang for NSO

◉ XML for NSO

Now we are proud to announce the final piece of the puzzle. We’re bringing it all together with the new service development labs for NSO. If this is your first time hearing about Cisco NSO and service development, let’s review some of the context.

Why change is the only constant

Network programmability has been enhancing our networking builds, changes, and deployments for several years now. For the most part, this was inspired by Software Defined Networks – i.e., networks based on scripting methods, using standard programming languages to control and monitor your network device infrastructure.

Software-defined networking principles can deliver abstractions of existing network infrastructure. This enables faster service development and deployment. Standards such as NETCONF and YANG are currently the driving force behind these abstractions, and are enabling a significant improvement in network management. Scripting can take out a lot of laborious and repetitive tasks. However, it may still have shortfalls, as it can focus on single devices, one vendor, or one platform.

Service orchestration simplifies network operations

Service orchestration simplifies network operations and management of network services. Instead of focusing on a particular device and system configuration that builds a network service, only the important inputs are collected. The rest of the steps and processes for delivery are automated. The actual details, such as vendor-specific configurations on network devices and the correct ordering of steps, are abstracted from the user of the service. This results in consistent configurations, prevention of errors and outages, and overall cost reduction of managing a network.

Remove the complexity

With NSO services, service application maps input parameters to create, modify, and delete a service instance into the resulting native commands to devices in the network. The input parameters are given from a northbound system such as a self-service portal via an API (Application Programming Interface). This calls to NSO or a network engineer using any of the NSO User Interfaces such as the NSO CLI.

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NSO Service Development Module


In this new NSO learning lab you will learn how NSO services simplify network operations, how they work, and how to develop a template-based service. You will also use Python for scripting and service development, and to develop nano services. The module is broken into three sections which will guide you through use cases of NSO Service Developments.

◉ Introduction to NSO Service Development – How NSO services simplify network operations, how they work, and how to develop a template-based service

◉ Python Scripts and NSO Service Development – Python Scripts and NSO Service Development

◉ NSO Nano Service Development – How to develop nano services in NSO

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Try it yourself now


You can find the new NSO Service deployment module in the NSO Basics for Network Operations Learning Track. All these new learning labs can be run and tested in the NSO DevNet reservation sandbox.

One of the things I embrace as an engineer is that change will happen. It might happen overnight, or over an extended period of time. But, it will happen. The only constant in the networking and software industry is ‘change.’ Let’s embrace this!

Source: cisco.com