New CI/CD + NetDevOps Learning Lab for Cisco NSO

Network Automation in recent years has adopted the methodology and best practices from other domains. Software developers and Compute / Cloud infrastructure engineers use Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), along with DevOps best practices to increase reliability, decrease errors and save time. We have created a lab to showcase how applying these best practices to the network would look like using Cisco NSO.

We are excited to announce a new CI/CD NetDevOps Learning Lab for NSO. We built this lab standing on the shoulders of great content created by Julio Gomez and others, such as his blog series on NSO and NetDevOps. The lab uses the NSO Reservable Sandbox, here are the links for your reference:

Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) is a multi-domain orchestration platform used to manage the configuration lifecycle of physical and virtual network devices.

Since Cisco NSO can learn the network configuration of all network devices, across all platforms and vendors (over 250 device types supported), it is a great platform to learn to automate your network. This lab covers the basics of creating your own configuration pipeline with automated change verification checks using Cisco pyATS: Network Test & Automation Solution.

Also, since Cisco NSO keeps a copy of the configuration of all the devices it manages in a structured data format, you don’t have to hand craft any YAML files, but merely export the data from the NSO configuration database (CDB). Any changes to the data that is then pushed back to NSO then gets translated into the appropriate commands for you. No need to worry about whitespace issues or Jinja2 woes, since NSO handles those boring details for you.

The lab has enough content to get you started and running, but feel free to dig deeper in Cisco NSO or NetDevOps with all the resources on DevNet.

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