Uncover the latest upgrades in the NSO Sandboxes

After many months of work, I’m happy to share that our NSO reservable sandbox and NSO Always-On sandbox have received a well-deserved upgrade. The NSO sandboxes are a great companion as you go on your automation journey, and when you need a quick environment to test your ideas. Additionally, the best thing is, the NSO Sandboxes are free to use! Its as simple as making a reservation by hitting the Launch button and you are ready to go.

Now let’s explore the upgrade we have prepared for you.

NSO Always-On Sandbox

The NSO Always-On sandbox has been migrated to the NSO official container. We built on top of the container to ensure the sandbox is always available and easy to update and manage.

A NSO router package was installed (this package is taken from the NSO built-in examples) and using Netsim devices, we can display a basic environment.

This sandbox is read-only, which is meant for a quick look and simple tests, for example API calls to sync the devices to NSO. If you require an environment where you can get your hands dirty, keep reading.

NSO Reservable Sandbox

The NSO reservable sandbox is the place where you want to test your ideas and break things. You have now at your disposal three NSO instances of System install, which are great for High Availability scenarios among other things.

The secret to having these three instances is again the NSO official container, which we used to add all the packages, NEDs and configuration required at built time. So, when the sandbox is launched, you will have ready NSO instances in a deterministic state.

If you are curious about it, take a look at the NSO Containers Reservable Sandbox repository where we published the scripts, Dockerfile, and configuration used to build this container.

CML Topology

But not only the NSO instances were updated. The CML topology received also a change and fixes. You will find now a topology consisting of several network devices and hosts that mimic two networks, one for development and one for production.

You can interact directly with the devices using TELNET/SSH or through NSO. The NSO instances have the minimum required configuration to work with them.

This topology is great when you want to use a pipeline that tests on development and deploys on production.

GitLab

Speaking about pipelines, the GitLab instance inside the sandbox was also upgraded with a newer GitLab version. You can also find a demo project (thanks to the Cisco CSS CX Automation team) and a GitLab runner ready to be used with pipelines. An example will come soon.

What’s Next

We have many ideas for what we could add and upgrade to the sandboxes, as well as adding examples that can use their full potential. But I’m more interested in what you think we should add next, what you need or what you are curious about it.

Want to learn more

Here are some links you want to save (or save this blog) to learn more about NSO.

Want to get more content about NSO? Reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’m happy to hear your ideas.

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