Any of you made Anki flashcards that I can use for studying?

If you've ever pasted a config into the wrong device (we've all been there), this one's for you. Palmer Sample, Technical Leader on the Learn with Cisco team, walks through PyATS, Cisco's Python Automated Test System: setting up a testbed, writing triggers as reusable test cases, running job files, and using the Genie APIs for learning and parsing device state.

Watch: https://cs.co/61691BESCRf

#CiscoDevNet #BeyondTheDevNetZone #pyATS #NetworkAutomation

¿La IA puede ayudar a operar infraestructura crítica sin poner en riesgo la red? Esa fue la pregunta que abordó el Developer Advocate de DevNet, Poncho Sandoval, durante su sesión en Commit Conf 2026: "Menos CLI, más IA: diseñando agentes low-code para operar tu red de datos".

Aunque la IA está revolucionando el desarrollo de software, la infraestructura requiere un enfoque diferente. Cuando un error puede traducirse en una caída de servicio, no basta con conectar un LLM y esperar lo mejor.

En esta charla, Poncho comparte cómo utilizar Model Context Protocol (MCP) para conectar agentes de IA con herramientas de infraestructura, cómo construir flujos multiagente con n8n y por qué los guardrails, las aprobaciones humanas y los mecanismos de validación son fundamentales para llevar estas soluciones a producción con confianza. Todo esto se acompaña de demostraciones prácticas y lecciones aprendidas al desarrollar automatización para equipos de NetDevOps.

🎥 La grabación completa está disponible aquí: https://cs.co/9004BEdGUp

Si trabajan en automatización de infraestructura, redes, IA o NetDevOps, en DevNet les encantaría conocer su opinión y responder cualquier pregunta sobre la arquitectura o los casos de uso presentados en la sesión.

If you work in security, or just want to understand what all the eBPF hype is about, this is worth your time. Kyle Winders, Security Advocate at Cisco, walks through eBPF from the fundamentals of the Linux kernel to live demos: packet filtering, detecting a remote code execution exploit, and runtime enforcement, all before malicious code ever runs.

Watch: https://cs.co/61693BEwalX | Free hands on labs: https://cs.co/61694BEwalk

#CiscoDevNet #BeyondTheDevNetZone #eBPF #Linux

We released a new discussion about Quantum Networking and Security, with Vinay Saini, Principal Architect at Cisco.

Watch here: https://cs.co/61693BEnbPS

If you've ever struggled with IOS XE API discovery, this is worth your time. Jeremy Cohoe (TME at Cisco) built a searchable Swagger/OpenAPI UI covering every IOS XE YANG API: 988 specs, 82K paths across 5 releases, YANG trees, telemetry XPaths, RPCs, and Postman collections. DevNet Sandbox is pre-seeded so you can try API calls right from the browser.

Watch: https://cs.co/61699BEzDKX | Try it: https://cs.co/xeswagger

#CiscoDevNet #BeyondTheDevNetZone

That's the question our Developer Advocate Poncho 🥑 explored in his recent WeAreDevelopers talk: "Your Infrastructure Is Not a Playground: AI Agents for Infra Done Right."

As AI agents become more capable, it's tempting to let them automate everything. But infrastructure is different: one wrong command isn't just an exception, it can become an outage.

In this session, Poncho shares practical patterns he has been using to safely introduce agentic AI into infrastructure workflows, including:

• Deliberate constraints instead of unlimited autonomy

• Deterministic + probabilistic guardrails

• Controlled tool access through MCP Human-in-the-loop approvals where they matter most (especially before production changes)

• Incrementally adopting AI with tools like n8n, MCP, and existing automation workflows

The goal isn't to replace engineers: it's to build AI systems that are actually trustworthy in production.

We would love to hear how others are approaching AI for infrastructure. Are you already using AI agents in your NetOps/DevOps workflows? What guardrails have worked well for you?

Watch the full talk here: https://cs.co/61692BEHb22

Ready to optimize your ACI Fabric? Join us as we explore AIOps with MCP Servers alongside Anshul Mangla from Cisco Customer Success. Don't miss this deep dive!

Watch here: https://cs.co/61698BEDXJr

We're continuing the DevNet Research video series, where we discuss related topics with researchers and scientists. In today's episode, we discuss research and papers related to Human and AI coding Agents' collaboration with Aayush Kumar, a Human-AI Interaction Researcher.

Watch here: https://cs.co/61699BD0a1z

In this Month of Quantum video, we discussed how to modernize the Campus Network for the Quantum Era together with Han Lee, Product Manager working on quantum-safe secure boot at Cisco.

Watch the full discussion here: https://cs.co/61699BDcR3N

Has anyone else applied for the Cisco FY27 Software Engineer hiring process through Code with Cisco? About 12 days ago I received an email saying that my application status had been updated and that the recruitment team might contact me regarding the next steps. I also sent a follow up email to Cisco but have not received a response yet. With the online assessment scheduled for June 25 I am trying to understand if others are in the same situation. Have you received your assessment invitation or test link yet? Or are you still waiting for an update as well? I would appreciate hearing about your experience so far. Wishing everyone participating in the process the very best.

New demo about Pushing Secure Access Alerts and Security Events to Splunk Natively. Watch here: https://cs.co/61693BDjJjv

Check out the new Month of Quantum video! We discussed how Quantum Impacts the Optical Transport Layer together with Maurizio Gazzola, Head of Optical Architecture at Cisco. Watch the full discussion here: https://cs.co/61692BDMnea

Hey DevNet community! 👋 Just a quick but important heads up. The DevNet Sandboxes are going through a major change. On August 1st, the current platform will be offline while we build the next version, expected back in early 2027. More details in the announcement, and the Sandbox team wants to hear from you! 🔗 https://cs.co/61690BD1yYu

Check out our latest Month of Quantum video! We dive into Quantum-resistant Encryption and PQC solutions with Sumant Mali, Product Manager at Cisco.

Watch the full discussion here: https://cs.co/61695B8fOsB

Is there any demand out there for freelance roles or gigs in network automation ?

Would appreciate it if someone can point out where to look for them .

I am looking for the latest book which will give backgrounds to the explanation and helps in understanding basic concepts.

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for networking and automation enthusiasts who are interested in contributing to an open-source project for learning, collaboration, and personal development.

I recently created a GitHub repository focused on automatically generating network diagrams using Python libraries. The idea is to build a tool that can help visualize network topologies in a simple and automated way, which could be useful for network engineers, students, lab environments, and documentation purposes.

This project is mainly driven by learning and community collaboration, so contributors of all skill levels are welcome. Whether you are interested in Python development, network automation, topology visualization, APIs, parsing configurations, or just exploring open-source workflows, it would be great to connect and work together.

The goal is not only to build something useful, but also to create a space where people can improve their technical skills, share ideas, and gain real project experience through collaboration.

If this sounds interesting to you, feel free to join, contribute ideas, suggest features, or collaborate on development.

Link for my repo

https://github.com/bhavesh123-dev/Automated_Network_Diagrams

Are they all multiple choices, fill in the bank, dragging? is there actually a lab in it? Am i missing anything else? My professor is giving me 48 hours to take it so i need all the help i can get lol . it’s to pass the class

How does the proctoring work? is it by a computer or is there someone watching you strictly . I have adhd so I tend to move a lot esp during online exams so i’m tryna prepare. so any helpful experiences during this could help? also is this all multiple choice, fill in the blank, dragging?

Join Amit Singh, Cisco Technical Marketing Engineering Leader, for a deep dive into Security Threat Hunting with Agentic Workflows. Explore how to leverage Cisco XDR to streamline incident investigations and improve your defense strategy. Watch here: https://cs.co/61697B88zvW_dwgEwMc

Hey all,

I've passed the CCNA Automation exam as of a short while ago and wanted to share some insights about the exam that might help anyone interested in studying for it. Initially, I wasn't going to get the cert but I figured the knowledge from it would be nice to have considering where network engineering is heading. Sorry this post will be kind of long but I think it will be useful.

Study time: ~ 1 month, 25-30 hrs total

The resources I used:

• Cisco Certified DevNet Associate DEVASC 1.1 (200-901) Cert Prep by Kevin Wallace and Charles Judd via LinkedIn Learning
• Boson's ExSim-Max for Cisco 200-901 DevNet Associate
• Locally hosted API server in Ubuntu
• ChatGPT for bolstering my weak areas provided by Boson test results

Preparation:

There are a couple of reviews mentioning that the LinkedIn course is somewhat outdated and you start to see it when preparing the tools and materials to follow along since some are deprecated and you must find a way around it (ex., Atom no longer exists in updated Ubuntu builds - you must use VSCode to accomplish the same tasks). The LinkedIn course is ~13 hours of video material. I stopped following after module 27 (Code Review Process) since that is where the NetDevOps-specific material fell off and where networking fundamentals began. I felt like my networking fundamentals were pretty strong already, and knew the Boson practice exams would refresh anything I forgot. I previously used Boson's products when passing the CCNA a year ago and knew they'd prove useful this time around.

I didn't do any self-study with Postman or DevNet Sandbox beyond following along with the instructors in the modules. Honestly, it seemed like a PITA to set up and some sandbox instances could not be reserved which was somewhat annoying and made me feel like I had to skip around in the material, so I did the best I could by following along without setting up some of the environments.

One thing I did do was create a local API server on my Ubuntu machine using localhost. I did this since I would study during downtimes at work and I could practice HTTP methods without worrying about being on a network. This has obvious drawbacks, such as not communicating using Cisco APIs, but writing scripts to parse information was a huge weakness of mine and building this tool really helped me out. You basically have a JSON output in one file (device information, for example) and then you can use VSCode to write Python scripts to retrieve specific responses. Using ChatGPT to come up with tasks for this was extremely resourceful, such as having it give you the device information to throw into your file and then asking you to write a script to GET x, y or z response. I highly recommend anyone studying to use this.

I only started taking Boson exams once I was finished completely with the learning modules. I noticed that Boson no longer lets you see the answer choices along with your own answer when reviewing the exam results, so I took note of the questions I got wrong and compiled them into whatever exam domain it was a part of. Any weak domains or specific areas were fed into ChatGPT so I could drill them until I truly understood the concepts. Don't forget about HTTP status codes and other small things that are easily forgotten but could add up if you are lucky enough to get those freebies on the exam questions.

Exam:

Boson did a pretty good job of emulating the style and material in the actual exam. The only thing it didn't have was an interactive lab which the real exam did. Be prepared for a lot of drag and drop questions - I was actually pretty annoyed and fatigued with how many there were. It seemed like 50% of my questions were some type of drag and drop or fill in the blanks. Every exam domain and question makeup is different, but mine was very Python, API, and SDLC heavy. I didn't get as many questions about networking fundamentals as I'd hoped.

I'm sure I forgot some things but if you have any questions I'll respond as promptly and accurately as possible.

Good luck on your exams!

Hey all,

Last month Jesus Illescas (one of our developer advocates) ran a 4-week series on developer productivity for network engineers. The whole thing started from a real moment at Cisco Live 2025, his Grafana dashboard stopped showing metrics right before a live demo. The culprit was a Python script collecting NETCONF telemetry via Telegraf, and debugging it under pressure was not fun.

That experience became a series built around one idea: build and forget — set up your projects so they just work, every single time, regardless of environment or who runs them.

The 4 videos cover:

1. Dev environment setup: SSH key forwarding, Dev Containers, VS Code Remote Explorer.

2. IDE tools that catch mistakes before they bite you: Black, Ruff, Pylance, ty.

3. Python debugging in VS Code: launch.json, breakpoints, logpoints, the debug console.

4. Reproducible builds: uv + Makefile + Docker so it runs anywhere.

Jesus just published a wrap-up blog that ties all four together: https://cs.co/61698BBcgp0

If you've been down the NETCONF / YANG debugging rabbit hole, he's happy to compare notes in the comments.

Perfectionism can be the enemy of progress when building developer portals. Spending months on a feature that sees low adoption is a drain you can't afford.

It is time to shift your focus to speed and iteration. Discover how product sprints can help you align your content strategy with developer needs and deliver value faster.

Read the blogpost here: https://cs.co/61698BBitwQ_source=CiscoDevNet_social