Preface

Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) is a versatile tool. Its design acknowledges that it is impossible to support every specific use case out of the box in today's diverse networks. Instead, NSO provides the tooling and support systems that enable fast and cost-effective development of custom, bespoke solutions.

As the product name suggests, a lot revolves around services in NSO. When implemented as services, network applications can offload many common tasks to NSO and focus on use-case-specific logic, allowing you to manage configuration in an intelligent way.

The following guide primarily targets software developers, system integrators, and network automation engineers who need to extend NSO with service packages or add other custom functionality. The content leads you through the process of developing applications in NSO and shows you how to use various NSO features to simplify network automation.

We recommend readers have at least some understanding of the Python or Java programming language. The required level depends on the complexity of the actual use case. You can implement many automation scenarios by simply modifying the provided examples. However, prior knowledge of NSO basics, as described in the NSO User Guide, is necessary for the best experience.