Cisco CCNP Automating and Programming Service Provider Solutions (300-535 SPAUTO)

Manual CLI changes do not scale in service provider networks. Logging in over SSH, adding a BGP neighbor, and checking show output works until a single typo is repeated across dozens of routers. As the course puts it, any mistake made at the CLI can be made many times over at scale through automation. This training helps IT Directors build a team that automates safely, not just quickly.

Role fit: Assign it to Network Engineers and Team Leads with three to five years of Cisco experience who are moving toward automation or service provider operations. No prior coding background is assumed. Git, Python fundamentals, APIs, and data formats are covered before NETCONF, RESTCONF, Ansible, and Cisco NSO.

Risk and change control: Your team learns guardrails that matter to change advisory boards:

• NETCONF candidate datastores and commits
• Network-wide transactions that discard changes if one device fails
• NSO dry runs that preview native CLI before anything is applied

Time investment: Plan for about 20 hours per learner across 23 skills, each roughly 50 minutes. That makes it practical to schedule one or two skills a week alongside operational work.

The course follows the 300-535 SPAUTO objectives, a CCNP Service Provider concentration exam Cisco retired on 2 February 2026. Hands-on demos use a Linux workstation, VS Code, and Cisco DevNet sandboxes, so learners can practice the same workflows they will bring back to production.

Service provider teams still making changes by SSH and show commands carry real risk. As the course points out, any mistake made at the CLI can be repeated many times over at scale through automation. This training shows IT teams how to automate safely, using structured data, transactional workflows, and validation in place of error-prone manual edits.

• Fewer outages from bad changes: Engineers learn to stage changes in the NETCONF candidate datastore and push network-wide transactions. Every device commits together, or every change is discarded if one device fails. This protects sensitive work like BGP peering.
• Consistent, repeatable deployments: Teams use Ansible playbooks, Puppet desired-state manifests, and Python automation with tools such as ncclient and Nornir to deploy and validate configurations across many devices. They also use Git to version-control that automation code.
• Drift detection and remediation: With Cisco NSO, engineers compare intended and actual device state. They preview the exact native CLI NSO will apply with a dry run, then sync devices back into compliance.
• Faster visibility into network health: Engineers use model-driven APIs and structured network data to retrieve operational state without digging through raw CLI output. That gives teams a clearer way to inspect configuration, utilization, and device behavior across service provider environments.

The result is a team that can retrieve and change configuration through RESTCONF, NETCONF, and gNMI APIs and spend less time on manual ticket work. That team also has the automation depth the 300-535 SPAUTO objectives set out before Cisco retired that exam on 2 February 2026.

Knowledge

• How APIs, Git version control, and Python fundamentals (variables, loops, functions, and classes) underpin modern service provider network automation
• How YANG data models and nodes structure device data, and how JSON, XML, and YAML represent it
• How RESTCONF and NETCONF differ, including how NETCONF candidate datastores and commits reduce the risk of erroneous changes at scale
• The difference between imperative tools like Ansible and declarative, end-state tools like Puppet
• How gRPC telemetry streams deliver structured, real-time data to visualization tools such as Grafana
• The role of Cisco NSO and network functions virtualization (NFV) concepts in service provider automation and orchestration

Ability

• Send show commands and push configurations across multiple devices with Netmiko and Python loops
• Validate operational state with Ansible ad hoc commands and deploy configuration with the ios_config module and RESTCONF PUT and POST requests
• Retrieve capabilities, configuration, and state data from IOS XE and IOS XR devices with NETCONF (ncclient) and RESTCONF
• Push network-wide transactions that commit together or roll back on error, using NETCONF candidate datastores and YDK
• Retrieve targeted operational data with NETCONF subtree filters and apply model-driven automation concepts with YANG-based data
• Run NSO dry runs and sync-to operations to remediate configuration drift, and interact with NSO through Python and its REST API