Today I passed the Cisco Certified DevNet Associate DEVASC 200-901 exam.

Here’s a quick note about my experience.

DevNet certifications were announced this year at Cisco Live . I was busy on another track at the moment and added them to the backlog.

Then some $bigProjects started, summertime priority went to outdoor activities after months of lockdown, other $bigProjects sucked all my energy and the end of the year was approaching fast.

A mix of peer pressure and FOMO the DevNet Class of 2020 gave me some motivation to focus my studies and schedule the exam before the end of the year’s deadline (postponed to February 24, 2021).

Network automation is the perfect mix of two of my passions: networking and coding, I couldn’t miss this opportunity!

Exam Preparation

I took advantage of the O'Reilly Learning subscription and based my studies on the Cisco Certified DevNet Associate DEVASC 200-901 Official Cert Guide. .

To gain confidence with the tools used for network automation I did some labs with curl , requests and PostMan . The DevNet Sandbox provides all the necessary platforms to work with the API.

I write ~~bad~~ code for some personal projects so the Python part of the exam preparation was just a light review, same for the networking chapters.

I used Learn Python 3 the Hard Way to start and Python Tricks as reference for specific topics.

NETCONF and RESTCONF are pretty new to me, I don’t use them in my current job. I did some exercises with ncclient and curl to grasp the basics and learn enough to cover the topics of the exam.

The Exam

As earlier this year I did the exam remotely from the kid’s room. The experience was positive again, I had no issues with the software setup. Drinks are permitted but gum, smoking and food are not.

The webcam must stream a video for the whole duration of the exam. The bandwidth depends on the quality of the video, HD is enough to comply the exam requirements. If you have a 4k/FHD cam just change the settings to avoid any issue.

I’ve found the exam fair, as usual my main concern was related to the wording of some questions.

I scored quite good (965/1000) probably thanks to my experience with Python, API and automation in general.

This was the traffic on my Internet connection, not that much. I advise to reduce the resolution of the video feed, the proctor probably doesn’t need a 4k video stream, HD should be enough.

How much bandwidth you need for a remote #Cisco #DevNet exam? Not much actually, just 500Kbps for video streaming from the webcam #Grafana #DevNetClassof2020 pic.twitter.com/bJt21jiYS7
— Gian Paolo (@gp_ifconfig) December 21, 2020

Wrap up

I’m happy to join the DevNet Class of 2020. I’ve already shared my view on DevNet :

Cisco DevNet is the best thing that could happen to the entire networking industry

and according to my Twitter echo chamber many Network Engineers are writing code to create new tools, automate some tasks or glue together different products using API.

While this will not be a career change for me I consider coding an important skill to complete my profile.

Stay tuned for my next projects!