For organizations striving for agile, reliable, and scalable network operations, Cisco Crosswork Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) stands as a foundational pillar. NSO's continuous evolution, particularly across versions 6.0 through 6.5, has introduced a suite of enhancements designed to address the complex demands of modern network automation, offering significant value to potential customers seeking expert consultation and support. This technical overview dissects the key improvements in each release, underscoring their impact on operational efficiency, security, and scalability.
Cisco Crosswork NSO 6.0: Performance and Observability Redefined
NSO 6.0 marked a significant leap forward, primarily focusing on performance boosts and enhanced observability. A key introduction was the NSO Insights Manager, a dashboard providing crucial KPIs on transaction volumes and Northbound API operations, offering real-time visibility into NSO's internal workings. This version also refined the concurrency model and introduced Commit Queues, optimizing how NSO handles concurrent operations and ensuring greater stability in large-scale deployments. Furthermore, Existing Service Protection and a new confirm-network-state commit mode improved interoperability with out-of-band changes, safeguarding existing services.
Cisco Crosswork NSO 6.1: High Availability and Containerization Prowess
Version 6.1 brought robust High Availability (HA) with Raft consensus, providing secure and durable state replication with automatic cluster management. This is critical for maintaining business continuity and minimizing downtime. The release also embraced modern deployment strategies with Containerized NSO, offering pre-built Docker images for streamlined deployments. CDB Compaction improvements optimized database performance, while NED package handling was enhanced to allow additions without service outages. Security saw a boost with AAA infrastructure improvements, including Single Sign-On (SSO) and package authentication. Compliance Reporting became more efficient, leveraging parallel processing and memory optimization by streaming reports to disk.
Cisco Crosswork NSO 6.2: Enhanced Security and Developer Experience
NSO 6.2 focused on bolstering security and refining the developer experience. It introduced support for LDAP and TACACS+ authentication through dedicated packages, providing flexible and secure access control. A containerized build environment for NSO packages, via a new Development Image, simplified and standardized package creation. Nano service usability was significantly improved with new ncs-make-package options and streamlined development workflows. Furthermore, upgrade improvements included an optimized CDB schema upgrade algorithm and the ability to preview schema changes, reducing upgrade risks and downtime.
Cisco Crosswork NSO 6.3: Streamlined UI and Distributed Observability
With NSO 6.3, the Web UI underwent substantial modernization, offering a streamlined user experience and improved device management capabilities, including auto-configure and rename actions for easier onboarding. Support for Linux/arm64 platforms expanded deployment flexibility. For distributed deployments, observability improvements were introduced, with NETCONF and RESTCONF APIs now supporting standard-based Trace Context propagation, crucial for end-to-end tracing in complex environments. This version also added JSON metadata support and RESTCONF data filtering with an "exclude" query parameter, enhancing API flexibility and data retrieval.
Cisco Crosswork NSO 6.4: Persistence and Operational Efficiency
NSO 6.4 delivered a transformative new persistence layer that utilizes RAM more efficiently, functioning as a cache and offloading stale data to disk. This allows for larger deployments on smaller resources and simplifies operations with background compaction. IPC Authentication introduced a more secure way for inter-process communication. Keyboard-interactive SSH login was enabled for multi-factor authentication towards network elements, enhancing security. Significant improvements were made to HA replication time in rule-based HA setups, and the introduction of passive follower nodes for HA Raft facilitated distribution across datacenters. The Web UI continued to be refined, and a new documentation framework with AI-assisted search significantly improved user experience.
Cisco Crosswork NSO 6.5: Advanced Interoperation and FIPS Compliance
The latest release, NSO 6.5, brings further critical advancements. It significantly enhanced existing service protection with the confirm-network-state commit mode, allowing NSO to better interoperate with out-of-band changes and policy-defined handling of overlapping configuration data. A major highlight is the support for installing NSO in a FIPS 140-3 compliant mode, catering to organizations with stringent cryptographic requirements. The NSO Web UI received further updates to its Package Manager, Alarms, and Compliance Reporting tools, offering improved design and functionality. YANG-Push subscription over RESTCONF was introduced, enabling real-time data streaming. Device auto-configuration was made more robust with enhanced retry mechanisms, ensuring smoother device onboarding.
Conclusion
The continuous innovation across Cisco Crosswork NSO versions 6.0 to 6.5 demonstrates Cisco's commitment to providing a leading-edge network automation platform. From foundational performance and observability enhancements to advanced high availability, containerization, security, and refined user experiences, each release builds upon the last, offering increasingly sophisticated capabilities. For organizations navigating the complexities of modern network management, leveraging these advancements through expert NSO consultation and support is paramount to unlocking true operational agility, reducing manual errors, and accelerating service delivery.
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