Automating and Programming Cisco Enterprise Solutions (ENAUTO) Free Sample Questions

An RPC (remote procedure call) API exposes remote operations as procedures. Each call invokes one specific function or service on the server, such as a NETCONF RPC or a JSON-RPC method, and the client passes parameters (arguments) with the call. RPC is not limited to network devices and does not require UDP: NETCONF RPCs run over SSH/TCP, and gRPC runs over HTTP/2. SSL/TLS is also not part of the definition of RPC.

A Python virtual environment (python3 -m venv ) is a lightweight, isolated Python environment with its own site-packages directory. Each project can quickly get its own set of installed modules at the versions it needs, for example from pip install -r requirements.txt, for development, testing and debugging without affecting the system Python or other projects. A venv does not port code between languages, emulate other operating systems, or simplify a CI/CD pipeline.

Ansible is agentless. It runs on a control node and pushes changes to IOS XE over SSH (network_cli) or over the device's APIs, so nothing except SSH/API access is needed on the device. The same playbook and module model works across many device types and operating systems through platform collections such as cisco.ios, so Ansible is a device-independent automation method. Playbooks are not installed on, shipped with, or written from the IOS XE CLI.

In a software-defined network, a controller built on a robust software stack with northbound APIs abstracts the network. Operators express their intent to the controller, which automatically translates it into device configuration. Tightly coupled control and data planes, device-by-device configuration, and dependence on specialized hardware are characteristics of traditional networks.

A synchronous API call blocks the calling code until the server returns a response. If the response is slow or never arrives, the application waits, which adds perceived latency. Synchronous calls can be made from any language and are not inherently less portable. Not blocking while the request is processed describes asynchronous calls.

Action Batches allow you to send multiple configuration requests in a single API call. This reduces the number of HTTP requests, helping to stay within rate limits, and supports 'atomic' transactions where either all changes are applied or none are, ensuring configuration consistency.

In RESTCONF, operational data (status) is typically accessed via the interfaces-state container (in RFC 7223/8343 models) or similar state containers. The /restconf/data root is correct, and GET is the correct verb for retrieval. Accessing configuration data would use the interfaces container.

edit_config(..., default_operation='replace') adds replace to the RPC. The NETCONF default is merge; with replace, RFC 6241 §7.2 states that the configuration data in the parameter completely replaces the configuration in the target datastore, so anything not in the payload is removed. (To replace only one container or list entry, keep the default merge and put the operation="replace" attribute on that element in the XML.) error_option='rollback-on-error' only controls error handling, target='startup' is not an edit-config target on IOS XE (edits go to running, or candidate when enabled), and ncclient's format accepts 'xml', 'text' or 'url', not 'json'.