Cisco 350-901 AUTOCOR v2.0 Roadmap

Weeks 1–2: learn to treat interfaces as contracts rather than remote command prompts.

• Parse JSON and XML while preserving namespaces, native types, absent optional fields, and explicit errors.
• Read YANG trees and identify configuration, state, lists, keys, constraints, actions, and notifications.
• Compare NETCONF transactions with RESTCONF resources and HTTP semantics.
• Discover capabilities, models, versions, datastores, encodings, pagination, and rate limits before use.
• Build least-privilege machine identity and secret rotation into the client design.
• Practice timeouts, bounded retries, jitter, idempotency, optimistic concurrency, and post-read verification.
• Write unit, contract, integration, negative, and failure tests with synthetic fixtures.
• Complete Network Automation questions 1–8 and 26–32.

Weeks 3–4: represent intent as reviewable, reproducible, policy-checked source.

• Use focused Git branches, commits, pull requests, protected integration, and deliberate reverts.
• Separate reusable modules, environment inputs, inventory, generated artifacts, state, and secrets.
• Understand Terraform plan, apply, state bindings, refresh, imports, locking, access, and drift.
• Use Ansible state-aware modules and deterministic templates instead of blind append commands.
• Package repeatable tools in minimal pinned container images while retaining host-kernel and supply-chain controls.
• Pin and verify pipeline actions, providers, collections, images, and other executable dependencies.
• Promote one immutable artifact instead of rebuilding differently in every environment.
• Complete Infrastructure as Code questions 9–16 and 33–39.

Weeks 5–6: connect every configuration outcome to service behavior and recovery.

• Build layered format, lint, schema, unit, contract, policy, secret, and target checks.
• Bind approvals to exact artifact, plan, inventory revision, target, and expiry.
• Deploy to a representative canary, observe, then expand in controlled waves with stop thresholds.
• Define SLIs and SLOs for successful intended changes, latency, drift coverage, queue lag, and rollback.
• Preserve source and ingestion time, and monitor collector, parser, queue, delivery, and freshness health.
• Represent failed or missing telemetry as degraded or unknown instead of healthy.
• Practice containment, evidence preservation, identity revocation, desired-state restoration, and post-incident actions.
• Complete Operations questions 17–21 and 40–44.

Weeks 7–8: use AI as a bounded advisory component, never as self-authorizing infrastructure.

• Distinguish classification, generation, embeddings, semantic retrieval, and retrieval-augmented generation.
• Track source authority, access, version, freshness, deletion, and provenance in knowledge indexes.
• Treat logs, documents, and tickets as untrusted content that can contain prompt injection.
• Minimize and redact context; keep credentials, real customer data, and unrestricted tools away from the model.
• Require structured facts, hypotheses, citations, uncertainty, alternatives, risks, tests, and abstention.
• Evaluate normal, missing, conflicting, stale, unsupported, adversarial, and dangerous scenarios.
• Monitor model and data drift, class-specific outcomes, reviewer overrides, privacy, latency, and cost.
• Complete AI in Automation questions 22–25 and 45–50.

Weeks 9–10+: integrate the four domains through substantial, reversible systems.

• Build the model-driven service with capability discovery, semantic plans, timeout ambiguity, conflicts, canary, and rollback.
• Build the GitOps pipeline with protected state, pinned dependencies, signed artifacts, policy checks, waves, and drift response.
• Build the governed AI assistant with ACL-filtered retrieval, adversarial evaluation, deterministic gates, and a separate executor.
• For every project, capture architecture, trust boundaries, prerequisites, tests, failures, security, cost, privacy, evidence, and cleanup.
• Review all 40 unique flashcards by explaining the distinction, not reciting a phrase.
• Answer all 50 original questions and explain why every distractor fails.
• Practice performance-based reasoning: inspect, plan, change narrowly, verify, and recover.
• Recheck official Cisco topics before scheduling because versions and policies can change.