Cisco provides two other excellent, and, at the time of writing, free, methods for practicing network automation with various Cisco gears. Both of the tools require a Cisco Connection Online (CCO) login. They are both really good, especially for the price point (they are free!). It is hard for me to imagine that these online tools will remain free for long; it is my belief that, at some point, these tools will need to charge money for their usage or be rolled into a bigger initiative that requires a fee. However, we can take advantage of them while they are available at no charge.

The first tool is the Cisco DevNet (https://developer.cisco.com/) sandbox, which includes guided learning tracks, complete documentation, and sandbox remote labs, among other benefits. Some of the labs are always on, while others you need to reserve. The lab availability will depend on usage. It is a great alternative if you do not already have a lab at your own disposal. In my experience with DevNet, some of the documentation and links were outdated, but they can be easily retrieved for the most updated version. In a rapidly changing field such as software development, this is somewhat expected. DevNet is certainly a tool that you should take full advantage of, regardless of whether you have a locally run VIRL host or not:

Another online lab option for Cisco is https://dcloud.cisco.com/. You can think of dCloud as running VIRL on other people's servers without having to manage or pay for those resources. It seems that Cisco is treating dCloud as both a standalone product as well as an extension to VIRL. For example, in the use case of when you are unable to run more than a few IOX-XR or NX-OS instances locally, you can use dCloud to extend your local lab. It is a relatively new tool, but it is definitely worth a look: