>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live US 2019, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Good morning, welcome to theCUBE's second day of coverage of Cisco Live 2019 from San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host is Stu Miniman, and Stu and I have a couple of guests from Cisco's Data Center Networking group with us. To my right, Thomas Scheibe, VP of Product Management and to his right, Ranga Rao, Senior Director of Product Management. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Welcome back, Ranga. >> Thank you very much. >> Thomas, great to have you. >> Happy to be here, yeah. >> So, here we are in the DevNet Zone, this is, Ranga you were saying this is probably one of the busiest locations within all of Cisco Live. It's been jammed since this morning. >> Stu: You got the ACI Takeover going on right now. >> It is! >> Yes, yes. >> So with that said, Thomas, with ACI, application-centric infrastructure, all these changes to the network, what's going on on day two? >> It's fun, it's actually, yeah, as you say, it's a little busier. We have a good set of news coming this week and yeah, you're going to hear more but let me give a little bit of a hint here as to what we're doing. We talked about how do we extend ACI into the cloud, or, as they say, anywhere. We did this two or three months ago with AWS. We're following up with the same for Azure, as well as having extension into the IBM Cloud, so that's really really exciting, opens up a lot of capabilities not just for the networking teams, how to extend into the cloud, we also have some interesting things around how we actually can start with ACI in the cloud first for the app developers, and then come back if you want to deploy either in the cloud or on prem. So, really an extension of what is doable for the networking team, as well as actually for the app teams. >> So, any ACI, any platform, any location, any workload? Any hypervisor, any container platform you want, yeah. Flexibility, that's what this is about. So, Ranga, spoke with you earlier this year at one of your partner shows, talking about all the latest, you know, AI, cognitive learning and all of those pieces there. Partner's obviously a big piece of the ACI story here. >> Thomas: Yeah. >> Thomas was giving a little talk about some of the cloud provider, what more can you share about what's happening with how your product integrates with a vast ecosystem? >> Absolutely, when we built ACI, we sort of anticipated this moment when this crowd in the DevNet area that we are seeing, right? Like, from people shifting from a very CLI focused approach to a developer focused, and integrated solution-focused approach. So we built ACI as an open platform. We have 65 plus partners, and with new integrations coming on like every so often. Just this at Cisco Live, we are launching an integration with F5. F5 is building, has built, an app for the Cisco ACI App Center, and a whole number of tools and integrations for developers. We have essentially built integrations with Ansible, Terraform, and new Python modules, so these are all exciting new things coming at Cisco Live. >> So, when you guys talk with customers, being in product management, I know you talk to customers all the time. There's presumably a very bidirectional symbiotic relationship. When you're talking with customers, Thomas, what are some of the values that they're looking for ACI to help them deliver, especially as it relates to being able to get more value out of the data that they've got? >> Right, so there are a couple of things that are probably standing out. One is, if you turn to the networking team, it's all around network automation and segmentation. There are the two biggest things everybody's after. Particularly if you look as the data is more distributed it's become harder and harder to do those all manually. You want to automate your date one activity as well as you want to make sure you can enforce segmentation of the data lost in the cloud, and on prem, all over the place. So these are the two big ones that really every network operations team is after. And then the second piece that we see obviously more and more is, what about day two? Give me better visibility, in particular, as they say, if the data is so dissolute, get me better visibility. What is going on? And then be able to tie this back to the user, which is the application team. Is there an impact on the application or not? And so there are a lot of interesting tools that we have and we're going to demo those all here, that is available for the networking team. The other piece, really, and you asked for the values, as I said, the app team, right? What is today, if an app team is developing they're typically then handed over in production. This is where this friction happens. How long does it take to go from here to here? If I can shorten that one and just take the blueprints out of the app development process, and map it directly to the automation capability of ACI, I can shorten the cycle to deploy, and so that's a tremendous value that we do see from customers. >> Great, lots of discussion in the keynote about the ever changing architectures that are happening here. Give us the update, you know? We've been down this path for ACI for a few years now, but where are your customers at? You know, what are the new things that are causing them challenges and opportunities, Thomas? >> Yeah, I probably use instead of ever changing I would say ever expanding, but you're absolutely right, because what we saw when we started this office rollaround how do I automate my data center? How do I get a cloud experience in my data center? What we see changing, and what I find is driven by this whole app refactoring process, that customers want to deploy apps maybe in the cloud, maybe develop in the cloud and so they need an extension to their automated data center into the cloud, and so really what you see from us is an expansion of that ACI concept, to Ranga's point, we actually really didn't change. We're just extending it to container development platforms, to different cloud environments, but it's the same idea, how do I automate the end to end network reach as well as these segmentations? >> Ranga, maybe can you expand on some of the automated piece of it, even, you know, I look at one of the things that jumped out at me this week is there's some changes to the CCIE program. It's not just, okay, I've done it, and I do my test. It's, well, we understand that things are changing year to year, and therefor how I get my certification, How I keep up on these, it is going to change. Where does automation play in all of this? >> Absolutely, I mean, when you think about automation there are two key parts to it. One is the automation that happens within the fabric that the controller manages and there's a lot of that. To extend on what Thomas was saying, right, in terms of how quickly the fabric can be brought up, how quickly applications can be deployed on the fabric and so on. Beyond that, there's automation that we have built leveraging the modern devo apps and CICD tools that are very popular among the developer community. Like I said, we have built integrations with Ansible, Terraform and so on, but we have also made rich APIs available across our platform. Every piece of information that the controller or the switches have is very much accessible for developers. That's really a back breaking approach to networking where developers have access to everything and can program to the network. So I think that's where the world is going, and that's what we plan to support with automation. >> Let me comment on this, because there's an interesting piece where we did, right? We have this fabric controller called the APIC. It's actually an App posting platform as well and so where we're actually taking advantage of that, everything is code in ACI, and you can write as a partner customer, apps, right on top, and so like the F5 integration that we have done is literally an F5-written and app residing there, right? And so it's really, really really flexible to build workflows around what you want to do on any infrastructure, for customers themself, for any partner themself. >> Yeah, it's an interesting piece, cause when you think, you know, I think back at my career. How much did the network really, the network architect think about the applications? Like, oh, okay, how much throughput and sure, I need it to go from north to south to east, west. Or, oh, wait, this thing needed some extra buffer credits, but usually, you know, the business owner, application owner and the network people, they were throwing things over the wall between each other and tweaking some dials here. Now when I look around this show, it's we're talking about building applications at the core of it and it's happening together. Can you speak a little bit to some of the activities going around, and that trend? >> No, absolutely, it's actually exciting. I actually, because my background is I did programming long long time back, and it's actually- >> Back when you called it programming, not coding? >> Correct. (laughing) it was programming. It is actually exciting to see, and I can tell you over the fast four, five years, when we run these techtorials we ask, cause, like architecture and programming, how many people are interested programming? And it used to be, I dunno, 10%. Now it's literally 60 to 70% of the people in the room are saying we're using automation frameworks like Ansible, and they actually see what we're doing and the value and they want to learn more. So there's a significant shift in terms of what people expect, what they want to do as a network infrastructure, versus what it was in the past. It's just a reflection on, as I said, the agility that is needed out of the infrastructure, and how do we react to what the developers, the users, want to do that put the apps on, so. >> In the spirit of Cisco's bridge to possible which was the Barcelona theme, is this a bridge to IT and business working better together? >> Absolutely. I mean the way... I dunno whether I can say much, but it's absolutely, how do I bridge, we call it initially, how do I bridge between what you called out, the networking and application team? It's the bridge to possible. It's not like, oh, it's your problem, it's my problem. We can do it together or these two teams can do it together, absolutely. That's actually a very good reference. >> To add to that, when we were in 2012 thinking about what should ACI be, everyone in the industry was somehow thinking that all the network engineers will magically become programmers, right? So programmability is a big part of what the network needs but also being aware of the application and being able to respond to the right needs of the application at the right moment is a pretty big thing, and that's what we have built with ACI, with the first class support for programmability. >> And the programmability that we're seeing and hearing about, Ranga, how is that a differentiator for Cisco? >> So, I think, first of all, the network, we have always believed, is the nervous system of the enterprise, so a lot really interesting information goes through the network, so unlocking the value of the network for these different use cases is what's made possible with the programmability approaches that we have taken, right? The only reason why we have 65 plus partners programming to our platform, is because we have these open APIs. We have a ton of channel partners using the open APIs to build apps and to, like, support videos, different use cases for our customers, with ad hoc automation or even using some of the automation framework, so it has really, evolved the network from being CLI-centric to being solution and programmability centric. >> Maybe one point to make since he said open APIs, and I can't overemphasize this, we're truly open APIs, right? Because sometimes there's in this, not naming names, but people saying, oh, you have to be a certification to use these APIs. That is not the case for Cisco APIs on ACI. They are open. Everybody, customers, partners, quite frankly, even competitors could use those to program. We're standing behind our APIs. They can be used as-is. >> So it is quite a big change. I mean, people know historically, Cisco it's like, well, Cisco solves customer problems, and then they would drive it through the standards. Here, you know, we we've watched the ascendency of the DevNet group, and you know, hundreds of thousands of people now helping to build code. It's the API economy, so, you know, very much it's not the Cisco I thought about a generation ago. >> Thank you. You know, we take this as a compliment. We're actually really excited to see how much development is possible by opening this platform up with APIs and I think that somebody else said this, so it's not all mine, but your more APIs to have, you have user lists to integrate, the faster we jointly develop and actually achieve what we want, so that's the bridge. >> And the beautiful thing about APIs is customers and other developers learn things that we wouldn't have and we learn, and we are seeing a lot of that, so that's another way of unlocking innovation for our customers, and we are seeing a lot of that, you know? >> So when we talk with any customer, any business, we always talk about speed scale, speed to innovation. With the wave of connectivity, the expansion of 5G, WiFi six, the proliferation of mobile data that's going to be traversing the networks the next few years. It's going to be video. How is an application-centric infrastructure going to allow customers to take advantage of the demands on the network that need for speed, so that your customers can be as competitive as they need to be? >> Let me try to kind of tune down to the essence there. What really is going on, you have all these different applications, as you point out, all of these users and endpoints, and what you want to do is you want to have an ability to correlate between what the user wants to run on the infrastructure and how the infrastructure has to behave. And then also, you want to correlate back as to infrastructure issues, who is impacted? And really was ACI was about is not rebuilding applications. It was about, provide this glue, this bridge, between what's going on in the infrastructure to what the user experience is, and if I can do this it becomes so much more efficient and it's so much easier to roll out all these new applications on an ACI infrastructure. >> Exciting stuff, guys. Thomas, Ranga, thank you for joining Stu and me on theCUBE today. Lots of exciting stuff. We'll be listening for those announcements that you said are coming out later today. >> Yeah, okay. You will see them. >> All right, excellent. Thanks, guys, we appreciate your time. >> Thanks, same here, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Our pleasure. For Stu Miniman, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from our second day of coverage of Cisco Live San Diego. Thanks for watching. (energetic theme music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Barcelona, Spain. it's The Cube covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and The Cube's Ecosystem Partner. (upbeat music) (people chatting in background) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. This is The Cube exclusive coverage live in Barcelona, Spain, for Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder and co-host of The Cube here all week, two days of live wall-to-wall coverage in the DevNet Zone where all the action's at. It's the biggest story at Cisco Live is the impact of the DevNet and the developer network that's been growing leaps and bounds. Of course, we covered DevNet Create earlier last year, which is a Cloud Native event. Kind of bring in two communities together from Cisco and of course, we can't talk about developers without talking about experiences that developers need and want and expect and also, you know, how to operate in those environments. We have two great guests. Mandy Whaley's been on before, The Cube Alumni Director of Developer Experiences at Cisco, and Tom Davies, who's the Senior Manager of the DevNet Sandbox. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Good to see you again. >> Excited to be here. Yeah, good to see you, too. >> So congratulations. >> DevNet is again booming. It's the hot part of the show. It's one of the top stories here in Barcelona. >> Yes. >> It's been great. Our workshops, where we're doing the hands-on coding, have been extremely full even early in the morning and late into the evening, and it's great to see people really diving in, laptops open, getting their hands on, and doing some coding. >> That's great stuff, congratulations. And, you know, the Sandbox is interesting because now you guys are completely open. Love the motto: learn, code, inspire, and connect. That's the motto here. You got to have a place for people to do this. >> You do. >> What is this Sandbox thing that you guys are rollin' out? It's pretty interesting. >> Yeah, so the Sandbox is completely open to everyone, and the idea behind it is if you like, if you can go to developer.cisco.com/sandbox, you can hit our catalog and start playing with our technology within minutes by just clicking on the technology you want to cover. We'll spin you up that environment, and you can start playing it as a developer really quite quickly. >> Alright, take me through a progression example, because let's just say I hit that website, developer.cisco.com/sandbox, >> Yeah. what do I do? I mean, what are people doing? Is it like, you know, Hello World or what are they coding? What are they learning? I mean, what's goin' on there? >> It just depends on the technology that they choose. So we go to developer.cisco.com/sandbox, hit Catalog, it comes out with a bunch of titles, and in that catalog, you can choose Networking, you could choose Security, you could choose Data Center, Cloud, Open Source, any different technology that that developer might be interested in or want to integrate into, and then from there they click on that title and say, "Right, I want to reserve say APIC-EM. "I'm interested in Networking and control of Networking." From there, we spin that environment up for them, completely secure, send them the details of how it's connect, they connect to it, and then they are free to start coding within minutes on, say, a APIC-EM controller solution, figure out what the latest release provides them, >> Yeah. how they integrate into it, and how they can start innovatin' in a really easy way over the top. >> So they can, it's a playground. They can do mash-ups. >> It's a playground, yeah. >> It is. >> I can sling API's around, test stuff, break stuff. >> If they're breaking somethin', they're probably doin' something right so we encourage it. >> Yeah (laughs) >> Yeah. >> It's brilliant. >> Yeah. >> The other thing that's really cool about the Sandbox is that Tom takes a lot of time and care to make sure we put together fully, you know, environments where you can actually build things with the Cisco gear plus open source projects that are relevant to those pieces of the Cisco technology portfolio, so it's not just the environment. It's sample code, it's open source you can use, it's traffic generations, it's really a full working environment. >> Yeah, that brings up a good point I wanted to ask you, as we had some other guests on. We couldn't get to it. You're startin' to see with Kubernetes and well, first docker containers and now all containers. Really interesting. I mean, Red Hat just bought CoreOS yesterday. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's big news. >> They did, they did. >> Big news, yeah. >> In Europe, you miss all the action. The State of the Union. (Tom laughs). >> I know. >> It was a big story on the New York Times on Sunday. I'm like, "Ah, I'm missin' all the late news." But that's a signal. Containers are commoditized. You're seeing that be the now abstraction layer for moving work loads around and program around it. >> We do. >> Kubernetes gives an orchestration opportunity that now allows you to bring this service mesh concept to the table. >> It does. >> This is becoming a really interesting developer dream, because now I could provision >> Yes. microservices and start doing network services with those microservice at the app layer. >> Yeah. >> This to me is a really, really big trend. I know you guys have kind of quietly put it out there, a term called "Net DevOps," >> Yes. which I think will be a very big thing. >> Yep. (Mandy laughs) >> Because it's DevOps the whole stack. >> It is. >> That's right, yeah. >> But really usin' the network more, so for the people who are power users of network services, this could become a very big DevOps movement. >> Yes, yes. >> Can you explain this concept of the Net DevOps, and does that relate to like SDO and some of the service mesh stuff out there? What's your-- >> Yeah, do you want to start with service mesh and then I'll dive into the lower parts or, yeah? >> We can do that. >> Go for it. >> Jump right in. >> Yeah. >> Share the information. >> Yeah, sure. >> The term service mesh is actually fairly new, and it's common because as people use microservices more, their understandin' that they just perforate like crazy, and it's actually really quite hard to understand which microservices talk to which microservices, are they doin' it securely? Are they within policy? Are they talkin' to the right thing? And that's where SDO comes in. It's really providin' a proxy for that traffic so you can easily talk between microservice A and microservice B, understand it, see observability between that traffic, and then control that traffic, and SDO is takin' really the abstraction away, takin' the pain away from that huge service. >> Just talk about the quantify that time savings, because this is like, I think this really kind of was the minds get blown. That example you just laid out, without that, what would you have to do? I have to build a proxy, I have to test it. >> You do. >> I mean, just take me through it. >> Yeah. The comparisons A to B. >> Well, normally when you have >> Real quick. a microservice, you probably have about 15 other services around them all. Like if you had a ton of microservices, you probably have 15 different subserving services around it. With SDO, it takes 15 away so you don't have to manage or operate all those, and it brings you down to one, and that's really super key, 'cause it makes it so much easier to deal with microservices >> Yeah. then to bail them out. >> And then I boil it down, and then I tell people when Amazon launched Lambda, which essentially the serverless trend, 'cause they're always >> Yeah. just services. Never really serverless. (Mandy laughs) I know the Cisco people debate this all the time, and now there's, it's true. This server's behind it. >> Of course. They just take this abstraction away. They're really enabling this notion of a mindset for the developer where this gets into the user experience, user expectation. >> Right. >> Yes. >> If I want infrastructure as a code and I don't want to dive into the network services, I want the one not the 15 to deal with. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> I'm essentially programming the infrastructure at that point, so this is a big, effin' deal. >> This is a big deal, >> It is. and then even what we're seeing is that the expectations are set by DevOps practices, and now that our network devices are opening up APIs, and we have the really strong assurance and analytics pieces that we saw in the Cisco keynotes, we can extend those DevOps concepts to managing network devices. So something very traditional, networking task, like out of VLAN. Let's say you want to do that, but you want to do that in a network as code manner. So you want to take that through a build pipeline, something that would be familiar to a developer or somebody who manages their infrastructure in a DevOps way, but now you can do it for a networking device. And you can take it through build and test just like you would code, and all of your network configurations are source controlled so you have your version control around it, and that's a big mind shift for the network developers. But in DevNet, we have the application developers, the ops engineers, and the net workers, and then what we're tryin' to do is share those practices across because that's the only way we'll get to the scale, the consistency, the level of automation that we need. >> Alright, so here's a question for you guys. Put you on the spot. DevOps has been great. It's going mainstream. Some are called CloudOps, whatever, but DevOps is great, great movement. >> Yes. >> That's been goin' on for a while, you know. Hey. >> Yeah. You know, pat each other on the back. (Mandy laughs) But DevOps means automation. >> Yes, yes. >> Right? >> And the old rule is you got to do it twice automated. This scares people. So what is being automated away in the Net DevOps model? >> So I wouldn't know that it's being automated away, but the idea is that is if we're managing infrastructure, traditionally you would do it in a sequential and manual way, right? But we need to do it in a parallel and automated way. So moving towards that automation helps us do that. I think we see some network engineers who think, "I have to learn a lot of new skills to do this." >> Mm-hmm. >> And that is true, but you don't have to be the level of an application developer who's writing applications to do some automation and scripting, and DevNet's really working to put the tools out there to lead them down that path and get them moving in that direction. It's also a little bit more, I mean, DevOps is definitely the automation in the tools. There's also the culture of bringing Dev and Ops together. So the same thing happens there as well. >> Totally agree, and also the process as well, repeatability in what we're doin'. So once you've done one >> Yes. and that process works for you, you can repeat that process for the next set of configuration you're deploying. >> Yeah, definitely. >> What's interesting. >> Super slick. >> Rowan showed on stage the future titles of what it'll be like in 2030 or 2050. I forget which year it was. >> Yes, yes. I joked, it says the LinkedIn on that. Might not even be around, might be around then, either. (Mandy laughs) This is a new field, right? >> Yes. >> And successful companies, the ethos was hire the smartest person because the jobs that are coming haven't been invented yet, so there's no right experience there. So this kind of reminds me of what's going on with DevOps where, you know, Network guys, they're not dumb. I mean, they're smart, right? >> Super smart. >> You know? >> Yeah. >> And it used to be that you were the rock star if you ran the network. >> That's right, that's right. >> Okay, now the rock stars are more the app developers and the developers on the Dev Op side. So these would be easy, and we're seeing that it's easy for those guys to jump in to some of these coding and/or agile mindsets. >> Yes. >> 'Cause they are gunslingers, they are rock stars. >> They are, it's incredible how fast they're picking it up. I mean, they are, just from the ones that we met from last year to this year who were here came to like their first coding class. This year they're here, and they're like, "Oh yeah, I totally get this build pipeline. "I'm doing this in my organization." We're seeing 'em pick it up incredibly fast. >> And so they obviously see a path to other jobs. What patterns are you guys seeing in terms of things that they're doing on the Sandbox and/or some of the user expectations that they have as they're now fresh, young, or/and middle age >> Yeah. or old students >> Right? in the new world. What are some of the patterns? >> Yeah. >> What are they kickin' tires on? What's the, what are they gravitating towards? >> Everythin', but they yeah, literally everythin', but they're always like quite interested in containers and what's happenin' in the container world and how that applies >> Yes. to networkin', especially because as we touched on it earlier, there's a lot of networkin' to be had in the container world, and it's not just one layer of (mumbles) of the service mesh. There's also virtualization layers, there's like abstracted policy layers. There's a good few layers of networkin' that you need to know and really understand to be able to get into, so that's one real trend that the network guys >> Yes. really are jumpin' on, and so they should, because they're great at it. >> Yeah, I would add to that. Like I've been seeing, you know, in different conversations I have with people who are coming from the appDev side or the Op side and saying, "Wow, I'm really good at containers. "I can build apps and containers all day." And then they get into it, and they're like, "The networking part of containers is hard. "There's a lot to learn." >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And so I definitely see a lot of activity around both sides coming together around, "How do we really make that work?" >> And the bottom line is is that this whole "Your job's going away" is ridiculous because this really proves that there is so much job security in DevOps it's ridiculous. >> There's more devices per engineer to be managed then ever before, so it's really just you have to have the automation to even keep up, right? >> Yeah, it's quite funny, actually, because I come from a very much a software centered background, and networkin' to me was black magic. You had to know so much stuff in the networking order, it used to scare the hell out of me, but I had to go down into the network layer to start understandin' it to do a better job of software >> Well, you was locked down. and I'm seein' the reverse. >> I mean, you had perimeter-base security, (Tom laughs) and you had very inflexible configuration management things. You were just >> Yeah. really locked down. >> That's right. Now agile and dyanmic >> And then we're seein'. adaptive, and these are the words that are described. And now add IoT to the mix. You guys had the Black Hat, you know, IoT booth here, >> Yes. which is phenomenal. >> Yes. It's only going to increase the edge of the network, which is not new to Cisco. >> Definitely. Cisco knows the edge. >> That's right. So it's going to be interesting to see that going forward. >> Yeah. >> Definitely. >> And that's one of our sandboxes. We have a sandbox where developers can practice taking docker containers and deploying them into Edge Compute in our routers, and that's one that's really popular and gets a lot of-- >> It's incredibly popular. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Mandy and Tom, thanks for comin' on The Cube. Really appreciate, great to see you again. >> Yeah, thank you so much. >> Congratulations on all your success. Go kick on the tires of the Sandbox. >> It's all down to Mandy. >> Yeah. >> You guys did a great job. >> DevNet developer network for Cisco here, and of course DevNet created in separate small, boutique-event small, for the Cloud Native World. You want to check that out. Well, the Cube will be there this year. This is The Cube live coverage. I'm John Furrier, stay tuned for more of day 2, exclusive Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, Veen and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. (upbeat electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone, to our live coverage from theCUBE here in Barcelona, Spain, for exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, cofounder and cohost of theCUBE, with my cohost this week, Stu Miniman. Been to many events also, senior analyst at wikibon.com. Stu and I have been breaking down all the action here in the DevNet zone. And we have with us here as our guest, Ashley Roach, who is a principal engineer and evangelist with Cisco. DevNet himself, has full view of what's going on. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >> Good to see you again. We covered DevNet Create, which was really our first foray into what DevNet was doing outside of the Cisco ecosystem, bringing that cloud-native developer into the Cisco fold. Here, it's the Cisco show where all the Cisco ecosystem and your customers are growing into the cloud and programming with DevNet. So congratulations, it's been phenomenal. It's been one of the top stories we've been covering as DevNet has just been explosive. >> Oh, thanks a lot. It's been a lot of hard work. >> People have been learning, they're coding, they're being inspired, and they're connecting, It's a very sharing culture. Props to you guys and the team. Well done. >> Ashley: Appreciate it. >> So what is DevNet? I mean, this is a cultural shift. We've been reporting on theCUBE all year and last year. But really this year, end of last year, we started really putting the stake in the ground saying we are going to see a renaissance in software development. Linux foundations, reporting that there's going to be exponential growth in code and open-source. You seeing that you can create intellectual property with only 10% of the energy codewise, 90% using open-source. They call that the code sandwich. Again, this is just data that they're sharing, but it points to the bigger trend. Developers are becoming the important part of the equation, and the integration of the stack from network to application, are working together. And again, proof point's there, things like Kubernetes, containers, have obviously been out there for a long time. You're starting to see the visibility for developers. >> Right. >> John: You're at Cisco, you're in the middle of all this. You're seeing one side of the camp and the other. >> Ashley: Yeah. >> What's your view? >> Yeah, I think that's a good, it captures a lot of the dynamics that are going on right now in the environments. And I mean, for me, I come at this from an application developer standpoint. I actually, when I joined Cisco, I was not a hardware guy at all (laughs) Frankly, I'm not even now. I'm much more oriented towards software, and so when we've seen, though, sort of the power of the underlying infrastructure that gets married up to some of these overlay systems like Kubernetes and containers, more and more of the infrastructure on one hand is getting abstracted, which you might think, oh, uh oh. Like, that's a problem. But in reality, the infrastructure still needs to be there, right? You can't run your serverless function out of thin air. >> John: Yeah. >> At least not yet. >> John: It's truly not serverless. There's servers somewhere. >> Yeah, exactly. So, you know, those are the funny jokes that we like to have in the industry, right? But at the same time, you want to think like, okay, well I'm writing my application, I'm a developer. I don't want to know about infrastructure. My whole job is I don't care about that. But there is information and utility in the data that you can get from the infrastructure because at some point, your application will fail. You may have some bugs, and yeah, Kubernetes may kill your container and bring up another one. But you still need to de-bug that issue, and so yeah, you can get tracking, you can get analytics. But also, you can get that stuff from that infrastructure that's underlying it. And so, like one of the presentations I'm doing tomorrow, I wrote just kind of a proof of concept sample app where it's a Spring Boot app that has a built-in health check capability. It ties into APIC-EM and or DNA Center and uses that information that's available about the network. So maybe it's your, from your firewall to your application, you can run a path trace and just have that happen every five minutes or something like that, or check the health of an entire environment every, you know, so often. And then your application can resolve issues or have just data about it so that we can keep moving. >> Yeah, actually, you know, I love that comment you talked, you know, you're not a hardware person, and that's okay. >> Ashley: Right. >> And there's lots of people here at the Cisco show that aren't. That's a change from just a few years ago. How is that dynamic changing? You know, I remember for a few years I was arguing like every networking person needs to become a coder and there's, you know, push back and people are scared and what's going to happen to my job and can I learn that skill set? >> Ashley: Right. >> The bar for entry seems pretty low these days but how do we translate some of those languages? >> Yeah, I think that perception of say, an ops person becoming a programmer, it's not really the right mindset. >> Right. >> There's a couple mindsets, though, that are important. So one of the things we're trying to do is foster the DevOps culture somewhat. And to do that, an ops person has to understand and have empathy for the problems that exist on the application side and vice versa. So for us, we're just trying to education people in that vein. >> John: Yeah. >> But all of the infrastructure is now also automatable and you don't have to automate at low level. You can automate it with things like Ansible, which is a bit more accessible for people that haven't been programming for a long time. So, you know, I think those are the things that we see and that we're trying to encourage within our community and just broadly speaking, I would say, in the industry. >> You brought up empathy, interesting. Because this is a cultural shift, right? So this mindset, this cultural DNA, you have to have empathy. But it's kind of like the Venn diagram. Empathy is one circle. >> Ashley: Mhm. >> Feasibility is another and viability is the other, right? >> Ashley: Mhm. >> So it's always in context to what you can get done, right? So you guys at DevNet have a good view of the development environment. What are some of the challenges and what are the opportunities for folks in the Cisco ecosystem to get their hands dirty, get down and dirty with the tech-- >> Ashley: Oh, yeah. >> Where they can do feasible, viable projects that are possible. Well, seeing Python certainly is one approach. Great for data wrangling, but you know, you got Node.js out there, has been a great language. >> Ashley: Yep. >> App guys are doing Node.js because of JavaScript in server-side. >> Ashley: Yep. >> You got a lot of IO that sounds like a network service mindset. Is there things that you see going on around that what's possible and what's kind of moonshot like projects and where should people start? >> Well, I think, again, kind of going to this historical point of view, it used to be you had one programming book and you're sitting there, you know, late at night copying code from that. And maybe it came with a CD and you could download, you know, your sample code onto your hard drive. And then, you know, you'd be sitting there flipping back and forth and then you hit an issue. You're like, I don't know what to do. Maybe you're trying to teach yourself. I don't have any friends that are programmers. I mean, today, with, I built the vast amount of resources that are available online. You know, like, we have our DevNet Learning Labs. And so that's the set of tutorials that we've provided, but that's not the only thing out there. You've got Code School, Codeacademy. You've got the loops out there. I mean, shoot, MIT, Stanford, they're all putting their courseware in open-source. So the universe of educational material for people to understand this stuff and get started is really, really awesome now. And then also, it's easier than ever, I think,. to actually code because you're, again, like code is becoming more and more abstract at higher level languages. So Python, Node.js, those are still kind of low level, but there are packages on top of those, you know, middleware and Node.js, to build a web server. You get Express or sales or whatever, and then you're kind of off to the races. Like Spring Boot is crazy. It used to be Spring was a bit of a pain in the butt with, you know-- >> Yeah. >> Ashley: All the dependency, injection and everything. But with Spring Boot, now you just add, you know, a dependency, and you've got an entire web framework or an authorization framework or whatever. And that was like, I was pretty blown away when I started seeing-- >> So it's a lot easier. >> It's, yeah, it's just a lot easier. Things are more curated. You have certain stacks. You know, it used to be LAMP stack, now you got ELK stack for data things, you got, you know, and so on. So the universe is wide open for a lot of people to program today. >> So Ashley, love the training angles that you talked about there. But what I bring to mind, a little bit orthogonal to what we've been talking about here-- >> Ashley: Ooh, good programmer buzzword there. >> But one that John and I have been asking about, you mentioned open-source. >> Yes. >> So obviously, things like Spring, lot of things you mentioned are open-source. >> Yes. >> But what about Cisco's, you know, involvement in the community, giving back to open-source. What's the philosophical, you know, viewpoint-- >> Yeah. >> From Cisco's standpoint? >> Yeah, we're active in open-source. We're big contributors to OpenStack, for example. You know, we've got some of, we've created like a CNI module for Kubernetes called Contiv. And so that's in open-source. We, you know, in DevNet, we publish tons of things in open-source, just code samples and you know, example projects and so on. Cisco's actually a big contributor to the Linux kernel, so it's a long legacy of open-source at Cisco. So it's part of our culture. >> So there's no restrictions on everybody going on GitHub, throwing their stuff in, being part of the communities-- >> There's certainly restrictions. Yeah, we have processes that we're supposed to follow. I mean, we got to protect the intellectual property when we need to. I mean, it's the way it is for working at a company. But at the same time, you know, there is viable processes if it makes business sense to open-source things. >> I mean, the line John's used, you know, for the last year or so, is GitHub, that's people's resumes these days. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So we want to make sure, what I'm saying is it sounds like the ecosystem at Cisco, friendly for the developers to come in, participate. You got a business to run, obviously. Legal keeps their eye on stuff, but you know, Cisco's out there. We saw it in the container ecosystem, OpenStack-- >> Ashley: Yes. >> Stu: Kubernetes, Linux, absolutely-- >> Yeah. >> Stu: Not just even in networking but beyond that. See a lot of Cisco out there, so-- >> Yeah, great. >> So my question for you, personal question. If you could talk to your 22 year old self right now-- >> Ashley: Oh, wow, yeah. >> You're high school, actually, you're college or college graduate, what would you say to yourself knowing what you know now? 'Cause this is a really interesting point. I mean, at my age, we used to build stuff straight up from the bottom of the stack to the top, and it was a lot of heavy lifting. Now you're really kind of getting into some engineering here and then some composite Lego block kind of thinking where these frameworks could just snap together. Sometimes (mumbles) But it's a lot cooler now. I mean, I wish I was 22. What would you say to your 22 year old self out there? What would you advise yourself? What would you say to yourself? >> Where's my smoking jacket? (John laughs) Yeah, so, I mean, I was a liberal arts undergrad and I did take computer programming classes. So I did a couple courses in C toward the end of my time in university, and that's because I've always been interested in technical, you know, in programming and stuff. But I think probably I would have maybe stayed another year to try to maybe get an actual CS degree. So that might be one thing, I think the other-- >> John: What would you jump on today if you saw all of this awesome code, open-source? I mean, like, it's like open bar in the coding party. I mean-- >> Yeah, it's overwhelming. >> It's so many things to jump on and-- >> You know, obviously, joking, I should say blockchain and machine learning and AI, right? But actually, I would say the machine learning and AI stuff is probably a good, interesting, you know, wave of technology, yeah. >> I just want to, you know, we're talking about your 22 year old self. How about your kids? >> Ashley: Yeah. >> You're working with your kids, checking out your GitHub on there. So, you know, maybe share, you know, younger people. You know, how do they get involved? In the keynote yesterday, it was, you know, jobs of the future. >> Right, well, yeah. For my kids, I have two daughters. And so, I try to encourage them to at least be familiar with coding. I've tried to teach them Linux some, but we've done programming classes, but it's kind of hard sometimes to get them interested in something like programming, to be honest. So some of it's trying to be creative problem solvers, trying to craft that sort of attitude, you know. So that then, when they do get the opportunity to do some programming, that they'll be interested about it. >> I mean, the young kids love gaming. Gaming's a good way to get people in. >> Yep. >> VR is now an interesting-- >> I mean, Minecraft and Sims, those are the two that my oldest daughter loves. I mean, the thing I remember that's the funniest was when you know, of course, this was when we all got computers back in the day and we did keyboards, right, in order to do stuff. So I got the first iPad when it came out and I brought it home and my daughter, who was, I think, six or eight at the time, she's like, "Cool, I understand this." Like automatically understood it. But then, she went to the TV and it had icons on it. So she walked up to the TV and tried to do that, and I was like, "Oh, that's funny." Like her mental model is this. >> Yeah. >> Where our mental model was that and so on earlier on. >> My oldest son says, "Dad, search engine is so your generation," (Ashley laughs) Not even email, like search, Google search. >> Yeah, the digital, it's like the digital native thing. On the other hand, we actually are fairly restrictive about like cell phone and mobile because it's a lot. That sort of thing. They really, really are going to face some interesting, I don't know, social, you know, the social things that you have in high school and middle school now multiplied and amplified through all that. We're sort of cautious, too, as parents, you know. >> Lot of societal issues to deal with. Alright, now getting back to DevNet here, I want to get your thoughts because we had a big setup here. One of the things that the folks people can't see on camera is we're in the DevNet zone. You see behind us, but there's everywhere else around. It's really the big story at Cisco Live and has been for awhile. Every year it gets bigger. It's like, it keeps growing in interest. What do you guys show here? What's the purpose? Give a little quick, take a minute to explain the DevNet approach this year-- >> Okay. >> John: And how it's different-- >> Yeah. >> John: And how you guys take this going forward. >> So the DevNet zone, philosophically, we tried to have the experiential. We don't want people to come in here and get death by PowerPoint of hey, check out this awesome new product that we created. You know, that kind of thing. >> Yeah. >> Instead, we want people to come in and have the opportunity to sit down, either by themselves or with a friend or, you know, with one of us to be able to work through sort of tutorials so that we have this area of the Learning Labs or learn about the DevNet sandbox. That's another area that we have where that is a sort of try it out, live, always-on, cloud service that we provide for anyone. We also have, of course, examples of example use cases. So we have some IOT and collaboration use cases that we're demonstrating in the new APIs that have come out of those products that you wouldn't think may be necessarily, oh, collaboration and IOT really are connected. But in fact, you know, ultimately you need to get a human involved when you have exceptions. And in a lot of cases like for edge compute scenarios, it's exception oriented. So when we, the example that we have here is we have a truck that's sitting on a handcrafted scale that's like a raspberry pie thing that one of our evangelists, Casey Bleeker, made. And it's putting, you know, analog data into our container that's running on an edge device. And when an exception occurs when the scale has this truck on it with too many stones in the back, then it triggers an alert. It creates a team room for people to come and escalate and discuss. It'll make a phone call automatically to the truck driver and pull people together to deal with that situation. But then, additionally, we have a new room capabilities with like, our telepresence systems. And that has face identification, not like from identifying the user standpoint, but it knows it can count how many people are in the room, for example. So if you combine that sort of IOT capability with this collaboration unit that's going to already be there, you're getting kind of a win-win of that infrastructure in the rooms. >> Ashley, talked about there's so many different things going on there, what's exciting you the most? Where are you seeing the most people, you know, gravitating around? >> Yeah, in the DevNet zone in general? >> Well, it can be here or in general, yeah. >> Well, I think one thing in the DevNet zone, we also have a white hat black hat challenge. So that's been very, very popular. What we're doing is demonstrating using, you know, off the shelf hacker tools, how vulnerable some IOT devices are to give people. It's kind of a you've heard about it, now experience it and do it yourself to see how easy it really is. And then see, of course, how our solutions can help you mitigate those problems. So that's, you know, IOT security is a big concern, I think, in general, and so I think that's an exciting spot for people-- >> So hands-on learning, very people-oriented, very open-- >> Yes, yep. >> The motto I love, I'm reading on the thing there, learn code, inspire, connect. So learn, toe in the water, connect-- >> Ashley: Yes. >> Share. >> Yeah. >> Mentor, collaborate. >> The other thing that we're sort of soft launching, I guess, is we have a new application developer site on DevNet, and so-- >> John: What's the URL? >> It is developer.cisco.com/site/app-dev. >> John: Okay, that's good. Memorize that, quiz later. >> Yeah. >> That's long, just search. >> Yeah, right, right. >> Hey, Alexa. >> Right, so, but with that, we're trying to make it easier for people to understand the use cases for what kinds of applications they can build using our technology. So indoor location, using kind of doing maps and heat maps and building that kind of scenario, for example. >> Awesome. >> Ashley: Through T-Mobile and video and such. >> As you are evangelizing your engine on the engineering side, what's the plans going forward? Post-event, obviously, you've got Cisco Live in Orlando this year, it's in 2018. >> Ashley: Yeah, we have-- >> But you guys got a lot of these going on, you got a lot of digital content. What's the outreach plan? Where should people expect to see you guys? Share the going forward plan. >> Yeah, I wish I knew where everyone was going to be. So thankfully, on the website-- >> They're on the internet! >> We have an events calendar, so I would definitely encourage you to look there if you're interested in connecting with one of us. We have the Cisco Live in Melbourne then Orlando. We also have DevNet Create in April and that's in Mountain View, I think, Bay Area. So would love to have people come out to that, and kind of the theme of that last year, which was the inaugural one, continues this year, which is where apps need infrastructure. So we want to kind of continue this conversation about DevOps, how, you know, applications and infrastructure-- >> John: Yeah. >> Can benefit each other. >> And just for the folks watching, theCUBE was at the inaugural DevNet Create. We'll be there again, we'll also be in Orlando. And again, this is important, we'll end on this point. I'd like you to take a minute to explain the difference between DevNet and DevNet Create because this is really interesting. I like the way you guys are doing this. It's really open, but it's pretty transparent. So share the difference between DevNet and DevNet Create. >> Yeah, so DevNet is our developer program, and so that's a website-- >> Before Cisco and-- >> It's Cisco, it's oriented towards those things. DevNet Create is more about forming a community to solve these problems about applications and infrastructure. So that intersection, whether you call it DevOps, whether you call it I don't know what, potatoes and you know, something. Something in there, you know, there is this fluid spot where applications are looking more like infrastructure, infrastructure is starting to look more like applications. So what does that mean and how do we explore that together to, you know-- >> We call it cloud-native. >> Ashley: Yeah. >> It's a set of developers who just, like you, don't really want to get involved in network but love it to be more magical. >> Right. >> Right? And Cisco folks love Cisco because they're in that world, right? So-- >> Yes. >> To me, it's really interesting you guys do that. Congratulations. >> Yeah, thanks. And it's not just for Cisco people, right? So Cisco Live and DevNet Zone is that. For Create, it's actually the inverse. We encourage people from the community to come and check it out as opposed to the-- >> John: Props to you guys, great stuff. Cisco, DevNet Zone is where theCUBE is. Of course DevNet Create is going to be outside of the Cisco ecosystem. Connecting the two is really the key. We're living in a world, global connected devices, connected people, that's the mission of Cisco. Love that vision, but of course, we're theCUBE, bringing you the live content here in Barcelona. All, of course, is available online, youtube.com/siliconangle. Of course, thecube.net is our new site. Check it out. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. More live coverage coming from Barcelona with theCUBE after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)