>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube. Covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're live in San Francisco for Cisco System's Inaugural DevNet Create Event. Which is an extension of their DevNet Developer Program. Which is the Cisco, you know, core developer program. Now, going out to the community to create, kind of, ingratiate into the DevOps developer world, connecting IOT and infrastructure together. This is The Cube's exclusive coverage for two days. Our next guest is Todd Nightingale, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco. Welcome to The Cube, I'm John Furrier. My co-host Peter Burris, welcome to The Cube. >> Thanks. >> Tell us about your group first. Just explain your division, what you guys do and why is it relevant to DevNet Create? I mean, you guys already got a massive developer program that's kicked off and growth within Cisco. Why DevNet Create? Why ingratiate out into the community and connect with these new developers? >> Sure, sure yeah. The Meraki business, it's cloud-managed infrastructure. We make wireless, switching, routing. And now phones and cameras and mobile device management. You know what we've realized is as simple to manage, simple to monitor, that our solution is, a lot of our customers, they want to do more. They want to expand and build custom applications. They want to leverage social logins. And do all kinds of different analytics on top of the infrastructure. The infrastructure is starting to be a part of a greater technology you know, digitization of their business, or their school, or their government. And really I think the lesson that we've learned over the last couple years is the key is to open up the platform. Is to have some faith in the community. Open up the platform and do your best to recruit, you know, best in class development teams from around the world. And once people can get more from your platform than others than they're going to flock to you over time. We're lucky, right, as a cloud managed solution, we've got all of our devices already being managed and monitored from the cloud. So for developers, it's very easy to develop on cloud APIs. >> So, they don't need to come in and be a total network guru. They just come in and leverage infrastructure as code for a gameable infrastructure, is that right? >> Exactly, yeah, rest APIs in the cloud. Just like you might integrate to a Facebook API or a Google API. You integrate to a Meraki API. And you're able to control the infrastructure, get analytics from the infrastructure, understand your locations better, all of that stuff. >> Peter and I always talk on The Cube about a couple concepts, but two are relevant. For this one, I'll give you a reaction to. One is internet scale now is going to a whole nother dimension. Cisco dominating with scale at the router level within internet one. But now, with internet and things, he brings up this concept of this known technology but unknown processing development. You mentioned new devices connecting. This is, like, a new connection point that needs to be managed dynamically. You don't know when they're going to come on and off. So, that's kind of cool. I'm going to get your reaction to that. Is that how you guys see the world? Because that really is IOT. New devices are connected to the network, they need a connection, they need power, and they need to be provisioned, managed, and allocated. They're throwing off data. This is a developer dream but also could be a nightmare. >> Yeah, look, I think that a lot of the story of networking has been this concept of, like, building a network, configuring it up just right, and then when it's perfect, you don't touch it. You're afraid you might break something. The concept of fat-fingering is so common, right? And so these networks are incredibly powerful but brittle. And that just can't be the way anymore. It has to be simple enough that people can feel that their network is nimble and changeable and can be configured and managed and changed over time to react to this stuff. I think the technology is getting better when it comes to simple and automated provisioning of IOT devices. We're tracking very carefully a technology called mud that allows for these devices to provision with a policy set by the manufacturer, and all that stuff. The real story is the networks were deploying today will have to be nimble. And they'll have to be upgradable from the cloud and be able to get better over time and make it easier and easier for people who have maybe a thousand users on their network today, they're going to have a hundred thousand devices on their network in five years. And they have to be ready for that. And be ready to continue to evolve over time. >> So, one of the things, that our researchers, we've talked to a lot of CIOs, is that they're moving to an orientation that's focused on elasticity, which might be no workload at any scale to what we're calling, plasticity. Which has very, very specific meaning, at least, in the physics sense. Not only are you able to scale up and down, but you're also able to reconfigure very, very rapidly. So, things will plop into a new shape that will sustain itself. And I want to know what you think about this concept. Not just elasticity, but plasticity. The ability for the infrastructure to reconfigure itself in ways that make sense and sustain that shape as the business evolves. >> Yeah, I think, look on the compute side, that's very real, right? When you think about load on different servers, with applications running across different clouds and data centers. This stuff has to be expandable and also, expandable in a controlled way, not just, you know, spinning up thousands and thousands of servers. And I think this concept of plasticity gets to that. It has to scale but in a controlled concept. When it comes to the infrastructure, the bigger deal is, the infrastructure is always optimizing whatever networking resources you have. There's only so much ban with coming to your site or to and from you cloud and all that stuff. And when the load starts to spike, and really explode over time, before you have the ability to find more ban with another service provider. What the infrastructure has to do is it has to automatically optimize your most important apps, you more important applications. Prioritize that through your network and optimize the rest to do its best in whatever limited resource it has. Infrastructure and network infrastructure, I think of this more of like resource optimization. And those algorithms having to be nimble. And to be honest, really dynamic, as the load spikes in different ways, over different times. >> I think it's a great point. But let me push you on this. But don't we also have to remember the patterns associated with that? So we can anticipate the infrastructure, can anticipate some of these spikes, time of month, time of day. In response to particular other business events. So, the infrastructure itself has to then, have a muscle memory associated with some of these things. So, that it can, again, kind of, constantly reconfigured itself to support what the business events that are becoming more obvious overall. So that we don't have to reconfigure them ourselves. Does that make sense to you? >> Yeah, I think, you know, we talk about this, sort of, next generation of network intelligence. And really using some type of machine learning to predict these type of events. To me, it's not just about, you know, automatically reconfiguring the infrastructure. But it's also about making the next recommendation about hey, the way your trends are going, you're really going to need, x, y, z change in the physical network in two months, in six months, in nine months. Predicting what will be the next shoe to drop and how IT managers will have to expand their network capacity in what ways. You know, I think that's really this concept of networking intelligence. It's a serious problem. I mean, the machine learning to understand these patterns and to be able to see through a lot of noise and really see what's happening is interesting. I think what app dynamics does for the application space, in, like, large day centers, understanding which code is being used more often and where your load really is happening. We're going to start to see some of those same, like, deep learning data analytics applications in networking. And I think it's exciting, I agree. It's an exciting space. >> Todd, I want to get your thoughts on something because we're before we came on camera about your background at MIT and Meroki, when it's got a start on the roots. You guys were hackers, okay? You were freedom fighters for the internet band. Which, by the way, we still have broadband starvation in this country, in my opinion. But I got to give you guys props for that. So, you got kind of a hacker mentality. But you talk about your journey, about how you group is, kind of, bringing in some group core IP. You're also, kind of, a global system integrator within Cisco, among the core IP. That's more important now than ever, as app dynamics collides with the Cisco infrastructure DNA. Can you share some insight on what it's like internally as Cisco? Because this is the classic, you know, decade and a half long argument within Cisco of moving up the stack. I mean, I've talked to many SBPs at Cisco, "We got to move up the stack." And, "No, we're good down here." You guys are moving up the stack, you're on of the hackers in there. I mean, technically, maybe not a hacker now. But I mean, mentality wise, you're looking at it differently. What's the different view? Share some color. >> It's been awhile since checked in any code. Yeah, look, I'd say there's a really great reality to inquire by Cisco. If you're in networking. And we focus a lot on adding value up the stack, putting things into the cloud platform, not just into the device and all that stuff. But if you're at Cisco, Cisco is holding on the richest infrastructure, IT infrastructure, intellectual property portfolio in the world. Almost indisputably, right? And as soon as you're acquired by Cisco, you get access to this immediately. We have, through different acquisitions, been able to leverage like, source fire amp and directory of modules, networking components from around Cisco. You know, since part of Cisco, we've been able to build stackable switching and aggregation, fiber switching, all this stuff. Deep, deep networking IP from all around Cisco. And like, I keep waiting for the bill to arrive. And it never has. >> It's your like Picasso, you got this canvass, you got freedom. >> There is a lot of teamwork there. You really have access to all of the intellectual properties. As a network hacker, it's a pretty amazing opportunity. So, we're excited about that. >> But the other thing it does is that you not only get access to all of this intellectual property, but you've got an install base that is so extremely relevant and is the basis for much of what the computing industry and computing world does now and for some extended time into the future. So, you've got a ready-made target of people ready to adopt. How do you think that your core professionals, on the networking side, are going to evolve their skills and their capabilities to make themselves increasingly relevant in this emerging world. >> You know, look, I think that's the story of definite. We see a lot of IT shops that have, you know, really deep infrastructure management capability. And as the infrastructure gets more automated or they start to use Meraki and it gets simpler to manage, they find themselves with time to finally focus on their own mission. Their mission is not, like, massive management of thousands of networking devices. CIOs care about education technology, or hotel technology, or restaurant technology. They finally have time to really work on digitizing the hotel industry, or digitizing schools in Latin America, whatever that happens to be. I really see them, like, moving up the stack. The skills of IT groups around the world are what really are moving up the stack. And all of a sudden, they're building apps. And they're, like, analyzing data and trying to apply machine intelligence to customer behavior. And everything that the promise of this technology used to be. First, we got to get out of the weeds. We got to simplify the infrastructure and get our IT shops out of that and into that business-relevant IT. >> It's also a mindset shift too. Again, you mentioned earlier, it used to be the network is fixed and brittle. And then you were constrained by what the network could provide you above. Now, the apps are dictating down to the networks. So, there's now a new model of app saying, "Hey, I don't need you to be "a provisioning configuration management guru, "on provisioning new devices. "I just want to get the network to do "what I need and not be an expert." That's ethos of DevOps. How is that playing forth for you guys, with DevNet Create out here? Give us some examples of how you guys are making that a reality and some of the directional things that you were working on. >> Yeah, it's a great example. You know, we have an awesome deployment in Mexico, called Mexico Conectado. And it's kind of near and dear to my heart. Federal buildings all over Mexico. The government funded, for the first time ever, internet access and all those sites with wi-fi for the building but also publicly accessible. And a lot of the sites they deployed, it was the first internet connection going into that building. Or maybe even for that town in rural Mexico. You know, deploying out at thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of sites all around Mexico. That could've easily been it. Just trying to make that work. Just the crushing complexity of that many devices and that many sites and a dozen different service providers managing it. By using Meraki, those guys were able to, you know, deploy it out, and really have it managed by the service providers but monitored by the government. And then, open up the APIs. So, that the government can actually analyze across all of those deployments. How the network is being used, what kind of utility they're getting in urban areas verus rural areas. Is this initiative really working that they're bringing, internet's really being used in locations it hasn't been before. Or are they just, kind of, subsidizing internet for well-connected cities already? And they're really getting to see that visibility and understand if they're really meeting their goals. Not just scrambling all day to get off the ground. >> Okay, question from the crowd. Thanks for sending in the questions. Go to crowdchat.net/devnetcreate. A question is, "What is the most important "DevOps practice to you?" And you can globalize for Cisco or in your view, just the industry, community. "Infrastructure is code, configuration management, "continuous delivery, automated testing, or other?" >> Todd: Or other? >> Other being fill in the blank. One that you might think. >> Automated testing is near and dear to my heart. (John chuckles) It's near and dear to my heart. If we didn't implement a strong, automated testing practice at Meraki, we wouldn't ship anything. (John chuckling) Well, if you think about infrastructure is code, obviously that's important to us because that's what we're building, kind of, is a programmable network using these cloud APIs. Maybe the one that I feel is missing from the list would be the real concept of new product instruction through an MVP process. And this concept of building the minimally viable product. So that you get it in the hands of users as early as possible and start getting real feedback. But one value proposition, one used case met, if you can find a way to get that into the hand of users or in the hands of paying customers and start to get that feedback, that's the day that you hire the first real product manager. No one knows what people really want than active users trying to get value out of your product. And trying to figure out and get that expert in on day one before you start development. Don't believe experts, you know, believe users. >> Todd, thanks for coming on The Cube. And sharing the inside, really appreciate. Final question for you. DevNet's been very successful at the Susie. And the team put that together. It's pumping on all cylinders. Just go live, big showcase there. DevNet created an augural event. As it progresses, what's the objective of this event? And how is it different than DevNext events in your mind? >> Yeah, look, I think, just as my opinion and this is how I see it. For a long time, infrastructure has been this closed ecosystem. You buy expensive networking IT infrastructure, you configure it using whatever CLI is available and, like, that's it. And new systems came into being, like, in the cloud, even modern CRMs systems. Like salesforce, modern POS systems, all that stuff. And they all were open platforms. But infrastructure lagged. It was always a close ecosystem. I think what DevNet, kind of, stands for is the opening up of that ecosystem. And allowing the network to, like, dynamically react to the needs of the business. And to really be controlled in a new way. DevNet create for me is, sort of, this is inaugural event of, sort of, Cisco really stepping out and declaring, this is going to be the way of the future. I think we're all going to be sitting here in five years down at Moscone as they tear down the super structure from a five thousand person DevNet create. And we're going to be saying, "I was here at the first one. "I was in San Francisco for the first DevNet." >> Present and creation. >> Todd: Yes, exactly. >> Well done, totally love the mission. I think it's super important. Again, they're not mutually exclusive communities, they're merging together and it's a rising tide, congratulations. Todd Nightingale, senior vice president, general manager of Cisco Meraki cloud automation. Loves automated testing, but again, that's many practices that DevOps eat, those infrastructure is code, developer freedom. That's the theme here. We've got the more live coverage. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, stay with us. (upbeat music)