>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. (bubbly music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to the live coverage, here with theCUBE, here in Orlando, Florida, for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Stu Miniman, for the next three days of wall-to-wall live coverage. We have the co-founders of the Network Collective here Eyvonne Sharp and Jordan Martin, thanks for joining us today, Network Collective. Sounds great, sounds like it's a collection of networks, so what's goin' on, what do you guys do? First let's talk about what you guys do, obviously you guys do a lot of podcasting, a lot of diggin' into the tech, what is Network Collective? >> Network Collective is a video podcast that Jordan and I started. We really felt like there was a need to build community around network engineers, and that really a lot of network engineers are very isolated in their job, there's only a couple people where they work, they know what they know, and they don't have a lot of peers. And so we see Network Collective as a way to bring network engineers together to learn about their craft, and also share with one another in a community that's more than a once-a-year conference like Cisco Live. >> That's awesome, I love the video podcasting, more than ever now the need for kind of peer review, conversations around learning because the world's shifting. In the keynote today the CEO of Cisco talked about the old way, and the new networks that are coming. We've been talking about no perimeters for years, but now security threats are real, gotta keep that strain solid, keep managing that, but also bring in a new kind of a cloud-hybrid, multi-cloud world, requires real skill adoption, new things. What're you guys seeing, what's your thoughts, and what's some of the things that you guys are exploring on your video podcast around these trends? >> You wanna take that Jordan? >> Sure. So, I think the rate of change of networking is faster than it's been in a very long time, so we've, we've had to, we've kinda not had a whole lotta churn in the things we've had to learn, I mean it's been complex and difficult, and there's been challenges in getting up to speed, but, with the transition to more developer-focused, and developer-centric model of deploying equipment, it is--and the integration of cloud into what is essentially our infrastructure. It's changing so much, that it's good to get together and have those conversations because it's very difficult to navigate this by yourself, it's, you know, it's a lot to learn. >> You know, I wanna push back little bit on that 'cause, you know, I've been in networking my whole career. When I used to, I used to speak at Interop, and I'd put down, you know, here's the rate of change, and here are the decades. And it's like, you know, okay 10 gig, here's where the standards are, here's where the first pieces are, it's gonna take years for us to deploy this. I don't disagree that change is happening overall faster, but how are people keeping up with it? Are the enterprises that the networking people work for allowing them to roll out some of these changes a little faster? So, give us a little insight as to what you're hearing from the community? >> I think, I mean technology, I mean, we've got Moore's law, right? I mean technology has always been changing rapidly, I think the thing that is different is the way network engineers need to interact with their environment. Five to 10 years ago, you could still operate in an environment where you still did a lot of static routing, for example. Now, with the cloud, with workloads moving around, there is no way to run a multi-cloud enterprise network without some serious dynamic routing chops, whether that's BGP, or EIGRP, or OSPF, or all of the above, and a lot of network engineers are still catching up with some of those technologies, they're used to being able to do things the way that they've always done them. And I think there needs to be a mind shift where we start thinking about things dynamically, in that, you know, an IP address may not live in the same geography, it may move from on-premises to the cloud to another cloud, and we have to be able to build networks that are resilient enough, and flexible enough, to be able to support that kind of mobility. >> Yeah, I love that Eyvonne. Right, you talked about the multi-cloud world. Jordan, a follow up question I have for you, how does the networking person look at things when there's a lot of the networking that are really outside of their control when you talk about really, the cloud world today. >> Sure, and before we jump there, I wanna say, the change that we're talking about though, is a bit different than what's happened. So, what we've seen traditionally would be speeds and feeds, but what's changing is the way we operate networks, and that hasn't changed a lot. Now, as for, you know, how do you view it when you don't-- well that's a challenge that everyone is facing. We see networking getting further and closer to the host. And, when we see networking inside of VMware, I mean this has been something that's been around for, you know, a while now, but, we're just getting comfortable with the idea of hypervisor, and now we've got, you know, we've got containers, and we've got networking in third party services that we don't necessarily have access to, we don't have full control over, and it's a completely different nomenclature we have to relearn all the terms because of course, no one reused the stuff we were familiar with, because this all started from a developer mindset. It all makes sense where it came from, but now we're catching up. And so it's, the challenge is not only understanding what needs to be done in all these different environments, but also understanding, just the terminology, and what is means. What is a VPC? Well VPC means something completely different to a networker that has never touched Amazon, than it does to somebody who has worked at Amazon completely there's overlapping terms and confusion around that and it's just a matter of, I think you need some broader coordination. There's been discussion about something like a full stack engineer, I think that's a pretty rare thing, I don't know how, how likely it is that you're gonna be expert level in all different disciplines, but you do need, you do need cross-team collaboration more than you have traditionally. We've had these silos, those no longer work in a multi-cloud world, it just doesn't, just doesn't work anymore. >> One of the things that came out with the keynote was, the networks next act was the main theme, as they talked about this new way, I mean, they use secure, intelligent platform, you know, for digital business, you know, level one marketing there, more complex than a few years ago and then the onslaught of new things coming, AI, augmented reality, machine learning, and I'd put blockchain in there, I thought they would put blockchain in the keynote to hype it up a bit, but, then they introduced the multi-cloud concept at that point. So in the keynote, multi-cloud didn't come up until the next act came up, so obviously that is a key part of what we're seeing, we saw Google clouds CEO Diane Greene come on. How are network engineers looking at the multi-cloud? 'Cause, I mean, how are they, toe in the water, are they puttin' the tow in the water? (chuckles) What is multi-cloud to them? Because, I mean, we talk about Kubernetes all the time, from an app standpoint, but, networks have been locked down for many, many years, you talked about some of the chops they need, what are those next chops for a network engineer when it comes to taking the road to multi-cloud? >> Sure, I mean I think if you're going to do any kind of multi-cloud interconnect, you've gotta know VGP. But at the same time, you need to understand some of those fundamental concepts that, the reason developers are pushing to the cloud, is not cost, although I've heard that a lot, that you know this cloud thing can't be cheaper, but it's really about enabling the business to move faster, and so we need to start thinking that way as network engineers more too. We have I think historically, our mentality, we've even trained our network engineers to go slow, to be very deliberate, to plan out your changes, to have these really complex change windows, and we need to start thinking differently, we need to think about how to make modular changes, and to be able to allow our workloads to move and shift in ways that don't provide a lot of risk, and I think that's a new way of thinking for networking engineers. >> Yeah. >> Well, we're sitting here in the DevNet zone, and that was one of the highlights in the keynote, talking that there are over 500 thousand developers now registered on this platform that they've built here. Bring us inside a little bit, you know, is it, what was it, John, DevNet sec? There's all of these acronyms as to, you know, how developers-- >> Yeah, NetApp was their big thing. >> how the network and the operations go together. What are you seeing, what's working, what's some of the challenges? >> I think this is a shift of necessity. As we see more problems solved in the network, we're adding complexity at that layer that hasn't been seen before, before it was routing, we just had to get traffic from one place to another, then we added security, so okay we have security, but we, we create these choke points in security where we can send all the traffic through this place and just like, we can use filtering, or some sort of identification there. Well then we start moving to cloud and we talk about dynamic workloads, and we talk about things that could just shift anywhere in the world, well now our choke point is gone, and so now we have to manage all the pieces, all the solutions, all the things we're putting into the network, but we've gotta manage it in a distributed way. And so that's where I think the automation's, why it's such a big push right now is because, we have to do it that way, there's no way to manually put these features in the network and be able to manage them at any type of scale without automating that process, and that's why, I think, we see the growth of DevNet, I mean, if you've been here the past few years, it's gone from a little thing to a much, much bigger thing, there's a lot of people looking at automation specifically, that 500 thousand number is, rather large. Really impressive that there's that many people looking at networks from a programmatic way. But in the meantime, I think that there's also, a bit of a divide here, 'cause I think that there's, a lot of people are looking this way, but I think there's, we talk about this on the show pretty often, there's really two types of networks. There's the networks at companies where, it really is, they see their network as a competitive advantage, and those places are definitely looking at automation, and they're looking at multi-cloud. But we also see another trend in networking, and that is to, I want some simple, push button, just put it out, get packets A to B, and I don't wanna mess with it, I don't want expensive engineers on staff, I don't want-- So I feel like the industry's almost coming to a divide. That we're gonna have two different types of networks, we're gonna have the network for the place that the just want packets going A to B, and they really don't want much, and the other side of that divide is gonna be very complex networks that have to be managed with automation. >> Talk about that other divide, it's between, I mean, I love that conversation, because, that almost kinda comes into like the notion of networks as a service. Because if you wanna have less expensive people there, but yet have the reliability, how do those companies grow and maintain the robust resiliency of these networks, and have the high performance, take advantage of the goodness, well what does it matter? I mean, how are they, how is the demographic of the network evolving, 'cause, either they're stunted for growth, or they have an enabler. How do you view that, how do you take that apart? >> I think we have to, we have to look at our business needs, and evaluate the technologies that we use appropriate to that. There are times for complexity, I think we've pushed, as Jordan very eloquently described, a lot of complexity down into the network, and we're working, I think, now, as the entire industry to maybe back some of that out. But one of the things that I hear a lot when we talk about automation and things like DevNet and developers is, I believe a lot of network engineers are afraid their jobs are going away, but if you look at what's going on, we have more connected devices than we've ever had before, and that's not gonna stop, and all of those connected devices need networks. And so really what's happened is we've reached a complexity inflection point, which means we have to have better tools, and I think that's really what we're talking about is, is how do we, instead of doing everything manually, how do we look at the network as a system, and manage it as a system, with tools to manage it that way. >> Your point about that jobs going away, I love that comment because, that's a sunk fallacy because, there's so much other stuff happening, talk about security, so the basic question, I mean first of all, guys your job's not goin' away! (laughs) Check! It's only a, well, kind of, you don't stay current, so it's all the learning issues, the progression for learning. But really it's the role of the network engineers and the people running the networks, I mean, I remember back in, the old way, the network guys were the top dogs, they were kickin' butt, takin' names, they ran the show, a lot was riding on the network. But as we go into this new dynamic environment, what are the roles of the network? Is it security? I mean, what are some of the things that people are pivoting to, or laddering up to from a roles standpoint that you see, in terms of a progression of new discovery, new skills. Is there a path, have you seen any patterns, for the growth of the person? >> I really think network engineers need to at least understand what the cloud is and why it exists. And they need to understand more about the applications and what they mean to the business. I think we have created a divide sometimes where, you know, my job is just to get packets from point A to B, and I don't really need to understand what we do as an organization, and I think that those days are going to be behind us, we need to understand, you know, what applications are critical, why do we need to build the systems the way that we need to build them and use that information from the business? So I think for network engineers, I think cloud security, understanding applications, and learning the business and being able to talk that language is what's gonna be most valuable to them in their career in the future. >> Yeah, we've heard the term many times, I'm a plumber! Well, I mean, implying that moving packets from A to B. It gets interesting with containers. Policy-based stuff has been known concept in networking, QOS, these are things that are well known, but when we start lookin' at the trends up the stack, we're seeing that kinda thing goin' on, service meshes for instance, they talk about services from a policy standpoint, up the stack. That's always been the challenge for the Ciscos over the past 20 years is, how to move up the stack, should they move up the stack, but I think now seems to be a good time. Your reaction guys, to that notion of moving up the stack while maintaining the purity and the goodness of good networking. (laughing) >> I think that's the big challenge right now, right? The more we mesh it all together and we don't, we don't really define the layers that we've traditionally used, the more challenging it is to have experts in that domain, because the domain just grows so incredibly large. And so there's gotta be a balance here, and I think we're trying to find that, I don't know that we've hit that yet, you know where, where we understand where networking fits into all these pieces, how far into the host, or how far into the application does networking go, we've seen certain applications not using the host TCP/IP stack, right, just to find some sort of performance benefit and it, to me that seems like we're pushing really far into this idea of, you know, well if we don't have standards and define places where these things exist, it's gonna be very much the wild, wild west for a while, until we figure out where everything's going to be. And so I think it just presents challenges and opportunities I don't know that we have the answer about how far it goes yet. >> Well let me ask you a question, a good point by the way, we agree, it's evolving, it's a moving train as they say. But as, people that might be watching that might be a Cisco customer or someone deploying a lot of Cisco networks and products in his portfolio, what's your advice to them, what're you hearing that's a good first three steps to take today? Obviously the show's goin' on here, multi-cloud is in center of the focus, this new network age is here for the CEO. What are some things that people can do now that are safe and good first steps to continue on the journey to whatever this evolves into. >> Well I think as you're building your network you need to think about modularization, you need to think about how to build it in small, manageable pieces, and, even if you're not ready to take the automation step today, you need to think about what that's gonna look like in the future, so, if you really want to automate your network you have to have consistency, consistent policy, consistent configuration across your environment, and it's never too late to start that, or too early to start that, right? And so you can think about, if I wanted to take these 10 sites and I wanted to manage them as one, how would I build it? And you can use that kind of mental framework to help guide the decisions you make, even if you're not ready to jump into a full scale automation from soup to nuts. And also I think, it's important to start playing around with automation technology, there are all kinds of tools to do that, and you can start in an are that's either dev, or QA, that's not gonna be production impacting, but you really need to get your, wrap your hands around some of the tools that exist to automate, and start playing with those. >> Stay where you're comfortable, get in, learn, get hands on. Jordan, your thoughts? >> Yeah, so, I was just over here like nodding my head furiously, 'cause everything she said, I 100% agree with. >> Ditto. (laughing) >> Yes, ditto, exactly. The only thing I would add is that we think about automation a lot in the method of config push. Right, the idea of configuring a device in an automated way, but that's not the only avenue for automation. Start by pulling information from your devices, it is really, really low risk way to start looking at your network programmatically, is to be able to go out to all of your switches, all of your routers, all of your networking devices and pull the same information and correlate that data and get yourself some information that's with a broader view. Does nothing to effect the change or state of your network, but you are now starting to look at your network that way. And I will reiterate Eyvonne's point, you cannot automate a network if it's not repeatable. If every design, every topology, every location is a special snowflake, you will never be able to automate anything because you're gonna have a hundred unique automation scripts to run a hundred unique sites. >> You'd be chasin' your tail big time. >> You'd be chasin' your tail, and so it is critical, if you're not in that state now, what you need to do is start looking how to modularize, and make repeatable config blocks in your network. >> Well guys, thanks for comin' on, Eyvonne, Jordan, thanks for comin' on, appreciate you taking the time. Final question for ya, I know it's day one, we got two more days of live coverage here, but, if you can kinda project, and in your minds eye see the development of the show, what's bubbling up as the most important story that's gonna come out of Cisco Live if you had to look at some early indications from the keynotes and some of the conversations in the hallway, what do you think is the biggest story this year for Cisco Live? >> I think for me personally, I wanna understand what Cisco's cloud strategy looks like, to know where they're going with the cloud and how they're going to help stitch together all the different services that we have. The clouds are becoming their own monolith, they each do things their own way, and still the network is what is stitching all those services together to provide access. And so I think it's important to understand that strategy, and where Cisco's goin'. >> Jordan, your thoughts? >> My, what I'm really looking for from the show this year is how Cisco is gonna make orchestration approachable. We've seen this process of automation where only the hardcore programmers could do it, then we got some tools. And these tools, as we watch as more of Cisco's product platforms start to integrate with each other I think the key piece for enterprise shops that don't have that type of resource on staff is what tools are they gonna give them to make this orchestration, between the way in and the enterprise campus, and into the cloud and in the data center, how do we tie all that together and make that to like a nice, seamless way to operate your network? >> Hey, what a great opportunity to have another podcast called under the hood, see what's goin' on, lot of chops needed, thanks for comin' on, give a quick plug for the address for your podcast, where do we find it, what's the site, Network Collective, obviously you guys are doing great things. Share the coordinates. >> Sure, you can find us at thenetworkcollective.com we usually use the hashtag: #NetworkCollective I'm on Twitter @SharpNetwork. Jordan, you wanna tell people where to find you? >> Sure, @bcjordo on Twitter, and obviously if you wanna interact with Network Collective, @NetCollectivePC on Twitter as well. >> Alright, thanks so much for the commentary, great to have a little shared, little podcast here, live on theCUBE, here in Orlando, I'm John Furrier, with Stu Miniman for our coverage at Cisco Live 2018, stay with us for more, we've got two more days of this, got day one just gettin' started, be right back after this short break. (bubbly music)