(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hello, everyone, and welcome back to our live coverage from theCUBE exclusive, two days with Cisco's inaugural DevNet Create event. I'm John Furrier, with my co-host, Peter Burris, who's the general manager of Wikibon.com, and head of research for SiliconANGLE Media. We're talking with Susie Wee, who is the vice president and CTO of Cisco's DevNet, the creator of DevNet, the developer program that was started as grassroots, now a full-blown Cisco developer program. Now starting another foray into the cloud-native open-source community with this new event, DevNet Create. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you, John. >> Thanks for having us. We love going to the inaugural events because they're always the first, and you know, being bloggers, and media, you got to be first. First news, first comments. >> Susie: Always first. >> Always first, and we're the only media here, so thank you. >> Susie: Thank you. >> So tell us about the event (Susie chuckles). You're the host and the creator, with your team. >> Susie: Yes. >> How did this come together, why DevNet Create? You have DevNet, this event is going extremely well, tell us. >> Awesome, so, yeah, so we have DevNet, we've had DevNet for about three years. It was actually exactly three years ago that we had our first DevNet Zone, a developer conference at Cisco Live, three years ago. And there, we felt like we pretty squarely hit... We've had successes there, we've had a pretty strong handle on our infrastructure audience, but what we see is that there's this huge transition, transformation going on in the industry, with IoT and cloud, that changes the definition of how applications meet infrastructure. And so this whole thing with, you know, applications, what is an application? What is the infrastructure? The infrastructure is now programmable, how can apps interact? It opens up a whole new world, and so what we did was we created DevNet Create as a standalone developer conference focused on IoT and cloud to focus on that transformation. >> And a lot of industry trends kind of going on, and moves you're making, it's the company, or you, Cisco is making, AppDynamics, big acquisition, kind of speaks to that, but also, there's always a natural progression for Cisco to have moving up the stack with software, but IoT gives you guys a unique opportunity with the network concept. So, making it network programmable, infrastructure as code, as some say in the DevOps world, is the ethos. >> Absolutely. >> How do you guys see yourselves engaging with the community, and what are some of the plans, and what's some of the feedback you're getting here at the event? >> So what we've done here at the event is that, you know, as you've seen from the channel is that, our content is 90% from the community, maybe 10% from Cisco, 90% from the community, because we believe it is all about the ecosystem. It's about how applications meet the infrastructure, it's the systems people are building together. And there's a lot of movement in developing these technologies. We don't know the final form of how an IoT app... Like, who's going to build the app, who's going to build the users, who's going to run the service, who's going to run the infrastructure? It's all still evolving, and we think that the community needs to come together to solve this to make the most of the opportunity. And so that's what, really, this is all about. And then, we think it actually involves learning the languages, making sure that the app folks know the language of the infrastructure folks. They don't have to become experts in it, but just knowing the language. Understand what part's programmable, what part's not, what benefit can you derive from the infrastructure. And then, by really having knowledge of what you can get across, and creating a forum for people to get together to have this conversation, we can make those breakthroughs. >> So just a clarification, you said that 90% of the sessions are non-Cisco, or from the community, and only 10% from Cisco? >> Susie: That's right. >> Is that by design? >> That is absolutely by design. So, when we have the DevNet Zone at Cisco Live, that's all about all of Cisco's products, platforms, APIs, bringing in the community to come and learn about those, but DevNet Create was really, squarely for IoT and app developers, IoT app developers, cloud developers, people working on DevOps, to look at that intersection. So we didn't go into all the gory details of networking, like we very much like to do, but we were really trying to focus on, "What's the value to application developers, "and what are the opportunities?" >> Well, it's interesting because, Susie, we're in the midst, as you said, of a pretty significant transformation, and there's a lot of turbulence, not only in business and how business conceives of digital technology, and the role it's going to play, the developer world, cloud-this, cloud-that, different suppliers, but one of the anchor points is the network, even though the network itself is changing, >> It is. >> in the midst of a transformation, but it's a step function. So, you go from, on the wireless, go outside, 1G to 3G, to 5G, et cetera, that kind of thing, but how is the developer going to inform that next step function in the network, the next big transformation in the network, and to what degree is this kind of a session going to really catalyze that kind of a change? >> Absolutely. So, what happens is, you're right, it's something that we all know, all app developers know, and actually, every person in the world knows, the network is important. The network provides connectivity, the network is what provides Internet, data, and everything there. That's critical to apps, but the thing that's been heard about it is it's not programmable. Like, you kind of get that thing configured, it's working now, you leave it. Don't touch it. >> It's still wires. In the minds of a lot of people, (Susie laughs) it's still wires, right? >> It is, it's wires, or even if it's wireless, once you can get it configured, you leave it. You're not playing with it again, it's too, kind of, dangerous or fragile to change it. >> Because of the sensitivity to operational... >> Because of the sensitivity to operations. The big change that's happening is the network is becoming programmable. The network has APIs, and then, we have things like automation and controller-based networking coming into play, so you don't actually configure it by going one network device at a time, you feed these into a controller, and then, now you're actually doing network-wide commands. That takes out the human error, it actually makes it easy to configure and reconfigure. And when you have that ability to provision resources, to kind of reset configurations, when you can do that quickly through APIs, you suddenly have a tool that you never had before. So let me give you an example. So let's say that you're in a building, you have your badging systems, your automated elevators, you have your surveillance cameras, you want to put out a new security system with surveillance cameras. You don't want to put that on the same network segment as your vending machines. You have a different level of security required. Could put in a work order to say... >> Unless you're really worried about who's stealing from the vending machines. (all laugh) >> So what you can do, now that it's programmable, is use infrastructure as code, is basically say, "Boom, give me a new network segment, "let me drop these new devices onto it, "let the programmable network automatically create "a separate network segment that has "all of these devices together." Then you can start to use group-based policy to now set, you know, the rules that you want, for how those cameras are accessed, who they're accessible by, what kind of data can come in and out of it. You can actually do that with infrastructure as code. That was not a knob that app developers had before. So they don't need to become networking experts, but now they have these knobs that they can use to give you that next level of security, to give you that next level of programmability, and to do it at the speed that an app developer needs. >> So I was talking to Steve Post-y earlier this morning, and he's from Redhead, he's a lead developer, he's not a network guy, he's self-proclaimed, "Hey, I'm not a networking person, I care about apps," and he's a developer, and he brought up something interesting I want to get your thoughts on. I think you're onto something really big with your vision, which is why we're so pumped about it, and he brought up an example of ecosystem's edges, and margins of the edge of these, that when they come together, creates innovation opportunities. And he used the example of data science meets cloud. And what he was using in particular was the example of most data people in the old days were data jocks, they did data, they did things, and they weren't really computer scientists, but as those two communities came together, the computer scientist saying, "Hey, I don't know about data," and the data guy's like, "Hey, you know about algorithms," "I know about algorithms," so innovation happened when that came together. What you're doing here, if I got this right, is you're saying, "Hey, DevNet's doing great," from a Cisco perspective, "but now this whole new creative innovation world "in the cloud is happening in real time. "Bring 'em together, "so best of Cisco knowledge to the guys who don't want to be (chuckles) "experts in that can share information." Is that kind of where this is going? >> Yeah, that's exactly where it's going, and same example, earlier in my career, I was working on sending video over networks, and then you had the networking people doing networking, you had the video people doing video compression, but then video networking, or streaming media, kind of, oh, you can put, you know, your knowledge of the compression and the network all together, so that kind of emerged as a field. The same thing, so, so far, the applications, and the infrastructure, and IT departments have been completely separate. You would just do the best you can, it was the job of IT to provide it, but now, suddenly there's an opportunity to bring these together. And it's, again, it's because the infrastructure's becoming programmable, and now it has knobs and can work quickly. So, yes, this is kind of new ground. And things could continue the way they are, right? And it's okay, we're getting by, but you just won't be realizing the potential of the real kind of... >> Well, open-source has clearly demonstrated that the collective intelligence of communities can really move fast, and share, and it's now tier one, so you're seeing companies go public, MuleSoft, Cloudera, and the list goes on and on. So now you have the dynamic of open-source, so I got to ask you the question, as you go out with DevNet Create, as this creation, the builders that are out there building apps are going to have programmable networks, how do you see this next leg of the journey? Because you have the foray now with DevNet Create, looks good, really well done, what's next? >> What's next is going on and making the real instances that show the application and infrastructure synergy. So let me just give you a really simple example of something that we're doing, which is that Apple and Cisco have had a partnership, and this partnership is coming together in that we have iOS developers who are writing mobile apps. So you have your mobile apps people are writing, we have iOS 10, your app developers are writing these apps. But everybody knows you run into a situation where your app gets congested on the network. Let's say that we're here in Westfield Mall, and they want to put out an AR/VR app, and you want that traffic to work, right? 'Cause if the mall wants to offer an AR/VR service, it takes a lot of bandwidth to get that data through, but through this partnership, what we have is an ability we have to use an iOS 10 SDK to, basically, business optimize your app so that it can run well on a Cisco infrastructure. So basically, it's just saying, "Hey, this is important, "put it in the highest QoS (John laughs) level setting, "and make your AR/VR work." So it's just having these real instances where these work together. >> I mean, I used to be a plumber back in my day when I used to work at HP, and I know how hard it is, and so I'm going to bring this up, because networks used to be stable and fragile/brittle, and then that would determine what you could do on top of it. But there are things like DNS, we hear about DNS, we hear about configuration management, setting ports, and doing this, to your point, I want dynamic provisioning or policy at any given moment, yet the network's got to be ready to do that. >> You don't want to submit a work order for that. (laughs) >> You don't want to have to say, "Hey, can you provision port, whatever, "I need to send a bunch of bandwidth." This is what we're talking about when we say programmable infrastructure, just letting the apps interface with network APIs, right? >> Absolutely, and I think that, you heard earlier, that with CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, just announced CNI, so that what they're doing is now offering an ability to take your kind of container orchestration and take into consideration what's going on in the network, right? So if this link is more congested than that, then make sure that you're doing your orchestration in the right ways, that the network is informing the cloud layer, that the cloud platform's informing the network, so that's going to be huge. >> But do you think, I'm curious, Susie, do you think that we're going to see a time when we start bringing conventions at layer 7 in the network, so we start to parse layer 7 down a little bit, so developers can think in terms of some of those higher-level services that previously have been presentation? Are we likely to see that kind of a thing? As the pain of the network starts to go away, and an explicit knowledge of layer 1-6 become a lot less important, are we going to see a natural expansion at layer 7, and think about distributed data, distributed applications, distributed services, more coherence to how that happens on an industry-wide basis? What do you think? >> Yeah, so let's see, I don't know if I have a view on which layers go away, or which layers compress... >> But the knowledge, the focal point of those? >> But the knowledge, absolutely. So it comes into play, and what happens is, like, what is the infrastructure? In the Internet of things, things are a part of your infrastructure. That's just different. As you're going to microservices, applications aren't applications, they're being written as microservices, and then once you put those microservices in containers, they can move around. So you actually have a pretty different paradigm for thinking about the architecture of applications, of how they're orchestrated, what resources they sit on, and how you provision, so you get a very new paradigm for that. And then the key is... >> But they're inherently networked? >> That's right, that's right. It's all about connectivity, it's all about, you know, they don't do anything without the network. And we're pushing the boundaries of the network. >> These aren't function calls over memory like we used to think about things, these things are inherently networked. We know we have network SOAs, and service levels, and whatnot... >> Susie: There is. >> It sounds like we have... I was wondering, here, at this conference, are developers starting to talk about, "Geez, I would like to look at Kubernetes "as a lower-level feature in layer 7," >> Susie: They are. (laughs) >> "where there's a consistent approach to thinking about "how that orchestration layer is going to work, "and how containers work above that, "because I don't have to worry about session anymore, I don't have to worry about transmission." >> Susie: Absolutely. >> That goes away, so give me a little bit more visibility into some of that higher-level stuff, where, really, the connectivity issues are becoming more obvious. >> Absolutely, and an interesting example is that, you know, we actually talked about AppDynamics in the keynote, and so, with AppDynamics, what kind of information can you get from these bits of code that are running in different places? And it comes into where we have the Royal Bank of Scotland, who's saying, "What's my busiest bank branch "where people are doing mobile banking in the country?" And they're like, "Well, how do I answer that question?" And then you see that, oh, someone has their mobile phone, they take an app, then you actually break it down to how is that request, that API, how is that being, kind of, operated throughout your network. And when you take a look, you say, "Okay, well, this called this "piece of code that's running here. "This piece of code used this API to talk to this other service, to talk to this other," you can map that out, get back the calls of, "Hey, this is how many times this API has been called, "this is how many times this service has been called, "this is the ones that are talking to who," then they came up with the answer, saying that our busiest bank branch is the 9 a.m. Paddington Train Station. >> And that's a great example, because now you gain visibility >> Exactly >> into where the dependencies are, which even if you don't explicitly render it that way, starts to build a picture of what the layers of function might look like based on the dependencies and the sharing of the underlying services. >> That's right, and that's where you're saying, like, "What? The infrastructure just gave me business value (John laughs) "in a very direct way. "How did that happen?" >> John: That's a huge opportunity for Cisco. >> So it's a big... >> Well, let's get in the studio and let's break down the Kubernetes and the containers, 'cause Docker's here, a lot of other folks are here. We've had, also, Abby Kearns, the executive director of Cloud Foundry. We've had the executive director from the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, Dan was here, a lot of folks here in the industry kind of validating >> Yeah, Craig was here. >> your support. Sun used to have an expression, the network is the computer, but now, maybe Chuck Robbins should go for network is the app, or the app is the network, (Susie laughs) I mean, that's what's happening here. The interplay between the two is happening big time. >> It is happening here, yeah. Just every element, every piece of code, what we saw is that this year, developers will write 111 billion lines of code. You think about that, every piece of... >> Peter: That we know about. (chuckles) >> That we know about, there's probably more. (chuckles) and all of that, you're right, these are broken up into pieces that are inherently networked, right? They have data, it's all about data and information that they're sharing to give interesting experiences. So this is absolutely a new paradigm. >> Well, congratulations on your success. What a great journey, I know it's been a short time, but I noticed after our in-studio interview, when you came in to share with us, the show, as a preview, Chuck Robbins retweeted one of the tweets. >> Susie: He did. >> And so I got to ask you, internally at Cisco, I know you put this together kind of as a entrepreneurial inside the company, and had support for that, what is the conversation you have with Chuck and the executive team about this effort? Because they got to see a clear line of sight that the value of the network is creating business value. What are some of the internal conversations, can you give us a little bit of color without giving away all the trade secrets? >> Yeah, well, internally, we're getting huge support. Chuck Robbins checks in on this, he actually has been checking in saying, "How's it going?" Rowan Trollope sending, "Hey, how's it going? "I heard it's going great." >> Did he text you today? >> Chuck did a couple days ago. >> John: Okay. (chuckles) >> And then Rowan, today, so, yeah, so we have a lot of conversation. >> Rowan's a CUBE alumni, Chuck's got to get on theCUBE, (Susie laughs) Rowan's been on before. >> Yeah, so they're all kind of checking in on it. We have the IoT World Forum going on in parallel, in London, so, otherwise, they would be here as well. But they understand... >> John: There's a general excitement? This is not a rogue event? >> There's huge excitement. >> This is not, like, a rogue event? >> It's not, it's not, and what happens is... They also understand that we're talking about bringing in the ecosystem. It's not just a Cisco conversation, it is a community... >> Yeah, you're doing it right, you're not trying to take over the sandbox. You're coming in with respect and actually putting out content, and learning. >> Putting out content, and really, it's all about letting people interact and create this new area. It's breaking new ground, it's facilitating a conversation. I mean, where apps meet infrastructure, it's controversial as well. Some people should say, "They should never meet. "Why would they ever meet?" (Susie and John laugh) >> So, we do a lot of shows, I was telling Peter that, you know, we were at the first Hadoop Summit, second Hadoop World, with Cloudera, when they were a small startup, Docker's first event, CubeCon's first event, we do a lot of firsts, and I got to tell you, the energy here feels a lot like those events, where it's just so obvious that (chuckles) "Okay, finally, programmable infrastructure." >> Well, I'll be honest, I'm relieved, because, you know, we were taking a bet. So, you know, when I was bouncing this idea off of you, we were talking about it, it was a risk. So the question is, will it appeal to the app developers, will it appeal to the cloud developers, will it appeal overall? And I'm very relieved and happy to see that the vibe is very positive. >> Very positive. >> So people are very receptive to these ideas. >> Well, you know community, give more than you take has always been a great philosophy. >> I'm always a little paranoid and (John laughs) nervous but I'm very pleased, 'cause people seem to be really happy. There's a lot of action. >> There are a lot of PCs with Docker stickers on them here. (John laughs) >> There are. (laughs) There are, yes, yes. We have the true cloud, IoT, we have the hardcore developers here, and they seem to be very engaged and really embracing... >> Well, we've always been covering DevOps, again, from the beginning, and cloud-native is, to me, it's just a semantic word for DevOps. It's happening, it's going mainstream, and great to see Cisco, and congratulations on all your work, and thanks for including theCUBE in your inaugural event. >> Susie: Thank you. >> Susie Wee, Vice President and CTO at Cisco's DevNet. We're here for the inaugural event, DevNet Create, with the community, two great communities coming together. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, stay tuned for more coverage from our exclusive DevNet Create coverage, stay with us. (upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the senior director of strategy.