>> Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's the CUBE, covering CISCO Live 2018, brought to you by CISCO, Veeam, and the Cube's ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the CUBE's coverage of CISCO Live 2018 in Barcelona. You know, I'm a networking guy by background, but there's certain people in the industry that really I've gone to to learn, been really thrilled that I've had the opportunity to get to know, and every once in awhile I get to bring them to our audience, and really happy to bring back to the program Ivan Pepelnjak, from Slovenia, blogger, author, webinar, generally, you know, that network guy that those of us who watch the industry know. >> That grumpy networking guy. >> Ah, ya know, aren't most networking people at least online at least a little bit grumpy? And when you meet 'em in person, though, it's a slightly different experience, so thanks for joining us. >> Ah, thank you for inviting me. >> All right, so 2013 was the last time that we actually go to do one of these in person. >> Ivan: That's true. >> So networking, it's all the same, right? >> Ivan: It is. >> I mean we're probably still working on 10 gig rollout, ah, maybe 25 or 50 gig, speeds and feeds, and, ya know, oh, okay, ya know, IPV 6, I think we're kind of getting there, lots of other acronyms. We could talk awhile. But really, what's been some of the big things that you've been looking at? What are customers actually doing, and what are customers thinking of that you've been playing with? >> Well, it's amazing how little has changed. >> People are still talking about SDN like that's the big thing. No one has delivered on that apart from some point products like VMware, NSX, or CISCO ACI. Cloud is still the thing that will happen next year to most companies. We hear how 90% of all the companies that participate in some survey are using Cloud. And then the next question I'll ask is, "Well, is this Office 365, "or is this something more?" And they go like, "Well the survey "didn't differentiate on that." So thank you. >> Yeah, but, yeah look. The SDN, a friend of mine said SDN stands for Still Does Nothing. That being said, ACI, NSX, there's customers using it. >> Ivan: Oh, absolutely. >> It has not totally transformed the industry like they said. Cloud, I've yet to find a company that's not doing some SAS, and unless you have some regulation or things like that, you at least have some sandbox that you're doing some public Cloud. >> Ivan: Absolutely. >> But, absolutely people, they still have data centers, despite... >> Ivan: Well, it's a... >> It might not be their own building anymore. I was just talking to a service provider and the like, but yeah, I mean, the more things change the more things stay the same, right? >> Absolutely. Well yeah, we do see people moving to colos or, they would build their stuff somewhere else, or whatever, but it's amazing how much interest I am still getting in data center design courses, so there are still zillions of people who think that that is important, and yes, we all know we'll go to the Cloud, but everyone has his own hurdles, and so I think that eventually everyone will get to some sort of hybrid Cloud, where some stuff will be there, and some stuff legacy whatever will be here, and we'll have to live with that forever. >> Yeah, I mean, those of us we think back, I remember when this wave came, it was like, well, remember the XSPs in the 90s? There were two reasons why it failed. Number one, there wasn't enough network, and number two, ah, security. Well, you fast forward to, you know, two decades, and the network's gotten way better. I've got great speeds, and stuff like that, but you know physics is still a factor- >> Ivan: Well, yeah. >> And security is even more of an issue today than it was 20 years ago, I think. >> This started as a joke, but it is becoming more and more true. If you move to the Cloud, your security actually improves. >> Stu: Right. >> Because they have some security and you had none before. (both laugh) >> I at least get to rethink my security. >> Yeah. >> When I make some transformation. >> No, and they have the basics right. >> Right. >> Like physical access control, multi-tenant separation, encryption, trunk authentication. They get those things right, because otherwise they would be out of business. >> Okay, so we spent like more than a decade with how virtualization in networking. Have we gotten most of that at least reasonably well now? >> There are still people who don't get that ethernet was designed to be used on a single cable. So they still think that stretching a single ethernet across wide distances is a great idea, and everyone is still letting them get away with that. >> Yeah. >> Fortunately the Cloud vendors aren't buying. So if you want to move to Amazon, Google, whoever else, you have to redesign your applications and make them work correctly. So, eventually this thing will die, but it's like COBOL and mainframes, it will be there forever. >> Yeah, I mean, we've been saying for a few years on the Cube now that the challenge of our time is really distributed architectures, and of course they have a huge impact on networking, so how's the industry doing? How would you rate, you know, say we're here at CISCO Live, you know, how are they doing helping customers with these challenges? >> Most of them don't. >> I mean, if you look at a typical enterprise application, it still isn't developed for a distributed environment. Yeah, they use three tiers of servers, like always, but then they try to cope by solving all the problems in the ops phase, when they deploy stuff. And that's the biggest problem we are facing today. We are not changing the development processes and paradigms. >> Well, we're actually here in the Dev Net zone. I mean, I give CISCO kudos. Last time I came to CISCO Live was 2009. There weren't, we didn't talk about developers. >> Really? >> Everybody was, you know, doing plug fests, and getting their latest certification, but they're trying to embrace the developers more. There seem to be more of them here. >> Yeah. >> That boundary between network operator and developer, do you see? You know, is there communication, or are the network guys still stuck in a closet somewhere not talking to anybody? >> Well, there are two types of challenges. The first type of challenge is that the network guy in particular, but ops teams in general, are still not invited to the table when new stuff is discussed. So, the application developers dream up something based on their best knowledge. I mean, they're not evil or anything. They just don't know the operational impact of their decision. And because the networking security virtualization people are not at the table, then they have to cope with whatever these guys dream up in isolation. I'm never blaming them, because, you know, we should education them, and we are not doing that. >> Yeah. >> So anyone who manages to bring security, networking, and storage people in when the application architecture is being designed is my hero. But there are only few of them. And the other challenge is that the networking people don't realize that their world has changed. That they can't manually provision VLANs the way they've been doing for the last 20 years, and it's amazing once they get it, once they start simple automation stuff, how creative they become. What types of problems they solve. They don't have the shackles of CLI anymore. I shouldn't be saying that. (both laugh) I'm the old CLI junkie. But it's amazing how much can be done once you realize that you don't have to do everything manually. >> Yeah, CISCO's, you know, not shy about putting out strong visions. Marketing is definitely part of what they do. And the keynote this morning said it's a new era, and new infrastructure, powered by intent, informed by context. It sounded like a nice message, but this whole intent-based networking, what's your take on it? Is this, you know, are we going to come back five years from now and talk about intent based like we did SDN? Or, you know, what's your take? >> Well, let's keep in mind that this is all hype. What we're really talking about is an orchestration system with an abstraction layer. 'Cause first, it's really hard to define what intent based is, because there's no good definition. But there is a definition in programming which differentiates between declarative programming and imperative programming. And if we use declarative programming as something which could be intent based, that thing says, well, I don't tell the machine, or whatever, the system, how to do things. I just tell it what to do. And if you take a look at that from that perspective, then you figure out that every device configuration is an expression of your intent. >> Right. >> You never tell the device how to work. >> Yeah. >> You just tell the device what to do. >> Right. It's interesting, Ivan. I think back, you know, we used to manage individual boxes. Then we kind of created a little bit more pools, and the challenge they see right now is with the explosion of device, we're not going to have time to talk about all the IOT edge piece and everything, but there's no way an admin or a team of admins are going to be able to help there, so I need to infuse, I hate that, the ML, AI, choose your buzzword of choice, though, the machines need to be able to manage that a little bit more, you know, autonomous networks or something they (mumbles). I understand you're skeptical, so how do we get there, or, you know, otherwise, this whole label crap. >> There are two, there are three totally different things here. The first one, I totally agree with you that we should view networks as a single entity. Configuring boxes is stupid, and it's like, these admins don't do that. Well, some still do. They get the results they deserve. So, we should start thinking about network-wide data models which are then translated into device intent, which is really device configuration. And that makes absolute sense. But remember what I said. This is just a glorified orchestration system with an abstraction layer. The second problem is machine learning. Some of the things we are dealing with have physical limitations, like the speed of light, or the number of things you can put into a hardware forwarding table. Once you're faced with those physical limitations, it's like, you know, self-driving cars, yeah, they are self driving, but they cannot go 300 miles per hour because laws of physics. So, it's one thing to say, well, I have these infinite resources and I can learn how to play Go in eight hours. >> Right. >> And it's a completely different thing to say now I will figure out how to deal with my network, which has this physical limitations. And also, you know, whenever I hear about these autonomous distributed thingees, we have routing protocols. They have been autonomous and distributed and self healing for decades, and we didn't call them machine learning or artificial intelligence. And, finally, once you get to the bottom of it, and you're faced with all those physical limitations, and now, let's say you want to solve a simple problem, which is, how do I optimize the use of my network? You do some research. You figure out that this problem has been solved 20 years ago. There are companies with commercial products that have solved this problem. It's just that no one is using them because they are too expensive, because what you can save by using them doesn't offset the cost that these people had to invest into R and D to make this work. So, machine learning, yeah. Can you make it cheaper? I don't think so. >> All right, so, Ivan, I want to give you the last word. >> Mm-hmm. >> Grumpy networking, what do you look forward to the most at this show, and any final anecdotes you want to share, before we have to wrap? >> Well, the one thing I am looking forward is to see people to start automate their networks. To jump over that mental barrier, and when they break through it, it's amazing how many success stories you get. So I know a number of networking engineers who were on my automation course, and six months later, they write me saying, "Now I have this thing in production, "and we cut down the site deployment "from three days to five minutes." When I read emails like that, it's like, "You're my hero." >> Excellent, well I love it. For a grumpy person, you sure sound a little bit of an optimist about what some of the people come in and get this. Maybe a realist is more right. Ivan Pepelnjak, really appreciate you joining us. We'll be back with lots more coverage from CISCO Live 2018 from Barcelona. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching the Cube. (the Cube jingle)