(soft music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting, Accelerating Automation with DevNet, brought to you by Cisco. >> And welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We have our ongoing coverage of the Cisco DevNet event. It's really Accelerating with Automation and Programmability in the new normal. And we know the new normal is definitely continuing to go. We've been doing this since the middle of March and now we're in October. So, we're excited to have our next guest. He's Thomas Scheibe, he is the vice president of product management for data center for Cisco, Thomas, great to see you. >> Hey, good to see you too. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, and truly run it in normal as everybody can see on our background. >> Exactly, so, I mean, I'm curious, we've talked to a lot of people. We talked to a lot of leaders, you know, especially like back in March and April with this light switch moment, which was, you know, no time to prep, and suddenly everybody has to work from home. Teachers got to teach from home. And so you got the kids home, you got the spouse home, everybody's home trying to get on the network and do their zoom calls and their classes. I'm curious from your perspective, you guys are right there on the network, you're right in the infrastructure. What did you hear and see kind of from your customers when suddenly, you know, March 16th hit and everybody had to go home? >> Well, (laughs) good point, hey, I do think we all appreciate the network much more than we used to do before. And then the only other difference is I'm really more on WebEx calls and zoom calls, but, you know, otherwise yes. What I do see actually is that as I said network becomes much more operas as a critical piece. And so before we really talked a lot about agility and flexibility, these days we talk much more about resiliency quite frankly, and what do I need to have in place with respect to network to get my things from left to right. And you know, north to south and east to west, as we see in the data center. >> Right. >> And touches as for most of my customers, a very, very important topic at this point. >> Right, you know, it's amazing to think, you know, had this happened, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, you know, the ability for so many people in the information industry to be able to actually make that transition relatively seamlessly is actually pretty amazing. I'm sure there was (chuckles) some excitement and some kudos in terms of, you know, it is all based on the network and it is kind of this quiet thing in the background that nobody pays attention to. It's like a ref in the football game until they make a bad play. So, you know, it is pretty fascinating that you and your colleagues have put this infrastructure and that enabled us to really make that move with really no prep, no planning and actually have a whole lot of services delivered into our homes that we're used to getting at the office or are used to getting at school. >> Yeah, and I mean, to your point, I mean, some of us did some planning. We clearly talking about some of these trends and the way I look at this trend as being distributed data centers and having the ability to move your workloads and access for users to wherever you want to be. And so I think that clearly went on for a while. And so, in a sense we prep was our normal we're prepping for. But as I said, resiliency just became so much more important. And, you know, one of the things I actually do a little preview for a blog I put out end of August around resiliency. If you didn't put this in place, you better put it in place. Because I think as we all know, we saw it in March this is like maybe two or three months, we're now in October. And I think this is the new normal for some time being. >> Yeah, I think so. So, let's stick on that theme in terms of trends, right? The other great trend is public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud. There's all types of variants on that theme, you had in that blog post about resiliency in data center cloud networking, data center cloud. You know, some people think, wait, it's kind of an either or I either got my data center or I've got my stuff in the cloud and I've got public cloud. And then as I said, hybrid cloud, you're talking really specifically about enabling both inner data center resiliency within multi data center resiliency within the same enterprise as well as connecting to the cloud. That's probably counterintuitive for some people to think that that's something that Cisco is excited about and supporting. So, I wonder if you can share, you know, kind of how the market is changing, how you guys are reacting and really putting the things in place to deliver customer choice. >> Yeah, no, it's actually, to me, it's really not counterintuitive because in the end, what I'm focusing on and the company is focusing on is what our customers want to do and need to do. And that's really, you know, most people call hybrid cloud or multicloud. In the end, what it is is really the ability to have the flexibility, to move your workloads where you want them to be. And there are different reasons why you want to place them, right? You might've placed them for security reason. You might played some compliance reasons depending on which customer segment you're after. If you're in the United States or in Europe or in Asia, there are a lot of different reasons where you're going to put your syncs. And so I think in the end what an enterprise looks for is that agility, flexibility, and resiliency. And so really what you want to put in place is what we call like a cloud on ramp, right? You need to have an ability to move syncs as needed. But the logic context section which we see in the last couple of months accelerating is really this whole theme around digital transformation, which goes hand in hand than was the requirement on the IT side really do. And IT operations transformation, right? How IT operates. And I think that's really exciting to see, and this was excellent. Well, a lot of my discussions I was customized. What does it actually mean with respect to the IT organization? And what are the operational changes there's a lot of our customers are going through quite frankly accelerated going through? >> Right, and automation is in the title of the event. So, automation is an increasingly important thing, you know, as we know, and we hear all the time, you know, the flows of data, the complexity of the data. Either on the security or the way the network's moving, or as you said, shifting workloads around, based on the dynamic situations, whether that's business security, et cetera. And a software defined networking has been around for a while. How are you seeing kind of this evolution in adding more automation, you know, to more and more processes to free up those you know, kind of limited resources in terms of really skilled people to focus on the things that they should be focused on and not stuff that hopefully you can, you know, get a machine to run with some level of automation. >> Yeah, that's a good point. And I said, TechLine, I have, you know, sometimes when my mind is really going from CloudReady, which is in most of our infrastructure is today to cloud-native. And so let me a little expand on those, right? It's like the CloudReady is basically what we have put in place over the last five to six years, all the infrastructure that our customers have, network infrastructure or the Nexus 9000, they're all CloudReady, right? And what this really means, you have APIs everywhere, right? Whether this is on the box, whether it's on the controller, whether this is on the operations tools, all of these are API enabled. And that's just the foundation for automation, right? You have to have that. Now, the next step really is what do you do with that capability, right? And this is the integration with a lot of automation tools and that's the whole range, right? This is where the IT operation transformation kicks in different customers at different speed, right? Some just, you know, I use these APIs and use normal tools that they have on a network world just to pull information. Some customers go for further saying, "I want to integrate this with some CMDB tools." Some go even further and saying, "This is like the cloud-native (indistinct), "Oh, I want to use, let's say, Red Hat Ansible, or I want to use (indistinct) Terraform and use those things to actually drive how I managed my infrastructure. And so that's really the combination of the automation capability plus the integration was relevant cloud-native enabling tools that really is happening at this point. We're seeing customers accelerating in that motion. Which really then drives us how they run their IT operations. >> Right. >> And so that's a pretty exciting area to see. given as I said, we have the infrastructure in place. There's no need for customers to actually do change something. Most of them have already the infrastructures that can do this. It's just not doing the operational change the process change is to actually get there. >> Right, and it's funny, we recently covered, you know, PagerDuty and they highlight what you just talked about, the cloud-native, which is, you know, all of these applications now are so interdependent on all these different API, you know, pulling data from all these technical applications. So, hey, when they work great, it's terrific. But if there's a problem, you know, there's a whole lot of potential throats to choke out there and find those issues. And it's all being connected via the network. So, you know, it's even more critically important, not only for the application, but for all these little tiny components within the application to deliver, you know, ultimately a customer experience within very small units of time. So, that you don't lose that customer. You complete that transaction. They check out of their shopping cart. You know, all these things that are now created with cloud-native applications that just couldn't really do before. >> Now, you're absolutely right. And this is like, just as I said, I'm actually very excited because it opens up a lot of abilities for our customers. How they want to actually structure the operation, right? One of the nice things around this whole automation plus cloud network tool integration is you actually opened us up not a sole automation training, not just to the network operations personnel, right? You also open it up and can use those for the SecOps person or for the DevOps person or for the CloudOps engineering team, right? Because the way it's structured, the way we built this, it's literally as an API interface and you can now decide, what is your process? Do you want to have a more traditional process, you have to request, a network operation teams executes the request using these tools and then hands it back over. Or do you say, "Hey, maybe some of these security things, "I can hand over the SecOps team and they can "directly call these APIs, right?" Or even one step further, you can have the opportunity that the DevOps or the application team actually says, "Hey, I going to write a whole infrastructure as code "kind of a script or template, and I just execute, right?" And it's really just using what the infrastructure provides. And so that whole range of different user roles in our customer base, what they can do with the automation capability that's available. It's just very, very exciting way because it literally unleashes a lot of flexibility. How they want to structure and how they want to rebuild the IT operations processes. >> That's interesting, you know, 'cause the, you know, the DevOps culture has taken over a lot, right? Obviously changed software programming for the last 20 years. And I think, you know, there's a lot of just kind of the concept of DevOps versus necessarily, you know, the actual things that you do to execute that technique. And I don't think most people would think of, you know, NetworkOps or, NetOps, whatever the equivalent is in the networking world to have kind of a fast changing dynamic kind of point of view versus a stick it in, spec it, stick it in, lock it down. So, I wonder if you can, you can share how, kind of that DevOps attitude point of view, workflow, whatever the right verb is has impacted things at Cisco in the way you guys think about networking and flexibility within the networking world. >> Yeah, literally, absolutely. And again, it's all customer driven, right? It's none of these is really actually, you know, a little bit of credit, maybe some of us where we have a vision, but a lot of it is just customer driven feedback. And yeah, we do have EU Network Operations Teams come to you saying, "Hey, we use Ansible heavily on the compute, "so, we might use this for Alpha Seven. "We want to use the same for networking." And so we made available all these integrations with sobriety as a state, whether these are the switches, whether these are ACI and dc network controller or our multi site orchestration capabilities, all of these has Ansible integration the way to the right. The other one as I mentioned that how she formed Tarco Terraform, we have integrations available and they see the requests for these tools to use that. And so that is the motion we're in for over a year now. And another blog actually is out there we just posted saying, Yeah, all set what you can do. And then a parallel to this, right? Just making the integration available. We also have a very, very heavy focus on definite and enablement and training. And, you know, a little plucking I know probably part of the segment, the whole definite community that Cisco has is very, very vibrant. And the beauty of this is right. If you look at us, whether you're a NetOps person or a DevOps person or a SecOps person, it doesn't really matter. There's a lot of like capability available to just help you get going or go from one level to the next level, right? And there's simple things like sandbox environments where you can, you know, without stress try things out, snippets of code are there, you can do all of these things. And so we do see it's a kind of a push and pull a tremendous amount of interest and a tremendous time people spend to learn. Quite frankly then, that's another side product of the suggestion when people say, "Oh man, and say, okay, online learning is the thing." So, these tools are used very heavily. >> Right. That's awesome 'cause you know, we've had Susie Leon a number of times and I know he and Mandy and the team, right? Really built this DevNet thing. And it really follows along this other theme that we see consistently across other pieces of tech, which is democratization, right? Democratization is the access tool, taking it out of just a mahogany row with, again, a really limited number of people that know how to make it work. And it can make the changes in an opening up to a software defined world where now it's application centric point of view, where the people that are building the apps to go create competitive advantage now don't have to wait for, you know, the one network person to help them out in and out of these environments really interesting. And I wonder if, you know, when you look at what's happened with public cloud and how they kind of changed the buying parameter, how they kind of changed the degree of difficulty to get project started, you know, how you guys have kind of integrated that type of thought process to make it easier for app developers to get their job done. >> Yeah, I mean, again, I typically look at this more from a customer lens, right? It's the transformation process and it always starts as I want agility, I want flexibility and I want resiliency, right? This is where we talk to a business owner what they're looking for. And then that translates into an IT operations process, right? Your strategy needs to map then how you actually do this. And that just drives then what tools do you want to have available to actually enable this, right? And the enablement again is for different roles, right? You need to give sync services to the app developer and the platform team and the security team, right? To your point so the network can act at the same speed. But you also give tools to the network operations teams because they need to adjust then, they have the ability to react to some of these requirements, right? And it's not just automation, I said we focused on that, but there's also to your point, the need, how do I extend between data centers? You know, just for backup and recovery, and how do I extend into public clouds, right? And in the end that's a network connectivity problem, and we have solved as, we have meters available, we have integrations into AWS. We have integrations into Ajua to actually make this very easy from a network perspective to extend your private domains, private networks into which have private networks on these public clouds. So, from an app developer perspective, now it looks like it's on the same network. It's a protective enterprise network. Some of it might sit here, some of it might sit here. But it's really looking the same. And that's really in the end I said what a business looks at, right? They don't necessarily want to say, I need you to have something separate for this deployment or separate for that deployment. What they want is I need you to deploy something. I need to do this resilience. And the resilient way and an agile way gives me the tools. And so that's really where we focused and what we're driving, right? It's that combination of automation consistently, and then definite tools available that we support, but they're all open. They're all standard tools as the ones I mentioned, right? That everybody's using. So, you're not getting into this, "Oh, this is specific to Cisco, right? It's really democratization, I actually liked your term. >> Yeah, it's a great term and it's really interesting, especially with the APIs and the way everything is so tied together. That everyone kind of has to enable this because that's what the customer is demanding. And it is all about the applications and the workloads and where those things are moving, but they don't really want to manage that. They just want to, you know, deliver business benefit to their customers in respond to, you know, competitive threats in the marketplace, et cetera. So, it's really an interesting time for the infrastructure to really support kind of this app first point of view, versus the other way around is kind of what it used to be. And enable this hyper fast development, hyper fast change in the competitive landscape or else you will be left behind. So, super important stuff. >> Yeah, no, I totally agree. And as I said, I mean, it's kind of interesting because we started on the Cisco data center. It's where we started this probably six or seven years ago. When we named the application-centric, clearly a lot of these concepts evolved. But in a sense it is that reversal of the role from the network provides something and you use to, this is what I want to do. And I need a service thinking on the networking side to expose services that can be consumed. And so that clearly is playing out. And as I said, automation is a key foundation that we put in place. And our customers most of our customers at this point are on these products. They have all the capabilities there are. They can literally take advantage. There's really nothing that stops them at this point. >> Well, it's good times for you because I'm sure you've seen all the memes in social media, right? What's driving your digital transformation is the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know the answer to the question. So, I don't think the pace of change is going to slow down anytime soon. So, (indistinct) keeping the network up and enabling us all to get done what we have to get done and all the little magic that happens behind the scenes. >> Yeah, I know, thanks for having me and again, yeah, if you're listening and you're wondering, how do I get started? Cisco definitely is the place to go. It's, you know, fantastic, fantastic environment. And I highly recommend everybody, roll up the sleeves and you know, the best reasons you can have. >> Yeah, and we know once the physical events come back, we've been to DevNet Create a bunch of times, and it's a super vibrant, super excited, really engaged community, sharing lots of information. It's still kind of that early vibe, you know, where everyone is still really enthusiastic and really about learning and sharing information. So, like Susie and the team have really built a great thing and we're happy to continue to cover it and eventually we'll be back face to face. >> Okay, (chuckles) look forward to that as well. >> All right, thanks. He's Thomas and I'm Jeff you're watching continuing coverage of CiscoDevNet Accelerating With Automation and Programmability. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> live from Mountain View, California It's the queue covering definite create twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hi. Lisa Martin for the Cube, Live at Cisco Definite. Create twenty nineteen. This is Day two of our coverage here. We're excited to welcome Taylor Barnett, a speaker tech talk speaker for this event. Lead community engineer at Stoplight Taylor. It's great to have you on the Cube. I'm glad to be here. So first, inform us before we talk about your tech talk that you can yesterday here, adept that create tell us a little bit about Stop like, >> yeah, So stoplight is a platform. Teo, build test and design web ap eyes specifically, we focus right now on recipe eyes, but we're really encouraging design first principles when people are building out there a prize for very much preproduction And what we have found was so many guys out there are not documented. They're not tested, they're not designed well And so we wanted to build tooling the help users be able to do that. >> So that documentation we've heard yeah, yesterday and today is absolutely >> essential. Yeah, And so a lot of what we're doing is we're actually using the Open A P I specifications, which a lot of teams at Cisco are now using. And so we can auto generate documentation from that. But also, we can auto generate instant mock >> servers. >> Um, do different types of testing all from that, because it's both human and machine readable. You're taking advantage of that. >> So you gave a tech talk yesterday, so I like the title going to Infinity and beyond Documentation with open FBI. Tell us our audience, like basically kind of an overview of what you presented in the three takeaways that your audience left with. >> Yeah, so historically open a P I specification has been known to be an auto generating reference documentation. So what people are like, Yeah, I know it for documentation, but they don't know it for all the other things. So the things that helped them do design first principles, the things that helped them mock and get feedback about their AP eyes and also how to test. And so I say, the three takeaways, that's what I focus on, was, how does this design first really benefit us? And why is it worth spending that time? Because a lot of engineers. It kind of feels like a friction point. Like you're making me do something else before I can start coding on DSO helping them see those benefits and then also being ableto use the feedback through They get through mach ap eyes so that they don't have tio code all the p I and then get the feedback. They could do it before that process. So much, master. Yeah, totally. And just better testing to actually make sure that we once we designed the A that we actually implementing it to what the design says. Uh, >> so I'm not design front. You mentioned design first telling you before we met. Lied that we've heard that. Yeah, I did what I had yesterday and today. This's design first approach and it sounds like from what you're saying for developers, it's not necessarily the first thing they want to do. They want to get their hands on start coding. So yeah, tell may tell us what design first means and actually how it can really make the developers job better. >> Yeah, Yes. Oh, Design First is really just being able to take a step back before that code and like describe what the is on a lower like endpoint level for us that's doing it in a visual editor at Stoplight. We actually have a visual editor to help people do that so that it's not like writing things from scratch. So even then, that makes it faster than having to write on a blank document that nobody wants to like right in. And it might be a mess. And decisions are hard to make around that document because it's a mess and all this stuff and then being able to take that and then start doing the mocking and all the other things. So for developers, it's a lot about getting to see what those other benefits are to convince them that it's worth it. And that's going to save some time overall versus like having toe wait. One great example of that is actually with being ableto Ma K P IIs friend and engineers could go ahead and start implementing the guy before the development process of actually implement thing is even done so that traditional, like waterfall development process. You just cut that out because they can start doing in a parallel on DH so it can really make teams a lot more efficient. >> Did you Were you happy with the reaction yesterday? This is a This is the definite communities. God. Five hundred eighty five thousand plus people. There's been about four hundred here in person. What was the reaction? Especially from developers who may have been around a while and are very used to the waterfall upload where they like. Taylor. This is amazing. Or girl, this is like a whole cultural change. Yeah, you know, I mean, we we work well, >> actually, a lot of enterprise companies that stoplight. And it is it is a little bit of a cultural change. You talk, there's this whole bigger idea of, like, a P I transformation. Even just moving to having a pee ice first is a bigger change. And then, you know, then the design part. But I have found that once, if you're introducing somebody to a prize first, it's easy to sneak in design. So then you don't have to Then teach Oh, let's design the first and do decide. It's all part of the same package s o. A lot of enterprises what They're like transformations to moving toe, like in a very FBI focused infrastructures. They then are just more receptacle to design >> first. That's good. Especially if you're able to show them that the obvious benefits. Yeah, there getting things done faster like this is actually taking this new approach. Is that going to be better for you? And do you find that that developers are adjusting quickly to this new? Yeah. I mean, there's definitely >> pain points. The tooling is still catching up. Uh, so the industry is for recipe eyes has kind of centered around open FBI specifications. But there were others before that Ramel for a specifically and I'd use it for anybody. Also open a p. I used to be called swagger specification. Some people might know it by that, but a lot of it is like, Yeah, the tooling is still maturing, but it's in a lot better place than it used to be. So when I was a back end FBI engineer about four five years ago, I was introduced through a P I blueprint, which is another justification, and it was very painful tohave to document in a p I with it. And now it's just gotten so much better with the tooling mature >> you can see massive differences alone just by asking. >> Totally. Yeah, just like the last four years, actually. >> So this is your first definite create and your speaker at your very first one. That's pretty cool, Taylor. Yeah? Yeah. How long have you been involved in the definite community? And how is it impacted what you do for stuff like, >> Yeah. So I was kind of introduced through it. I knew people that worked on definite and like Mandy. And And so then I kind of got introduced that that, you know, it's been really interesting to see how they built up this community of people sharing code. And it's different then, like, get hub type community. And so it's kind of interesting. It was just like it's ah, you know, you don't see a lot of communities that are run by companies that necessarily >> there they're >> not in the code repository business, but they see the value in people sharing things and collaborating and stuff like that. And so it's kind of different of a community, but also very interesting tow. Have watching grab >> the sharing in the collaboration you walk in yesterday. People are eager to do that Yeah, and other types of conferences that we covered the Cube, especially if there's cooperative Shin Partners there. It's a different vibe has been very, very much one that's been refreshing on and to your point. The difference between what Cisco's built here in the lost, very organically bio away in the last five years with Suzie and Mandy have done that opened nous and that excitability to share things and learn from each other, even though there's got to be developers here from competing companies. Yeah, that's a very cool spirit. Yeah, and something that I think they've done a very good job fostering that they also I kind of wonder if it's chicken and egg. How much has definite. And this, you know, over half a million strong community been sort of forcing function or an accelerator of Cisco's evolution? If you look at Cisco's been around for such a long time, not on a P I first company Yeah, big enterprise. This is a big all of their products and with GPS ***, been really >> awesome to see all the talks that are focused on Cisco's a prize being designed first like I don't see a lot of enterprises that feel like they've really taken it toe heart as much. I've talked to some people and they say, Yeah, I mean, you know, there's been some pain points, but I'm like, Yeah, but there's companies that are envious of the Y .'All done this. Yes, and they've really, like, probably improved the developer experience that they're a piece so much because of having that design first >> approach. So one other thing that I think it's very cool about definite and create is that yesterday morning it was kicked off by two really strong technologists. You don't mention we had Mandy really on yesterday is a senior director of developer experience. Right after you. I've got Susie Leon, the SPP in CTO, and I go to a lot of events. The Cube covers a lot of events every year, and it's very important to us to be able to highlight women and technology because it's still an unresolved, you know, gap there. But it's also really unusual to see an event kicked off both days. No females. You've been a stem since you were a kid. How does that impact you? Do you see that is inspiring. You that is. I wish it wasn't an issue. >> Yeah, no. Yeah. I wish it was an issue, but no, but it's really awesome. So, like, when I was trying to decide if I accept my when they asked me to come speak, I totally looked at that. That was something when I saw their faces on them that they were going to be key notes and stuff, you know, it gave me already, like, a whole different feeling of how the conference >> was going to be >> so it was really exciting to see that. Yeah, >> that's good. And when I first got into tech a long time ago, I was just not aware of what was not monitor in a technical role. But I didn't notice. I mean, they noticed the difference and the disparity, but I didn't feel it. Yeah, And so it wasn't until I started going to more and more events where I sell >> theirs. So, yeah, sometimes you're at events where it's just the sea of people that don't look like you. And it's a lot different here. >> Yeah, until I imagine I appreciated it this morning. I'm sure. Well, when Susie called onto stage the young girls from Verizon and those from Presidio that are Cisco's clearly making a concerted effort to recognize and help this diversity in thought. I mean, imagine designing AP eyes with, you know, many different perspective is better products and services and company, and will be we just have more thought divers in and of itself. >> Oh, yeah, I think about it a lot with developer experience. So one of the things is there's this idea of beginner's mind failure that sometimes if if you think you're a p, I is like, great. But you don't approach it with the beginner's mind, you might actually be failing a lot of your users. So, you know, your, uh, your veteran developer, you're, you know, super skilled and you you don't fail in the somewhere areas that someone who's newer to development might fail. And so then you just lost a bunch of customers and right up front without even them getting deeper into the FBI. And so being ableto have, like more diverse perspectives around, designing a prize could definitely help prevent that. That's a >> really important point so that you make there because it's like if this is really everything that's designed these days. Whatever it is a on iPad. But sticker a piece of clothing. It's all designed for a consumer. Yeah, to consume whatever the product of services. And, you know, in technology, so much conversation goes around delivering an outstanding customer experience. And you're saying, you know, we have to think about that. Probably worked design, thinking, coming play right about designing with that sort of a day bers perspective of approach. That paper you gonna lose customers here were >> actually gets to the bottom line. Yeah, versus just being like a nice benefit kinds. >> Yeah, well, Taylor has been so fun having you on the Cube. Thank you so much. Now you have a flight to catch back in Austin. So thank you so much for doing this afternoon and rats on being a speaker at first. And it will seem Thanks for having me. My pleasure. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching to keep live from Cisco. Definite. Create twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching