>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco it's The Cube. Covering Devnet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back everyone. Live in San Francisco this is The Cube's exclusive coverage of Cisco Systems inaugural DevNet Create event an augmentation, extension and build upon their successful three year old DevNet Developer Program. Our next guest is Amanda Whaley who's the director of development experience at Cisco DevNet. Congratulations Amanda on one DevNet being successful for three years and now your foray into DevNet Create which is some call it the hoodie crowd, the cloud native developers, open source, completely different animal but important. >> Yes. >> From DevNet. >> Absolutely so the hoodie crowd is more my tribe that's my background is from software development and I came to Cisco because I was intrigued when they reached out and said we want to start a developer community, we want to start a developer program. I talked to Suzie Wee for a long time about it and what was interesting to me was there were new problems to solve in developer experience. So we know how to do rest APIs, there's a lot of best practices around how you make those easy for developers to use. How you make very consumable and developer friendly and there's a lot of work to do there but we do know how to do that. When you start adding in hardware so IOT, network devices, infrastructure, collaboration, video, there's a lot of new interesting developer experience problems to solve. So I was really intrigued to join Cisco bringing my software developer background and coming from more the web and startup world, coming into Cisco and trying to tackle what's this new connection of hardware plus software and how do we do the right developer experience around... >> Okay so I have to ask you what was your story, take us through the day in the life as you enter in to Cisco, you have Suzie wooed you in you got into the tractor beam 'cause she's brilliant she's awesome and then you go woah I'm in Cisco. >> Amanda: Yeah! >> You're looking around what was the reaction? >> So what was interesting was so DevNet started three years ago at Cisco live we had our first DevNet developer zone within Cisco Live. That was actually my first day at Cisco so my first day at Cisco. >> Peter: Baptism by fire. >> Yes absolutely and so that was my first day at Cisco and Suzie talked to me and she said hey there's a lot of network engineers that want to learn how to code and they want to learn about rest APIs. Could you do like a coding 101 and start to teach them about that so literally my first day at Cisco I was teaching this class on what's a rest API, how do you make the call, how do you learn about that and then how do you write some Python to do that? And I thought is anyone interested in this that's here? And I had this room packed with network engineers which I at that time I mean I knew some networking but definitely nothing compared to the CCIEs that were in the audience. >> John: Hardcore plumber networking guys. >> Yeah very very yeah. And so I taught the course and it just like caught on like wildfire they were so excited about because they saw this is actually pretty accessible and easy to do and one thing that stood out was we made our first rest call from Python and instead of getting your twitter followers or something like that it retrieved a list of network devices. You got IP addresses back and so it related to their world and so I think it was very fortunate that I had that on my first day 'cause I had an instant connection to what that community... >> They're like who is she's awesome come on! >> Co-Ost: Gimme that code! >> You're like ready to go for a walk around the block now come on kindergartners come on out. No but these network guys they're smart >> Really smart. so they can learn I mean it's not like they're wet behind the ears in terms smarts it's just new language for them. >> And that was the point of the class was like you guys are super smart you know all of this you just need some help getting tarted on this tooling. And so many of them I keep up with them on Twitter and other places and they have taken it so far beyond and they just needed that start and they were off to the races. So that's been really interesting and then the other piece of it has been working in our more app developer technologies as developer experience for DevNet I get to work across collaboration, IOT, Networking, data center like the whole spectrum of Cisco technologies. So on the other side in application we have Cisco Spark they have javascript SDKs and it's very developer friendly and so that is kind of going back to my developer tribe and bringing them in and saying to you want to sell to the enterprise, do you want to work with the enterprise, Cisco's got a lot to offer and there's a lot of interesting things to do there. >> Yeah a lot of them have Cisco networks and gear all around the place so it's important. Now talk about machine learning and AI the hottest trend on the planet right now in your tribe and in developer tribe a lot of machine learning going on and machine learning's been around data center, networking guys it's not new to them either so that's an interesting convergence point. IOT as a network device. >> Amanda: Right right. >> So you got IOT you got AI and machine learning booming, this seems like it's a perfect storm for the melting pot of... >> It really is so today in my keynote I talked a little bit about first of all why have I always liked working with the APIs and doing these integrations and I've always thought that it's what I like about it is the possibility you have a defined set of tools or Legos and then you can build them into whatever interesting thing you want to and I would say right now developers have a really interesting set of Legos, a new set of Legos because with sensors, whether that's an IOT sensor or a phone or a video camera or a piece of a switch in your data center a lot of those you can get information from them. So whatever kind of sensor it is plus easy connectivity and kind of connectivity everywhere plus could computing plus data equals like magic because now you can do now machine learning finally has enough data to do the real thing. My original background was chemical engineering and I actually did predictive model control and we did machine learning on it but we didn't have quite enough data. We couldn't store quite enough of it, we didn't have enough connectivity we couldn't really get there. And now it's like all of my grad school dreams are coming true and you can do all these amazing things that seemed possible then and so I think that's what DevNet Create has been about to me is getting the infrastructure, the engineers, the app developers together with the machine learning community and saying like now's the time there's a lot of interesting things we can build. >> And magic can come out of that. >> Magic yeah right! >> And you think about it that's chemical reaction. The chemistry of bringing multiple things together and there's experimentation sometimes it might blow up. >> Amanda: Hopefully not! >> Innovation you know has is about experimentation and Andy Jassy at Amazon web services I mean I've talked to him multiple times and him and Jeff Bezos consistently talk about do experiments try things and I think that is the ethos. >> It is and that is particularly our ethos in DevNet in fact in DevNet Create an experiment right a new conference let's get people together and start this conversation and see how it comes together. >> What's your reaction to the show here? The vibe your feeling? Feedback your getting? Observations. >> I'm so happy it's been great. I had someone tell mt today that this was the most welcome they had felt at any developer conference that they'd been to and I took that as a huge complement that they felt very comfortable, they liked the conversations they were having they were learning lots of new information so I think that's been good and then I think exactly that mix of infrastructure plus app developer that we were trying to put together is absolutely happening. I see it in the sessions I see it in the birds of a feather and there's a lot of good conversations happening around that. >> Question for you that we get all the time and it comes up on crowd chat I'd like to ask you the question just get your reaction to is what misperception of devops is out there that you would like to correct? If there could be one and you say you know it's not that what's your... >> The one that seems the most prevalent to me and I think it's starting to get some attention but it's still out there is that devops is just about about the tools. Like just pick the right devops tools. Docker docker docker or use puppet and chef and you're good you're devopsing and it's like that is not the case right? It's really a lot more about the culture and the way the teams work together so if there was anything I could, and the people right, so it's flipping the emphasis from what's the devops tool that you're using to how are you building the right culture and structure of people? That's the one I would correct. >> Suzie was on yesterday and Peter and Suzie had a little bit of a bonding moment because they recognize each other from previous lives HP and his old job and it brought up a conversation around what Peter also did at his old job at Metagroup where he talked about this notion of an infrastructure engineer and what's interesting. >> Peter: Infrastructure developer. >> I mean infrastructure developer sorry. That was normally like a network engineer. So the network engineer's now on the engineering side meeting with developers almost like there seems I can't put my finger on it just like I can feel it my knee weather patterns coming over that a new developer is emerging. And we've talked a little bit about it last night about this what is a full stack developer it doesn't stop at the database it can go all the way down to the network so you're starting to see the view a little bit of a new kind of developer. Kind of like when data science emerged from not being an analyst but to being an algorithms specialist meets data person. >> Right I think it's interesting and this shows up in a lot of different places. When I think about devops I think about this spectrum of the teams working and there's the infrastructure teams who are working on the most deepest layer of the infrastructure and you kind of build up through there into the Devops teams into the app dev teams into maybe even something sort of above the app dev team which would be like a low code solution where you're just using something like build.io or something like that. Something that we wouldn't normally think of as developers right. So that spectrum is broadening on both ends and people are moving down the stack and moving up the stack. The network engineers one of the things in DevNet we're working on is what we call the evolution of the network engineer and where is that going and network engineers have had to learn new technology before and now there's just a new set which includes automation and APIs and configuration management, infrastructures, code and so they're moving up the stack. And then developers are also starting to think I really want my application to run well on the network because if no one can use it then my application's not doing anything and so things like the optimized for business that we have with Apple where a developer can go in through an SDK and say I want to set these QOS settings so that my app gets treatment like that's a way that they're converging and I think that's really interesting. >> Peter: So one of the things that we've been working on at Wikibon I want to test this assumption by we've talked a little bit about it is the idea of a data zone. Where just as we use a security zone as a concept where everything that's in that zone and it's both the technologies there's governmental there's other types of, has this seized security characteristics and if it's going to be part of that conglomeration it must have these security characteristics. And we're no thinking you could do the same thing with data. Where you start saying so for example we talked earlier about the idea that the network is what connects places together and that developers think in terms of the places things are like the internet of things. I'm wondering if it's time for us to think in terms of the network in time or the network is time and not think in terms of where something is but think in terms of when it is. And whether or not that's going to become a very powerful way of helping developers think about the role that the network's going to play is the data available now because I have an event that I have to support now and it seems as though that could be one of those things that snaps this group, these two communities together to think it's in time that you're trying to make things happen and the network has to be able to present things in time and you have to be cognisant of in time. It's one of the reasons for example why restful is not the only way to do things. >> Right exactly. >> IOT thinks in time what do you think about that? >> Yeah I think that's really interesting and actually that's something we're diving in with our community on is so you've been a developer you've worked with rest services and now you're doing IOT well you need to learn a lot of new protocols and how to do things more in real time and that's a skill set that some developers maybe don't have they're interested in learning so we're looking at how do we help people along that way. >> John: Well data in motion is a big topic. >> Exactly yeah absolutely. And so I think and then the network, thinking about from a network provider like I need this data here at this time is very interesting concept and that starts to speak to what can be done at the edge which is obviously like an interesting concept for us. >> But also the role the network's going to play in terms of predicatively anticipating where stuff is and when it needs to be there. >> Yeah yeah I think that's a really interesting space. >> But it's programmable if you think about what' Cisco's always been good at and most network and ops guys is they've been good at policy based stuff and they really they know what events are they have network events right things happen all the time. Network management software principles have always been grounded in software so now how do you take that to bridging against hat's why I see a convergence. >> Amanda: We should have a conference around that. >> It's called DevNet Create. Okay so final question for you as you guys have done this how's your team doing with the talks was one going on behind us is a birds of a feather IOT session you've got a hack-a-thon over here. Pretty cool by design that we heard yesterday that it's not 90% Cisco it's 90% community 10% Cisco so this is not a Cisco coming in and saying hey we're in cloud native get used to us we're here you know. >> Absolutely not so it's I'm really proud of how my team came together around that so I have our team of developer evangelists who we connect with the developer community and we really look at our job as this full circle of we get materials out and learning and get people excited about using Cisco APIs and we also bring information back about like here's what customers think about using it, here's what the community's doing all of that. So when we started DevNet Create we set the stake in the ground of we want this to be way more community content than our content we produce ourselves. And so the evangelists did a great job of reaching out into communities, connecting with speakers, finding the content that we wanted to highlight to this audience and bringing it in so that the talks have been fabulous, the workshops have been a huge hit it's like standing room only in there and people getting a seat and not wanting to leave because they want to keep their seat and so they'll stay for four workshops in a row you know it's been amazing. >> I think it's great it's exciting for me to watch 'cause I know the developer goodness is happening. People are donating soft we see Google donating a lot of open source even Amazon on the machine learning you guys have a lot of people that open source but I got to ask you know within Cisco and it's ecosystem of a company we see a lot or Cisco on our Cube events that we go to. We go to 100 events last year we've been to 150 this year. We saw Dehli and Ciro we saw some Cisco folks there. Sapphire there's a deal with Century Link and Honna Cloud, Enterprise Cloud so there's Cisco everywhere. There's relationships that Cisco has, how are you looking at taking DevNet Create or are you going to stay a little bit decoupled, be more startup like and kind of figure that scene out or is that on the radar yet? >> So I think we know with starting DevNet Create for this first year what we really want to do is get foundation out there, stake in the ground, get a community started and get this conversation started. And we're really looking to in the iterative experimental way look at what comes out of this year and where the community really wants to take it. So I think we'll be figuring that out. >> John: So see what grows out of it. It's a thousand flowers kind of thing. >> Yeah and I think that it will be, we will always have the intention of keeping that we want to keep the mix of audience of infrastructure and app and we'll see how that grows so... >> Well Amanda congratulations to you, Rick and Suzie and the teams. I'd like to get some of those experts on the Cube interviews as soon as possible. >> Absolutely! >> And some crowd chats. You guys did an amazing IOT crowd chat. I'll share that out to the hashtag. >> That was really fun. >> Very collaborative you guys are a lot of experts and Cisco's got a lot of experts in hiding behind the curtain there you're bringing them out in public here. >> That's right. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> We're here live with special inaugural coverage of DevNet Create, Cisco's new event. Cloud native, open source, all about the community. Like The Cube we care about that and we'll bring you more live coverage after this short break. >> Hi I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior director of Strategy and Planning for Cisco.