 from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. Hey, welcome back everyone, we're live in San Francisco for Cisco Systems inaugural DevNet Create event, which is an extension of their DevNet developer program, which is the Cisco core developer program, now going out to the community to create, kind of ingratiate into the DevOps developer world, connecting IoT and infrastructure together. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage for two days, our next guest is Todd Knight and Gail, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco. Welcome to theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Peter Barris, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks. Tell us what your group first, let's explain your division, what you guys do and why is it relevant to DevNet Create? I mean, you guys already got a massive developer program that's kicked off and grown within Cisco, why DevNet Create, why ingratiate out into the community and connect with these new developers? Sure, sure, yeah, the Maraki business, it's cloud-managed infrastructure. We make wireless switching, routing, now phones and cameras, mobile device management and what we've realized is, as simple to manage, simple to monitor that our solution is, a lot of our customers, they want to do more, they want to expand and build custom applications, they want to leverage social logins and do all kinds of different analytics on top of the infrastructure. The infrastructure is starting to be a part of a greater technology digitization of their business or their school or their government. And really, I think the lesson that we've learned over the last couple of years is the key is to open up the platform, is to have some faith in the community. Open up the platform and do your best to recruit best in class development teams from around the world and once people can get more from your platform than others, then they're going to flock to you over time. We're lucky, right? As a cloud managed solution, we've got all of our devices already being managed and monitored from the cloud. So for developers, it's very easy to develop on cloud APIs. So they don't need to come in and be a total network or they just come in and leverage infrastructure as code for programmable infrastructure, is that right? Exactly, yeah. Rest APIs in the cloud, just like you might integrate to a Facebook API or Google API, you integrate to a Meraki API and you're able to control the infrastructure, get analytics from the infrastructure, understand your locations better, you know, all that. Peter and I always talk on theCUBE about a couple of concepts, but two are relevant for this, I want to get your reaction to. One, it's internet scale now, is going to a home of the dimension, fairly Cisco dominated with scale at the router level within internet one. But now with internet of things, he brings up this concept of there's no technology but unknown processes developed. You mentioned new devices connecting. This is like a new connection point that needs to be managed dynamically. You don't know when they're going to come on and off. So that's kind of cool. I want to get your reaction to that. Is that how you guys see the world? Because that really is IoT. New devices are connected to the network. They need a connection, they need power and they need to be provisioned, managed and allocated, they're throwing off data. This is a developer dream, but also could be a nightmare. Yeah, look, I think that a lot of the story of networking has been this concept of like building a network configured up just right and then when it's perfect, you don't touch it, you're afraid you might break something. The concept of fat fingering is so common, right? And so these networks are incredibly powerful but brittle and that just can't be the way anymore. It has to be simple enough that people can feel that their network is nimble and changeable and can be configured and managed and changed over time to react to this stuff. I think the technology is getting better when it comes to simple and automated provisioning of all IoT devices. We're tracking very carefully a technology called MUD that allows for these devices to provision with a policy set by the manufacturer and all that stuff but the real story is the networks we're deploying today will have to be nimble and they'll have to be upgradable from the cloud and be able to get better over time and make it easier and easier for people who have maybe a thousand users on their network today. They're going to have a hundred thousand devices on their network in five years and they have to be ready for that and be ready to continue to evolve over time. So one of the things that our research as we've talked to a lot of CIOs is that they're moving from an orientation that's focused on elasticity which might be known workload at any scale to a work calling plasticity which has very, very specific meaning at least in a physics sense in that not only are you able to scale up and down but you're also able to reconfigure very, very rapidly. So things will pop into a new shape that will sustain itself. And I want to know what you think about this concept of not just elasticity but plasticity, the ability for the infrastructure to reconfigure itself in ways that make sense and sustain that shape as the business evolves. Yeah, I think look on the compute side, that's very real, right? When you think about load on different servers with applications running across different clouds and data centers, this stuff has to be expandable and also expandable in a controlled way, not just, you know, spinning up thousands and thousands of servers. And I think this concept of plasticity gets to that, right, it has to scale but in a controlled concept. When it comes to the infrastructure, think the bigger deal is the infrastructure is always optimizing whatever networking resources you have. There's only so much bandwidth coming to your site or to and from your cloud and all that stuff. And when the load starts to spike and really explode over time, before you have the ability to find more bandwidth or another server provider, what the infrastructure has to do is has to automatically optimize your most important apps, your most important applications. Prioritize that through your network and optimize the rest to do its best in whatever limited resources it has. So in infrastructure, in networking infrastructure, I think of this more of like resource optimization and that being, and those algorithms happening to be nimble and to be honest, really dynamic as the load spikes in different ways over different times. I think it's a great point but let me push you on this but don't we also have to remember the patterns associated with that and so that as we can anticipate the infrastructure we can anticipate some of these spikes time of month, time of day, in response to particular other business events so that the infrastructure itself has to then have a muscle memory associated with some of these things so that it can again, kind of constantly reconfigure itself to support what the business events that are becoming more obvious overall so that we don't have to reconfigure them themselves. Does that make sense to you? Yeah, I think we talk about this sort of next generation of network intelligence and really using some type of machine learning to predict these type of events and to me it's not just about automatically reconfiguring the infrastructure but it's also about making the next recommendation about hey, the way your trends are going you're really going to need XYZ change in the physical network in two months in six months and nine months predicting what will be the next shoe to drop and how IT managers will have to expand their network capacity in what ways. I think that's really this concept of network intelligence and it's a serious problem. I mean the machine learning to understand these patterns and to be able to see through a lot of noise and really see what's happening is interesting. I think what AppDynamics does for the application space in large day centers and understanding which code is being used more often and where your load really is happening we're going to start to see some of those same like deep learning data analytics applications in networking and I think it's exciting. I agree, it's exciting space. Todd, I want to get your thoughts on something because we were talking before we came on camera about your background at MIT in Maraki when it's got a starter in the roots. Here's for hackers, okay? You are freedom fighters for the internet bandwidth which by the way we still have broadband starvation in this country in my opinion but I got to give you guys props for that. So you got kind of a hacker mentality but you talk about your journey about how your group is kind of bringing in some core IP. You're also kind of a global system integrator within Cisco among the core IP. That's more important now than ever as AppDynamics collides with the Cisco infrastructure DNA. Can you share some insight on what it's like internally at Cisco because this is the classic decade and a half long argument within Cisco of moving up the stack and I've talked to many SVPs at Cisco we got to move up the stack and no we're good down here. You guys are moving up the stack. You're one of the hackers in there. I mean technically maybe not a hacker now but I mean mentality wise you're looking at it differently. What's the different view? Share some color. It's been a while since I checked in any code but yeah look I'd say there's a really great reality of being acquired by Cisco. If you're in networking and we focus a lot on adding value up the stack, putting things into the cloud platform not just like into the devices and all that stuff but if you're at Cisco, Cisco is holding on to the richest infrastructure, IT infrastructure, intellectual property portfolio in the world almost indisputably, right? And as soon as you're acquired by Cisco you get access to this immediately. We have through different acquisitions been able to leverage like source fire amp and threat grid modules, networking components from around Cisco. Since part of Cisco we've been able to build stackable switching and aggregation fiber switching all this stuff, deep, deep networking IP from all around Cisco and like I keep waiting for the bill to arrive and it never has. It's like your Picasso, you got this canvas, you got freedom. And you get, I mean there is a lot of teamwork there, like you really have access to all the intellectual property. As a network hacker it's a pretty amazing opportunity so we're excited about that. But the other thing it does is that you not only get access to all this intellectual property but you've got an install base that is still extremely relevant and is the basis for much of what the computing industry and computing world does now and for some extended time into the future. So you've got a ready-made target of people ready to adopt. How do you think that your core professionals in the networking side are going to evolve their skills and their capabilities to make themselves increasingly relevant in this emerging world? You know, look, I think that's the story of DevNet. Well, we see a lot of IT shops that have really deep infrastructure management capability and as the infrastructure gets more automated or they start to use Meraki and it gets simpler to manage, they find themselves with time to finally focus on their own mission. And their mission is not like massive management of thousands of networking devices. CIOs care about education technology or hotel technology or restaurant technology and that they finally have time to really work on digitizing the hotel industry or digitizing schools in Latin America, whatever that happens to be. And I really see them like moving up the stack. The skills of IT groups around the world are what really are moving up the stack and all of a sudden they're building acts and they're like analyzing data and trying to apply machine intelligence to customer behavior and like everything that like the promise of this technology used to be, first we got to get out of the weeds. We got to simplify the infrastructure and get our IT shops out of that and into that kind of business-relevant IT. It's also a mindset shift too. Again, you mentioned earlier it used to be the network was fixed and brittle and then you were constrained by what the network could provide you above. Now the apps are dictating down to the networks so there's now a new model of apps saying, hey, I don't need to be a provisioning configuration management guru on provisioning one of the new devices. I just want to get the network to do what I need and not be an expert. That's ethos of DevOps. How is that playing forth for you guys with DevNet Create out here? Give some examples of how you guys are making that a reality and some of the directional things that you were working on. Yeah, that's a great example. You know, we have an awesome deployment in Mexico called Mexico Connectado and it's kind of near and dear to my heart. Federal buildings all over Mexico, the government funded for the first time ever internet access and all those sites with Wi-Fi for the building but also publicly accessible. And a lot of the sites they deployed, it was the first internet connection going into that building or maybe even for that town in rural Mexico. And, you know, deploying out at thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of sites all around Mexico, that could have easily been it. Just trying to make that work. Just the crushing complexity of that many devices and that many sites and a dozen different service providers managing it. But, you know, by using Meraki, those guys were able to, you know, deploy it out and really have it managed by the service providers but monitored by the government and then open up the APIs so that the government can actually analyze across all those deployments, how the network is being used, what kind of utility they're getting in urban areas versus rural areas. Is this initiative really working that they're bringing internet's really being used in locations that hasn't been before? Or are they just kind of subsidizing internet for well-connected cities already? And they're really getting to see that visibility and understand if they're really meeting their goals, not just scrambling all day to get off the ground. Okay, question from the crowd. Thanks for sending in the questions. Go to crowdchat.net slash devnet create. A question is, what is the most important DevOps practice to you, and if you can globalize Francisco or in your view, just the industry, community. Infrastructure as code, configuration management, continuous delivery, automated testing, or other? Or other. Other being fill in the blank. One that you might think. Yeah. Well hey look, automated testing is near and dear to my heart, it's near and dear to my heart. If we didn't implement a strong automated testing practice at Meraki, we wouldn't ship anything. And I think, if you think about infrastructure as code, I think obviously that's important to us because that's what we're building, kind of as a programmable network using these cloud APIs. Maybe the one that I feel is missing from the list would be the real, the concept of new product introduction through an MVP process. And this concept of building the minimally viable product so that you can get it in the hands of users as early as possible and start getting real feedback. When there's but one value proposition, one use case met, if you can find a way to get that into the hand of users or in the hands of paying customers and start to get that feedback, that's the day that you hired the like first real product manager. No one knows what people really want than active users trying to get value out of your product. Yeah. And trying to figure out and get that expert in on day one before you start development, don't believe experts, you know, believe users. Todd, thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing the insight. Really appreciate it. Final question for you, DevNet's been very successful with Susie kind of in the team put that together. It's pumping on all cylinders. Just go live, big showcase there. DevNet create inaugural event. As it progresses, what's the objective of this event and how is it different than DevNet events in your mind? Yeah, look, I think if I, just as my opinion this is how I see it. For a long time, infrastructure has been this closed ecosystem. You buy expensive networking IT infrastructure, you configure it using whatever CLI is available and like that's it. And new systems came into being like in the cloud, even modern like CRM systems like Salesforce, modern POS systems, all this stuff and they all were open platforms, but infrastructure lagged. There's always a closed ecosystem. And I think what DevNet kind of stands for is the opening up of that ecosystem and allowing the network to dynamically react to the needs of the business and to really be controlled in a new way. And DevNet create for me is sort of this is the inaugural event of sort of Cisco really stepping out and declaring this is going to be the way of the future. I think we're all going to be sitting here in five years down at Moscone as they tear down the superstructure from a 5,000 person DevNet create. And we're going to be saying, I was here at the first one. I was in San Francisco for the first DevNet creation. Yes, exactly. Well done. Totally loved the mission. I think it's super important. Again, they're not mutually exclusive communities. They're merging together and it's a rising tide. Congratulations. Todd Nightingale, Senior Vice President, General Manager of Cisco, Maraki, Cloud Automation, loves automated testing. But again, that's many practices. The DevOps ethos infrastructure is code, developer freedom, that's the theme here. We'll be back with more live coverage. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Stay with us.