 Live from Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE. Covering DevNet Create 2019, brought to you by Cisco. Hi, welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with John Furrier, day two of our coverage on theCUBE of Cisco DevNet Create 2019. Very excited to welcome to theCUBE one of this year's DevNet Creator Awards. We have Andra Ailert, Digital Automation Practice Manager from Devension Data. Andra, it's wonderful to have you join us. Hi, thanks for having me. So congratulations, this is breaking news for everybody, including you, that you had just won the DevNet Creator Award. Tell us about how you're feeling since you just got that news. Well, in the same time, I feel excited, I feel honored, and I feel also humbled. It's a bigger word to win, and I'm very proud that I can bring this award back home to my company. Did they tell you, this is only the second year that they've given out these awards. Did they tell you some of the criteria? Because obviously, you were selected and were surprised to learn that today. Pretty cool surprise to have, but did they give you any context about who they're looking for? Like your activity in the DevNet community and things like that? Tell us a little bit about that. Exactly, so they are looking for the people who are having a great impact and who are great advocates of DevNet outside of the Cisco world. So when they are going to clients and when they are going to the developer community in the different countries. So they are looking for advocates. They are also looking for people who are great contributors to the network. So if you have some very nice code examples and you're posting them on the code exchange. So these are a couple of criteria that they are following. And how long have you been an active member of the DevNet community? I'm quite a veteran. I've been there since the very beginning of the DevNet. So actually before even the release, I already got to review the information that something in this direction will come. And then I was there from the very beginning. The journey continued with being there at the first DevNet Express event. Being now, for example, here at DevNet Create. Last year I've organized the first DevNet Express event at a partner. So together with my company with Dimension Data, we organized the first DevNet Express event in Frankfurt where we have invited clients but also a lot of people from our engineering teams. So quite a fantastic journey until now with DevNet. And I'm happy that I'm there since so early. What's been the reaction so far to DevNet's growth and change? What's the biggest surprise or notable change with DevNet community? There are a couple of things which are changing. So inside the company, for example, with the adoption of DevNet and with people going very often on DevNet, we have seen a different style of learning. So engineers now have a different way of how do I approach learning? Where do I go if I need to find something? And another change is related to how people interact with each other. Because, yeah, the network engineer was there. He was doing very cool stuff. Maybe sometimes he was also sharing. But with DevNet, the entire openness is now a standard. So people are sharing between them. Colleagues are also taking on even internal social media like Yammer and posting, hey, look, I've done this cool stuff. And a lot of it is also thanks to DevNet because it brought a little bit of new style of being. And they bring DevNet creating, which is a cloud native kind of mindset. How has that gone over with network engineers being coding, Python, machine learning, Meraki, new things are coming? So they're all on the transformation path and our company is doing a lot of activities in this direction. We've had, for example, last year, we have a very good advocate for coding at the machine data. His name is Anthony Shaw. He had last year an entire initiative running, learn to code. And so we had colleagues from all over the company, independently of the department you were from, which started to code. So we had them learning how to code. And then this is basically the very big fundament and you can directly start afterwards with learning paths in the DevNet. So it's quite a transformation and I would say that it's a nice journey to be on. And how have you guys, the gentleman that you just mentioned and yourself is, as you've described, a veteran of the DevNet community, how have you guys maybe influenced to mention data to really fully embrace DevNet and the path? I think there are two big ways in which this has been done. So on one hand, Anthony Shaw with his very successful initiative, this has brought the transformation from the learning side. And on the other hand, by starting to have these skills, we have brought out the news to our clients. And so this has impacted the business. And when the business is impacted and when you show a business value by using automation, by using the network programmability, then the entire company is aware and this is how afterwards we started to, okay, we really embrace the challenge. You're really sort of changing the culture of dimension data in a good way. Yes, I wouldn't say it's totally changing, but we see that we are very easily adapting to the new way. Talk about the automation piece. What do you do in your day-to-day job? Take us through day in the life of what you're doing, what are the cool things you're doing? Struggles, challenges, opportunities. What's the fun stuff, what's the not so fun stuff that software's automating away? Okay, very nice. So on one hand, on a day-to-day basis, we analyze with our clients what they are doing and we are coming with suggestions where they could be faster. And also we are coming with suggestions where they could reduce errors and so on. So basically we go, we talk to our clients, we are coming back with the problems they have, we prepare for them a solution. Then afterwards, this solution, it's mainly based on using APIs. Cisco APIs are also amongst our favorite. Once we are presenting the solution, then the clients are saying, yes, it's something I'd like to have in my network or no, it's something I don't want. Then once the clients are happy with the solution that we are proposing them, then we start developing, we are developing in agile methodology, so very close touch with the client, failed fast and have a very agile way of doing things. Afterwards, once the project is done, we continue improving what we have with the clients and continuing our journey from there. This is part of what a day in a software engineering department looks like or like in a network engineering department looks like. On top of this, we need all the time to take care of best practices. How do we code? We need to take care of being security compliant. Like working in Europe, we have a lot of rules and regulations that we need to respect and we are of some of these rules and regulations. We are very proud that they are there and they are there to protect us and to protect the data which sometimes belongs to us. So this is also a topic that we are working on day to day. Afterwards, we are also working a lot in improving our skills. We are having a weekly make and learn, for example, where someone is baking a cake, someone else is presenting a technical topic. So it's an entire process and these are all activities that we are running on a day to day basis. You know, one of the big trends was going back 10 years DevOps, infrastructure as code, great, great, great trend. Now, net DevOps, you mentioned that term, is about DevOps applied to networking. That's a big theme of DevNet and DevNet creators, programmable networks. What does that mean to you? People say net DevOps. It means a lot. It's very close to my heart. It's also the topic of my presentation. Later today, I have a speaker slot at Tech Talk. You know, net DevOps, a lot of people might think, okay, it's just some network engineers who are writing something script in the network. Well, it's not just that. It's a lot of components. It's also about the culture. It's about the people. It's about the processes that you are involving. It's about what tools you're using. So for me, the entire net DevOps is really close to my heart because it's an entire mindset which needs transformation. Someone learn about it. Where should they go to learn about net DevOps? Where should people go to learn about how to do net DevOps? What it is? It's a very good entry point. It's the DevNet, right? You have there a lot of learning labs. You have the sandboxes. You also have the tracks that you can learn from there. And of course, you go online. You have a lot of courses. You have a lot of blogs. You have a lot of influencers who are posting about what's going on. And what you should adapt in your network. Then, yes, you can also use some books. There are also some nice books there. Of course, you need to pay attention because by the time a book is released, maybe that information could be deprecated. You know, like IT runs quite fast. But definitely, definitely, it's one of the starting points. So I got to ask you a personal question. What's the coolest thing that's going on here at DevNet Create or within the industry that you're excited about? Machine learning and artificial intelligence. It's definitely something that I want to keep an eye on it where I'm running a couple of small tests. It will definitely change the way we see the world and it will also define what our kids will further learn because now you see like we are used to a certain way of learning which is there since maybe 200 years. This will have like machine learning and artificial intelligence will have such a big impact on everything we do that it will maybe be overwhelming. So it's a very interesting point that I'm following here at the DevNet Create. There are very nice talks. And you got to get the data to get the machine learning. You need data. Marathi's got great wireless. Wi-Fi 6 is here. IoT looking good. A lot of activity. Yes, it's indeed a lot of activity. And I'd like to believe that the data is somehow the new gold or the new petroleum. So having a hand on the data is something that is valuable indeed. How have you found, if we look at the participants that are here, we've got developers, infrastructure folks who are moving towards adopting DevOps, kind of connecting them with the app developers. How have you seen people change, job roles change as these other folks are adopting DevOps, especially now that you're talking about bringing them the network folks. How have you seen roles change and how has your job in particular changed and advanced and evolved with the practice of net DevOps? So I will start with the first part of your question. Roles have indeed changed a lot. And this also I can see in the moment when we try to recruit, because there is no profile out there that you say, okay, I want to recruit a net DevOps. You will not find on the market net DevOps already built as a profile. So you need to recruit people where you see the potential and try to bring these new colleagues into the net DevOps journey. So this is one part on how roles are evolving. And then very direct to myself how my career has evolved. I think it's very linked to how the entire definite community has evolved. I've started five years ago at Dimensionita and it was my first, let's say like a big job in Germany. And my career has evolved in a very rapid way. So I went from technology associate to system engineer, design engineer, then leading a team of software, net DevOps engineers. And now I'm since a couple of weeks working for the Europe region at Dimensionita to advocate and to create a strategy for net DevOps as a practice. And so what would you recommend to the younger generation because you were saying, well, we can't hire for someone that has net DevOps experience. What are some of the skills, maybe even some of the softer skills, like being a good collaborator, being a good communicator that you would recommend that the younger generation really fine tune in addition to their technology expertise that you think this is going to make someone really gets this role and can help really transform it. So I think outside of all the technical skills that they can acquire in terms of programming, networking, and so on, there are two big soft skills that they should have. And in my opinion, it's something very important. It's something I'm looking at every person I'm interviewing. These two are curiosity. You need to be curious about what's out there. If you're not curious, you cannot evolve. And the second one is learnability. Even if you don't know something, you still say, okay, I don't know it, but I will go and learn about it. You know, like we are learning everyday something. You're like, what was there five years ago and what was there two years ago? It's different to what we have now. And so learnability and curiosity are the two main topics for me. Fantastic. Well, Andra, again, congratulations on winning the DevNet Creator Award this year, 2019. It's been a pleasure talking to you. We look forward to seeing more great things that you do in the DevNet community in the next year. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Our pleasure. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching us live on theCUBE's second day of coverage. This is Go DevNet Create 2019. Thanks for watching.