 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE coverage here in Barcelona, Spain of Cisco Live Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman here in the DevNet Lounge, been here all week. Three days of coverage, we're on day three. Our next guest is Mandy Whaley, who's the senior director of developer experience for Cisco DevNet, CUBE alumni. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. Thanks so much, glad to be here. So what a success, we've interviewed many times. DevNet is now chipped over to the point where over a half a million developers in the Cisco ecosystem here, using APIs and cloud native tools up their game. Big time, congratulations. Thank you, thank you very much. It's been a very exciting progression since the beginning of DevNet, which was around four and a half years ago. So it's been great to see the community grow and learn and progress along that way. Well, I just want to say while we're on camera how proud I am of you guys, because being there and watching you guys use all your resources and grow this organization to the point where the influence in Cisco has been so massive, you're on the right side of history. All products are now having APIs, Susie, we said. So this is now not just a corner group within Cisco, this is now part of the machinery. It is, it is. And it's really, you know, we are having APIs across the whole portfolio and up and down the stack. So from the device level up to the controller level, you know, up to the orchestration level. So that's really exciting to see that. And over those years with the progression of DevNet, we've just become more connected into, we're part of our engineering organization, which I think is a great place for a developer group to be because you have that strong connection to the engineering groups. So just becoming, you know, just having more and more parts of that portfolio connected in with the developer piece has been really exciting. The other thing that I think has been great about the growth of the community, and what I always notice when we're at Cisco Live is that the developer advocates that we have, which are part of my team, they, it's the people that matter so much. You know, they are really there trying to help people learn, help them move to the next step. And they really care about the community. So much of the community cares about them. And so when we all get together in a event like this, it's fantastic to be able to see that. And people are going through the journey, have been there for multiple years now. Yes. And new people are coming in at an accelerated rate, the flywheel's going. That's right, yeah. So my first day at Cisco, I taught the first coding for Network Engineers class that we offered at Cisco Live many years ago. And what's great is that I've seen some of the people who were in that first class, you know, and they're back here today and now they're doing Kubernetes and SCO and really advanced stuff. And they've really taken that basics that they got and just ran with it and added more skills, which is great to see. But then we're also seeing just as many new people coming in and that kind of snowball effect of the community skilling up and helping each other and kind of pushing the boundaries. Yeah, Mandy, we've always seen education has always been a strong foundational piece of Cisco Live. I remember back, first time I came to Cisco Live over a decade ago and people were getting their CCIE certification. Gives a little bit the breadth and depth because it's my fourth time in the DevNet zone. It's always expanding. As you said, Kubernetes and Istio and Java were overflowing sessions here. Absolutely, so the way that we structure the learning in the DevNet zone, we have a big focus on hands-on. Like so we have small group workshops where people are coding during the workshop and those are many times just completely overflowing. People standing around, soaking it up, sitting on the floor coding. You know, it's been great to see that. But the main things that we have, we have the workshops and then we have bigger classroom sections which cover concepts or even things like culture change like Dev and network and ops working together, right? Like kind of extending on those topics. And then we have a lot of demos going on around the zone too. We've got a couple of new things this year. One of those is our start now zone. And this is a new zone within the zone that we created this time. And it was for the people who said, I'm really new, I haven't programmed in a while. I'm not sure if a full-on developer workshop is right for me, I want a place to start. So we call it start now. And what's going on in that zone is all day, every day, the intro to coding, intro to REST APIs, workshops running back to back. And every single one of those sessions has been booked full and wait listed full for the whole week. So that's been great to see that many people getting started. And then we also have something really new in that zone, which is one-to-one mentoring. So we wanted to get people a chance to come in and say, I work in data center networking. I don't know where to start. Like, help me point me in the way and get me started. So we have people from our advocacy team. They're people from the wider DevNet team. People from all across Cisco. They're as mentors helping them get started with like, this is a great API for you to start with. These are kind of the basic skills you want to dive into. And just having those conversations, a lot of times gives people the push to kind of jump into these new topics. What are some of the highlights in the DevNet zones? Great demos, the workshops, the classrooms, other key, but there's also other demos. Yeah, there's one demo that's been really popular. And it's actually an augmented reality demo. And it uses our DNA center. So our DNA center networking APIs. And what it does is you can like, scan a wireless access point and it will recognize it. And then using the APIs, bring up all of the information about that access point. You can also like, directionally find where is the nearest access point to me? Like if you're an engineer who maybe needs to fix something. And then the other thing that's cool is you can turn it on and in an augmented reality way, see the signal strings like overlaid over the space that you're in. So you can troubleshoot and find issues. And our goal with building that demo was, when you think about networking APIs, typically you think about maybe dashboards, automations, which are fantastic and do a lot for you. But we also like to push the boundaries on like the kinds of apps that people could think about building. And that augmented reality one is a great one to show that. What are the popular sessions? What have we seen some overflow? What's getting traction? What's the key booked sessions? So we've had two big launches at Cisco Live overall this week around IoT and also the new ACI, Data Center Networking ACI Anywhere announcements. So the sessions related to those have of course been very popular with people jumping in. The Kubernetes, the Istio sessions have been very popular. DNA Center, a lot of people like skilling up on those APIs. And then a lot of the things that are getting started with Python, learning about different libraries that are relevant to the network automation world. All of those have been really popular as well. Some of the feedback I've gotten from the community is of course there's the great stuff here, but it's what you do year round. So the labs are available all the time. Yeah. I know there's more events and just ongoing learning. Maybe you can share a little bit beyond that. Yeah, so we spend a lot of time trying to connect this experience to the online because not everyone is here, right? In fact, most of the people aren't. They're all in the world. And so all the workshops that are taught here, there's a learning lab, a DevNet learning lab that you can do the same material available online. And then we have our DevNet sandbox, which is hosted labs. If you don't have a spare network laying around or you don't have a Kubernetes cluster to work against, you can just instantly reserve them. And a lot of times they are configured in ways that help you do to certain use cases. And then we have a new thing that was just launched kind of prior to getting here, which is actually called our learning paths, which give a really curated experience around four enterprise networking program to really do these eight things. So it's real specific. So that's an exciting thing. The other new thing is code exchange. Have you guys heard about code exchange? Yeah, I've heard a good buzz about this. But explain that. So we wanted to make it really easy for our developers to find code to start from. So you're not starting from scratch, right? So maybe you want to find something for ACI written in Python. So code exchange is a place on DevNet. You can go in, you can search, you can filter by technology and language. And then you get back a curated list of GitHub repos, of projects that people have published on GitHub. So it just helps people discover the things that the community is working on and people can share their code there as well. And then it'll be featured in that way. So this has been really great, especially for maybe people new to programming. They don't want to start from a blank page. I don't know that anyone likes starting from a blank page, but it's great. They can find projects, modify them, and start to, you know, we're starting to build out use cases there as well. That's faster learning. Yeah, exactly. Mandy got to ask you, one of the things that has been impressive is you guys saw the future early with APIs. I mean, anyone in the cloud business kind of saw that. But you brought it into Cisco, DevNet. DevNet became that core community that's now programmable with the network. It's still the cloud native, and you have DevNet Create another event, another kind of concept, bringing cloud native and networking together. Kind of an experiment a few years ago, the cube was there covering it. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. That's evolving. Can you share the progress of DevNet Create? Yeah, absolutely. So DevNet Create is a smaller, much, much smaller conference in Cisco Live, and it's solely focused on our developer community. And it is where we really try to connect in with cloud native. We connect in with a lot of ISVs who may be building cool applications with Cisco partners of all types. It's also very community driven. We try to have about 80% of the content, 80 to 90% of the content be from the community that comes in through their call for papers and is presented there. And so it's a very fun, very conversation, connect people from different parts of the industry together and get them thinking about what's possible with, we call it, where apps meet infrastructure. So that includes things like IoT, new kinds of interactions like voice and location and things like that. So it's coming up, it's in April. It's in Mountain View and we're really excited. We're heavy into the planning for that right now. April 24th, I believe. I love how you bring the two worlds together because there's more learning shared experiences but also that's what's happening with Cisco in the world. It's coming together. So you guys are out front on that. Look forward to seeing that. Okay, final question for you. I put you on the spot here. Oh no. What's it like for you personally because we've had conversations in the past on theCUBE and also in person around the commitment that the DevNet team has, the vision that they saw now that's becoming real. How do you feel and what are some of the learnings that you've had looking back a few years to now? That's great. I feel really proud of our team is one thing that's really there is as a leader within DevNet is great to see that the commitment that the team puts in has the results that we're seeing and to see them be proud of it is great and I'm proud of our community as well because they're excited and it's energizing. It's great to see that coming together and know that some of the beginnings when there was a lot of like, maybe not everyone understands what we're trying to do and like there's where, what is the reason for Cisco diving into developer and all those kinds of questions that we're seeing that all come to fruition is pretty exciting. Dave Vellante asked Susie, we about the success of the program and others have tried, you guys have been successful. So I'll ask the question, what does it take to be successful to stand up and or transform a preexisting community with modern, cool tools without kind of burning down the old to bring in the new? How do you rise that up? What's the strategy? What's been successful? What's the formula? I don't know if there's any formula. We always say that it was interesting because starting a developer program for Cisco was this really hardware-focused company moving towards software. There was no playbook for how to do developers for this. That was actually one of the reasons I came to Cisco. It was really exciting. What we have done a lot is listen to the community and ask the community what they are seeing and how we can help, as well as asking that question internally at Cisco. Manny, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I know you're busy, great job, great success. We can certainly testify that your team's working hard and the team is cranking out great material. We're in the DevNet zone. They're also parting hard, John. Yeah, they play hard. See, we don't say party. It's not politically correct. Thank you so much for your support. Great to cover you guys. Great content, great people, smart people on theCUBE. That's our formula. We love working with you. Thanks for coming. More live coverage here in the DevNet zone after this short break. Stay with us.