 Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back everyone to our live coverage from theCUBE here in Barcelona, Spain for exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furry, co-founder and co-host of theCUBE. With my co-host this week, Stu Miniman, been to many events also, senior analysts at wikibon.com. Stu and I have been breaking down all the action here in the DevNet zone. And we have with us here as our guest, Ashley Roach, who's a principal engineer and evangelist with Cisco DevNet himself. Has full view of what's going on. Welcome to theCUBE. Hey, thanks for having me, appreciate it. Great to see you again. We covered DevNet Create, which was really our first foray into what DevNet was doing outside of the Cisco ecosystem, bringing that cloud native developer into the Cisco fold. Here it's the Cisco show. Where all the Cisco ecosystem and your customers are growing into the cloud and programming with DevNet. So congratulations, it's been a phenomenon. One of the top stories we've been covering is DevNet has just been explosive. Oh, thanks a lot. People are learning, they're coding, they're being inspired, and they're connecting as a very sharing culture, props to you guys at the team. Well done. Appreciate it. So what is DevNet? I mean, this is a cultural shift. We've been reporting on theCUBE all year and last year, but really this year and the last year we started really putting a stake in the ground saying we are going to see a renaissance in software development. Linux Foundation's reporting that there's going to be exponential growth in code and open source. You're seeing that you can create intellectual property with only 10% of the energy code wise, 90% using open source. They call that the code sandwich. Again, this is just data that they're sharing, but it points to the bigger trend. Developers are becoming the important part of the equation and the integration of the stack from network to application are working together. And again, proof points there are things like Kubernetes, containers, and Osteven been out there for a long time. You're starting to see the visibility for developers. You're at Cisco, you're in the middle of all this. You're seeing one side of the camp and the other. What's your view? Yeah, I think that's a good, it captures a lot of the dynamics that are going on right now in the environments. And I mean, for me, I come at this from an application developer standpoint. I actually, when I joined Cisco, I was not a hardware guy at all. Frankly, I'm not even now. I'm much more oriented towards software. And so, when we've seen the power of the underlying infrastructure that gets married up to some of these overlay systems like Kubernetes and containers, more and more of the infrastructure on one hand is getting abstracted, which you might think, oh, uh-oh, that's a problem. But in reality, the infrastructure still needs to be there, right? You can't run your serverless function out of thin air. At least not yet. It's truly not serverless. There's server somewhere. Yeah, exactly. So those are the funny jokes that we like to have in the industry, right? But at the same time, you want to think like, okay, well I'm writing my application, I'm a developer, I don't want to know about infrastructure. Like my whole job is I don't care about that. But there is information and utility in the data that you can get from the infrastructure because at some point your application will fail. You may have some bugs. And yeah, Kubernetes may kill your container and bring up another one, but you still need to debug that issue. And so, yeah, you can get tracking, you can get analytics, but also you can get that stuff from that infrastructure that's underlying it. And so, like one of the presentations I'm doing tomorrow, I wrote just kind of a proof of concept sample app where it's a Spring Boot app that has a built-in health check capability. It ties into APIC-EM and or DNA Center and uses that information that's available about the network. So maybe it's from your firewall to your application. You can run a path trace and just have that happen every five minutes or something like that or check the health of the entire environment every so often. And then your application can resolve issues or have just data about it so that we can keep moving. Yeah, Ashley, I love that comment you talked. You're not a hardware person and that's okay. And there's lots of people here at the Cisco Show that aren't, that's a change from just a few years ago. How is that dynamic changing? I remember for a few years, I was arguing like every networking person needs to become a coder and there's pushback and people are scared and what's going to happen to my job and can I learn that skill set? The bar for entry seems pretty low these days but how do we translate some of those languages? Yeah, I think the perception of say an ops person becoming a programmer, it's not really the right mindset. There's a couple of mindsets though that are important. So one of the things we're trying to do is foster the DevOps culture somewhat. And to do that, an ops person has to understand and have empathy for the problems that exist on the application side and vice versa. So for us, we're just trying to educate people in that vein. But all of the infrastructure is now also automatable and you don't have to automate at low level. You can automate it with things like Ansible which is a bit more accessible for people that haven't been programming for a long time. So I think those are the things that we see and that we're trying to encourage within our community and just broadly speaking I would say in the industry. We're going to have empathy, interesting. Because this is a cultural shift, right? So this mindset, this cultural DNA, you have to have empathy but it's kind of like the Venn diagram. Empathy is one circle. Feasibility is another and viability is the other, right? So it's always in context to what you can get done, right? So you guys at DevNet have a good view of the development environment. What are some of the challenges and what are the opportunities for folks in the Cisco ecosystem to get their hands dirty, get down and dirty with the tech where they can do feasible, viable projects that are possible. We're seeing Python certainly as one approach, great for data wrangling. But you know, you got Node.js out there. It's been a great language. App guys are doing Node.js because of JavaScript, the server side. You got a lot of IO. That sounds like a network service mindset. Is there things that you see going on around that? What's possible? And what's kind of moonshot like projects and where should people start? Well, I think again, kind of going to this historical point of view, it used to be you had one programming book and you're sitting there late at night copying code from that and maybe it came with a CD and you could download your sample code onto your hard drive and then you'd be sitting there flipping back and forth and then you hit an issue. You're like, I don't know what to do. Maybe you're trying to teach yourself. I don't have any friends that are programmers. I mean, today with the vast amount of resources that are available online, like we have our DevNet learning labs and so that's a set of tutorials that we've provided but that's not the only thing out there. You've got Code School, Code Academy, you've got the MOOCs out there. I mean, shoot MIT, Stanford, they're all putting their courseware in open source. So the universe of educational material for people to understand this stuff and get started is really, really awesome now. And then also it's easier than ever I think to actually code because you're again, code is becoming more and more abstracted at higher level languages. So Python, Node.js, those are still kind of low level but there are packages on top of those, middleware and Node.js. To build a web server you get express or sales or whatever and then you're kind of off to the races. Like Spring Boot is crazy. It used to be Spring was a bit of a pain in the butt with all the dependency injection and everything but with Spring Boot now you just add a dependency and you've got an entire web framework or an authorization framework or whatever. And I was like, I was pretty blown away when I started. So it's a lot easier. Yeah, it's just a lot easier. Things are more curated. You have certain stacks. You know, it used to be lamp stack. Now you got elk stack for data things. You got, you know, and so on. So I just, the universe is wide open for a lot of people to program today. So I love the training angles that you talked about there. I want to bring in a little bit orthogonal to what we've been talking about here. But one that John and I have been asking about. You mentioned open source. So obviously things like Spring, a lot of things you mentioned are open source. But what about Cisco's involvement in community given back to open source? What's the philosophical viewpoint from Cisco's standpoint? Yeah, we're active in open source. We're big contributors to open stack, for example. We've got some of, we've created like a CNI module for Kubernetes called Contiv. And so that's in open source. We, you know, in DevNet, we publish tons of things in open source, just code samples and, you know, example projects and so on. Cisco's actually a big contributor to the Linux kernel. So it's a long legacy of open source at Cisco. So it's part of our culture. So there's no restrictions on everybody going on GitHub, throwing their stuff in, being part of the communities. There's certainly restrictions. Yeah, we have processes that we're supposed to follow. I mean, we got to protect intellectual property when we need to. I mean, it's the way it is for working at a company. But at the same time, there is viable processes if it makes business sense to open source things. I mean, the line John's used for the last year or so is, you know, GitHub, I mean, that's people's resumes these days. So I want to make sure, what I'm saying is, it sounds like the ecosystem of Cisco, friendly for the developers to come in, participate. You got a business to run obviously, legal, how to keep their eye on stuff. But you know, Cisco's out there. We saw it in the container ecosystem, open secutes, Kubernetes, Linux, absolutely. Not just even in networking, but beyond that. See a lot of Cisco out there. Yeah, great. So my question for you, a personal question. If you could talk to your 22-year-old self right now. Oh, wow, yeah. Your high school, Ashley, or your college or college graduate, what would you say to yourself, knowing what you know now? Because this is a really interesting point. My age, I used to build stuff straight up from the bottom of the stack to the top and it was a lot of heavy lifting. Now you're really kind of getting into some engineering here and then some composite, like Lego block kind of thinking, where these frameworks can just snap together. Sometimes it's a little hard to understand. But it's a lot cooler now. I mean, I wish I was 22. What would you say to your 22-year-old self out there? What would you advise yourself? What would you say to yourself? Where's my smoking jacket and, you know, yeah, so, I mean, I was a liberal arts undergrad. And I did take computer programming classes. So I did a couple of courses in C towards the end of my time in university. And that's because I've always been interested in technical, you know, in programming and stuff. But I think probably I would have maybe stayed another year to try to maybe get an actual CS degree. So that might be one thing. I think the other... What would you jump on today if you saw all this awesome code, open source? I mean, like, it's like open bar and the coding, you know, hearty. I mean, it's so many things to jump on. I mean, you know, obviously, joking, I should say, blockchain and machine learning and AI, right? But actually, like, I would say the machine learning and AI stuff is probably a good, interesting, you know, wave of technology. Yeah, I just want to, you know, we're talking about your 22-year-old self. How about your kids? I think you're working with your kids some. I've been checking out your GitHub, it's not there. So maybe share, you know, just even, you know, younger people, you know, how do they get involved? You know, in the keynote yesterday, it was, you know, jobs of the future. Right. Well, yeah, for my kids, I have two daughters. And so I try to encourage them to at least be familiar with coding. Like, I've tried to teach them Linux some. We've done programming classes, but it's kind of hard sometimes to get them interested in something like programming, to be honest. So some of it's trying to be creative, problem solvers, trying to craft that sort of attitude. You know, so that then when they do get the opportunity to do some programming, they'll be interested about it. I mean, the young kids love gaming. Gaming's a good way to get people in. VR is now an interesting- Minecraft and Sims, those are the two that my oldest daughter loves. I mean, the thing I remember, this is the funniest, was when, you know, of course, this is like, we all got computers back in the day and we did keyboards, right, in order to do stuff. So I got the first iPad when it came out and I brought it home and my daughter, who is I think six or eight at the time, she's like, cool, I understand this, like automatically understood it. But then she went to the TV and I had, it had icons on it. So she walked up to the TV and tried to do that and I was like, oh, that's funny. Like, her mental model is this. You know, where our mental model was that and so on, earlier on. My oldest son says, dad, search engine is so to your generation. Not even email, like search, I think Google search. Yeah, I mean, the digital, it's like the digital native thing. On the other hand, we actually are fairly restrictive about like cell phone and mobile because it's a lot, that sort of thing. They really, really are going to face some interesting, I don't know, social, you know, the social things that you have in high school and middle school, now multiplied and amplified through all that. We're sort of cautious too, as parents. A lot of societal issues to deal with. All right, now, betting back to DevNet here. I want to get your thoughts, because we've got a big setup here. One of the things that the folks, people can't see on cameras. We're in the DevNet zone. You can see behind us, but there's everywhere else around. It's really the big story at Cisco Live. It has been for a while. Every year it gets bigger. It's like, it just keeps growing in interest. What are you guys showing here? What's the purpose? Give it a quick, take a minute to explain the DevNet approach this year and how it's different and how you guys going to take this going forward. So, the DevNet zone, philosophically, we tried to have the experiential. We don't want people to come in here and get death by PowerPoint of, hey, check out this awesome new product that we created. You know, that kind of thing. Instead, we want people to come in and have the opportunity to sit down, either by themselves or with a friend or with one of us to be able to work through sort of tutorials so that we have this area of the learning labs or learn about the DevNet sandbox. That's another area that we have where that is a sort of try it out live, always on cloud service that we provide for anyone. We also have, of course, examples, example use cases. So, we have some IoT and collaboration use cases that we're demonstrating in the new APIs that have come out of those products. So, you wouldn't think maybe necessarily, oh, collaboration and IoT really are connected. But, in fact, ultimately you need to get a human involved when you have exceptions. And in a lot of cases, like for our edge compute scenarios, it's exception oriented. So, the example that we have here is we have a truck that's sitting on a handcrafted scale that's like a Raspberry Pi thing that one of our evangelists, Casey Gleeker, made. And it's putting analog data into our container that's running on an edge device. And when an exception occurs, when the scale has this truck on it with too many stones in the back, then it triggers an alert. It creates a team room for people to come and escalate and discuss. It'll make a phone call automatically to the truck driver and pull people together to deal with that situation. But then additionally, we have new room kit capabilities with like our telepresence systems. And that has like face identification, not like from identifying the user standpoint, but it knows it can count how many people are in the room, for example. So, if you combine that sort of IoT capability with this collaboration unit that's gonna already be there, you're getting kind of a win-win of that infrastructure in the rooms. Yeah, actually, talked about it. There's so many different things going on there. What's exciting you the most? Where are you seeing the most people gravitating around? In the DevNet zone? Oh, just here or in general, yeah. Well, I think one thing in the DevNet zone, we also have a white hat, black hat challenge. So that's been very, very popular. What we're doing is demonstrating, using off-the-shelf hacker tools, how vulnerable some IoT devices are to give people, it's kind of, you've heard about it, now experience it, and do it yourself to see how easy it really is. And then see, of course, how our solutions can help you mitigate those problems. So that's, IoT security is a big concern, I think in general. And so, I think that's an exciting spot. So hands-on learning. Very people-oriented, very open. The motto I love, I'm reading another thing there, learn, code, inspire, connect. So learn, toe in the water, connect, share, mentor, collaborate. The other thing that we're sort of soft launching, I guess, is we have a new application developer site on DevNet. And so, What's the URL? It is developer.sysco.com slash site slash app-dev. Okay, that's good. Memorize that, quiz later, that's long. Just search. Yeah. Right. Hey, Alexa. Right. But with that, we're trying to make it easier for people to understand the use cases for what kinds of applications they can build using our technology. So indoor location, using kind of doing maps and heat maps and building that kind of scenario, for example, through IoT mobile and video. As you are evangelizing your engineering side, what's the plans going forward? Post-event, obviously you got Cisco Live in Orlando this year. It's in 2018. Yeah, we have a lot. What do you guys know about this going on? We've got a lot of digital content. What's the outreach plan? Where should people expect to see you guys share the going forward plan? I wish I knew where everyone was going to be. So thankfully on the website, They're on the internet. We have an events calendar. So I would definitely encourage you to look there if you're interested in connecting with one of us. We have the Cisco Live in Melbourne and then Orlando. We also have DevNet Create in April. And that's in Santa's Mountain View, I think, Bay Area. So we'd love to have people come out to that and kind of the theme of that last year, which was the inaugural one continues this year, which is where apps meet infrastructure. So we want to kind of continue this conversation about DevOps, how applications and infrastructure can benefit each other. And just for the folks watching, the Cube was at the inaugural DevNet Create. We'll be there again, we'll also be in Orlando. And again, this is important. We'll end on this point. I'd like you to take a minute to explain the difference between DevNet and DevNet Create. Cause this is really interesting. I like the way you guys are doing this. It's really open, but it's pretty transparent. So share the difference between DevNet and DevNet Create. Yeah, so DevNet is our developer program. And so that's a website, it's Cisco, it's oriented towards those things. DevNet Create is more about forming a community to solve these problems about applications and infrastructure. So that intersection, whether that's, you call it DevOps, whether you call it, I don't know what, potatoes. Something in there, there is this fluid spot where applications are looking more like infrastructure, starting to look more like applications. So what does that mean and how do we explore that together to see what the future is? We call it cloud native. It's a set of developers who just, like you, don't really want to get involved in the network but love it to be more magical. And Cisco folks love Cisco because they're in the world. So it's really interesting, you guys do that. Congratulations. Thanks. And it's not just for Cisco people, right? So Cisco Live and DevNet Zone is that. For Create, it's actually the inverse. We encourage people from the community to come and check it out as opposed to the... Props to you guys, great stuff. Cisco, DevNet Zone, this is where theCUBE is. Of course, DevNet Create is going to be outside of the Cisco ecosystem. Connecting the two is really the key. We're living in a world, global devices, connected people, that's the mission of Cisco. Love that vision. But of course, with theCUBE, bringing you the live content here in Barcelona, of course, it's available online, YouTube.com. So that's SiliconANGLE. Of course, thecube.net is our new site. Check it out, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. More live coverage coming from Barcelona with theCUBE after this short break.