 From Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain, with Cisco's Live 2018 Europe, I was going to say DevNet, but we're in the DevNet zone, I'm John Furrier, your host with Stu Miniman analysts at wikibon.com. Our next guest is Susie Wee, who's vice president and CTO of DevNet. Susie, a CUBE alumni, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you. Great to see you, welcome to Barcelona. Thank you for having us. We are in the hot section of the DevNet zone, the signs, because it's a big part of the hallway here, and it's really where the action is. You guys have continued to do a great job, and we're psyched to be on the ground with the action, and thanks for inviting us. Great, I'm glad that you're here. There's so much going on. Okay, so DevNet is this renaissance going on at Cisco, but it's also not just a Cisco phenomenon, at the world of software development, seeing an explosion. I mean, from the edge of the network and crazy fringe of cryptocurrency, blockchain, all the way into app development, and then under the hood DevOps, some really great things are happening. You have it featured here at DevOps at DevNet. What's going on at the DevNet zone? Yeah, it's really interesting, because what happens is here at Cisco Live, and here in the DevNet zone, we have basically people who deploy network and compute infrastructures around Europe. And so it's pretty amazing that we have the people who are like feet on the street, working in those networks, deploying them, digitizing smart cities, putting up new buildings, putting up new infrastructure everywhere. And what's really cool is they're all interested in learning about APIs and software. And so that's not easy, right? That's something that's a big shift, and like I'm running a network infrastructure, and I'm ready to learn about software and deep dive into APIs. So our new products are coming out, which actually have built-in programmability. Like the network now has APIs, it's getting built into the network, and whereas you could always take a compute infrastructure and manage it virtually, use CI CD pipelines and everything there with DevOps, but the thing is now the network has APIs, and you can now kind of flexibly deploy your network in that same way of DevOps, but using net DevOps, and that's kind of what it's all about. Susie, I wonder, there was so much hype for a bunch of years about software-defined networking, but under the covers, like behind the scenes, it's the API economy, that's where the accidents happen. It doesn't seem like it's gotten quite the attention. You have some interesting things about where net and dev go together. What do people miss out there? That kind of the industry watchers that aren't here, aren't seeing the people that are spending days already doing this stuff here, and obviously are really excited. Well, there was all the excitement and hype, it kind of went through its hype curve of what software-defined networking was and would be and could be, but the thing that we have to remember is that there's real mission-critical networks operating all around the world, and people who are out there who deploy them and run them and manage them, and so what happens is you need to do more than just put out a new protocol or put out a new innovation. You need to kind of bring the community along and still make those revolutions, but by evolving, having the evolutions in the folks who are deploying and making all the right thing happen. So what happens is just SDN is now becoming a reality because it took more than just putting a controller on top of an existing network. That's good, that's an important part of it, but it's also just building programmability into the network elements themselves and then being able to get that really kind of rapid response as you're deploying new configurations, setting policy, incorporating security, and so now just SDN is becoming real and the real world here, all of these folks are picking it all up. So I have to ask you, you mentioned Net DevOps, because we've talked about DevOps all day long, Stu and I, go to all the shows and you know we're hot the trot for DevOps, but you said Net DevOps. What is that? Can you explain? Yeah, it's really awesome. It's just basically the fact that with DevOps you're taking your applications, cloud applications, deploying them fast, rapidly, CI CD, using this infrastructure as code type of thinking. Well now it's not only the compute but the network plays in that too. So basically, if you picture underneath that network is a bunch of network devices, a bunch of security products, all of these things are coming together to really connect everything and that's becoming programmable. And what happens is now with Net DevOps, you can create and treat the network as code. So you want to deploy changes in your network, you'll do it with a software configuration update. You want to add new devices into the network, you want to add new users and set new policies for security, control how apps are done, how cloud applications are running, you can actually roll that out as software changes. So what happens is suddenly it's not only compute that works in a DevOps pipeline, but the network is also participating in this Net DevOps pipeline. You know I love that this new trend Net DevOps because it's kind of like the old days was you move up the stack, now you see the movement down the stack and the applications to DevOps, now moving lower to NetOps, Net DevOps. But the question is, that makes total sense by the way, but I need to ask who's writing that code? The network guys? So in DevOps, we knew the DevOps guys were the operators and the developers kind of coming together. They're pushing code, real agile. Who does that? The same guys doing DevOps or is it the network guys, a combination of both? What's the personas? Yeah, it's really exciting the way that it's evolving. So what you see is in Cisco Live we have a huge kind of community, just people who come to Cisco Live to get trained, to get their certifications on how to deploy the latest networking technologies and operate and manage them. They get certified and they're running those networks around the world. They're now here picking up the software skills and learning to use the new software products and being able to deploy Net DevOps. So they're all here to learn about how can I put build-in automation? Once you have that programmability and automation you can scale and work things out in really big ways. How can I put application performance monitoring into my network and make sure that it's operating properly and we're getting the right assurance that it's performing well? So the network operators are picking up those skills. But in addition, there's actually the app developers who are coming in and app developers who are writing, for example, management or DevOps or even Docker, Kubernetes, folks who are in that who need the network. And basically now they're like, the network has APIs I can actually use that so that if for Docker and for Kubernetes, we're working with Google on stuff, our developers are actually now writing tools to make sure that as you're optimizing your microservices, the placement of them, you're taking the network into account as well. So you kind of get both. And Kubernetes plays an interesting role because you can actually run those functions on Kubernetes, can't you? Yes. So that's kind of a new trend. Yeah. So are they writing code here in DevNet zone or is that the network operators are coming in banging out code? So network operators are here banging out code. There's app developers who are coming in and banging out code as well. And this whole thing of like, you know, the infrastructure guys, the app developer guys, and then the DevOps. There's this DevOps professional, kind of like the IT folks that are moving on to embrace DevOps. And they're kind of emerging in the middle of here to use all of these tools that are created and open source. And appealing to all constituencies, stakeholders of software. We are. We are. Yeah. We are. And actually, I think that's- Is that why DevNet's so popular? I think that people have a need. They see a need. And basically what I think, like the trend that's going on that's kind of making this stuff happen is that we know there's so much excitement in applications and cloud and all of the developments there and the internet of things. These applications need the network more than ever before. So before they only use the network for connectivity, but now they need the network for security. They need it for scale. They do need more bandwidth. They need good performance. And so- And they need to program that too. And they need to program it. Exactly. And so that's what the new network API is. The fact that you have a programmable network is what's letting those guys play and not just say, you know, before it was, here's your network. Just do the most you can given the performance of the network, right? So Susie, first of all- But now it's programmable, yeah. Congratulations on, you know, the DevNet zone here is awesome. Thank you. And we know it's challenging to bring developers in to, you know, pull this community in where they might not have been before. There's retraining everything. But I was wondering if you could give us a little insight into Cisco. So Cisco, you know, been around for decades, networking company. Software's been a piece of it for a long time. I mean, it's, you know, even when it's, you know, hey, we spent a lot of money on building this chip out there. iOS was what drove that. Software's a large piece, but the whole developer angle, getting Cisco behind this gives a little bit of insight as to what kind of transformation, you know, your team has driven inside to get more of Cisco on board. I mean, you know, people that are used to selling boxes and things, you know, the networking industry, it's about ports and cables and speeds and feeds. And, you know, the app side's very different. It is, it is very different. And it's, it was actually really great. So we've built DevNet over the last four years. And it was one thing to kind of have the strategy, like we knew that the products were going to software, that SDN was emerging, and that the only way it could actually become real is for Cisco to also participate in it, right? Just cause there's so much network out there that is Cisco. And so the entire industry has made that become more real, but you need to build an ecosystem around it, right? The only reason to have software like there's many reasons, but one of the main reasons is actually to make sure that the ecosystem is participating in the innovation. So yeah, we created DevNet to not just focus on our internal development, but to provide and kind of catalyze the industry to participate and really innovate and build software on top using all the new APIs. So yeah, it's been amazing to see the growth. And what's interesting is over the last four years, it's the community. So from our first DevNet zone, we had a lot of people who are interested. They were like, ah, my day job's been networking, I coded a long time ago, let me get back into it. But now we see that audience plus much more. Like if you look at here at how engaged all of these kind of networkers and developers are, is they're right in there. They're just hungry saying, I have applications that I need to deploy, applications are hitting the infrastructure, my network can make a difference in how well these new applications run. They're all in. You've done this a number of times now. Do you have like kind of the hero numbers as to what percentage of the attendees spend a bunch of time in the DevNet zone? How much code or applications get written? Just kind of order a magnitude kind of the engagement. You mean kind of like from before till now? Yeah, or just expectations for this show, what you've seen at some of the previous events. Yeah, well kind of what's funny is what happened is the DevNet zone, like having a developer conference within Cisco Live, it kind of grew as like what's going on there and people were immediately interested, it was full, but we have just kind of grown and grown it to have learning labs, to have ISV partners in here, to have just kind of like resellers, people who are solutions providers, they're kind of all here. This has actually turned into the busiest area of Cisco Live. Yeah, and you've got your own events too. Yes, yes, that's right. And on top of like having the DevNet zone here, our developer conference within Cisco Live, where the Cisco audience comes in, right? The huge ecosystem, we also have DevNet Create. So when we're going out, app developers are also interested in network APIs. So it's not just networkers. And so we actually have DevNet Create, which is just the dedicated developer conference for IoT cloud developers, app developers, and they've shown big interest in all of this as well. And it's the whole new constituents, but it's kind of the same game though, right? It's like you're offering the programmable network to a whole other net new Cisco community. Is that kind of how you guys look at it? It is, and exactly. And like we've gone outside, we're offering the network and what we're doing is we're actually, you know, when you're a real networking geek, like a networking expert, like us, you can do network talk, right? And you're talking network and you're kind of getting into all of that. And before app developers were like, we don't care about that. Like just, we need to write our apps. We shouldn't have to worry about the network. But now that those APIs are coming too, and again, their apps are dependent on network performance. They're dependent on security they can get from the network. It turns out that once we express the value proposition to them, like this is what a network API can do for you. They're really interested. And even though we've observed that there's a separation between app developers who just want to write apps and software engineering, which is under the hood, they still need to be involved in the network because of microservices. So now they have the ability to use APIs that they're comfortable with, they know APIs and make unique changes to the app based upon unique network characteristics they could tap into. This seems to be the glue and the crossover point for you guys. Is that, do they get that right? It is, it is. So what happens is there will always be a set of app developers who of course are not going to use the network. They're going to write their app. They're going to want it to deploy everywhere, of course. I mean, that's what everybody wants. But you've already seen it. As someone writes a cloud app, right? They write a cloud service or a cloud app and it scales and they're deploying their app across different clusters and they are learning a lot about what's going on. They have to write policies, they have to decide what countries am I going to spin up my servers in? So actually they do a lot of that. So what happens is this set of kind of cloud developers and especially as they move to microservices, as you said, their applications are going to a microservice-based architecture. Things can spin up in different places and then it becomes more critical of, how do these different containers talk to each other? What's the networking policy for what data can go in and out? What's the security policy? And you need to build that in. So the network matters to them. The beautiful thing about what you guys are doing is you're catering to a whole new generation of developers who are slinging APIs on one hand but also potentially writing Node.js code and so they're very familiar with IO. Exactly, yes. So microservices is like fish to water and so you're just making it easier for them. That's the angle on the app side. That's right, and we're just giving them that tool. And they had so much pain with it before because a lot of times people would be like, writing their app, they're doing it in their cluster, then they push it to production, boom it goes out and then it doesn't work anymore. And a lot of times it's because the network is not set up properly in their new thing. So they blame the network, but once you start to open up the APIs you can start to move these things and do it. Well, Susie, you have a great group. It's the biggest story here. We believe we've been reporting DevNet's own. You know, theCUBE, we're always on the best trends and the best waves, you're on it. By the way, have you seen the security challenge over here? The black hat. The black hat, white hat security challenge. It's actually pretty interesting. Well, we'll have to go test our chops too. That's right. Dust off those coding hands. That's right. We'll go over there. Well I love the tagline all around these classrooms. Learn, code, inspire and connect. Great motto because you're building community on one end and educating on the other spectrum. So education to community. Great spectrum. Congratulations. Thank you. Susie, we Vice President and CTO of DevNet here at Cisco doing a great job. This is where the action is. This is the transformation of Cisco. It's becoming software and network DevOps. New term Net DevOps heard here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more live coverage in Barcelona, Spain after this short break.