 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back to theCUBE virtual coverage of AnsibleFest 2020 virtual, not face-to-face this year, obviously because of COVID and all events are going virtual. This is theCUBE virtual. I'm excited to have on CUBE alumni, Mandy Wadeley, who's the senior director of DevNet and Cisco certification. Mandy, great to see you. Thank you, virtually. Great to see you too. It's exciting to be here with theCUBE again and especially here at AnsibleFest. Last time we saw each other at a physical event was Barcelona in January, obviously the world's taking a turn. Obviously a lot of people online learning, it's been great. A lot more Dev Ops sec things going on. We'll get into that in a second, but I want to first talk about you and your role at Cisco and Red Hat Ansible. You're a trusted advisor. What are customers experiencing and what are their expectations around automation, the big theme of this conference? Absolutely. So in terms of the community that I work with at Cisco, it's our DevNet and our learning community, all of our Cisco certified engineers, as well as our DevNet developer audience. And so automation is at the core of what they're working on and we've seen even the move to more work from home, all the virtual things that we're dealing with, that's even more emphasis on companies needing to do automation and needing to have the skills to build that within their teams. So we're really seeing that everyone has expectations around platforms being able to have open APIs, integrate with tool sets, having choice in how they integrate things into their different workflows that they may already be using. And then we're seeing a big demand for people wanting to skill up and learn about automation, learn about Ansible, learn about Python. Our new DevNet certifications, they actually cover Cisco platforms as well as industry standard topics like Python and Ansible. And we've seen really great feedback from the community around loving that combination of getting to work really deeply with our Cisco technologies, as well as learning things like Ansible and Python. We had a special challenge when we launched the DevNet certifications for the first 500 people to earn that certification. And we were really excited to see the community achieve that within the first 16 days. So I just think that shows, you know, how important automation is to our community right now. What do you hear from customers around this certification opportunity around Ansible and Python? Can you give an example? So what we're hearing from companies and customers and individual developers is that they're having to deal with more scale. They are seeing more opportunity to handle consistent policy, to make sure configurations are consistent. All of these things are really important right now with the scale they're trying to handle. And so they're looking for ways that they can quickly add these skills to their tool set. And since we are working from home, not traveling as much, everyone schedules a little bit different, there is extra opportunity for teams to dig in and do some learning. So, you know, leaders, IT leaders are looking for, how do they work with their teams to go after these skills and add them into their way that they approach problems, the way they solve problems. And then individuals are looking for how they add them to open up new job roles, new opportunities for themselves. Well, I want to give you a shout out and props and kudos for the work you guys have done over at DevNet. We've watched the evolution. I'll see you guys have transformed the learning but also the API enabled products and economy that Cisco is driving with the SaaS. This is consistent with Ansible's success in the cloud and on premise with private cloud. Again, cloud, ops, sec, everything's kind of happening. Tell us the importance of automation within the Cisco products and how Ansible fits in. Absolutely. So, you know, like I said earlier, having this open APIs really across the whole Cisco portfolio and up and down the stock at the device level, at the controller level. That's part of our strategy. It's important to our customers. It's important to Cisco. We actually have a developer event, DevNet Create coming up. And Chuck Robbins will be talking about some of that importance of developers and automation in the Cisco strategy at DevNet Create. So maybe you can tune in and see some of that as well. We have been working with Ansible since early on in terms of how we bring Cisco technologies together with Ansible. And as Ansible moved to the new collections, we stepped into that very early. We knew it was important to have a seamless transition around that for our community. And that's been a big part of our work this year in terms of how we've been working with Ansible and getting ready for the new collection structure. You know, the people who are watching and know theCUBE know that, or maybe new to theCUBE and our work, know that I've been a cheerleader for CloudNative, but now it's actually happening, Mandy. We've been cheering it on and saying it's going to happen. CloudNative and the modern app focus, again, this is some of the narrative on the inside, you know, the industry is now mainstream. This is really a big deal because it's now DevOps and Sec. So all that's happening mainstream, the rise of Kubernetes, everything is on the front burner when it comes to CloudNative. So I got to ask you, how do the developers here at AnsibleFest get to learn more about Cisco? Because now you're bringing everything together, the automation up and down the stack from modern apps down to the plumbing, network's certainly super important from Edge, 5G's right around the corner. This is a business enterprise opportunity. How can developers at AnsibleFest learn more about Cisco? Fantastic. Yes, the one place to learn about all of our Cisco platforms, and like you said, how all of these things, CloudNative, DevOps, DevSecOps, how all of these things are coming together, you can learn about it at developer.sysgo.com. It's where all of our developer resources are, it's where you can find, if you're wanting to get started with Cisco products and Ansible, we have learning labs, engineer to engineer tutorials, videos, sample code, all kinds of the resources to help people get started on that journey. And the other thing we're really seeing is, like you said, this coming together and the real move in enterprises towards DevOps is creating all of these new job roles around DevSecOps and network automation engineer and web scale developer. And one of the things we're seeing is people are needing to add skills to their current skill set, mix and match, bringing hardware and software together, Cloud and networking skills and development skills to really meet the need for these new job roles, which is being driven by the business demands that we're facing. And that's one of the things that we're working really hard on in the DevNet and Cisco community right now. Can't go wrong by continuing your career at Cisco and certainly configuration management software comes together is awesome. So thanks for sharing that. One of the topics at Ansible Fest 2020 virtual this year is the theme is kind of three things as we heard on some of the interviews. Collections, collections, collections. This notion of Ansible automation platform has numerous Cisco certified collections. Can you share some insight and anecdotes from your community on from the DevNet users and what they're dealing with day-to-day around automation and how these collections and the certified collections fits in? Yeah, absolutely. So part of my team has been working with our community with Ansible to bring the Cisco Ansible collections together. And it's been a big part of our work throughout the year and we've seen tremendous use by the community. So we've been following the downloads of people downloading connections and using them. It's growing rapidly. We are really excited to see the use of the community and then the community interests support. And then we're doing our best to make sure that we have playbooks in our DevNet code exchange so people can go in and find them that we're helping people understand collections and how all of that fits together in the current Ansible structure. And we've just seen tremendous interest and response from the community on that. How does this tie into security automation? Another theme that comes up, you have a network, you got cloud, you got security, intrusion detection, prevention. These are all useful things to DevNet users. How does that all fit in? Security is one of the areas that I'm consistently hearing about from our community and customers. I think people are really looking for how they can deal with increased scale, how they can increase the scale that they're able to deal with and keep it secure. We're seeing people want to take quick action when a malicious activity occurs or even something like ensuring that policy is consistent across a range of security endpoints. And these are all places where automation can really help out and help teams manage the scale that they're having to deal with. So one of the things we've been working with is showing some learning labs on DevNet that combine using Ansible with our security products to help people tackle some of those use cases. We have an area called Automation Exchange and it's all about these automation use cases and giving you the sample code to get started on tackling some of these harder use cases. And that's where we have seen a lot of interest around security. On a broader scale, could you tell us where you see NetOps going? I mean, it's a big theme, Susie, we, April, yourself, we've all chatted about this in the past, NetOps or DevOps for network, networking ops, basically DevOps for networking, basically. Yes. Where's this, where's it going in the future? Where are we on the progress? Certainly it's been great evolution. How is DevNet evolving to push this mission forward? So one of the things that we talk with customers a lot about when they are moving down this pathway to bringing DevOps to the way that they run their network is we talk about a walk, run, fly progression and walk is where there are use cases where maybe you are only doing read-only type things and you're gathering insight, you're gathering information to help with troubleshooting, you're gathering information that maybe gets packaged up into a ticket that then an engineer takes action on. And this is a great place where a lot of organizations can start. If they are learning these skills, building these practices, they don't have to worry about it making changes but they get a lot of the benefit of the automation. So we're recommending that to companies who are getting started, teams that are getting started as a place to start their automation journey. And then really moving through that progression of next, taking some automated action all the way to that full DevOps life cycle and workflow. And we're seeing companies move through that progression as their teams also move through that progression. You know, just as a side note, one of the things we've been riffing on lately around the cloud native as you know now, it's mainstream as we just talked about is that the integrations are a big part of it. So you can have an environment that has a little bit of that, a little bit of this, a lot of integrations because of APIs and also microservices, you've got Kubernetes around to tie it on, glue it all together. You got DevNet Create coming up, right? And you guys always have a great DevNet zone at your events. It's a real learning environment. Talk to the Ansible developers in the community out there and how you guys work together for these classes because you guys have a lot of learning. There's like a cross-section of the communities that work together, some don't, some do. The cloud native really enables the integrations to happen quicker. Can you just share what's going on at DevNet Create and your world? Absolutely. So, and it's great because John, you were at our first DevNet Create years ago when we started it. So it's really exciting. This is our first virtual DevNet Create that's October 13th. And we had planned it to be an in-person event in March right when the pandemic hit the US. And so we had to re-plan and regroup and bring it to a virtual audience this fall. And it's actually been great with our virtual events. We've been able to see how there's so many more people who can participate, who can learn, who can be a part of that community because it's not only limited to the people who can be there in person. So we're actually really excited about that virtual part of it. DevNet Create is the event where we have speakers from all over our community, from companies, from partners, from community groups, and all kinds of technologies. Like you said, it's a great place to look at the integrations. So you'll find talks on Ansible, you'll find talks on Kubernetes, you'll find talks on IoT, you'll find talks on mashing up different APIs to go after use cases. And it's really about that strength of the community speakers that brings a lot of excellent content in to DevNet Create. And we're so thankful for them and the way that our community likes to, you know, step up and share and help each other. Well, yes, we were there for the first one. We'll still be there with you. But the question that comes up, and I'd like you to just quickly take a minute to clarify, the difference between DevNet and DevNet Create, because there is a nuance here. It's important. Take a minute to explain DevNet and DevNet Create and the objective of it. Absolutely. So DevNet, our DevNet zone event which happened typically in our Cisco lives, they have more of a focus on our more network engineer community who is spanning into programmability, DevOps, moving that direction. Because it happens within a Cisco live event, normally the DevNet zone. DevNet Create is our conference that started to focus on the application developer, the cloud developer, and how they are starting to tackle some of these hybrid use cases. And so DevNet Create is the place where, you know, that really comes together. Last year, Susie and I were on stage and we really wanted to know kind of what aspect people were bringing to the conference and we asked the community, you know, how many people are really focused on application development in their day job? That's their main focus. How many people are more on the off side? Infrastructure developer, DevOps, engineer. And then how many people are really working to bridge that? And it was one third, one third, one third in terms of the people at Create that year. And that was just really great to see. And to me, I think really shows the community that's building around DevNet Create. And if you look at the trends too, the discussions are about modern applications. And certainly with COVID, people are looking at this and saying, hey, it's an opportunity to use this pandemic and look at the opportunities that be very agile and create these modern apps, which require programmability, which require distractions away from the complexity, all the way down to the network. I mean, it really is a great vision. Yeah. And even things like, you know, using things with Meraki cameras, with using things like our collaboration products to build those use cases that are really helping out in a lot of the new challenges that we're facing. So that's all what you can find at DevNet Create. It's one of my favorite events because it does cover such a range of topics. I remember my first interview at one of your first event with Todd Nightingale. He was doing the Meraki thing. Now he's running a lot of the big part of the business there, but it really was a great vision. You guys really nailed it. Hats off to you guys. Kudos, props, congratulations, and stay safe. And we'll see you at your event. Thanks for joining me. Thank you so much. And thanks to Ansible Fest. Okay, this is theCUBE virtual coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host with Ansible Fest 2020. Thanks for watching.