 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. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage live in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder and co-host of theCUBE here all week. Two days of live wall-to-wall coverage in the DevNet zone for all the actions. That's the biggest story at Cisco Live is the impact of the DevNet and the developer network that's been growing. Leaps and bounds, of course, we covered DevNet Create earlier last year, which is a cloud-native event, kind of bringing two communities together from Cisco. And of course, we can't talk about developers without talking about experiences that developers need and want and expect. And also, you know, how to operate in those environments. We have two great guests, Mandy Whaley's been on before, CUBE alumni director of developer experiences at Cisco, and Tom Davies, who's the senior manager of the DevNet Sandbox. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, good to see you. So congratulations, DevNet is again booming. It's the hot part of the show. It's one of the top stories here in Barcelona. It's been great. Our workshops, where we're doing the hands-on coding, have been extremely full, even early in the morning, and late into the evening. And it's great to see people really diving in, laptops open, getting their hands on and doing some coding. That's great stuff, congratulations. And you know, the Sandbox is interesting because now you guys are completely open, love the motto, learn, code, inspire, and connect. That's the motto here. You got to have a place for people to do this. You do. What is the Sandbox thing that you guys are rolling out? It's pretty interesting. Yeah, so the Sandbox is completely open to everyone, and the idea behind it is, if you like, if you can go to developer.sysgo.com slash Sandbox, you can hit our catalog and start playing with our technology within minutes by just clicking on the technology you want to cover, and we'll spin you up that environment and you can start playing as a developer really quite quickly. All right, take me through a progression example, because let's just say I hit that website, developer.sysgo.com slash Sandbox. What do I do? I mean, what are people doing? Is it like, you know, Hello World? Or, you know, what are they coding? Are they learning? I mean, what's going on there? It does depend on the technology that they choose. So we go to developer.sysgo.com slash Sandbox, hit catalog, it comes up with a bunch of tiles. And in that catalog, you can choose networking, you could choose security, you could choose data center, cloud, open source, any different technology that that developer might be interested in or want to integrate into. And then from there, they click on that tile and say, right, I want to reserve, say, APKM. I'm interested in networking and controller of networking. From there, we spin that environment up for them, completely secure, send them the details of how to connect. They connect to it and then they are free to start coding within minutes on, say, APKM controller solution, figure out what the latest release provides them, how they integrate into it and how they can start innovating in a really easy way. It's a playground. They can do mashups. It is. They can swing APIs around, test stuff, break stuff. And if they're breaking something, they're probably doing something right. So we encourage it. Yeah, brilliant. The other thing that's really cool about the Sandbox is that Tom takes a lot of time and care to make sure we put together fully environments where you can actually build things with the Cisco gear plus open source projects that are relevant to those pieces of the Cisco technology portfolio. So it's not just the environment. It's sample code. It's open source you can use. It's traffic generations. It's really a full working environment. Yeah, that brings up a good point. I wanted to ask you, because we had some other guests on. We couldn't get to it, but you know, you're starting to see with Kubernetes and we're first Docker containers and now all containers, really interesting. I mean, Red Hat just bought Coro West yesterday. Big news. Big news, yeah. In Europe, you miss all the action. Send to the union. I know. You're in the New York Times on Sunday. I'm like, oh, I miss all the news. But that's a signal. Containers are commoditized. Just seeing that being the now abstraction layer for moving workloads around and program around it. Kubernetes gives an orchestration opportunity that now allows you to bring this service mesh concept to the table. This is becoming a really interesting developer dream because now I could provision microservices and start doing network services with those microservices of the app layer. This to me is a really, really big trend. I know you guys have kind of quietly put it out there called, term called net DevOps, which I think will be a very big thing because it's DevOps for the whole stack. But really using the network more. So for the people who are power users of network services, this could become a very big DevOps movement. Yes, yes. Can you explain this concept of the net DevOps? Does that relate to like Istio and some of the service mesh stuff out there? What's your- Yeah, do you want to start with service mesh and then I'll dive into the lower part? So, yeah. We can do it. Go for it. Yeah, sure. The term service mesh is actually fairly new and it's coming because as people use microservices more they're understanding that they just peripherate like crazy. And it's actually really quite hard to understand which microservices is talking to, which microservices are they doing it securely? Are they within policy? Are they talking to the right thing? And that's where Istio comes in. It's really providing a proxy for that traffic so you can easily talk between microservice A and microservice B, understand it, see observability between that traffic and then control that traffic. And Istio is taking really the abstraction away and taking the pain away from that huge service. Just talk about the quantifier that's time savings because this is like, I think this really kind of was the minds get blown. You just, that example just laid out. Without that, what would you have to do? I'd have to build a proxy. I'd have to test it. You do. I mean, just take me through it. The comparisons, A to B, real quick. Normally when you have a microservice, you probably have about 15 other services around it. Oh, if you had a ton of microservices, you probably have 15 different subserving services around it. With Istio, it takes 15 away so you don't have to manage or operate all those and it brings it down to one. And that's really super key. It makes it so much easier to do all microservices and develop them out. I mean, I boil it down and I tell people when Amazon launched Lambda, that was essentially the serverless trend. There always are services, never really serverless. I know Cisco people debate this all the time and others, it's true, there's servers behind it. They just take this abstraction away. They're really enabling this notion of a mindset for the developer where this gets into the user experience, user expectation. If I want infrastructure as a code and I don't want to dive into the network services, I want the one, not the 15, to deal with. I'm essentially programming the infrastructure at that point, so this is a big FN deal. This is a big deal and then even what we're seeing is that the expectations are set by DevOps practices and now that our network devices are opening up APIs and we have the really strong assurance and analytics pieces that we saw in the Cisco keynotes, we can extend those DevOps concepts to managing network devices. So something very traditional networking test like add a VLAN. Let's say you want to do that but you want to do that in a network as code manner. So you want to take that through a build pipeline, something that would be familiar to a developer or someone who manages their infrastructure in a DevOps way. But now you can do it for a networking device and you can take it through build and test just like you would code and all of your network configurations are source controlled so you have your version control around it and that's a big mind shift for the network developers. But in DevNet we have the application developers, the ops engineers and the networkers and what we're trying to do is share those practices across because that's the only way we'll get to the scale, the consistency, the level of automation that we need. All right, so here's a question for you guys pushing the spot. DevOps has been great, it's going mainstream. Some are called cloud ops, whatever, but DevOps is great, great movement. That's been going on for a while. Hey, yeah, yeah, had each other on the back. But DevOps means automation, right? And the old rule is you have to do it twice automated. This scares people. So what is being automated away in the net DevOps model? So I wouldn't know that it's being automated away, but the idea is that if we're managing infrastructure, traditionally you would do it in a sequential and manual way, right? But we need to do it in a parallel and automated way. And so moving towards that automation helps us do that. I think we see some network engineers who think I have to learn a lot of new skills to do this. And that is true. But you don't have to be the level of an application developer who's writing applications to do some automation and scripting. And DevNet's really working to put the tools out there to lead them down that path and get them moving in that direction. And it's also a little bit more, I mean, DevOps is definitely the automation of the tools. There's also the culture of bringing DevOps together. So same thing happens there as well. Totally agree. And also the process as well, repeatability in what we're doing. So once you've done it one and that process works for you, you can repeat that process for the next set of configuration you're deploying. Yeah. Rowan showed on stage the future titles of what it'll be like in 2030 or 2050 and what year it was. I joke, it says LinkedIn on that, might even be around, it might be around then either. But this is a new field, right? And successful companies, the ethos was higher the smartest person because the jobs that are coming haven't been invented yet. So there's no experience there. So this kind of reminds me of what's going on with DevOps where network guys, they're not dumb. I mean, they're smart. Super smart. So they, you know, it used to be you were the rock star if you ran the network. That's right, that's right. Now the rock stars are more the app developers and the developers on the DevOps side. So it would be easy and we're seeing that it's easy for those guys to jump in some of these coding and or agile mindsets. Yes. Because they are gunslingers, they are rock stars. They are, it's incredible how fast they are picking it up. I mean, they are just from the ones that we've met from last year to this year who are here came to like their first coding class. This year they're here and they're like, oh yeah, I totally get this build pipeline. I'm doing this in my organization. We're seeing them pick it up incredibly fast. And so they obviously see a path to other jobs. What patterns are you guys seeing in terms of things that they're doing on the sandbox and or some of the user expectations that they have as they're now fresh, young or and middle aged or old students in the new world. What are some of the patterns? Yeah. What are they kicking the tires on? What are they gravitating towards? Everything, but they literally everything, but they're always quite interested in containers and what's happening in the container world and how that applies to networking, especially because as we touched on earlier, there's a lot of networking to be had in the container world and is not just one layer of Istio at the service mesh. There's also virtualization layers. There's abstracted policy layers. There's a good few layers of networking that you need to know and really understand to be able to get into. So that's one real trend that the network guys really are jumping on and so they should because they're great at it. Yeah. I would add to that. I've been seeing in different conversations I have with people who are coming from the app dev side or the ops side and saying, wow, I'm really good at containers. I can build apps and containers all day and then they get into it and they're like, the networking part of containers is hard. There's a lot to learn. And so I definitely see a lot of activity around both sides coming together around how do we really make that work? And the bottom line is that the whole, this whole, your job's going away is ridiculous because this really proves that there is so much job security in DevOps. It's ridiculous. There's more devices per engineer to be managed than ever before. So it's really just, you have to have the automation to even keep up. It's quite funny actually because I come from a very much a software centric background. And networking to me was black magic. You had to know so much stuff in a networking order. You used to scare the hell out of me but I had to go down into the network layer to start understanding it, to do a better job of software. You was locked down. I mean, you had perimeter based security and you had very inflexible configuration management things you really locked down. Now, agile and dynamic, adaptive and these are the words that are described. And now add IoT to the mix. You guys have the black hat, you know, IoT here, which is phenomenal. It's only going to increase the edge of the network. Not new to Cisco. Cisco knows the edge. So it's going to be interesting to see that going forward. So. And that's one of our sandboxes. We have a sandbox where developers can practice taking Docker containers and deploying them into edge compute in our routers. And that's one that's really popular. It's incredibly popular. Mandy and Tom, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Great to see you again. Congratulations on all your success. Go kick on the tires on the sandbox. You guys doing a great job. DevNet, developer network for Cisco here. And of course DevNet created and separate small boutique events, small for the cloud native world. You want to check that out with CUBE will be there this year. This is theCUBE live coverage. I'm John Furrier. Stay tuned for more of day two exclusive Cisco live 2018 in Europe. We'll be right back.