 from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. Okay, welcome back everyone, live in San Francisco, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Systems, inaugural DevNet Create event, an augmentation extension and build upon their successful three-year-old DevNet developer program. Our next guest is Amanda Whaley, who's the director of development experience at Cisco DevNet. Well congratulations Amanda on one, DevNet being successful over three years. And now you're foray into DevNet Create, which is some called the hoodie crowd, the cloud native developers, open source, completely different animal, but important from DevNet. Absolutely, so the hoodie crowd is more my tribe, that's my background is from software development and I came to Cisco because I was intrigued when they reached out and said, we want to start a developer community, we want to start a developer program. I talked to Susie Wee for a long time about it and what was interesting to me was, there were new problems to solve in developer experience. So we know how to do REST APIs, there's a lot of best practices around how you make those easy for developers to use, how you make them very consumable and developer friendly and there's a lot of work to do there, but we do know how to do that. When you start adding in hardware, so IoT, network devices, infrastructure, collaboration, video, there's a lot of new, interesting developer experience problems to solve. So I was really intrigued to join Cisco, bringing my software developer background and coming from more the web and startup world, coming into Cisco and trying to tackle what's this new connection of hardware plus software and how do we do the right developer experience around it? So I have to ask you, what was your story? Take us through the day in the life as you enter into Cisco, you have it, Susie woot you in, you got into the tractor because she's brilliant, she's awesome and then you go, oh, I'm in Cisco. What are you looking around? What was your reaction? Tell us. So what was interesting was, so DevNet started three years ago at Cisco Live, we had our first DevNet developer zone within Cisco Live. That was actually my first day at Cisco. So my first day at Cisco. Half dozen by five. Yes, absolutely. And so that was my first day at Cisco and Susie talked to me and she said, hey, there's a lot of network engineers that wanna learn how to code and they wanna learn about Rust APIs. Could you do like a coding 101 and start to teach them about that? So literally on my first day at Cisco, I was teaching this class on what's a Rust API, how do you make the call, how do you learn about that and then how do you write some Python to do that? And I thought, is anyone interested in this that's here? And I had this room packed with network engineers, which I at that time, I knew some networking, but definitely nothing compared to the CCIEs that were in the audience. And yeah, very, very, yeah. And so I taught the course and it just caught on wildfire. They were so excited about because they saw this is actually pretty accessible and easy to do. And one thing that stood out was we made our first Rust call from Python and instead of getting your Twitter followers or something like that, it retrieved a list of network devices. You've got IP addresses back and so it related to their world. And so I think it was very fortunate that I had that on my first day because I had an instant connection to what that community needed. They're like, who is, she's awesome. Come on. Well, it was, it helped me understand what they were interested in. You're like, we're gonna go for a while on the block now. Come on, kindergartners, come on out. No, but these network guys, they're smart, so they can learn. Really smart. It's not like they're wet behind the ears in terms of smart, it's a new language for them. And that was the point of the class was like, you guys are super smart, you know all of this, you just need some help getting started on this tooling. And so many of them, I keep up with them on Twitter and other places and they have taken it so far beyond and they just needed that start and then they were off to the races. So that's been really interesting and then the other piece of it has been working in our more app developer technologies because as developer experience for DevNet, I get to work across collaboration, IoT, networking, data center, like the whole spectrum of Cisco technologies. So on the other side in application, we have Cisco Spark, they have great JavaScript SDKs and it's very developer friendly. And so that is kind of going back to my developer tribe and bringing them in and saying, do you want to sell to the enterprise? Do you want to work with the enterprise? Cisco's got a lot to offer and there's a lot of interesting things to do there. They have Cisco networks and gear all around the place and so it's important. Now talk about machine learning and AI, the hottest trend on the planet right now in your tribe and developer tribe. A lot of machine learning going on and machine learning has been around in the data center. Networking guys, it's not new to them either. So that's an interesting convergence point. IoT is a network device. So you got IoT, you got AI and machine learning booming. This seems like it's a perfect storm for the melting pot of... It really is. So today in my keynote, I talked a little bit about, first of all, why have I always liked working with APIs and doing these integrations and I've always thought that what I like about it is the possibility you have a defined set of tools or Legos and then you can build them into whatever interesting thing you want to. And I would say right now developers have a really interesting set of Legos, a new set of Legos because with sensors, whether that's an IoT sensor or a phone or a video camera or a piece of a switch in your data center, a lot of those have you can get information from them. So whatever kind of sensor it is, plus easy connectivity and kind of connectivity everywhere, plus cloud computing, plus data equals like magic. Because now you can do, now machine learning finally has enough data to do the real thing. My original background was chemical engineering and I actually did predictive model control and we did machine learning on it but we didn't have quite enough data, we couldn't store quite enough of it, we didn't have enough connectivity, we couldn't really get there. And now it's like all of my grad school dreams are coming true and you can do all of these amazing things that seem possible then. And so I think that's what DevNet Create has been about to me is getting the infrastructure, engineers, the app developers together with the machine learning community and saying like now is the time there's a lot of interesting things we can build. And magic. And magic. Yeah. Right. I mean you think about it, that's chemical reaction, the chemistry of bringing multiple things together and this experimentation sometimes it might blow up or innovation is about experimentation. Andy Jassi at Amazon Web Services, I mean I've talked to him multiple times and him and Jeff Bezos consistently talk about take, do experiments, try things. And I think that is the ethos. It is and that is particularly our ethos in DevNet. In fact DevNet create an experiment, right? New conference, let's get this people together and start this conversation and see how it comes together. What's your reaction to the show here? Just divide your feeling, feedback you're getting, observations. It's been, I'm so happy. It's been great. I had someone tell me today that this was the most welcome they had felt at any developer conference that they'd been to and I thought took that as a huge compliment that they felt very comfortable. They liked the conversations they were having, they were learning lots of new information. So I think that's been good and then I think exactly that mix of infrastructure plus app developer that we were trying to put together is absolutely happening. I see it in the sessions, I see it in the birds of a feather and there's a lot of good conversations happening around that. Question for you that we get all the time and it comes up on CrowdChat, I'd like to ask you the questions. Just get your reaction to is what misperception of DevOps is out there that you would like to correct? If there could be one then you say, I know it's not that. What's your? The one that seems the most prevalent to me and I think it's starting to get some attention but it's still out there is that DevOps is just about the tools. Like just pick the right DevOps tools, Docker, Docker, Docker, use Puppet and Chef and you're good, you're DevOpsing. And it's like that is not the case, right? It's really a lot more about the culture and the way that the teams work together. So if there was anything I could and the people, right? And so it's flipping the emphasis from what's the DevOps tool that you're using to how are you building the right culture and structure of people? That's the one I would correct. Suzy was on yesterday and Peter and Suzy had a little bit of a bonding moment because they recognize each other from previous lives, HP and his old job. But and it brought up a conversation about what Peter also did in his old job at Meta Group where he talked about this notion of an infrastructure engineer. And what's interesting now was, I mean infrastructure developer, I'm sorry. That was normally like a network engineer. So the network engineer is now on the engineering side meeting developers almost like there seems, I can't put my finger on it. It's like I can feel in my knee weather patterns coming over. That a new developers emerging. And we talked a little bit about last night about this, what is a full stack developer? Doesn't stop at the database. It can go all the way down to the network. So you start to see in this view a little bit of a new kind of developer. Kind of like when data science emerged from not being an analyst but to being an algorithms specialist meets data person. Right. I think it's interesting that, and this shows up in a lot of different places. When I think about DevOps, I think about this spectrum of the teams working. And there's the infrastructure teams who are working on the most deepest layer of the infrastructure. And then you kind of build up through there into the DevOps teams, into the app dev teams, into maybe even something sort of above the app dev team, which would be like a low code solution where you're just using something like built.io or something like that. Something that we would normally think of as developers, right? So that spectrum is broadening on both ends and people are moving down the stack and moving up the stack. The network engineers, one of the things in DevNet we're working on is what we call the evolution of a network engineer. And where is that going? And network engineers have had to learn new technology before. And now there's just a new set which includes automation and APIs and configuration management, infrastructure as code. And so they're moving up the stack and then developers are also starting to think, I really want my application to run well on the network because if no one can use it, then my application's not doing anything. And so things like the optimized for business that we have with Apple where developer can go in through an SDK and say, I want to set these QoS settings so that my app gets treatment. Like that's a way that they're converging. I think that's really interesting. So one of the things that we've been working on at Wikibon, I want to test this assumption by, we talked a little bit about it, is the idea of data zone. Where just as we use a security zone as a concept where everything that's in that zone and it's both the technologies, it's governmental, there's other types that has these security characteristics and if it's going to be part of that agglomeration it must have these security characteristics. And we're not thinking you could do the same thing with data. Where you start saying, so for example, we talked earlier about the idea that the network is what connects places together. And the developers think in terms of, the places where things are, like the Internet of Things. I'm wondering if it's time for us to think in terms of the network in time, or the network is time. And not think in terms of where something is, but think in terms of when it is. And whether or not that's going to become a very powerful way of helping developers think about the role that the network's going to play. Is the data available now? Because I have an event that I have to support now. And it seems as though that could be one of those things that snaps this group, these two communities together to think it's in time that you're trying to make things happen. And the network has to be able to present things in time. And you have to be cognizant of in time. That's one of the reasons, for example, why RESTful is not the only way to do things. IOT thinks in time. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think that's really interesting. And actually that's something we're diving in with our community on is, so you've been a developer, you've worked with REST services and now you're doing IOT. Well, you need to learn a lot of new protocols and how to do more things more in real time. And that's a skill set that some developers maybe don't have, they're interested in learning. And so we're looking at how do we help people along that way. Well, data in motion is a big topic. Exactly, yeah, absolutely. And so I think, and then the network, like thinking about from a network provider, like I need this data here at this time is very interesting concept. And that starts to speak to what can be done at the edge, which is obviously like an interesting concept for us. But also the role the network's going to play in terms of predictably anticipating where stuff is and when it needs to be there. Yeah, yeah, I think that's, I think that's really interesting. But it's programmable, if you think about what Cisco's always been good at and most network and ops guys is, they've been good at policy-based stuff. And they really, they know what events are and they have network events, right? Things happen all the time, network management software principles have always been grounded in software. So now how do you take that to bridging, again, that's why I see a convergence. I think we should have a conference around that. It's called, you have net create. Net create. Okay, so final question for you, as you guys have done this, how's your team doing with the talks, was one going on behind us as a birds of a feather, IOT session, you've got a hackathon over here. Pretty cool by design that we heard yesterday that it's not 90% Cisco, it's 90% community, 10% Cisco. So it's not, this is not a Cisco coming in and saying, hey, we're in cloud native, get used to us, we're here, you know? So, I mean. Absolutely not. So it's, I'm really proud of how my team came together around that. So I have our team of developer evangelists who we connect with the developer community and we really look at our job as this full circle. We get materials out and learning and get people excited about using Cisco APIs and we also bring information back about like, here's how it is, here's what customers think about using it, here's what the community's doing, all of that. So when we started DevNet Create, we set the stake in the ground of, we want this to be way more community content than our content we produce ourselves. And so the evangelists did a great job of reaching out into communities, connecting with speakers, finding the content that we wanted to highlight to this audience and bringing it in. So the talks have been fabulous, the workshops have been a huge hit, it's like standing room only in there and people getting a seat and not wanting to leave because they want to keep their seat and so they'll stay for workshops in a row. It's been amazing. I think it's great, it's exciting for me to watch because I know the developer goodness is happening. People are donating software, you see Google donating a lot of open source, even Amazon on the machine learning. You guys have a lot of people open source, but I got to ask you now within Cisco and it's ecosystem of this company, we see a lot of Cisco people on our Cube events that we go to, we go to 100, that's last year would be over 150 this year, we saw Deli and Ciro, we saw some Cisco folks there, there's Sapphire, there's a deal with CenturyLink and on a cloud enterprise cloud. So there's Cisco everywhere, there's relationships that Cisco has. How are you looking at taking DevNet Create or are you going to stay a little bit decoupled, be more startup like and kind of figure that scene out or is that on the radar yet? So I think we know with starting DevNet Create for this first year, what we really wanted to do is get foundation out there, stake in the ground, get a community started and get this conversation started. And we're really looking to in the iterative experimental way, look at what comes out of this year and where the community really wants to take it. So I think we'll be figuring that out. I see what grows out of it. Yes, we see what grows. Thousands of flowers bloom kind of thing. Yeah, and I think that it will be, we will always have the intention of keeping that, we want to keep the mix of audience of infrastructure and app and we'll see how that grows. Well, Amanda, congratulations to you, Rick and Susie and the teams. I'd like to get some of those experts on the CUBE interviews as soon as possible. Absolutely. Add some crowd chats. You guys did an amazing IoT crowd chat. I'll share that into the hashtag. So very collaborative. You guys are a lot of experts and Cisco's got a lot of experts out in hiding behind the curtain there. You're bringing them out, bringing them out out in public here. That's right. Congratulations. Thank you very much. We're here live for the special inaugural coverage of DevNet Create. Cisco's new event, cloud native open source, all about the community, like the CUBE, we care about that and we'll bring you more live coverage after this short break. Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the senior director of strategy and planning for Cisco.