 from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Hello, everyone, welcome back to the live coverage here at theCUBE here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with my co-student and for the next three days of wall-to-wall live coverage, we have the co-founders of the network collective here, Yvonne Sharp and Jordan Martin. Thanks for joining us today, network collective. Sounds great, sounds like it's a collection of networks. Sir, what's going on? What do you guys do? First, let's talk about what you guys do. I saw you guys doing a lot of podcasting, a lot of digging into the tech. What is network collective? Network collective is a video podcast that Jordan and I started. We really felt like there was a need to build community around network engineers and that really a lot of network engineers are very isolated in their job. There's only a couple of people where they work that know what they know and they don't have a lot of peers. And so we see network collective as a way to bring network engineers together to learn about their craft and also share with one another in a community that's more than a once-a-year conference like Cisco Live. That's awesome, I love the video podcasting. More than ever now, the need for kind of peer review, conversations around learning because the world's shifting, the keynote today, the CEO of Cisco talked about the old way and the new networks that are coming. We've been talking about no perimeters for years but now security threats are real, got to keep that screen solid, keep managing that. But also bringing a new kind of a cloud, hybrid, multi-cloud world requires real skill adoption, new things. What are you guys seeing? What's your thoughts and what's some things that you guys are exploring on your video podcast around these trends? Do you want to take that, Jordan? Sure, so I think the rate of change in networking is faster than it's been in a very long time. So we've kind of not had a whole lot of churn in the things that we've had to learn. I mean, it's been complex and difficult and there's been challenges in getting up to speed but with the transition to a more developer-focused and developer-centric model of deploying equipment, it is, and the integration of cloud into what is essentially our infrastructure, it's changing so much that it's good to get together and have those conversations because it's very difficult to navigate this by yourself, it's a lot to learn. Yeah, I want to push back a little bit on that because I've been in networking my whole career when I used to speak at Interop and I put down, here's the rate of change and here are the decades. It's like, okay, 10 gig, here's where the standards are, here's where the first pieces are, it's going to take years for us to deploy this. I don't disagree that change is happening overall faster but how are people keeping up with it? Are the enterprises that the networking people work for allowing them to roll out some of these change a little faster, so it gives a little insight as to what you're hearing from the community. I think, I mean, technology, we've got Moore's Law, right? I mean, technology has always been changing rapidly. I think the thing that is different is the way network engineers need to interact with their environment. Five to 10 years ago, you could still operate in an environment where you still did a lot of static routing, for example. Now, with the cloud, with workloads moving around, there is no way to run a multi-cloud enterprise network without some serious dynamic routing chops, whether that's BGP or EIGRP or OSPF or all of the above and a lot of network engineers are still catching up with some of those technologies. They're used to being able to do things the way that they've always done them and I think there needs to be a mind shift where we start thinking about things dynamically and that an IP address may not live in the same geography. It may move from on-premises to the cloud to another cloud and we have to be able to build networks that are resilient enough and flexible enough to be able to support that kind of mobility. Yeah, I love that, Yvonne, you're right. You talk about the multi-cloud world. Jordan, a follow-up question I have for you. How does the networking person look at things when there's a lot of the networking that are really outside of their control when you talk about really the cloud world today? Sure, before we jump there, I want to say the change that we're talking about though is a bit different than what's happened. So what we've seen traditionally, we mean speeds and feeds, but what's changing is the way we operate networks and that hasn't changed a lot. Now as for how do you view it when you don't, well that's a challenge that everyone is facing. We see networking getting further and closer to the host and when we see networking inside of VMware, I mean this has been something around for a while now, but we're just getting comfortable with the idea of hypervisor and now we've got containers and we've got networking in third-party services that we don't necessarily have access to, we don't have full control over and it's a completely different nomenclature. We have to relearn all the terms because of course no one reused the stuff we're familiar with because this all started from a developer mindset. It all makes sense where it came from, but now we're catching up. And so the challenge is not only understanding what needs to be done in all these different environments but also understanding just the terminology and what it means, what is a VPC? Well VPC means something completely different to a networker that has never touched Amazon than it does to somebody who has worked in Amazon completely. There's overlapping terms and confusion around that and it's just a matter of, I think you need some broader coordination. There's been discussion about something like a full-stack engineer. I think that's a pretty rare thing. I don't know how likely it is that you're going to be expert level in all different disciplines. But you do need cross-team collaboration more than you have traditionally. We've had these silos that no longer work in a multi-cloud world. It just doesn't work anymore. One of the things that came up in the keynote was the Networks Next Act was the main theme as they talked about this new way. They used secure intelligent platform for digital business, a little marketing there. More complex than a few years ago and then the onslaught of new things coming, AI, augmented reality machine learning and I put blockchain in there because I thought they would have put blockchain in the keynote to hype it up a bit. But then they introduced the multi-cloud concept at that point. So in the keynote, multi-cloud didn't come up until the next act came up. So obviously that is a key part of what we're seeing. We saw Google Cloud's CEO, Diane Green come on. How are network engineers looking at the multi-cloud? Because, I mean, are they toe in the water? Are they putting the toe in the water? What is multi-cloud to them? Because we talk about Kubernetes all the time from an app standpoint, but networks have been locked down for many, many years. You talked about some of the chops they need. What are those next chops for a network engineer when it comes to taking the road to multi-cloud? Sure, I mean, I think if you are going to do any kind of multi-cloud interconnect, you've got to know BGP. But at the same time, you need to understand some of those fundamental concepts that the reason developers are pushing to the cloud is not cost, although I've heard that a lot, that, well, this cloud thing can't be cheaper, but it's really about enabling the business to move faster, and so we need to start thinking that way as network engineers more too. We have, I think, historically, our mentality, and we've even trained our network engineers to go slow, to be very deliberate, to plan out your changes, to have these really complex change windows, and we need to start thinking differently. We need to think about how to make modular changes and to be able to allow our workloads to move and shift in ways that don't provide a lot of risk, and I think that's a new way of thinking for network engineers. Yeah, well, we're sitting here in the DevNet zone, and that was one of the highlights in the keynote talking that there are over 500,000 developers now registered on this platform that they've built here. Bring us inside a little bit, you know, is it, what was it, John? DevNet, Sec, you know, there's all of these acronyms as to, you know, how developers can... NetOps was their big thing. Yeah, how the network and the operations go together. What are you seeing? What's working? What are some of the challenges? I think this is a shift of necessity. As we see more problems solved in the network, we're adding complexity at that layer that hasn't been seen before, before it was routing. We just had to get traffic from one place to another. Then we added security. So, okay, we've got security going to security where we can send all the traffic through this place and just, like, we can do filtering or some sort of identification there. Well, then we start moving to cloud and we talk about dynamic workloads and we talk about things that can just shift anywhere in the world. Well, now our choke point is gone and so now we have to manage all the pieces, all the solutions, all the things we're putting into the network. We've got to manage it in a distributed way and so that's where I think the automation is white. It's such a big push right now is because we have to do it that way. There's no way to manually put these features in the network and be able to manage them at any type of scale without automating that process and that's why I think we see the growth of DevNet. I mean, we've been here the past few years. It's gone from a little thing to a much, much bigger thing. There's a lot of people looking at automation specifically that 500,000 number is rather large. That is really impressive that there's that many people looking at networks from a programmatic way. But in the meantime, I think that there's also a bit of a divide here because I think that there's, a lot of people are looking this way but I think there's, we talk about this on the show pretty often, there's really two types of networks. There's the networks of companies where it really is, they see their network as a competitive advantage and those places are definitely looking at automation and they're looking at multi-cloud. But we also see another trend in networking and that is to, I want some simple push button, just put it out, get packets A to B and I don't want to mess with it, I don't want expensive engineers on staff, I don't want, so I feel like the industry's almost coming to a divide that we're going to have like two different types of networks. We're going to have the network for the place that they just want packets going A to B and they really don't want much and the other side of that divide is going to be very complex networks that have to be managed with automation. Tell me about that other divide, I love that conversation because that almost kind of comes into like the notion of networks as a service because if you want to have less expensive people there but yet have the reliability, how do those companies grow and maintain the robust resiliency of these networks and have the high performance take advantage of the goodness, or does it matter? I mean, how are they, how is that demographic of the network evolving because either they're stunted for growth or they have an enabler, how do you view that and how do you take that apart? I think we have to look at our business needs and evaluate the technologies that we use appropriate to that, there are times for complexity, I think we pushed as Jordan very eloquently described a lot of complexity down into the network and we're working I think now as the entire industry to maybe back some of that out but one of the things that I hear a lot when we talk about automation and things like DevNet and developers is, I believe a lot of network engineers are afraid their jobs are going away but if you look at what's going on we have more connected devices than we've ever had before and that's not going to stop and all of those connected devices need networks and so really what's happened is we've reached a complexity inflection point which means we have to have better tools and I think that's really what we're talking about is how do we, instead of doing everything manually how do we look at the network as a system and manage it as a system with tools to manage it that way? You pointed about the jobs going away, I love that comment because that's a fallacy because there's so much other stuff happening tell us security, so that begs the question, I mean first of all, guys your job's not going away Jack, it's only, well Ken if you don't like stay current so there's all the learning issues the progression for learning but really it's the role of the network engineers and the people running the networks I mean I remember back in the old way the network guys were the top dogs they were kicking butt, taking names they ran the show, lot was riding on the network but as we go into this new dynamic environment what are the roles of the network? Is it security, I mean what are some of the things that people are pivoting to or are laddering up to from a role standpoint that you see in terms of a progression of new discovery, new skills is there a path, have you seen any patterns for the growth of the person? I really think network engineers need to at least understand what the cloud is and why it exists and they need to understand more about the applications and what they mean to the business I think we have created a divide sometimes where my job is just to get packets from point A to B and I don't really need to understand what we do as an organization and I think that those days are going to be behind us we need to understand what applications are critical why do we need to build the systems the way that we need to build them and use that information from the business so I think for network engineers I think cloud security, understanding applications and learning the business and being able to talk that language is what's going to be most valuable to them and their career in the future. Yeah and you know we've heard the term many times I'm a plumber, well I mean applying that moving packets from A to B it gets interesting with containers policy based stuff is known concept of networking QOS, these are things that are well known but when you start looking at the trends up the stack you're seeing that kind of thing going on service meshes for instance they talk about services from a policy standpoint up the stack that's always been the challenge for Cisco over the past 20 years is how to move up the stack should they move up the stack but I think now seems to be a good time your reaction guys to that notion of moving up the stack while maintaining the purity and the goodness of good networking I mean that's a big challenge right now right? The more that we mesh it all together and we don't really define the layers that we've traditionally used the more challenging it is to have experts in that domain because the domain just grows so incredibly large and so there's got to be a balance here and I think we're trying to find that I don't know that we've hit that yet you know where we understand where networking fits into all these pieces how far into the host or how far into the application does networking go we've seen certain applications not using the host TCP-IP stack right just to find some sort of performance benefit and to me that seems like we're pushing really far into this idea of you know well if we don't have standards and define places where these things exist it's going to be very much the Wild Wild West for a little while until we figure out where everything is going to be and so I think it just presents challenges and opportunities I don't know that we have the answer about how far it goes yet well let me ask you a question a good point by the way we agree I mean it's evolving it's a moving train as they say but as people that might be watching that might be a Cisco customer or someone deploying a lot of Cisco networks and products in this portfolio what's your advice to them what are you hearing that's a good first three steps to take today obviously the show's going on here the multicloud is the center of the focus this new network age is here for the CEO what are some things that people can do now that are safe and good first steps to continue on the journey to whatever this evolves into I think as you're building your network you need to think about modularization you need to think about how to build it in small manageable pieces and even if you're not ready to take the automation step today you need to think about what that's going to look like in the future so if you really want to automate your network you have to have consistency, consistent policy consistent configuration across your environment and it's never too late to start that or too early to start that right and so you can think about if I wanted to take these 10 sites and I wanted to manage them as one how would I build it and you can use that kind of mental framework to help guide the decisions you make even if you're not ready to jump into full scale automation from soup to nuts and also I think it's important to start playing around with automation technology there are all kinds of tools to do that and you can start in an area that's either dev or QA it's not going to be production impacting but you really need to wrap your hands around some of the tools that exist to automate to start playing with that Stay where you're comfortable get learned, get hands on Jordan, your thoughts Yeah, so I was over here like knotting my head furiously because everything she said that I was going to agree with Yes, ditto, exactly The only thing I would add is that we think about automation a lot in the method of config push or the idea of configuring your device and automating away but that's not the only avenue for automation start by pulling information from your devices it is really, really low risk way to start looking at your network programmatically is to be able to go out to all of your switches all of your routers all of your networking devices and pull the same information and correlate that data and get yourself some information that's with a broader view does nothing to affect the change or state of your network but you are now starting to look at your network that way and I will reiterate Yvonne's point you cannot automate a network if it's not repeatable if every design, every topology every location is a special snowflake you will never be able to automate anything because you're going to have a hundred unique automation scrims to run a hundred unique sites It's going to be chasing your tail It's going to be chasing your tail and so it is critical if you're not in that state now what you need to do is start looking at how to modularize and make repeatable config blocks in your network Well guys, thanks for coming on Yvonne George, thanks for coming on I appreciate you taking the time Final question, I know it's day one we've got two more days of live coverage here but if you can kind of project in your mind's eye, see the development of the show what's bubbling up as the most important story that's going to come out of Cisco Live? Have you had to look at some early indications from the keynotes and some of the conversations in the hallway? What do you think is the biggest story this year for Cisco Live? I think for me personally I want to understand what Cisco's cloud strategy looks like to know where they're going with the cloud and how they're going to help stitch together all the different services that we have the clouds are becoming their own monolith they each do things their own way and still the network is what is stitching all those services together to provide access and so I think it's important to understand that strategy and where Cisco's going Jordan, your thoughts? My, what I'm really looking for from the show this year is how Cisco's going to make orchestration approachable we've seen this process of automation where only the hardcore programmers could do it then we've got some tools and these tools and as we watch as more of Cisco's product platforms start to integrate with each other I think the key piece for enterprise shops that don't have that type of resource on staff is what tools are they going to give them to make this orchestration between the WAN and the enterprise campus and into the cloud and in the data center how do we tie all that together and make that like a nice seamless way to operate your network? Hey what a great opportunity to have another podcast called Under the Hood and see what's going on a lot of chops needed, thanks for coming on give a quick plug for your address for your podcast where do we find it, what's the site? Network Collective obviously you guys doing great things share the coordinates. Sure you can find us at thenetworkcollective.com we usually use the hashtag network collective I'm on Twitter at Sharp Network Jordan you want to tell people to find you? Sure, I'm at B.C. Jordan on Twitter and obviously if you want to interact with Network Collective at Net Collective PC on Twitter as well. All right thanks so much for the commentary and great to have a little shared a little podcast here live on theCUBE here in Orlando I'm John Furrier Stu Miniman for our coverage at Cisco Live 2018, stay with us for more we got two more days of this got day one just getting started be right back after this short break.