Cisco Live 2015 - My Recap

Alas, Cisco Live has come and gone, with San Diego off in the distance with much milder weather than the humidity I’m living in now. There are several (more notable) blogs out there who have weighed in on their #CLUS experience (http://www.ciscolive.com/us/activities/featured-blogs/). This post hopefully adds a unique perspective to both the technical side of the conference as well as the aesthetic side. Let me explain.

The technical material and presenters were top notch again this year.  The opening (John Chambers) and closing (Mike Rowe) keynotes were simply amazing.  I’ve not watched a great deal of Mike Rowe’s shows on cable.  I was simply amazed at his story and the passion of his support for the trade skills. He exposed some disconcerting trends in the economy that are quite timely as there is already a great deal of soul searching in academia about the role of a 4-year degree in the economy.  I especially loved these posters he presented:

This year, I had a new “first” in a session: a practical exercise in applying the material covered in the session (BRKRST-2667, IPv6 Addressing Plans). With the huge address space available, it’s very easy to feel like the task is daunting. The content of the session was easily digestible and the exercise proved that most of our usual addressing skills and schemes still applied.

This year marked the second year of DevNet - Cisco’s increased focus on software development in conjunction with networking. They allocated a large chunk of floor space in the Sails Pavillion to the effort. Last year, it wasn’t clear to me that any conference attendee could participate and it was very crowded and cluttered area. This year, they advertised clearly and had plenty of accessibility.

I come from a Linux systems engineering background so the ability to script is second nature to me. However, I’ve not had any prior experience with JSON, XML, or REST APIs. With two 30 minutes speaker sessions, I’ve learned enough that I can now sit down and start hacking out some pretty useful scripts against network devices. That, is pretty awesome. As a bonus, those sessions were right before “beer-thirty” and I was reward for my new found skills :)

On the aesthetics side, the conference is getting really big. 25,000 strong this year. Many sessions were full a month or two before the conference started. I’ve frequently said these past few years that another day is needed for the conference. No luck on that front. However, with SDCC, there was quite enough space in the session areas to handle the crowd.

While we had a second year of box lunches, the conference at least fully utilized the best asset of the center: outdoor patio seating with San Diego’s beautiful weather and views of Coronado island. More than made up for (or took my attention off of) the shortcomings of the side items.

The “World of Solutions” area, however, IMHO was a disaster. Not enough space to walk around at all. Early morning was the only time where you could walk and avoid bumps/bruises. Any evening hour was ridiculously crowded to the point of futility. I only talked with two of the five vendors I wanted to visit (not counting the Cisco area). It was so frustrating I gave up.

Now, we head to Las Vegas for multiple years. Let’s just say that it would not be a bad location if we could avoid the decades old stench filled casino pit areas. The last time around, there seemed to be plenty of space for about 15,000 attendees. Hopefully, they’ll have plenty of space next year.

This year, I tried to be more involved with the social media activities. I am not a prolific blogger or tweeter. However, I definitely wanted to connect more and network with peers this time around. I wouldn’t say I had a huge amount of success, outside of meeting Cisco’s social media team for various business units. But, I did learn a new term: gamification. Obviously, I had been a willing participant for many years but never knew there was a label for it or strategies around it.

Oh, yeah.  Not like many around me remembered, but I certainly didn’t forget the #CAE:

To wrap this up, I would definitely like to convey that the conference is IMHO one of the premier conference events I’ve attended. Any items above that are less then stellar should not be used as a reason not to go. I wholeheartedly recommend you as a network engineer should attend. Like anything that is beloved and treasured, I’m sure some of my perspective is rooted in the nostalgia of “the good ole days”.