Programmability at Cisco Live 2016

Today I want to post my observations regarding the DevNet component of the Cisco Live 2016 conference.

Conference Strategy

In years past, I ate up every single breakout session and at least one technical seminar (extra cost).  My philosophy was centered around the full exposure, massive brain infusion, and “drink from the fire hose” aspect of the conference.  During those years, I was an IT architect for a university and needed to develop a strong sense of the best technologies (for that institution) as well as the direction those technologies were going.

This year (2016), I was in a new role at a new company (financial services).  The technologies I oversee require a substantial level of automation, monitoring, and programatic analysis of complex system behavior - it’s called High Performance Computing.  As such, I spent about equal time in breakout sessions that were focused on the usual network technologies and the balance of time in the DevNet area presentations.

DevNet Zone

That DevNet time was primarily spent in two of the available formats:  theater/classroom areas and the workbenches.  The one area I did not frequent much were the topical booths where one could walk up and learn more about VIRL, for example.  The theaters and classrooms were not terribly different in format from a breakout session - standard lecture format.  Good, solid content and presenters.

By and large, though, I though the workbenches were a wonderful experience.  Every session I sat in on provided a hands-on experience for the technology presented.  Many of the workbenches had 8 or so MacBooks preloaded with the environments that, with the flexibility of virtualization, allowed each session to have clean environment for their own private lab.  Most of the presenters provided session material via GitHub (https://github.com/CiscoDevNet) or other content sharing medium (I vaguely recall a DropBox might have been used).

The programmability topics ran a pretty wide gamut - UCS Manager for servers, APIC-EM for enterprise networking, and Mantl for container/microservices infrastructure.  There was also a three part session on “Introduction to Python Network Programming for Network Architects and Engineers” (DEVNET 1040, 1041, and 1042) that takes participants from Python basics to creating network connections to making REST API calls - with all the sample code in between.

My only disappointment in all the programmability focus is that much of it was fairly high level and the sessions were barely 45 minutes long.  I wanted the similar levels of depth and intensity that are available in the Networkers break out sessions.  Despite my desire for more, though, the theater and workbench sessions definitely had strong content for the target audience - strong network engineers without a systems or programming background.

But, to counter that, many of the sessions leveraged a few of the existing demonstrations that exist online for people to freely run through at the DevNet Learning Labs (https://learninglabs.cisco.com). Additional, more advanced demo labs exist for users to continue developing their expertise.

Take Away

With my experiences in DevNet, the content from several breakout sessions, and some of the discussions with Cisco engineers, Cisco is definitely placing a LOT of focus on automation and network programmability.  It is certainly laced all throughout their Digital Network Architecture (DNA).  You can learn more about the fruits of what they are doing over at the DevNet website (https://developer.cisco.com/site/devnet/home/index.gsp).

I really hope the Cisco Live 2017 DevNet improves on three fronts:

1. Step up the depth of the content - some of the introductory material is great for network engineers looking for a helping hand into programming.  Deep dives into the API of each platform, particularly in the workbench areas, would provide huge value.  I did attend a solid expose on the UCS XML API and APIC-EM but more complicated uses of the API are in order.  They may have been there and I didn’t catch them because …
2. Better scheduling - the workbenches were scheduled on the hour for the most part, practically ever hour.  This made it very difficult to attend breakout sessions from the normal “Networkers” portion of the conference and many of the DevNet sessions.
3. Technical Seminars - “bootcamps” on programming against an API.  Maybe that advanced material I’m looking for can be wrapped into an 8-hour session to build a particular, simple application based on that API?

Disclaimers

I was a member of the Cisco Champions program for 2016.  Being a member of the program, I was provided access to some NDA presentations and stumbled upon access to a suite at the Cisco Appreciation Event.  Other than no lines getting into the event or getting food/drinks, there were no other benefits to such access.

Also, I also tied for 3rd place in the Cisco Live 2016 blogger contest!  The prize for the contest was front row seats at each of the keynote speeches for the conference.  Other than a cool selfie with Chuck Robbins (while wearing a kilt!) and a great view, there were no other benefits to the prize.  You can read about the contest at URL.

No one asked for any social media coverage nor did I commit to providing any for the NDA access or CAE suite.  The blogger contest did require making quality blog posts about Cisco Live (duh!).

At the beginning of 2017 (in 4 short days!), I will be joining Cisco as a Virtual Systems Engineer (VSE).  I am posting this article because I enjoyed the Cisco Live conference, the social media crowd I got to know, and the immense high-quality information that I learned (or at least was made aware of!).  I was not asked to post this as a condition of employment or as a result of my employment.