Intro

So it’s been almost 5 months since my last blog post. I can’t believe it’s been that long 😬… but I’m back!

I thought what a better way to come back then recap my experience at this year’s Cisco Live US conference held in Las Vegas, so let’s get into it!

This post will be specific to my experience, so I won’t be going over every new product/innovation announced… there are plenty of articles out there to go over that (hint hint). I’ll touch on some of the sessions I went to, the vendor booths I liked, my exam experience, and my overall thoughts on the conference.

Cisco Live Opportunities

Before I dive into my thoughts, I wanted to level-set on some of the opportunities I took advantage of (with a full conference pass) at Cisco Live:

• Keynotes
• Technical Sessions
• World of Solutions (Cisco/Vendor booths)
• Free exam voucher

There are other opportunities at Cisco Live (i.e. Capture the flag, labs, etc.), but as other attendees know, there’s so much to do and not enough time. My post will be specific to the opportunities I took advantage of at the conference.

Keynotes

At Cisco Live, there are two keynotes. I only had the opportunity to attend the “main” keynote on Tuesday. I say “main” because this is the keynote with all the announcements and updates from Cisco’s executives.

Overall, I thought the keynote’s message of simplicity was a step in the right direction. I think Cisco has realized their product portfolio has exploded over the past few years with acquisitions (i.e. Viptela SD-WAN, ThousandEyes) and other innovations (i.e. DNA Center), and they needed to simplify the management of their platforms across different network domains. The introduction of Cisco Networking Cloud is a good start, but there’s much more work to be done. I also heard they are planning to simplify their licensing model, but I haven’t seen any other details around it yet. This would be a step in the right direction, and support their simplifying message.

One personal thought is that I noticed Cisco Meraki has continued receiving more and more features to integrate Cisco Catalyst switches. I believe they mentioned in the keynote that you’ll soon be able to manage the software images across your Catalyst switches. Personally, I can see customers beginning to ask more questions, such as whether they should continue with DNA Center (as many are still adopting it), or begin looking at integrating their Catalyst environment with the Meraki Cloud. Obviously, there are some constraints between the two (i.e. DNA Center can be on-prem vs pushing your network management to the cloud, features/capabilities, etc.), but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more conversations happening.

Technical Sessions

As you may guess, most of my sessions revolved around the DevNet Zone. However, I always try to make sure to attend a few “traditional” networking sessions. I use quotes to signify these sessions were strictly about good ol’ networking tech. The two network sessions I attended were BRKDCN-1621 – Introduction to VXLAN: The Future Path of Your Datacenter and BRKARC-2093 – Innovations in Silicon and Software: Defining the Next Generation of Enterprise Technology. Both were great sessions with fantastic, knowledgeable speakers.

The “Introduction to VXLAN” session explained the journey from traditional L2 spanning tree in the datacenter to how/why VXLAN BGP-EVPN makes more sense with today’s application workloads and flows. I specifically enjoyed the packet walk slides, which helped explain the structure of a packet and how it changes hop-by-hop.

The “Innovations in Silicon and Software” session was a real eye-opener for me. The session was very heavy from a technical perspective. We dove into the lifecycle of ASICs – how they are designed, built, and programmed. Even though it was very technical, you could tell each presenter was ingrained in their work and really loved what they do, which makes the presentation so much better.

Now let’s move onto the DevNet sessions I attended. In total, I attended around 10 sessions focused on automation/software dev. There were some other smaller “lightning talks” that I was hoping to attend, but like I said in the beginning, time flies when you’re at the conference. I won’t highlight all the sessions, but let’s go over my top 3 (in no particular order): DEVNET-3008 – Extending CML: Terraforming the Lost City, DEVNET-2092 – API Design-First – Not Just Another Pretty Interface, and BRKCRT-2013 – Test-Driven Automation with pyATS.

Terraform and CML have always been of interest to me ever since the CML Terraform provider was released (CML TF docs), so it made sense to attend the “Extending CML: Terraforming the Lost City” session. Also, I’ve followed and chatted with Quinn Snyder on Twitter and Discord in the past, so I had meet him IRL. The presentation was great – Quinn has a natural ability to keep the audience engaged through his genuine excitement about the tech. I also learned about a new tool – atlantis – which creates pull request automation workflows.

I attended multiple API-focused sessions. Now that I’ve had experience building smaller automation projects, I wanted to learn more about API best practices, contracts, and how they can be built to “industry-standard”. The “API Design-First” session did not disappoint. The presentation dove into the OpenAPI Spec (OAS) and how important it is to establish an API spec and to keep it up-to-date. There are many benefits using OAS, which ultimately makes your job (API maintainer) easier. There’s a lot to touch on with OAS, so this topic may spin out to be a separate blog post in itself.

The last session I attended at the conference was presented by my good friend, John Capobianco. It was “Test-Driven Automation with pyATS”, which obviously is one of my favorite tools for network automation testing. I don’t think this needs to be said, but John obviously nailed the presentation. The excitement and joy on his face as he presented really helped capture the audience. I believe many people left that presentation looking for more. Way to go John!

World of Solutions

One of the coolest parts of Cisco Live is walking around the World of Solutions. Think of any vendor from L1-L7 on the OSI model and there’s a good chance they have a booth setup at Cisco Live. Starting with L1, you have manufacturers of racks, cabling, and power management (Panduit, Eaton, Legrand, etc.). Moving up the stack, you have a plethora of companies from multiple tech domains – network monitoring/telemetry, network automation, cloud providers, cellular/mobility, security, and the list can go on and on. If you’d like to learn more about the all the different vendors that were at the conference, check out the exhibitor list here: Exhibitor List.

I found myself spending much of my time wandering from booth to booth, learning about the different products each company was promoting. The 3 booths I enjoyed the most were (in no particular order):

• Forward Networks: best booth appearance – check out pictures of their booth on their Twitter account
• ThousandEyes: best swag – their t-shirts were a W
• Itential: spent the most time at this booth – they are doing a lot of cool stuff with automation

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, the World of Solutions is where everyone gets their swag. This was my second Cisco Live, so I had a little more control, but you’ll see many people carrying around a separate bag packed full of swag they’ve collected from the different vendor booths. Even if you aren’t into swag, I recommend leaving some space in your suitcase when you pack for Cisco Live. There’s a good chance you’ll come home with more than what you brought.

Free Exam Voucher

The last, and definitely not the least important, opportunity I took advantage of at Cisco Live was the free exam voucher. This voucher provides you one “free” (it comes bundled with the price of the full conference pass) attempt at any Cisco exam (minus Expert-level labs). I decided to take the Cisco 300-910 DEVOPS exam. My initial goal was to take it to get a feel for the exam, but as I was taking the exam, I realized there was a chance I could pass. To my surprise, I passed!

I still need 40 CE credits to renew my CCNPs, but the Rev Up to Recert series provided by Cisco U. should be able to help with that 😁. If there’s interest, I may write a separate blog post on my experience with the DEVOPS exam.

Community

Since you’ve made it this far, I decided to include one last opportunity that everyone needs to take advantage of at Cisco Live – meeting other people in the industry. Luckily, I’ve had the opportunity to build relationships with many people in the online network engineering communities. It was so great to meet a bunch of people for the first time (in person) that I’ve talked to on Discord and/or Twitter for the past couple years. This was the absolute best part of the conference! I hope to meet many of you again at other meetups and conferences!

Wrapping Up

My overall experience at Cisco Live was great. I attended some great sessions, met some great people (finally in-person!), and left recharged to make more content and continue helping others in the community. As always, if you would like to chat or have any feedback, feel free to hit me up on Twitter (@devnetdan). Until next time!