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  • Cisco Unveils 800G Networking Platform to Advance DataOps

    Cisco Unveils 800G Networking Platform to Advance DataOps

    At the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit conference, Cisco announced it developed an 800-gigabit switch that consumes significantly less power than the previous generation of its networking equipment.

    Thomas Scheibe, vice president of product management for cloud networking for Cisco’s Nexus and ACI product line, said the throughput provided by the latest 7-nanometer iteration of Cisco One ASIC processors is primarily needed by organizations processing massive amounts of data to train artificial intelligence (AI) models either in a local data center or in the cloud. The challenge is that many of the organizations are looking to build AI models that process massive amounts of data while simultaneously reducing their IT infrastructure’s carbon footprint, he noted.

    Cisco has been able to achieve that goal by continuing to invest in proprietary ASIC processors; they are at the core of its networking portfolio to improve data operations (DataOps), said Scheibe. Many IT teams are also looking to replace legacy network routers and switches that consume more power and reduce energy costs by as much as 77%, added Scheibe. In terms of climate impact, Cisco claimed its 8111-32EH switch can now provide 25.6Tbps at 15% of the power requirement. Cisco projected that switch will save about 10,000 kg CO2e per year compared to a 12.8Tbps switch. That equates to the greenhouse gas emissions generated by an average gasoline-powered passenger vehicle driving 26,155 miles, according to Cisco.

    IT teams also have the option of deploying either Cisco’s network operating system or SONiC—Software for Open Networking in the Cloud—network operating system (NOS).

    Cisco is also providing IT organizations with the option to configure its latest routers and switches to run at either 800, 400 or 100 Gigabits with an eye toward upgrading throughput sometime in the future.

    In general, DataOps as an IT discipline is maturing as organizations realize they need to implement best practices to optimize data flows across their organization. Cisco is giving IT teams the option of employing a standard Ethernet fabric or an alternative fabric that increases throughput by predicting which packets need to be delivered to a specific location based on their attributes and the behavior of previous network traffic. As the volume of data that needs to be accessed by low-latency applications continues to expand, DataOps will become a more critical IT discipline. Historically, storage administrators tended to be responsible for data management, but as these applications continue to proliferate, a new class of DataOps engineers is emerging to optimize the flow of data across distributed computing environments.

    In the longer term, it’s not clear how much carbon dioxide emissions are factoring into IT decisions these days, but there are organizations that have begun to track it as part of an effort to lower their carbon emissions. Most cloud service providers have also committed to being carbon neutral. Cisco is betting achieving that goal will require IT infrastructure upgrades at a time when the amount of data that needs to be processed will only continue to exponentially increase.

  • Automation has Become an Absolute IT Necessity – Techstrong TV

    Automation has Become an Absolute IT Necessity – Techstrong TV

    Vijoy Pandey, vice president of emerging technologies and Incubation for Cisco, explains why automation has become an absolute IT necessity. The video is below followed by a transcript of the conversation.

    Michael Vizard: Hey, guys, thanks for the throw. We’re here with Vijoy Pandey, who’s vice president of emerging technology and incubation for Cisco. We’re gonna be talking about all things related to automation. Vijoy, welcome to the show.

    Vijoy Pandey: Thank you, Mike, pleasure to be here.

    Michael Vizard: Right now, everybody is struggling, looking to find people, hire people, retain people, and this was an issue before COVID came, but it seems like it’s much worse these days, and there seems to be no end in sight. So, what is your best advice to folks about how to think about managing talent these days?

    Vijoy Pandey: Yeah, I think that’s a pretty important point you raise there, Mike. Just like everybody else, we’ve been seeing not just news articles around the great resignation, but also we’re feeling that inside of Cisco as well. We know that our partners, our customers, all of us are feeling that pinch, where it’s incredibly important to retain top talent, but it’s also very hard to find talent, given the trends that we’re seeing around us.

    Anything about cloud computing, anything about AI, all of those things. So, we think of the problem in a very different way. We think – and we’ve done a bunch of surveys inside of Cisco – what we realized was given the global nature of events – we know some events unfolding right now – and all of the geopolitical events happening, all the pandemic, people really are realizing that life is too short.

    It’s not a pithy statement here, it’s actually people believe that life is just too short, and they actually want to do meaningful work. They want to make an impact, not just to the team that they are with, nor the company that they’re with, but even a global impact with the work that they do.

    But they also want to grow and learn, and make sure that they are on a path themselves towards meaningfully improving their own lives. So, I think those are pretty important characteristics that we have gathered, and as organizations and as teams we need to harness that desire to make both local impact as well as global impact as well as figure out how to drive meaning into everybody’s personal lives – yours, mine, our teams’, and so on and so forth.

    So, there’s a bunch of things that we are doing inside of Cisco to make sure that this meaning, or meaningful impact, is nurtured. One of the things that we keep on saying is that yes, there is a business to run, but there’s also an avenue we need to give our employees and our teams to innovate, to look at impact beyond the run-of-the-mill business that any corporation needs to do.

    So, typically what we end up doing is we end up taking problem statements that we face, let’s say, as a team or an organization, and we start splitting it into buckets. So, think about buckets that deal with run-of-the-mill business, because that, you need to absolutely take care of.

    But also, there are buckets that you need to innovate around or do meaningful work around. So, we have a portfolio management system inside, at least on my team, that says let’s take 60 percent of your time and make sure that that’s allocated towards run-of-the-mill business as usual projects, and then maybe 30 percent of the time which is future-looking and adding new features or looking at new markets and so on and so forth, and maybe 10 percent of your time is actually towards growing yourself, nurturing yourself, or making some meaningful impact on the global stage. So, that’s actually how we’ve been viewing the problem.

    Michael Vizard: Early on, I think a lot of people were intimidated by automation, and there was concerns that people might lose their jobs. Now, I wonder if we’ve flipped that entirely, where people are saying hey, I don’t really wanna work for organizations that don’t have automated IT process in place because of your points – there’s just things that I don’t wanna spend my day doing anymore. So, has the whole conversation flipped, as far as automation is concerned?

    Vijoy Pandey: I would say the conversation is flipping as we speak, again, yeah, going back to the previous comment, yes, people don’t want to spend time on repeatable tasks, on things which a computer can do better than you and I can do. I have this constant struggle with my kid nowadays as to why do I need to learn grammar when there’s Grammarly? But that’s a different matter.

    But I think it’s a similar mindset going through every individual in the workforce, as to am I really adding value in the workplace, and am I being more productive, which in turn translates is the organization being more productive, which in turn translates to is the economy and the country being more productive.

    So, I think the bump towards productivity is definitely a goal that people are more concerned about, and you hear the other side of this, which is, as you pointed out, is the digitization of the workplace is the digitization of all economy. That’s in progress.

    We’ve called that using various phrases – software eating of the world, or the API economy – whatever term that you want to use. But we are moving towards a world where software is critical in driving everything that we do. Software in terms of automation, or even beyond that, is definitely key to whatever we do.

    Michael Vizard: Not too long ago we all thought we’d be running around by flying cars by now, and that IT would be easy. We’ve seen neither, and it looks like IT is getting more complex than ever. So, my question to you is is IT getting to the point where it is just too complex to manually deal with and we need automation, because we are seeing all these microservices, serverless frameworks.

    There’s all our existing monolithic applications, it’s distributed all the way out to the edge now. Have we reached some sort of inflection point?

    Vijoy Pandey: Yeah, I think to your point IT is definitely way more complex than it was even a decade ago, and I think the crux of the matter is that the way you are building applications and all of the digitization that we talked about is actually taking place in a very, very distributed manner.

    So, as an application developer, first and foremost, we at Cisco like to say that the application is your brand. So, if I am a bank, how my customers interact with the apps that I build defines me, my company, my bank, as the brand. Because if bank A has more capabilities in their software, their mobile app, versus bank B, I will migrate towards bank A.

    So, I think the application is becoming the front end to everything customer experience is all about. So, if you take that notion and play it out, that means the application developer that is developing those applications is under extreme pressure to deliver velocity behind features, do deliver trust with the data of the customers, to deliver uptime and security and so on and so forth.

    So, which means that they are picking and choosing all of these APIs that exist anywhere to make their job faster, easier more secure, more trustworthy. So, if you think about that kind of an environment, as a developer, I’m picking APIs from cloud providers, SaaS providers, I have legacy systems, I have transaction systems, I have edge devices, in the case of a bank. It might be sitting at a branch office.

    I have all of these APIs and systems that I need to interface with just to build one particular app or feature. So, in this kind of a distributed environment, think about the IT – more IT people, right? It’s like I’m trying to build a platform that caters to these kind of demands, and so it is definitely getting more complex, it’s getting more distributed, and every provider in the distributed environment has their own semantics, their own lifecycle management behind their APIs and their infrastructures.

    So, automation – I mean, it’s just humanly impossible to not just deploy but even manage and observe such a highly distributed – and secure, by the way – such a highly distributed system. So, automation is key to doing all of this, a direction automation, to me, is discoverability.

    It’s intent-based, it’s security, which is there’s no longer a perimeter of security, and it’s observability across all of these end points, API to mainframe. That is key to moving forward.

    Michael Vizard: Do you think as we go along that organizations – at least some of them I talked to, it’s almost like a chicken and an egg kind of issue. They have so much legacy stuff that can’t be automated that they can’t invest in automation, and they can’t necessarily buy all new platforms tomorrow. So, how do we get over the automation hump to kind of get from point A to point B without necessarily breaking the IT budget?

    Vijoy Pandey: Yeah, that’s a great point. I think some of that, I’ve dealt with in my previous lives as well. The way to do that is – and there’s no questions about it, that for some period of time, there is going to be more chaos and more money spent than before that time or after that time.

    So, we just have to acknowledge that as vendors, as customers, as organizations, that for some period of time, there’s going to be turmoil. That’s the way, at least, I’ve handled it in the past, where you say let’s put milestones, where we say maybe we look after a pocket of the organization, and say we’re going to build this out in a highly automated, distributed, cloud-first, API-first manner.

    This part of the application, this part of the infrastructure goes out and does that. To do that, we’re going to do a clean slate process here. So, we’ll think about – we won’t get ourselves bound to organizational boundaries, skill set boundaries – that is very hard to do. Most people’s jobs, peoples’ skill sets, organizational structures, all of that.

    But we have to try in some pockets, and then give ourselves strict guidelines and metrics, and try and meet those metrics. If we meet those metrics, the resulting outcome is that I will be spending less moving forward than I’m spending today.

    So, I might spend a little bit more in getting maybe SREs or software engineers, and marrying them up with IT folks or architects, and getting something going. I’ll give myself a timeline of let’s say a year or 18 months; it cannot be longer than that, otherwise it’s a science project. 

    But after those 18 months, these are the metrics I’m going to come back to. I’ll get X percent improvement in productivity, and Y percent reduction in head count, let’s say. We shall measure ourselves to that objective, and I’ve seen that work.

    If it works – and start with something simpler. But go all the way, don’t go 80 percent. Let’s not do 80 percent automation or 80 percent of the use cases. Hundred percent automation, 100 percent of the use cases for this pocket of your environment, and then grow that out over time.

    Michael Vizard: We, of course, hear a lot about artificial intelligent and AI Ops. Are the machines gonna save us from ourselves? What’s the reality of AI?

    Vijoy Pandey: To me, AI is a tool, just like all of the other tools that we’ve talked about, which is we’ve talked about automation or infrastructure as code, we’ve talked about cloud native and serverless and microservices. Each one of these tools, programming and scriptings tools.

    So, all of these tools bring in something to the table, and infrastructure as code brings in consistency and intent-based infrastructures, and serverless and microservices, or cloud-native, bring in immutable architectures.

    The fact that you can grow and scale out and do all of those things, and availability goes through the roof and velocity goes through the roof. Similarly, AI and ML bring in insights to the table where it was humanly, again, impossible to do that just by looking at the vast variety of data and the deluge of data coming our way.

    If we could just take all of that – and it’s all unstructured. So, if I could take all of that and somehow put it in a structured database and somehow make sense of it as an individual, sure, we don’t need the AI or ML. But if I need to take all of that unstructured data and make some sense out of it, there’s no other way out, and I do need AI and ML.

    I mean, I do need some statistical mechanism first, to figure out and make some sense out of it. I do need AI/ML, maybe deep-learning, to make some sense out of it. But then I need to marry that tool with subject matter expertise, I need to marry that tool with what I as an individual, or as humans, we’ve learned in the past, because AI doesn’t have that context.

    Yes, we can do learning, all sorts of learning, but it doesn’t always work in all kinds of environments. We need to marry that with subject matter expertise, with some boundary conditions, and then we need to marry it with actions. Because AI/ML is gonna give us insights, but somebody needs to take actions on the insights.

    So to me, it’s a tool in the toolbox, and we need to leverage it when it makes sense. We need to rely on subject matter expertise when it makes sense, and eventually things will get to a point where we need to go to the next level of abstraction. 

    So, it’s always a game of moving that level of abstraction higher and higher, and that’s what we are after. So, maybe someday there will be flying cars and robots that will take all our jobs, but not right now.

    Michael Vizard: How do I bridge this divide in IT that maybe we don’t talk enough about, but there’s clearly a DevOps community that’s very programming-centric. The use APIs. Then there’s traditional IT administrators that use ITSM tools. They tend to be more graphical in nature. As we move forward with automation, do you think that those two camps are gonna converge, or how will this all play out?

    Vijoy Pandey: In my opinion, I think they have to converge. I think each one of those pieces have their space in the hierarchy of things. One of the things I learned pretty early on in one of my previous lives is what good is a dashboard if you cannot take an action on it?

    So, if you think about all dashboards that exist today, eventually, there is data being presented in a certain way about a certain problem, so that somebody can look at that and take an action. If you think about infrastructure as code, it’s exactly that.

    It’s basically let’s remove the dashboard, and let’s figure out what goes – triggers that, that allow me to take those preset actions. Let’s try and remove the action of a human looking at a dashboard, thinking about it, and taking some action on it.

    Now, again, I’m describing utopia, but I think that’s where, as engineers, as operations folks, we all need to move towards. To me, dashboards are a good start when the problem is less well understood. As we understand the problems better, we need to move towards code.

    Dashboards will still have their place in helping us understand more and more complex problems, but as problems are better understood, they need to move towards code. And that’s the way at least I think through it.

    Michael Vizard: All right, so automation needs to be our new North Star, as it were. Hey, Vijoy, thanks for being on the show.

    Vijoy Pandey: Thank you so much, it was a pleasure, and I enjoyed our conversation.

    Michael Vizard: All right, back to you guys in the studio.

  • Will Splunk be Gobbled up by Cisco?

    Will Splunk be Gobbled up by Cisco?

    Word on the street is that Cisco and Splunk are in discussions about a possible acquisition. Splunk, the technology monitoring, search and analytics company could be acquired by Cisco—originally a networking company but now a complex hardware and software conglomerate.

    Splunk has generated quite a reputation as a ‘dealer’ over the years. The company, much like a drug dealer, gets you hooked and then, when you can’t live without what they’re selling, makes you pay. The difference is that what they’re selling is insight and visibility into your own data.

    For many years, Splunk’s pricing model was simple—customers paid for the amount of data that was ingested. Splunk didn’t invent this type of pay-for-what-you-use-and-consume model. For mainframe workloads, IBM has long charged clients based on millions of instructions per second, or MIPS. Likewise, the entire cloud computing business model is based on a pay-for-what-you-use model. If, for example, you leave an AWS experimental instance running over the weekend or while you’re a vacation, you’re going to pay for it (many of us have learned that the hard way).

    So why am I picking on Splunk for being a dealer? The whole value proposition of Splunk is that the more data it ingests, the more useful the software platform can be. Splunk can help operations and security teams connect disparate data points to uncover potential emerging problems or greatly reduce the time it takes to resolve an incident. However, to unlock the power, you need to push more and more (and more and more) data into Splunk.

    But here is where Splunk gets down and dirty: Like any dealer, Splunk will give teams free trials and the ability to ingest data from new areas of your business for free. Once a team starts to see the value and is hooked on the software, the Splunk sales team is right there to take your money.

    Splunk now offers other pricing models, but the stigma sticks.

    Splunk Customers are the Company’s Best Salespeople

    Splunk has done an excellent job at creating evangelists out of their existing client base. I’ve attended a lot of vendor conferences, and my experience is that Splunk’s customers are some of the most enthusiastic I’ve ever encountered. What does user enthusiasm tell me about a vendor’s product? It is either that the product is making that employee a superstar within their company or making that employee highly desirable across the broader technology market.

    At Splunk events when I have candid conversations with customers, the adoption pattern follows a fairly standardized script. The IT operations team adopted Splunk. IT operations had a ton of success and shared that with the rest of IT. Security saw ops’ success and wanted to try Splunk out for themselves. In many cases, the cybersecurity use case within the company became the bigger Splunk deployment once the platform’s capabilities were understood.

    So Why Would Splunk Sell?

    Customers like Splunk and they’re obviously seeing value. So, why would a company like that ever sell? Well, first of all, the SIEM 2.0 market vanished; security log data analysis is table stakes. What do I mean by that?

    So Long, SIEM

    The idea of security information and event management (SIEM) hasn’t gone anywhere, but now security vendors need to do more than just SIEM.

    It wasn’t long ago that those of use following the security industry tracked RSA Netwitness, Logrhythm, IBM Qradar, HPE ArcSight, RSA Archer, Carbon Black and other SIEM vendors. The reality is that all of these companies have gone through massive transformations. Those of you reading this article might be surprised by the companies that now own many of these SIEM vendors!

    Splunk is no longer unique in its approach to applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to security log data.

    AIOps—The Company Lost its Focus

    Splunk cut its teeth with operations teams. The company helped ops teams quickly find the root cause of disruptions and spot problems before the pain was felt by customers. However, operations isn’t sexy. Rather than doubling and tripling down on operations, the company expanded to security. It made sense; security organizations deal with huge amounts of complex data.

    However, as DevOps rose to prominence, Splunk has been widely left out of the conversation. DevOps teams need software tools that can normalize data across job function-specific software platforms. This would have been a perfect opportunity for Splunk—however, new competition stepped in to fill this gap.

    The World Evolved—Businesses Need Observability

    SIEM 2.0 was hot—“was” being the operative word. Today, DevOps and DevSecOps teams are looking for observability offerings. Observability tools provide teams with the ability to understand and see what is going on within systems and software from a variety of perspectives. Observability platforms can view system and cloud health and resiliency, but can also give operations teams container-level data.

    Enter the Observability Vendors

    By no means is this a comprehensive list, but my colleagues at Techstrong Research and I have come up with a list of observability vendors you should be paying attention to. Some of these vendors are pure-play observability companies while others, like Splunk, have a variety of offerings.

    •   Splunk
    •   Sumo Logic
    •   Logz.io
    •   StackState
    •   Lightstep (acquired by ServiceNow)
    •   Dynatrace
    •   App Dynamics
    •   VMware – Tanzu
    •   AWS CloudWatch
    •   Azure 
    •   Honeycomb.io
    •   Grafana Labs

    Acquisitions

    •   IBM acquired Instana for observability and Turbonomics for AIOps
    •   Cisco acquired Epsagon
    •   Cisco acquired AppDynamic for $3.7B for application performance management/monitoring
    •   VMware acquired Mesh7
    •   GitLab acquired observability distribution Opstrace 
    •   NewRelic acquired CodeStream
    •   Splunk acquired SignalFX, FlowMill and Omnition
    •   ServiceNow acquired Lightstep

    Within the observability space, there is also a tremendous amount of open source. Many vendors are coalescing around the OpenTelemetry project, for instance, that focuses on collecting data. This type of open source use makes sense—vendors should focus on areas of differentiation and customer value rather than just data collection.

    Open Source related projects

    • Prometheus
    • OpenTracing and OpenCensus from Google (folded into OpenTelemetry)
    • Zipkin (Twitter) one of the first open source tracing projects

    Why Would Cisco Want Splunk?

    Splunk’s stock has been in decline since its CEO left in Q4 of 2021. Like other technology companies, inflation and a general technology sell-off is further impacting its stock price. In addition, the company is transitioning clients to cloud-based offerings, which is often a painful process for public companies (many companies have gone private to eschew Wall Street’s prying eyes).

    Cisco has, historically, occupied the network layer. Splunk understands network data and can offer many benefits to Cisco clients.

     Splunk is an enterprise software vendor that can scale in a non-linear way if Cisco can add stability to Splunk’s leadership and vision.

    Now, will the deal for Splunk get done at $20 billion? No. But a possible acquisition is very possible, especially given the fact that Splunk’s runway is short and getting shorter.

  • Cisco CEO Addresses World’s Largest Cybersecurity Conference: “Security Must Be Simple, Intelligent and Everywhere”

    San Jose, CA, May 17, 2021 — Cisco, the leader in enterprise security, today unveiled innovations to further its journey to radically simplify and deliver end-to-end security, across users, devices, networks, applications and data. Announcements today improve Extended Detection and Response (XDR) with greater visibility across network, endpoint and cloud. New innovations expand Cisco’s vision for Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) with enhanced threat detection in the cloud and redefine and simplify network security. Cisco continues to simplify customers’ security, network and IT operations – empowering organizations to embark securely on digital transformation.

    The world has shifted towards a more distributed workforce, and with recent global events, hybrid work is here to stay. Users now expect to connect from anywhere and on any device, while security teams have the same complex, piecemeal and time-consuming solutions. It is time to rethink security.

    “Security has to be at the heart of everything in the new world we live in. We believe it needs to be done with a platform approach that is simple, comprehensive and based on intelligence,” said Cisco Chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins, addressing the virtual RSA Conference audience. “There is really no perimeter in the enterprise to defend anymore. We need visibility across endpoints, users and applications as well as securing critical control points with continuous passwordless authentication.”

    Improving Visibility and Simplifying Extended Detection and Response (XDR)

    The erosion of the network perimeter and transition to work-from-anywhere have conspired to expose endpoint devices, users and applications to threats more so than ever before. Organizations continue to struggle with extending visibility and protection to endpoints, with more than 40% globally reporting a major security incident in the last two years, according to the new Cisco Security Outcomes Study: Endpoint Edition. Organizations that do not prioritize integrated solutions were almost twice as likely to have suffered a major security event. In response, Cisco continues to expand its XDR capabilities, integrating multiple security control points and applying analytics and automation to reduce customers’ time to detection and response. Cisco today announced:

    • Industry-leading Vulnerability Management with Kenna Security: Cisco will combine threat and risk-based vulnerability management as part of the SecureX platform with its announcement of intent to acquire Kenna Security. This integration will help customers prioritize vulnerabilities, speed and automate decision making with tailored information, and accelerate response time for cyber readiness.
    • SecureX Device Insights: Customers can quickly consolidate their device inventory from multiple sources within the SecureX platform to provide unsurpassed visibility and context for IT operations (ITOps) and security operations (SecOps) as well as automated threat enrichment and response.
    • Simplified Transition to XDR from EDR: As the only endpoint security solution with a built-in platform, SecureX continues to help customers simplify the move from Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) to XDR with more than 30 pre-built workflows, 40 turnkey integrations and new orchestration capabilities. In addition, Cisco Secure Client, our single agent across user, cloud and endpoint protection, enables faster XDR while reducing agent fatigue.
    • Expanded Investigation and Quicker Response: Cisco Secure Endpoint’s advanced search technology now bolsters XDR value, offering more than 200 endpoint queries out-of-the-box to get real-time answers to support investigations, threat hunting, and IT Ops use cases such as tracking artifacts about endpoints.

    “Organizations are increasingly looking to adopt end-to-end security architectures to support this new way of working, and we think it’s critical to take a platform approach to simplify security, network, and IT operations as customers embark on digital transformation,” said Gee Rittenhouse, SVP and General Manager, Cisco Secure. “Since it was launched last year at RSA, more than 7,000 customers are using Cisco’s SecureX platform to unlock value from existing security solutions and accelerate their migration to XDR.”

    “SecureX device insights provides an instant view of all the endpoints and devices with details needed to assess compliance and health of all assets in my environment,” said John DePalma, Cybersecurity Engineer, Sentara Healthcare. “SecureX device insights delivers welcome help to gain momentum on our Zero Trust journey at Sentara.”

    Delivering on a SASE Vision with Enhanced Cloud Security

    Today’s distributed and hybrid workforce necessitates delivering protection and performance wherever employees access the internet or cloud applications. Cisco’s SASE architecture integrates multiple security and networking functions into a single, secure connectivity offer. This significantly simplifies security and reduces the cost, time, and resources previously required for deployment, configuration, and integration. Continuing to deliver on its SASE vision, Cisco today announced:

    • Rapid Deployment of Cloud Security across SD-WAN: New integration between Cisco Umbrella and Cisco SD-WAN powered by Meraki extends the SD-WAN fabric to the cloud with the click of a button and includes intelligent path selection to enable customers with secure access and the best user experiences when connecting to cloud applications.
    • Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) in Cloud-Delivered Firewall: Umbrella’s cloud-delivered firewall now includes an additional layer of protection with Snort 3 IPS, backed by Cisco Talos, one of the largest commercial threat intelligence teams in the world.
    • New Packages for Best Protection and Value: Umbrella’s new Secure Internet Gateway (SIG) Advantage package reduces the complexities of purchasing and unifying point solutions by offering a complete set of security capabilities in a single subscription.

    Redefining and Simplifying Network Security

    Constantly changing application environments make network security more complex. Modern continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) applications necessitate tighter coordination among developers, security, and network teams to ensure application environments and workloads are secure, firewalls are appropriately configured, and policies are integrated. Otherwise, vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in these constantly changing environments leave doors open for potential threat actors. Redefining and simplifying network security, Cisco today announced:

    • Industry-first Integrated Network and Workload Security: Cisco Secure Workload dynamically informs Cisco Secure Firewall of required policy changes and provides comprehensive visibility and control, no matter where applications are located.
    • Upgraded Threat Defense: Secure Firewall Threat Defense 7.0, delivers better efficacy with Snort 3 IPS, the world-leading threat protection platform which defined next generation intrusion prevention systems (NGIPS). Snort is now deployed across 800K+ Cisco devices, and the open-sourced Snort engine has seen over 8M+ downloads with 750K+ active users. It includes the flexibility to create robust policies in dynamic environments where fixed IP addresses don’t exist, and performance gains up to 30% on most appliances.  (Snort 3 is also now featured in Cisco SD-WAN powered by Meraki and Umbrella.) The addition of the SecureX ribbon to Secure Firewall Management Center also further simplifies detection and response.
    • Introducing Cisco Secure Firewall Cloud Native: Purpose-built for Kubernetes environments, Cisco Secure Firewall Cloud Native is developer-friendly, and the most elastic firewall Cisco has ever built.

    “At ePlus we strive to deliver effective, integrated cybersecurity centered on mitigating business risk,” said Lee Waskevich, Vice President of Security at ePlus Technology, Inc. “Cisco is building on a strong portfolio and continues to innovate how they deliver a holistic platform approach focused on reducing complexity, and integrating security across the network, endpoints, users, apps and cloud through SecureX. As a Gold Master Certified Security Partner, ePlus is excited to partner with Cisco and help our customers recognize the advantages SecureX brings to their security operations.”

    To learn more about Cisco’s solutions to simplify security, visit cisco.com/go/security.

  • Cisco Leans on HashiCorp to Manage Infrastructure as Code

    Cisco Leans on HashiCorp to Manage Infrastructure as Code

    HashiCorp and Cisco today announced a Cisco Intersight Service for Terraform offering based on HashiCorp Terraform Cloud Business software.

    Cisco Intersight is an IT operations management platform that enables IT teams to manage IT infrastructure across a hybrid cloud computing environment. Open source Terraform tools have emerged as the dominant tool for provisioning infrastructure as code in the cloud and, increasingly, in on-premises IT environments.

    HashiCorp Terraform Cloud Business is an instance of Terraform that has been extended to include some additional security and governance capabilities enterprise IT organizations typically require.

    In recent years, Cisco has significantly expanded its presence in on-premises IT environments as many IT teams opted to deploy its servers alongside its networking equipment. Like every other provider of on-premises IT environment, Cisco has been moving to extend the reach of its management frameworks to public clouds to help foster the rise of hybrid cloud computing.

    Prior to the pandemic, most public clouds and on-premises IT environments were managed in isolation from one another. However, in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the pandemic, more IT teams are trying to centralize the management of IT platforms as part of an ongoing effort to reduce the total cost of IT. The multiyear alliance with HashiCorp fills a major hole in the Cisco management portfolio, as Terraform increasingly becomes a de facto standard for provisioning IT infrastructure-as-code.

    Vijay Venugopal, head of product management for Cisco Cloud and Compute Software, said the alliance with HashiCorp will make it possible to provide Terraform support across a management portfolio that, over time, continues to be enhanced with machine learning algorithms that add artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, also known as AIOps. That platform is already being employed by 6,000 customers to manage more than 600,000 servers, running primarily in on-premises IT environments, added Venugopal.

    HashiCorp Terraform Cisco

    It’s unclear how the battle for control over hybrid cloud computing will ultimately play out. While providers of on-premises platforms such as Cisco are making a case for using existing management frameworks to also manage workloads deployed on public clouds, the providers of those platforms are now extending their reach into on-premises IT environments. Cisco is, of course, betting that most organizations would prefer to extend an existing framework to achieve that goal, versus having to rip and replace existing IT infrastructure to employ an alternative framework from a cloud service provider.

    Regardless of how organizations ultimately decide to manage IT in the age of the hybrid cloud, it’s clear developers, thanks to tools such as Terraform, are exercising more direct control over IT infrastructure. Incorporating Terraform within a larger IT management framework presents an opportunity to bridge the divide between developers and IT operations teams that have historically relied on visual tools to provision infrastructure. The challenge now is finding a way for developers and IT administrators – with varying levels of programming expertise – to work more closely as management of IT environments become increasingly more complex.

  • Cisco Revamps Portfolio at the Network Edge

    Cisco Revamps Portfolio at the Network Edge

    Cisco today announced a series of Catalyst offerings that combine the functionality of a secure software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) and a router in a single platform.

    Archana Khetan, senior director of product management for enterprise routing and SD-WAN infrastructure within the Intent Based Networking Group at Cisco, said the Catalyst 8000 series is made up of both physical devices and virtual appliances that eliminate the need for organizations to deploy separate SD-WAN and routers at the network edge.

    The high end of the Catalyst 8500 platform line is based on a third-generation Quantum Flow Processor, a proprietary ASIC that Cisco employs in its networking equipment. It is designed for data center, colocation and aggregation sites and, for the first time for Cisco, integrates 40G and 100G Ethernet ports.

    The Catalyst 8300 Series Edge Platforms are designed for branch offices that are transitioning from relying solely on routers to embracing SD-WANs. In addition to providing 4X better performance than legacy Cisco routers, the Catalysts 8300 series is designed to allow organizations to insert modules that are compatible with existing Cisco’s ISR 4400 routers. Compute and switching capabilities can also be added via a UCS-E Series blades and UADP-based switch modules can be added to create a software-defined branch office capable of running microservices-based applications based on containers on x86 processors. Cisco also unveiled today a Catalyst Cellular Gateway, for organizations that want to connect branch offices over 4G LTE wireless networks with support for 5G networks planned.

    Finally, Cisco has added Catalyst 8000V Edge Software, which enables IT teams to deploy Cisco networking software on a public cloud. While most public clouds already provide networking services, Catalyst 8000V Edge Software provides more advanced networking and security capabilities that can be managed as an extension of an existing enterprise network, said Khetan.

    Each member of the Catalyst 8000 series has been integrated with Cisco Umbrella to provide a means of managing networking and security policies via the cloud, while Cisco SD-WAN Cloud OnRamp integrates with cloud services from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Microsoft to provide visibility into those environments.

    In addition, each platform provides access to a programmable application programming interface (API) library as part of Cisco’s ongoing effort to meld network operations and DevOps workflows.

    While Cisco remains the dominant provider of networking equipment in the enterprise, the rise of SD-WAN platforms that essentially replace routers in branch offices has created a slew of competitors that are gaining footholds in branch offices at the expense of Cisco. With the launch of the Catalyst 8000 series, Cisco is aiming to bridge the gap between routers and SD-WAN appliances within a single platform that promises to be easier to manage via the cloud.

    It’s not clear to what degree that approach will resonate with enterprise IT environments, but it’s clear Cisco is now more than ready to strike back.

  • Cisco Aligns With Google to Meld DevOps and NetOps

    Cisco Aligns With Google to Meld DevOps and NetOps

    The extension of a partnership between Cisco Systems and Google to drive tighter integration between their respective software-defined wide area network (SD-WANs) offerings and cloud platforms promises to accelerate the convergence of NetOps and DevOps.

    John Apostolopoulos, vice president and CTO for Intent-Based Networking Group at Cisco, said in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic it’s clear more organizations will be employing SD-WANs as an alternative to virtual private networks. Many of those SD-WAN deployments, however, will be on public clouds rather than in a traditional on-premises data center, he added.

    As that transition occurs, DevOps teams will increasingly invoke SD-WAN services via application programming interfaces (APIs) residing in the cloud to provide users with access to cloud applications, noted Apostolopoulos.

    Cisco and Google have a technology alliance in place that spans everything from Kubernetes to cloud management software. That partnership is now being extended to include forthcoming deployments of Cisco SD-WAN software on Google Anthos, a cloud platform based on Kubernetes that can be deployed on any cloud or on-premises IT environment, sometime in the first half of 2021.

    The availability of SD-WAN services from Cisco on multiple cloud platforms will naturally have significant implications for NetOps teams. Rather than having to manage individual routers and switches, the future of SD-WANs is moving more toward being a set of software services that are programmatically invoked. It’s not clear to what degree NetOps teams might be folded into DevOps teams as that transition occurs. IT teams will always require networking experts to optimize networking services to one degree or another, said Apostolopoulos. However, the days when DevOps teams had to wait days or weeks for a NetOps team to manually provision network services on their behalf are coming to an end.

    Apostolopoulos said in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, flexibility has become a highly prized IT asset. As such, more applications will soon be deployed in the cloud than ever. Cisco is betting that rather than having to manage multiple cloud network services, more organizations will prefer to extend enterprise networking services from Cisco across multiple clouds. That approach will enable IT organizations to more easily centralize the management of network services via a management console built on top of a consistent set of APIs, he noted.

    Just as importantly, Cisco will provide the integrated tools needed to secure those network services, added Apostolopoulos.

    In effect, Cisco is betting that enterprise IT organizations are going to consolidate networking and security services as part of an effort to reduce the total cost of IT. Cisco may not always be the least expensive provider of an individual router or switch. However, the total cost of integrating networking and security offerings from multiple vendors can add up quickly. The degree to which organizations have the political will and economic capital required to achieve that goal, of course, remains to be seen. Nevertheless, it’s also clear that maintaining the current networking and security status quo is not going to be able to hold for very much longer.

  • DevOps Chats: App Attention Index and The Era of Digital Reflex, with AppDynamics

    DevOps Chats: App Attention Index and The Era of Digital Reflex, with AppDynamics

    Application performance company AppDynamics (acquired by Cisco in 2017) recently released its 2019 edition of the App Attention Index Report. The 2019 report is subtitled The Era of Digital Reflex. Joining me on this episode of DevOps Chats is Steve Long, AppDynamics regional CTO and technology strategy.

    Digital connections are a near-constant. Interacting with our world through digital apps and transactions are omnipresent: making a restaurant reservation using OpenTable, making payments using an app or our smartphone digital wallet and checking our smartphones to plan and move through our day. Thus the name of the report, The Era of Digital Reflex.

    In addition to insights from the report, Steve and I talk about measuring the customer’s experience, tying performance back to the desired business outcoming, strategies for finding problems and reducing the time it takes to fix problems. Join us on this compelling discussion about application performance, customer experience and business outcomes.

    As usual, the streaming audio is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation.

    Transcript

    Mitch Ashley: Hi everyone, this is Mitch Ashley with devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and you’re listening to another DevOps Chat podcast. Today I’m joined by Steve Long. He’s regional CTO and technology strategy with AppDynamics. Today we’re going to be talking about the 2019 edition of the App Attention Index Report findings, The Era of Digital Reflex. Whoa, that sounds heavy. Steve, welcome to DevOps Chat.

     Steve Long: Thanks for having me today, Mitch. It’s a pleasure to be here today.

    Ashley: Sorry, I kind of put on my ‘60s accent. “Whoa, man, heavy.” Would you start out be introducing yourself? Tell us a little bit about what you do and of course, in case somebody doesn’t know what AppDynamics does and what AppDynamics is about.

    Long: Yeah, sure, absolutely. So I’ll go back a little bit in time. I was a vice-president of technology operations for a media company and then my last job before joining AppDynamics, I was a chief information officer for a financial tech company, a large banking services company. And I joined AppDynamics because–for two reasons. One was finding problems in the sea of–no longer a needle in the haystack–it’s a needle in a needle stack, at this point. With all of the complexities happening, it changed my career. And when Cisco and AppD joined and that merger took place, I couldn’t think of, you know, two companies that I would love to be part of, that when they joined–you know, after I left being a chief information officer to come and help drive technology strategy for AppDynamics.

    So AppDynamics is a application performance management company that back in the dawn of the day I became one of their first 30 customers, about nine years ago, and really attaching to the run time and basically looking and analyzing your application performance. If the application is the north star of your business and typically how businesses are driving revenue and transactions, we’re at the forefront and the heart of that, to be able to tap into that and give an MRI to what’s happening in your cloud, your data centers and what’s happening with the complex technology running in the business.

    So that’s a little bit about AppDynamics. We’re an application performance company and part of Cisco, and driving businesses to really see into what’s happening in their technology ecosystems.

    Ashley: Excellent. Well you share something with me, and that is both the kind of end consumer of technology like this is a CIO but also a tech person in the product, the tech vendor. So that’s fantastic. I enjoy sharing that with you. Now tell us a little bit about the App Attention Index Report and what that’s about–what it measures, what kind of information that it discloses for us.

    Long: Yeah, so “The Era of Digital Reflex” is the title, but at the core we’ve really entered into really consumers saying they use digital services almost like you would a human, like an extension of your body, like a reflex. And today we’re doing that almost automatically or unconsciously. And that shift in consumers–like if you look past five years ago, we had to proactively do that. Now, with something in the palm of your hand, you don’t realize it, but now you’re relying on digital services like every day and it’s really helping you get your jobs done and your life duties, and you’re taking decisive actions by it being a reflex.

    And it’s kind of a wake-up call for the industry and businesses, because at this point we’re looking at the performance of these applications being application loyalty and it’s taken over to be the new brand loyalty. So if businesses really want to stay competitive, they really have to have a really flawless experience for their users. Otherwise it impacts their brand loyalty and their application loyalty and other things. So that’s the heart of the report at a high level.

    Ashley: Makes total sense. I mean, you’re talking about our digital world and our connection to it. It’s not only true today, but it’s even more so–every day there’s a new function we do on our phones, on our computers, on our TVs, on whatever device is connected to some cloud somewhere. It’s almost all a digital transaction.

    Long: Yeah, absolutely.

    Ashley: So tell us a little bit about this year’s report–what some of the findings were. What would be some of the most interesting things that came out of it?

    Long: I’d like to actually use an example that I have personally, and it’s based on the report. So I actually had a lunch with colleagues, a friend and a customer last week, and it was about six of us. And I said, “Hey, just out of curiosity, how many applications have you guys used today?” And to a one, they looked at their phone and all kind of raised their heads back up and one rattled 13, one 17, one 12, one 19. I was like, “How did you do that?” And they were like, “Well we tend to close out our applications at the end of the day and it’s 2 p.m. and I counted up from the last application used to now.” And I was blown away. And so I did the same thing and went back to the last one that I hadn’t closed and counted and I was at all 11 at that point in time, at 2 p.m. And I thought to myself, “Wow, okay.”

    And then I asked–the secondary question was, “Well, did any of those give you any problems? And I’m relating back to the app index, because if it had a problem, what did you do?” and the first example that came back was, “I had a reservation at a restaurant last night and I had to go close one and go to the other because it didn’t have my reservation, so I ended up having–for every application that I have, I have a competitor.” And if it’s really sticky, maybe like banking or something else, maybe they don’t, but they’ve got a few ride shares, a few travel apps, a few restaurant apps. And it’s really that wake-up call, because the metric that comes out of the report is about 55% of the people can’t go without their mobile device for up to four hours.

    I did that today before this, just to see if I could do it. And right before I got on here I had to give up, because I needed to see if I had a notification or a text or something that I had missed. And so personally it is that reflex, that extension. It’s what we do now unconsciously.

    Ashley: I think I’d rather hold my breath than try to live without my digital–

    Long: No doubt. No doubt.

    Ashley: So when you count the number of applications that people are using, do you count like, for example, on your phone you can look to see, how much battery time did you consume with different applications is another way to measure effectively kind of usage. How do you look at it?

    Long: Well I mean, it’s habitual. So we just looked at ones that were open. But I mean, if I go back and look at my day, my alarm goes up and I pick up my phone. And the first thing I did there was, “Now that I have my phone in my hand, I’m going to look at an application.” My schedule, maybe my e-mail, maybe a text. And we’re basically saying now that the first thing we do is not talk to humans; it’s to look at our apps. And nowadays–you know, if I go back five or six years, my house is now fully connected. So I’m looking at my security camera and any events, I’m looking at my thermostat. Did I leave my air conditioning or heat on? Is my car charged? You know, and do I need to set the thermostat in there? Is it 100 degrees out and do I need to put the AC on before I get in my car? And all of a sudden I’ve got energy usage tools.

    So these applications can be anything from a browser-based service, but they’re there to help you with your life. And then as you get to work it becomes even more–more of a need, with reminders and you know, calendaring and everything going on in your work world and sharing documents and collaboration. And that’s why at 2 o’clock you can hit somebody who’s had 20 and in a day they can be hitting 30 to 50. So it’s pretty amazing what these digital services are doing and how intrinsic they are to our daily lives.

    Ashley: Well it’s amazing, because one of the things–I’m guessing I’m probably not part of your report–but occasionally I’ll look to see how many connected devices or IP addresses have been allocated in my home. And it has gone from a dozen to two dozen to over 70 in a year and a half.

    Long: Wow.

    Ashley: And that’s just as I kind of went to a connected home. And every one of those is not just talking to stuff in the home. It’s talking to the cloud, you know, for the temperature management, for the door locks, for the security system, whatever–it’s all talking to something, if not me or one of my family members through an app on the phone or browser.

    Long: And think about when they don’t work and they can’t talk to that cloud or digital service. And since it’s an extension of your human interactions, now you can have expectations that are super high that you just had a disruption, and it can impact your mood. It can cause frustration. It can do things that you don’t even know are happening. And that’s why we call it–you know, it’s a reflex now. It’s intrinsic, it’s unconscious and it can cause strife in our lives when it doesn’t work.

    Ashley: That’s a really good point, because we always think about networks as end consumers as speed, but the reliability has also gone up significantly, and it’s going to have to increase in reliability moving forward, because that’s–it’s a reflex, it’s a dependency, it’s an expectation, it’s a customer satisfaction measure, right? Of what that experience is like.

    Long: Yeah, and I think the expectation just a few years ago was much lower, and every year that goes by–I think three quarters of the people we queried–that their expectations had gone up. And it’s growing and growing, and the tolerance levels now have also become more important, and these services are just more important because they’re prompting a higher demand and better experiences, so that businesses can help you with your daily lives. And so the  net of it all is we’re hungry for very positive digital experiences, and we’re willing to pay for that and have them be more personalized and know who you are and kind of know what you want, and that’s a huge differentiator between businesses competing with each other.

    Ashley: Interesting. As you looked at this data, were there different ways that you slice and dice, segmented–you know, home versus business or mobile versus browser or any of those kind of ways of looking at the information, to gather some interesting facts?

    Long: Yeah, we did. We have a crosscut of that. Mainly though looking at the consumer base side and how it interacts with the businesses and how the expectations of the consumer are there and need to be met and exceeded. The experiences need to grow. I know in our daily interactions from AppD, we look at e-commerce companies and banking and a number of different online services, and it’s pretty clear that the performance, the loyalties are pretty clean cut when you have a performing app versus a non-performing app. And the impact it has on the consumer. And so those can transcend almost every industry. It’s almost industry-less, where the application performance wins.

    You know, every hundred milliseconds of latency–you know, that causes some level of distress, and when you start to get into situations where something might take 10 seconds, in industry A that might be acceptable because it’s a longer-term type of transaction. But in industry B, which may be more of a real-time field, like I need a ride or I need a stock trade or I need something like that, 10 seconds is unacceptable. And if you’re not able to measure that and have application performance, you can’t dissect what your problem is because ultimately it’s your business transaction which leads to your experience–a journey that you’re going through, your business journey–and at the end of that rainbow is the actual business outcome that you’re looking for. And whether that’s a sale or moving money or buying a ticket or a new shirt, that’s the key, is having that business outcome.

    And the more we tie application performance to that business outcome, we’re better off as a business. At AppDynamics we look at all of the way to the edge, to the browser, to the device, to the data centers, to the cloud, but we also tack into that the ability to look at money or what the business KPI that’s being impacted. Because if you have a seasonal event like an inventory level dropping or a loss of money or you’re making more money because of a promotion, wouldn’t you want to know that your performance or your lack of performance–what the impact is to businesses?

    Ashley: It’s interesting too, because it wasn’t very long ago–I mean, maybe just a few years ago–where we’re almost solely reliant on things like an NPS measurement or call times–things that we do in the call center. And outside of that, you know, one person tells five people when they have a bad experience and you don’t really know those kinds of things. But now, in this age of data for everything, you know, the last time somebody used my Lyft app, “Oh, it was poor performance. We haven’t seen them in three weeks.” Maybe they went to Uber. I may not know that, but I know what their last–there’s data there to mine and to go after, where some of the telemetry information about performance could indicate some symptom that might’ve led to a consumer change in behavior.

    Long: Yeah, and it’s no longer–we talk about expectations and not meeting them, but the downside is that is your reputation risk. I mean, if you get an issue reported to you from internal or you know, somebody inside, that’s one thing, versus it being reported to your call center–that’s another thing–versus somebody switching to a competitor and posting it on a social media site. Now you’re not only worried about stock price and revenue risk; you’re talking about reputation risk. And that reputation risk really does tie back into those expectations not being met, at whatever level it is. So reputation and how, you know, media out there is picking up on that and promoting that when it’s negative–for a reason, because it’s a shared experience.

    Ashley: This may be a bit of an impossible question, so I recognize that up front. Is it possible to measure what customers’ expectations are? Is it too big of a moving target? Is it too many variables? Or is it something we can get a handle on? How do you address that?

    Long: Well, I firmly believe we can. And say that coming from the customer side of AppDynamics, but also–you know, businesses know their business, their KPIs, what outcomes they’re looking for. And if you don’t measure it, you can’t really make change in a positive way. So we see digital transformation–Agile–you know, we’re seeing BizDevOps–those are all things to really move businesses to become more efficient, drive the right decisions around the right business outcomes they’re looking for. And you know, I always say you do have to focus on the application performance. Being a past CIO, I tried to put myself in the customer’s shoes. I mean, if you don’t have a robust way to look at application performance then you don’t have that safeguard or those guardrails that you can put up to make sure that, you know, number one, your mission-critical applications are working, but number two, it’s the user experience. And being able to measure that and seeing that all the way from the edge to your cloud services.

    And the dependencies. I mean, think about it, the number of SaaS providers, cloud providers, third-party data that you’re touching just to execute a login on any application site, it could span hundreds of transactions. And if any one of those little things go wrong, you’re not focusing on application performance or you can’t measure it, and it could have a negative user experience.

    Ashley: Very good point. Because there are very few, maybe if any, closed ecosystems, to throw the “ecosystem” word in there. You really are reliant on a lot of other providers to come together to deliver that overall experience, that service, that functionality.

    Long: Yeah, and that’s how you get your business outcomes. So I do think that it’s achievable and you know, that performance and correlating it to the business performance and the business outcome–that’s really the objective companies are setting, and why they’re moving to APM and companies that are expanding out to give them business metrics on top of APM and consumer metrics on top of APM. Because it’s that trifecta. And if you think about it, there’s lots of ways you can look at logs or network flow data, but at the application, since it’s the central north star of the business, it’s the most granular and contextual data that you can get to see whether or not your business is performing. So that when you have that granular and contextual data down to the line of code maybe not performing, you’re able to look at the two most important metrics to any company, which is finding and fixing problems and reducing the time it takes to get to solutions on either side of that. So the faster you find them and fix them–whether it’s a ten-second issue that you can automate out of your system, or if it turns out to be a ten-hour outage, those are radical, you know, separations that we see in companies by just implementing the right tool set, the right performance measurements and really driving their businesses to reduce those risks in any company.

    Ashley: Okay. Maybe one last thing to kind of touch on–were there any other interesting findings, notable things? Maybe kind of a small little quirk thing that was “Wow, we didn’t expect to see that,” any other things to glean from the report?

    Long: No, I think we’ve covered it. At a high level I always suggest, put yourself in the consumer’s shoes. Really have a robust way to look at performance, and tie that back to the business outcomes. Because ultimately the business teams have a really hard time understanding IT and engineering, but the IT teams actually can make that leap. They can tend to look at the business challenges and situations, take that complex technology of all the ecosystems and translate that into showing the business what’s actually happening under the covers in a meaningful way. And that’s the basis of the report, is that the expectations are rising, the issues are out there. Finding them and fixing them, and really, put yourself in the consumer’s shoes, because it’s only going to grow, the dependency. And the flawless application wins.

    Ashley: Great. How do folks get a hold of this? How do they get to The Era of Digital Reflex report?

    Long: It’s posted on our AppDynamics website. It’s AppDynamics.com, and you can go ahead and get it there, and we’d be happy to share that.

    Ashley: Excellent. For you to download, I assume?

    Long: Yep, sure is.

    Ashley: Nice. Okay, well excellent. Thank you so much, Steve. Appreciate you being on DevOps Chat with us.

    Long: Thanks, Mitch. It was a pleasure, and I appreciate the invite.

    Ashley: Absolutely. I want to thank my guest today, Steve Long, regional CTO with AppDynamics. And of course we want to thank you, our listeners. We appreciate the time that you spend listening to us and ____ some feedback that you give. This is Mitch Ashley with devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Have a great day, and be careful out there.

    — Mitchell Ashley

  • DevOps Deeper Dive: DevOps Arms Race Heats Up

    DevOps Deeper Dive: DevOps Arms Race Heats Up

    A massive amount of capital is pouring into DevOps companies as organizations finally begin to realize the extent to which they depend on software. While Marc Andreesen may have penned his famous “Software Is Eating the World” opinion piece way back in 2011, it’s only now that many organizations are starting to realize they are software companies that also manufacture something or specialize in the delivery of some type of digital service.

    The most recent example of a massive injection of capital into the DevOps space came in the form of a $268 million investment in GitLab earlier this month. That move followed the acquisition of SignalFx, provider of an application performance management (APM) platform, by Splunk in a deal valued at just over $1 billion.

    Arguably, DevOps vendors have been gearing up for this fight for the better part of the last decade. Way back in 2014, New Relic picked up $115 million after going public. Three years later, Cisco Systems acquired AppDynamics for $3.7 billion.

    Now all these companies are racing to build the platform through which organizations of all sizes will transform themselves into true software companies by embracing best DevOps practices infused with large amounts of artificial intelligence (AI).

    DevOps as a concept has been around now for the better part of a decade. However, it’s only now that organizations are embracing DevOps across the entire application development life cycle. Previously, organizations embraced DevOps within isolated areas of the IT organization. Today, there is a much more concerted effort underway to apply DevOps practices to build and deploy software on an industrial scale.

    Achieving that goal, however, will require a lot more than simply adding higher levels of automation to a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform. As business leaders realize how dependent the organization is on new applications to drive additional revenue, they are demanding more visibility into the software delivery process. Every delay to a software project now has revenue implications for the business.

    As more organizations come to that realization, it becomes apparent that monitoring software continuously as it is being built and after its deployed is now crucial to the business, said New Relic CEO Lew Cirne.

    “If mission-critical software not working, then the business is not working,” he said. “You must watch it all; you can’t pick and choose.”

    To become the de facto standard within an organization for monitoring those processes, DevOps vendors are racing to build DevOps platforms capable of operating at unprecedented levels of both scale and speed, said SignalFx CTO Arijit Mukherji.

    “The scale of the data has increased,” Mukherji noted. “Everything needs to happen in real-time.”

    DevOps platforms need to be extended to include support for everything from distributed tracing to machine learning algorithms, which organizations will rely on to identify the patterns employed to build AI models, he added.

    That level of investment requires a lot of additional capital that DevOps vendors either need to raise or, in the case of SignalFx and AppDynamics, tap into as a subsidiary of a larger company.

    The rise of microservices is further exacerbating those challenges as the number of dependencies within and between smaller segments of code increases. That fundamental shift in application architecture will require organizations to re-engineer DevOps processes across both the application and infrastructure levels of the entire IT environment, said Matt Cleve, director and global lead for Business iQ at AppDynamics.

    “Real-time visibility into the entire application stack is going to be a lot more important,” Cleve said.

    AppDynamics and parent company Cisco together will be in a unique position to deliver on that promise, he added.

    A recent survey conducted by the Harvard Business Review (HBR) on behalf of AppDynamics finds only 22% of IT organizations have access to any kind of real-time IT metrics.

    Widespread adoption of best DevOps practices has been a long time in coming. What is clear now, however, is that the organizations that take full advantage of DevOps by the end of this decade will thrive the most through the next.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Cisco Extends Ansible Support to Advance DevOps

    Cisco Extends Ansible Support to Advance DevOps

    Cisco Systems announced today that it is further embracing the open source Ansible automation framework on its storage area network (SAN) platform as part of an effort to extend best DevOps practices to IT infrastructure. The latest version of the Cisco MDS 9700 platform modules automates tasks such as VSAN configuration, device-alias and zoning configuration.

    Adarsh Viswanathan, product manager for data center storage at Cisco, said the company has embraced the Ansible framework because it’s an open framework that is now being adopted by enterprise IT organizations to manage infrastructure in a more adroit fashion. The rise of cloud-native applications being developed with DevOps processes not only result in more applications accessing a common pool of data, but also require changes to be made dynamically to the underlying storage platform.

    Cisco is adding support for 64G-line cards when they become available along with support for non-volatile memory express (NVMe) and All-Flash arrays. Cisco has also extended its SAN Analytics software to add support for the NVMe/Fibre Channel protocol along with existing support for SCSI/Fibre channel.

    Viswanathan said support for Ansible will make it simpler for IT organizations to embrace automation at scale. Cisco has previously embraced open application programming interfaces (APIs), OpenStack and Python-based scripts. Ansible takes those efforts to a higher level by make available a declarative framework that doesn’t necessarily require IT operations teams to develop programming expertise, said Viswanathan.

    IT operations teams are coming under increased pressure to provide developers with an IT experience that rivals cloud service providers. Frameworks such as Ansible make it possible for IT operations teams to make IT resources available on-demand to developers using IT infrastructure residing in an on-premises environment.

    Friction between developers and IT operations teams is rising as DevOps processes are employed more widely within enterprise IT environments. Many of those developers have alternatively turned to cloud service providers to build and deploy their applications. However, many organizations still need to deploy applications once they move into a production environment hosted in a local data center. In fact, more than 70% of enterprise applications still run in a local data center a decade after the initial rise of cloud computing. IT operations teams that manage those on-premises IT environments need to provide developers with access to resources they can easily scale up and down as required.

    Cloud-native applications based on microservices will further challenge IT operations teams as the number of application services trying to share a limited set of IT infrastructure resources only increases. In the case of Cisco, those limited resources are rack-based servers attached to SANs such as the Cisco MDS 9700.

    Of course, not every IT operations team is going to embrace DevOps processes overnight. Instead, many of them will be exposed to frameworks such as Ansible as they upgrade servers and storage over time. The one thing that is certain is developers will continue to apply pressure to make that transition sooner than later as more organizations continue to appreciate the extent to which they now depend on software to innovate.

    — Mike Vizard