>> Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's the CUBE,
covering CISCO Live 2018, brought to you
by CISCO, Veeam,
and the Cube's ecosystem partners.
Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman,
and this is the CUBE's coverage
of CISCO Live 2018 in Barcelona.
You know, I'm a networking guy by background,
but there's certain people in the industry
that really I've gone to to learn,
been really thrilled
that I've had the opportunity to get to know,
and every once in awhile I get to bring them
to our audience, and really happy to bring back
to the program Ivan Pepelnjak, from Slovenia,
blogger, author, webinar, generally, you know,
that network guy that those of us
who watch the industry know.
>> That grumpy networking guy.
>> Ah, ya know, aren't most networking people
at least online at least a little bit grumpy?
And when you meet 'em in person, though,
it's a slightly different experience,
so thanks for joining us.
>> Ah, thank you for inviting me.
>> All right, so 2013 was the last time
that we actually go to do one of these in person.
>> Ivan: That's true.
>> So networking, it's all the same, right?
>> Ivan: It is.
>> I mean we're probably still working on
10 gig rollout, ah, maybe 25 or 50 gig,
speeds and feeds, and, ya know,
oh, okay, ya know, IPV 6, I think
we're kind of getting there,
lots of other acronyms.
We could talk awhile.
But really, what's been some of
the big things that you've been looking at?
What are customers actually doing,
and what are customers thinking of
that you've been playing with?
>> Well, it's amazing how little has changed.
>> People are still talking about SDN
like that's the big thing.
No one has delivered on that apart from
some point products like VMware, NSX,
or CISCO ACI.
Cloud is still the thing that will happen
next year to most companies.
We hear how 90% of all the companies
that participate in some survey are using Cloud.
And then the next question I'll ask is,
"Well, is this Office 365,
"or is this something more?"
And they go like, "Well the survey
"didn't differentiate on that."
So thank you.
>> Yeah, but, yeah look.
The SDN, a friend of mine said SDN
stands for Still Does Nothing.
That being said, ACI, NSX,
there's customers using it.
>> Ivan: Oh, absolutely.
>> It has not totally transformed the industry
like they said.
Cloud, I've yet to find a company
that's not doing some SAS,
and unless you have some regulation
or things like that, you at least have
some sandbox that you're doing
some public Cloud.
>> Ivan: Absolutely.
>> But, absolutely people,
they still have data centers, despite...
>> Ivan: Well, it's a...
>> It might not be their own building anymore.
I was just talking to a service provider
and the like, but yeah, I mean,
the more things change the more things
stay the same, right?
>> Absolutely.
Well yeah, we do see people moving to colos
or, they would build their stuff somewhere else,
or whatever, but it's amazing how much
interest I am still getting in
data center design courses,
so there are still zillions of people
who think that that is important,
and yes, we all know we'll go to the Cloud,
but everyone has his own hurdles, and so
I think that eventually everyone will get
to some sort of hybrid Cloud,
where some stuff will be there,
and some stuff legacy whatever
will be here, and we'll have
to live with that forever.
>> Yeah, I mean, those of us we think back,
I remember when this wave came,
it was like, well,
remember the XSPs in the 90s?
There were two reasons why it failed.
Number one, there wasn't enough network,
and number two, ah, security.
Well, you fast forward to, you know,
two decades, and the network's
gotten way better.
I've got great speeds, and stuff like that,
but you know physics is still a factor-
>> Ivan: Well, yeah.
>> And security is even more of an issue today
than it was 20 years ago, I think.
>> This started as a joke, but it is
becoming more and more true.
If you move to the Cloud, your security
actually improves.
>> Stu: Right.
>> Because they have some security
and you had none before.
(both laugh)
>> I at least get to rethink my security.
>> Yeah.
>> When I make some transformation.
>> No, and they have the basics right.
>> Right.
>> Like physical access control,
multi-tenant separation, encryption,
trunk authentication.
They get those things right,
because otherwise they would be out of business.
>> Okay, so we spent like more than a decade
with how virtualization in networking.
Have we gotten most of that at least
reasonably well now?
>> There are still people who don't get that
ethernet was designed to be used
on a single cable.
So they still think that stretching
a single ethernet across wide distances
is a great idea, and everyone is still
letting them get away with that.
>> Yeah.
>> Fortunately the Cloud vendors aren't buying.
So if you want to move to Amazon, Google,
whoever else, you have to redesign
your applications and make them work correctly.
So, eventually this thing will die,
but it's like COBOL and mainframes,
it will be there forever.
>> Yeah, I mean, we've been saying for a few years
on the Cube now that the challenge of our time
is really distributed architectures,
and of course they have a huge impact
on networking, so how's the industry doing?
How would you rate, you know,
say we're here at CISCO Live,
you know, how are they doing helping customers
with these challenges?
>> Most of them don't.
>> I mean, if you look at a typical
enterprise application, it still isn't developed
for a distributed environment.
Yeah, they use three tiers of servers,
like always, but then they try to cope by
solving all the problems in the ops phase,
when they deploy stuff.
And that's the biggest problem
we are facing today.
We are not changing the development processes
and paradigms.
>> Well, we're actually here in the Dev Net zone.
I mean, I give CISCO kudos.
Last time I came to CISCO Live was 2009.
There weren't, we didn't talk about developers.
>> Really?
>> Everybody was, you know, doing plug fests,
and getting their latest certification, but
they're trying to embrace the developers more.
There seem to be more of them here.
>> Yeah.
>> That boundary between network operator
and developer, do you see?
You know, is there communication,
or are the network guys still
stuck in a closet somewhere
not talking to anybody?
>> Well, there are two types of challenges.
The first type of challenge is that
the network guy in particular,
but ops teams in general, are still
not invited to the table
when new stuff is discussed.
So, the application developers dream up something
based on their best knowledge.
I mean, they're not evil or anything.
They just don't know the operational impact
of their decision.
And because the networking security
virtualization people are not at the table,
then they have to cope with whatever
these guys dream up in isolation.
I'm never blaming them, because, you know,
we should education them,
and we are not doing that.
>> Yeah.
>> So anyone who manages to bring
security, networking, and storage people in
when the application architecture
is being designed is my hero.
But there are only few of them.
And the other challenge is that
the networking people don't realize
that their world has changed.
That they can't manually provision
VLANs the way they've been doing
for the last 20 years, and
it's amazing once they get it,
once they start simple automation stuff,
how creative they become.
What types of problems they solve.
They don't have the shackles
of CLI anymore.
I shouldn't be saying that.
(both laugh)
I'm the old CLI junkie.
But it's amazing how much can be done
once you realize that you
don't have to do everything manually.
>> Yeah, CISCO's, you know, not shy
about putting out strong visions.
Marketing is definitely part of what they do.
And the keynote this morning
said it's a new era, and new infrastructure,
powered by intent, informed by context.
It sounded like a nice message,
but this whole intent-based networking,
what's your take on it?
Is this, you know, are we going to come back
five years from now and talk about intent based
like we did SDN?
Or, you know, what's your take?
>> Well, let's keep in mind that
this is all hype.
What we're really talking about
is an orchestration system
with an abstraction layer.
'Cause first, it's really hard
to define what intent based is,
because there's no good definition.
But there is a definition in programming
which differentiates between
declarative programming
and imperative programming.
And if we use declarative programming
as something which could be intent based,
that thing says, well, I don't tell the machine,
or whatever, the system, how to do things.
I just tell it what to do.
And if you take a look at that
from that perspective, then you figure out
that every device configuration
is an expression of your intent.
>> Right.
>> You never tell the device how to work.
>> Yeah.
>> You just tell the device what to do.
>> Right.
It's interesting, Ivan.
I think back, you know, we used to manage
individual boxes.
Then we kind of created
a little bit more pools,
and the challenge they see right now is
with the explosion of device,
we're not going to have time to talk about
all the IOT edge piece and everything, but
there's no way an admin or a team of admins
are going to be able to help there,
so I need to infuse, I hate that,
the ML, AI, choose your buzzword of choice,
though, the machines need to be able to
manage that a little bit more, you know,
autonomous networks or something
they (mumbles).
I understand you're skeptical, so
how do we get there, or, you know, otherwise,
this whole label crap.
>> There are two, there are
three totally different things here.
The first one, I totally agree with you
that we should view networks as a single entity.
Configuring boxes is stupid, and it's like,
these admins don't do that.
Well, some still do.
They get the results they deserve.
So, we should start thinking about
network-wide data models which are then
translated into device intent,
which is really device configuration.
And that makes absolute sense.
But remember what I said.
This is just a glorified orchestration system
with an abstraction layer.
The second problem is machine learning.
Some of the things we are dealing with
have physical limitations,
like the speed of light, or the number of things
you can put into a hardware forwarding table.
Once you're faced
with those physical limitations,
it's like, you know, self-driving cars,
yeah, they are self driving,
but they cannot go 300 miles per hour
because laws of physics.
So, it's one thing to say,
well, I have these infinite resources
and I can learn how to play Go
in eight hours.
>> Right.
>> And it's a completely different thing
to say now I will figure out how to
deal with my network, which has this
physical limitations.
And also, you know, whenever I hear about these
autonomous distributed thingees,
we have routing protocols.
They have been autonomous and distributed
and self healing for decades,
and we didn't call them machine learning
or artificial intelligence.
And, finally, once you get to the bottom of it,
and you're faced with all those
physical limitations, and now,
let's say you want to solve a simple problem,
which is, how do I optimize
the use of my network?
You do some research.
You figure out that this problem
has been solved 20 years ago.
There are companies with commercial products
that have solved this problem.
It's just that no one is using them
because they are too expensive,
because what you can save by using them
doesn't offset the cost that these people
had to invest into R and D to make this work.
So, machine learning, yeah.
Can you make it cheaper?
I don't think so.
>> All right, so, Ivan, I want to give you
the last word.
>> Mm-hmm.
>> Grumpy networking, what
do you look forward to the most
at this show, and any final anecdotes
you want to share, before we have to wrap?
>> Well, the one thing I am looking forward
is to see people to start
automate their networks.
To jump over that mental barrier,
and when they break through it,
it's amazing how many success stories you get.
So I know a number of networking engineers
who were on my automation course,
and six months later, they write me saying,
"Now I have this thing in production,
"and we cut down the site deployment
"from three days to five minutes."
When I read emails like that, it's like,
"You're my hero."
>> Excellent, well I love it.
For a grumpy person, you sure sound
a little bit of an optimist about
what some of the people come in and get this.
Maybe a realist is more right.
Ivan Pepelnjak, really appreciate
you joining us.
We'll be back with lots more coverage from
CISCO Live 2018 from Barcelona.
I'm Stu Miniman.
You're watching the Cube.
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