Day three of Cisco Live 2022 is in the books. It is amazing to be at my first Cisco Live! It was fantastic to get to meet people in person. The Cisco Developer Relations (DevRel) team worked hard on the physical DevNet Zone, organizing all the sessions, lightning talks, and workshops. Countless hours went into putting it all together. The hard work paid off and we’ve been able to help our DevNet community learn, grow, and expand their technical knowledge and skills.
To help in that journey, Cisco has made several developer-focused announcements – including API Insights (previously APIx Manager), the launch of AppDynamics Cloud, and the Inclusivity and Full Stack Wellness initiative – that will directly impact the enterprise application developer as well as DevOps. Here are just a few announcements that have been made over the last few days.
Preview Open-Source Solutions
API Insights (formerly APIx Manager) is an open-source solution that the Cisco Developer Relations team is building to help improve the security, quality, productivity, and experience of the developers building enterprise applications.
- API Insights validates and scores API specifications against an organization’s guidelines. This allows you to track and improve APIs consistently and efficiently.
- API Insights provides a trend timeline of API quality and generates both API changelogs and diff comparisons of API versions to identify breaking changes before it impacts the developers that consume your APIs
Developers can use API Insights as part of their CI/CD pipeline and the Visual Studio Code extension, which allows them to leverage the functionalities of API Insights within the IDE. This functionality enables developers to leverage the principles of Shift Left by getting early visibility into their APIs during the code development process.
DevOps teams can use API Insights along with APIClarity, which is an open-source visibility tool for APIs from Cisco that captures and analyzes API traffic and identifies potential risks to your application’s security posture in run-time during operations.
DevSecOps – With API Insights, collaboration between development, security, and operations team is simplified. Leveraging industry-standard tools and practices (VS Code and CI/CD pipelines), developers can achieve the following benefits:
- Increased efficiency in the software development process.
- Improved product quality because more issues are detected in earlier stages before code is pushed to production.
- Cost-effective.
- Improved experience for developers who consume your APIs.
- Continuous monitoring of APIs for security and quality.
As applications become more interconnected and the use of APIs increases, solutions like API Insights that build bridges between DevSecOps and the development teams will become more valuable. Additionally, as the network and applications become more cloud-native, we’re going to start seeing the need for more applications that are cloud-native focused and aware.
De-Risk and Accelerate Migration of Applications to the Cloud
With the trend toward building cloud-native applications, these modernized applications also need modern full stack observability, and this is what we’ve recently launched with AppDynamics Cloud. Complementing AppDynamics Application Performance Monitoring (APM) offering, AppDynamics Cloud is purpose-built to provide visibility into the complex cloud-native application landscape, providing insights and recommended actions to take to deliver optimal application user experiences.
For companies migrating to the cloud, application refactoring to cloud-native and lift and shift migration strategies can be slow, given the amount of testing required both during the migration and in Q&A. Therefore, according to one Cisco managed service provider partner, AIOps can benefit from having observability tools – like AppDynamics APM and the new AppDynamics Cloud – which can accelerate these cloud migrations by 25-30% by making testing faster.
The use of an observability tool also helps reduce risk by capturing potential errors early in the migration cycle. Such a tool also helps to increase developer productivity by reducing time spent on non-development activities, such as Defect Management, Problem Management, and interactions with QA & test. These activities detract from a developer’s primary focus on innovation.
From a security aspect, the libraries developers initially used to build the application are tested before they are put into a production environment. However, once the application goes into a production environment, many people don’t know what is in that code. There can be libraries that attackers can exploit, such as was the case with the Log4j vulnerability. And unless operations have code-level visibility, along with data tied to a secure database of vulnerabilities such as with Cisco Talos, the organization is at risk of suffering a breach through a compromised application.
What Else?
These are just a few of the innovative things that have been announced so far at Cisco Live 2022 this week. From our announcement of our partnership with Emtrain on building a conscious workplace culture for hybrid work, to the innovative and exciting work that Cisco and Ford Motor Company are doing to transform the automotive industry, many exciting announcements have taken place. From a DevRel perspective, we also launched a new look and feel to developer.cisco.com, as well as having launched version 2.0 of our very popular Learning Labs.
I’d encourage you to take a look at all of these great announcements and learn how Cisco is engaging our customers today and impacting the world of tomorrow. Check out other announcements, or just learn more about Cisco Live!
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