Where Is DevNet Going Over the Next 10 Years, and Beyond?

Wow! It’s been 6 months since I wrote my last DevNet 10-year blog, ruminating on the creation and history of Cisco DevNet. Since then, the marking of our 10 year anniversary has exploded with in-person events at Cisco Live! in Melbourne and Amsterdam and a virtual celebration coming up on March 14th. I want to start this blog by saying a big “THANK YOU!” to our community for helping us look back and recognize the wonderful accomplishments we have had over these 10 years.

With this blog, I’d really like to dig into the future. It seems that we are hitting a major inflection point within the broader high-tech industries; one that is potentially as influential and challenging as the introduction of cloud and microservices architectures 10-15 years ago. Organizations had to learn how to navigate that paradigm shift and deal with issues they had never encountered before. Issues like tool sprawl, hybrid application deployments, virtual networking, container orchestration, and increased security attack vectors. On top of those technical concerns there was an added operational challenge of optimizing costs across on-premises versus cloud deployments. Out of those challenges a burgeoning need for observability has presented itself.

Focus on AI and sustainability

This time, however, the focus is on AI and sustainability, and possibly more importantly the role that observability can play in supporting solutions in both areas. At points, implementations of AI and sustainability efforts may contradict each other in practical application. However, improvements in tooling, born of the cloud revolution mentioned above, allow us to dynamically build visibility directly into the solution at all technology layers. This provides the opportunity for both reactive, and more importantly proactive, actions to be taken to optimize activity at any of those layers individually or in concert with each other.

So now, you are at the point of reading this going “that all sounds fine and good Matt, but how does DevNet and the organization’s future factor into all of this?”

Excellent question. And to that I answer “DevNet will be the glue.”

For 10 years, DevNet has been the face of programmability and automation for Cisco. Infrastructure as Code, NetDevOps, etcetera, we were there with documentation, sandboxes, sample code, learning labs, live events , and practical experience supporting our community as they glued together various products to build out amazing solutions that changed the way we work. We are now in the midst of upleveling all of that to bring a solution focus to all of the content and experience we provide so that you can move even more quickly.

Ten years ago, we started with very little and had to ramp programmability and integration aspects of Cisco’s portfolio VERY quickly. This pushed us into a “more is better” mindset so that we could make sure we had full coverage for our partners and customers in any product space. That worked well for a while, but now there is so much out there that we need to boil down to the essentials.

Quality over quantity

Over the next few months, you will see a host of changes that reflect a “quality over quantity” mindset. You may have even noticed a few of them already!

• We have redesigned our learning labs and documentation catalogs, and are in the midst of improving our API reference experience to make OAS specification documentation easier and clearer to use.
• Our Sandbox team just migrated their overwhelmingly valuable service to a new platform.
• We are also working on optimizing our search functionality and implementing AI into our tooling to promote content recommendations for individual areas of interest.
• Dynamic content will abound as we provide the latest and greatest on our homepage and in our product Dev Centers.
• Even our community is being revamped to be a more useful, insightful, and collaborative place to visit.

All of this is being done to help you navigate Cisco and DevNet, and make it easier to build your solutions.

As for AI, sustainability, and observability, keep an eye out for new Topic Hubs, documentation, learning labs, and sample codes in those spaces. We will be providing thought leadership and practical content that allows you to peek behind the curtain of AI and understand the nature of predictive and generative AI.

On the sustainability front, we will be curating solution focused material to allow you to realize energy usage optimization within your organization. As for observability, we will be showcasing solutions across the entire stack.

Finally, we will continue celebrating our community throughout the next 10 years, starting with our virtual 10th Anniversary Celebration on March 14. The event will celebrate milestones we’ve achieved throughout the past ten years, and expand on the ideas outlined in this blog like AI and Sustainability. As always, in June we hope to see you at Cisco Live in Las Vegas. In the meantime, stay tuned as we prepare to announce even more opportunities to learn, code, and build.

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