CiscoLive Interview: Talking about multcloud operations

This video features an interview with Kostas Roungeris, Product Marketing, Cloud Computing, Cisco, and Matt Ferguson, Director of Product Development, Cisco, at Cisco Live EU Barcelona 2020. They discuss Cisco’s software journey and its positioning in the cloud space, particularly concerning multi-cloud environments and the company’s relationship with its customers.

Here’s a summary of the key discussion points:

Multi-Cloud Dynamics and Organizational Impact: Roungeris and Ferguson explain how the transition to multi-cloud impacts various organizational functions, including infrastructure operations, application operations, development, and security operations. Each department views multi-cloud from its specific angle, focusing on aspects like compute/storage, performance/visibility, governance/policy, and CI/CD/agility, respectively.

Customer Needs Driving Multi-Cloud Adoption: They highlight that organizations are expanding to multiple clouds to service IT operations teams and enable faster development capabilities. A study revealed that organizations will need to support 50% more applications in the next three years, necessitating efficient blending of security, compute, and networking to support application modernization efforts.

Multi-Cloud as a Strategy: The speakers discuss how multi-cloud is evolving from a “symptom” of shadow IT to a deliberate strategy. Customers are seeking visibility, policies, and governance to manage cloud spending, ensure performance, and maintain necessary connectivity and bandwidth. Cisco aims to help customers navigate this journey, especially those just starting their cloud adoption.

Cisco’s Role in the Multi-Cloud Landscape: Cisco positions itself as an enabler for organizations, providing software, hardware, and SaaS products to facilitate connectivity, security, visibility, and observability across various cloud environments. They emphasize their role as a cloud-agnostic partner, helping customers leverage the best benefits from their chosen cloud providers rather than being a public cloud provider themselves.

Connecting Compute and Cloud: Ferguson details Cisco’s strength in networking and its significant computing portfolio. He explains how Cisco’s solutions connect applications, allowing for end-to-end visibility from the application experience down to the infrastructure and hardware layers, helping identify and resolve issues related to compute resources or memory in both private and public clouds.

Cloud-Native Applications and Containerization: The discussion touches upon the changing patterns for customers with the rise of cloud-native applications, microservices, and containerization. They note that containers are becoming the de facto infrastructure currency for developers due to their benefits. Cisco is focusing on filling the gap in monitoring and observability of services within the infrastructure stack, particularly how networking evolves to support these new deployment models, like service mesh networks.

Evolution of Standards and Cisco’s Strategy: The speakers acknowledge Kubernetes as an open, community-driven de facto standard, but also highlight the rapid influx of new technologies. Cisco’s strategy involves providing a full stack solution, managing the complexities of diverse technologies (like Kubernetes and Docker) through offerings like HX AP, allowing organizations to focus on application development rather than infrastructure management.

Organizational Dynamics in Cloud Adoption: Matt Ferguson cites the “State of DevOps report,” emphasizing that beyond technology, the human aspect and organizational dynamics are crucial for success in the cloud journey. Leaders are those who can break down silos and achieve an end-to-end view of service experience from development to production, ensuring smooth collaboration between different teams.

Security as a Linchpin: Security is highlighted as a critical component, with organizations starting their cloud strategies from a security standpoint. The DevOps methodology integrates security throughout the development process, rather than as an afterthought.

Democracy of Standards and Use Cases: Kostas Roungeris concludes by discussing the “democracy around standards” driven by open-source communities. He notes the vast depth of customer use cases for cloud technologies, emphasizing that different industries and specific needs (e.g., AI/ML vs. general hosting) will lead to diverse cloud strategies, including reliance on niche SaaS providers alongside public cloud offerings.