Top Developer Takeaways from Cisco Live 2024

At Cisco Live in Las Vegas, the DevNet Zone was abuzz with activity, focusing on the rapidly evolving landscape for automation engineering. This year’s event highlighted innovative strategies and tools that are driving the industry’s shift towards AI adoption. Cisco’s commitment to empowering engineers through the stack was evident, with AI being positioned as a key pillar of future development. As automation engineers, you have a pivotal role in leveraging AI to create smarter, more efficient solutions. Cisco DevNet is here to support your journey, providing the resources and community you need to succeed.

AI is complex, but with DevNet, it doesn’t have to be daunting. DevNet AI resources aim to help bring clarity to AI integration, making it accessible for engineers at all levels. Meanwhile, programmability in general remains a crucial focus. DevNet continues to enable IT organizations, building on our existing foundations in automation and programmability, and now extending into AI. Whether it’s through our advanced AI-powered tools or our supportive community, we’re dedicated to helping you harness AI’s full potential. As you continue to innovate, DevNet will be by your side, offering the knowledge and tools to keep you at the forefront of the industry.

Top takeaways from the DevNet Zone at Cisco Live

1. AI is transforming application development and automation with new possibilities
   AI is reshaping how we approach writing software, offering new possibilities and efficiencies. At Cisco Live, we explored AI’s potential to transform your projects with insights into AI-powered programmability, predictive AI, and generative AI.
2. Automation and programmability enable extensibility across domains
   Cisco provides the APIs necessary for extensibility in security, networking, data center, and collaboration, enabling organizations to build multi-domain solutions tailored to their business needs.
3. Technology is advancing sustainable energy management
   Sustainability is a key concern as our use of technology grows. At Cisco Live, our audience learned innovative approaches to energy management through automation and programmability.

Inside the action at the DevNet Zone

Technical Classroom Sessions

The DevNet Zone at Cisco Live focused on the latest advancements in AI, network programmability and more. Attendees had the chance to dive into AI-focused sessions, including our session “GenAI Impact on DevOps and Application Development: A Technical Perspective”. This session provided actionable guidance on integrating AI innovations into everyday DevOps workflows, and detailed specific Cisco solutions available to help facilitate this integration. The DevNet Zone was packed edge-to-edge with an impressive overflow into the aisles for a session on YANG Data modeling in the NSO Playground and process network automation.

The Sandbox Arcade

Attendees also experienced the fun of our new Sandbox Arcade, where they were able to learn about our Sandbox offerings and how to assemble API calls via retro style arcade games, providing a fun engaging way to practice coding skills. Although our arcade games were exclusive to Cisco Live attendees, DevNet Sandboxes are open to all. You can run your code on live infrastructure with our available Sandboxes to develop and test Cisco APIs, SDKs, and more.

Workshops

Hands-on learning experiences were delivered in instructor led workshops, where many sessions had waitlists of 100+. These high demand sessions included topics on building your first GenAI Assistant, automating network tasks, using ThousandEyes API integrations for network insights, and Meraki MX security. Hands-on learning doesn’t stop on site at Cisco Live. Explore DevNet’s online Learning Labs to keep building your skills on programmability, GenAI, and more.

Share Your Experience

Our Share Your Experience program provided attendees with a unique opportunity to share valuable feedback and input on our solutions, APIs, and resources. This input is extremely valuable in impacting our future offerings, helping us to continuously improve and evolve.

Key announcements and session highlights

Cisco Live 2024 was packed with new announcements, sharing updates on our AI strategy and solutions, as well as new innovations in security, networking, and observability. Here’s the breakdown of what was most exciting and impactful for those of us in networking, development and operations.

The first keynote kicked off strong, where Cisco announced a $1 billion investment to expand and develop secure and reliable AI solutions. These investments will further help to enable customer AI readiness, compute infrastructure, foundational models, model development, and training.

New partnerships from these investments include:

• Mistral AI specializes in generative artificial intelligence and develops new GenAI models for businesses, combining scientific excellence, an open approach and a responsible vision of technology.
• Scale AI provides a data-centric, end-to-end platform providing training and validation for AI applications.
• Cohere provides security-focused frontier large language models (LLMs) and industry-leading Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) capabilities tailored to meet the needs of enterprises.

Solutions and advancements to explore

• Nvidia and Cisco’s partnership will deliver a streamlined solution for deploying generative AI applications, with Cisco Nexus HyperFabric AI clusters simplifying infrastructure setup. Exclusive cloud management tools will offer effortless deployment and monitoring across data centers and edge sites.
• Cisco Networking Cloud introduces a unified management platform for seamless on-prem and cloud operations, featuring SSO, API management, sustainable networking, and enhanced Digital Experience Assurance with ThousandEyes, simplifying IT with advanced AI and energy insights.
• XDR with Meraki MX integrate together to enable direct telemetry analysis and correlation, enhancing visibility for Meraki admins and offering immediate threat response capabilities within the Meraki dashboard.
• Hypershield support for AMD Pensando DPUs and Intel IPUs delivers an AI-driven, distributed security architecture that spans from cloud to data centers to the edge, optimizing performance and energy efficiency.
• Motific, a new SaaS product for rapid and trusted delivery of GenAI applications, announced availability for free trial usage for all customers, and production usage for a limited set of customers, with a targeted general availability date of July 31, 2024. Additionally, a new collaboration with Mistral AI – a leading large language model provider – promises to enhance GenAI assistants with leading LLM capabilities.
• Splunk introduced Log Observer for Cisco AppDynamics, an integration that enables users to deliver faster troubleshooting across on-prem and hybrid environments. A new AI assistant was also announced for AppDynamics that will enable users to tap into insightful guidance to make informed decisions.
• New Cisco AI Certifications are being released, enabling teams build needed skills to design modern AI/ML compute and networks.

Cisco Live 2024 was an incredible event filled with learning, innovation, and community engagement. Whether you attended or followed virtually, we hope these takeaways inspire you to continue exploring AI, sustainability, and programmability in your projects.

Stay connected with DevNet beyond Cisco Live

Don’t miss out on skill building opportunities, even if you couldn’t attend in-person. Continue to grow with our developer community and keep the Cisco Live spirit alive all year long:

• Explore our technical resources: Keep up with the evolving AI landscape and evolve your skills with our AI hub. Explore learning labs, sample code, and sandboxes to enhance your skills and apply your knowledge in real-world scenarios across Cisco’s solutions. Start exploring all DevNet content here >.
• Join the community: Connect with peers and subject matter experts on your favorite technology topics by joining DevNet Creators in Webex. Share knowledge, ask questions, and collaborate on projects. Get access >
• Stay connected: Subscribe to our newsletter and follow @CiscoDevNet on LinkedIn, X, and Facebook for the latest updates, resources, and opportunities to connect with the DevNet community. Watch DevNet experts on our YouTube channel share exclusive insights, tutorials, and updates.

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