Cisco Live! U.S. 2019 Recap
Cisco Live!, Cisco’s massive annual customer and partner conference took place June 9-13, 2019 at the San Diego Convention Center, where Cisco celebrated 30 years of Cisco Live with over 28,000 customers, partner executives, and IT professionals in attendance. The event featured over 1,000 sessions, 300 partner exhibitors, and attracted more than 500,000 online attendees. Some of the highlights of the conference include Cisco AI Network Analytics, Multidomain Integration, Transforming the IoT Edge, and Cisco Certifications and DevNet.
Network automation remains one of the biggest challenges for IT. And luckily, Cisco introduced a new community-based developer center called Cisco DevNet Automation Exchange, bringing intent-based networking to practice and seeded with 50+ use cases (many contributed by Cisco’s engineers) that you can consume and work with in your own environment.
The Catalyst 9000 family (9100, 9200/9300/9400/9500/9600 and 9800) received a lot of attention during the keynote. Cisco rebuilt a single modern OS (across route, switch, and wireless) from the ground up to deliver the campus of the future — a common ASIC across the entire switching family. It’s open and programmable, resilient and secure, available on-prem and cloud hosted and open to support third party applications. The Catalyst 9000 family offers a full new suite of technology to support the wireless first world. When integrated with DNA Center, you’ll get the latest AI capabilities to make this even smarter and simpler to use.
Also highlighted in the opening keynote was more innovation for intent-based networking, multi-cloud and SD-WAN, data center, IoT, 5G and Wi-Fi 6, security, and cognitive collaboration.
Cisco continued its efforts to support multi-domain intent-based networking by demonstrating how their SDN products (SD-Access, SD-WAN, ACI) will be able to exchange information to create an end-to-end access control policy. In their example, APIC will populate DNAC’s scalable group tags, similar to the sharing between ISE/DNAC. Through data tagging, ACI will be able to allow user access to the application (EPG). Additionally, Cisco’s SD-WAN product, vManage, will take constructs from the APIC’s contract DSCP settings and systematically program all the WAN devices in the SD-WAN domain to create an application SLA. This was one key example of how Cisco is bringing these different domains together to work as a single entity allowing any user, from any device, on any network access to any application, in a secure manner.
Cisco also announced a host of changes revamping their certification program:
- CCNA is now a single core exam, encompassing a broad range of knowledge and skills
- Professional level exams now consist of a core exam and a concentration exam (there are generally a few options available and you only need to pass one)
- Prerequisites are eliminated, enabling you to start where you want
- Routing and Switching is now called Enterprise Infrastructure
- Assuming you’ve passed the Enterprise Core exam (300-401) as part of the CCNP Enterprise Infrastructure track, you can go direct to the CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure Lab exam to earn your CCIE
- Enterprise Infrastructure certification
For example:
You pass 300-401 and a CCNP Level Concentration Exam = CCNP status
You pass 300-401 and a CCIE Level Lab exam = CCIE status
Cisco will introduce a new certification path called Cisco Certified DevNet which will follow the same hierarchy of Associate, Professional, and Expert. According to Cisco, the DevNet certification program validates the skills of professional-level software developers, DevOps engineers, automation specialists, and other software professionals. The program certifies key emerging technical skills for a new kind of IT professional, empowering organizations to embrace the potential of applications, automation, and infrastructure for the network, Internet of Things (IoT), DevOps, and Webex.
If you’re feeling a case of FOMO, you can view over 1,000 on-demand sessions available here.
And remember, Cisco Live 2020 (May 31st – June 4th) will be back in Las Vegas, so click here to be notified when registration opens.