The eight-hour connection from Newark, NJ to Berlin for Cisco Live! Europe was baby smooth. Not even a hint of turbulence. Along the way I finished 1.5 books, slept, and watched Deepwater Horizon (it was decent). I never thought an international flight could be quite so… tranquil. Soon after touchdown I was juxtaposed with the bustling city of Berlin! Cabs are bopping around everywhere, sidewalks full of finely dressed people, and the small restaurants were filling up! After making it to the Hotel, it was time to head to the Messe and begin setup of the Sandbox booth.
My first impression of the DevNet zone this year is that it was one of my favorite designs. Shades of bright blue, orange and green contrasted with black.
Some of the Sandbox team awaiting attendees. Credit: @EbsworthPhoto
Each booth featured sharp lines, with 3D back-light designs. The whole area had a futuristic, Tron-like appearance. Cisco Live! Berlin is the final show we’d be featuring the DevCycle’s integration with the Sandbox. Our colleague Jock Reed (@jockdarock) had made some final improvements to the bike’s application. He first segmented the bikes pieces (web interface, API, database, and databroker) into individual applications, with the intention of loading each bit of code into containers. We decided to feature an IR829 with some “edge computing” to meet this objective.
An IR829 is similar to a Cisco 800 series router. It’s running Cisco ios, has a few switch ports, a WAN interface, and wifi. This makes it very simple to bring up a VPN tunnel to our Collaboration Endpoint Sandbox to access CUCM API - but this is where the similarities stop. The IR829 has access to Cell service, sensors, and has a compute layer to run Docker containers – the perfect little device to run the DevCycle’s containers! We setup the bike, networking, containers and voila! We’ve got a great little demo to show how the Sandbox is the simplest place to get free access to Cisco tech for API integrations!
Working the Sandbox booth with the DevCycle attracts all kinds of people – developers, engineers, business folk, press, execs and more. Things are different then demoing the DevCycle at Cisco Live! US. There were less quick demos, and more deep, technical discussions. People were genuinely interested in what the bike was for, and how it works with the Sandbox. This may be because CLEUR is a bit smaller then the US show, which freed us up to have longer interactions. Having these interactions actually enables us to stretch our limits, and learn more about what technology is out there.
The DevNet Zone also acts like a reunion for the DevNet team. Working as a distributed, global team provides tremendous flexibility but means we have to work diligently to be good communicators. At the DevNet zone we get to meet up, pollinate technical ideas and build strong working relationships. After a few shows it starts to feel a lot like a big family reunion. Cisco live is a win-win for attendees and us!
From the Left: Eddie Corban, Tom Davies, and Jacob Adams (me!). Credit @EbsworthPhoto
Representing the Sandbox and DevNet at Cisco Live! was a blast for our team! I met droves of good people looking to better themselves, products, and even the world through APIs and code. Making technology, APIs and information easily accessible is deeply rooted within our mission. What we do simply wouldn’t be possible without the support of our users! Thank you for being a part of DevNet! If you’ve got any feedback for DevNet, I want to hear it! Drop a comment below!
Signing off-
Jacob
Follow me on twitter: @jacob200ok
P.S. Want to meet us in person? Attend DevNet Create, Cisco Live! Melbourne, or Cisco Live! US.
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