Here's an interesting technique we wanted to show you. Mateusz Olszowy, on of our engineers in Cisco's Polish Technical Assistance Center (TAC), put together an application that uses a Raspberry Pi and the Spark API to create a web service to controls devices on the Internet of Things. In this video, you can see him using the web interface to create commands that controls the lights: Mateusz describes what he's doing as chatting with lights. His explanation of what's happening: Thanks to very straightforward documentation on developer.ciscospark.com I was able to setup my first integration within minutes!  This inspired me to create a webservice on a Raspberry Pi which parses any Spark message sent via outgoing webhooks. With every message posted in a room, the Spark API REST service notifies the Raspberry Pi and the signal gets triggered on pins (General Purpose Input/Output) to steer the relay that connects or disconnects the electrical circuit. The project became a nice fusion of Cisco Spark and Internet of Things. This is a simple example but it shows the power of these interfaces and how quickly you can create a solution. ... View more

Thursday is over in the DevNet Zone, and another day of great technical content has been presented.One of the key technologies under discussion today was Mantl, and you can look at Ken Owen's Blog Stateful Applications on Mantl using the Mesos ELK Framework to see the overview of what he talked about. It was also the day where our team of executives got together for the IoT futures panel, which played to a full house as they discussed the current state of the IoT industry and the trends they see driving innovation into the future. Putting all of this into perspective, Chris, our teammate blogging from the event, had a bit of an epiphany and talked about it in Changing the Human Experience . Spark was another big topic today, and you can find out more in Welcome the the Spark Game of Life. Weren't able to get to Berlin to join us? Curious about what the DevNet Zone is like? DevNet Evangelist Ashely Roach talked with Cisco TV's Robb Boyd and you can learn see a glimpse of DevNet and learn all about our learning labs in this video. Friday is a limited day in the DevNet Zone: you'll be able to spend some time finishing up your learning labs and talk to some of the Demo teams, but we're now winding down Berlin and like the rest of Cisco Live attendees, preparing to head home -- probably to take a nice long nap. But we can't nap for long, because planning is already happening for Cisco Live in the US, our big show of the year, and hopefully we've whetted your appetite for knowledge and convinced you to join us in Las Vegas in July. ... View more

The DevNet Zone in Berlin had another full day of programming on Wednesday, and we've been seeing the floor full of developers and Cisco enthusiasts, and everyone seems excited at the possibilities they're exploring, as Chris Oggerino noted in his daily blog. There's been a real buzz around the floor during the show. We're not done yet! We have another full day of programming coming to you Thursday with many interesting sessions and other activities. Here are a few of the highlights you should consider attending: Cisco Executives Discuss the Internet of Things at 1:00 in the main theater. As we do every show we bring together Cisco's executives to bring you up to date with what's happening around the Internet of Things universe and where they see the industry headed. APIC EM APIs: a deep dive at 12:00 in the main theater. This session is traditionally one of the most popular at DevNet Zones when we give it. Why should I care about APIs? A hands-on workshop -- trying to figure out why you keep hearing about APIs and what they are useful for? Stop by Classroom 2 at 9:30 to get a hands-on overview. Introducing Cloud Development with Project Shipped and Mantl: a deep dive -- looking to get started in cloud development? We have a session that will get you started at 9:00 in the main theater. We have the full suite of workshops, demos, learning labs and lots more going on as well, of course. If you're trying to figure out where you want to be, use our activity matrix to help find the activities you want. xxxxxx ... View more

We announced something big today at Cisco Live in Berlin: VIRL is moving to the cloud. We have partnered with Packet to support VIRL on their bare metal cloud platform. To get VIRL running on Packet, you just need register for a Packet account and have a valid VIRL license key. Using a few commands and the tools that we provide (using the Terraform toolset from Hashicorp), you can spin-up of a VIRL server in the cloud. Have a cup of coffee/tea or two as your new VIRL server is provisioned for you in ~30 minutes! Then voila, VIRL on Packet! Register today and receive $25 usage credit on Packet, and as a bonus, your VIRL license node limit will be DOUBLED FOR FREE when you use VIRL on Packet! 20 nodes on earth, 40 in the cloud. This new capability helps bring Packet to a lot more people at a lot less money since you no longer need to buy the hardware to run it. Elsewhere in the DevNet Zone Chris Oggerino is a long-time veteran of Cisco and recently joined the DevNet team, and this is his first Cisco Live with us in the DevNet Zone. He's writing about it for us every day, and today he talks about his thoughts of visiting the DevNet Zone for the first time, and why it doesn't feel like any trade show he's ever been to in the past -- in a good way. Over the weekend we held our Coding Camp in the Berlin Innovation Center, with the winning team was Team Sling Shot and they went home with 5,000 euros. Their solution was an application helping people connect with others and get inspired by sharing “blueprints” of their ideas with a community.  Team Sling Shot’s concept was to use relayr IoT technology to collect data from light, temperature, motion and other sensors placed in people’s homes, and automate appliances, thermostats and other home functions based on rules set up via Sling Shot’s simple ‘blueprints’ user interface. Over 100 people joined us for the training and the competition, with 14 teams working on solutions using technologies such as Tropo, Spark, Zeus, Shipped and relayr. Wednesday in the DevNet Zone Wednesday includes another full day of technical sessions and activities for you. If you haven't already decided what sessions to attend, here are a few suggestions: Open Source - Is the Honeymoon Over? is a panel discussion that will be held in the main theater at 3:00 The DevNet Sandbox: a deep dive will help you understand how to leverage the DevNet Sandbox in your development and testing, saving you the need to build out (and pay for) your own testing labs. Stop by at 10:00 in Classroom 1 Just getting started in development? DevNet Developer Evangelist Ashley Roach will be giving Intro to Git: a hands-on workshop to help you understand how to use that key developer tool at 1:00 in Classroom 2. Need to get elbow deep in the technology? Then OpenStack and OpenDaylight, The Evolving Relationship in Cloud Networking: a deep dive by DevNet Evanglist Charles Eckel is for you. Stop by Classroom 1 at 1:00. ... View more

The DevNet Zone in Cisco Live Berlin is open! Over the weekend we had a successful coding camp with over 50 participants spending some time at the Berlin Innovation Center studying new technologies and then diving in and building apps to show off their ideas. The winning team built a tool called Slingshot that was designed to show ways to help consumers engage with IoT. As day 1 winds down, here are a few quick looks at what's going on around the zone. Our Tropo Evangelist Johnny Diggz showed us a quick video of the inside of the Zone that gives you a nice sense of the space. Inside the Zone we have our main theater plus two classrooms, demo areas, our learning labs, workshop areas and lots more. We've been updating our activity matrix with last minute changes, so if you're trying to find a session or other activity, this is your go to place to find out what's happening in the DevNet Zone and when you need to be there. Looking for things to do? Here are a couple of sessions on Tuesday you might want to check out: Introduction to Tropo at 3:30 in the Main theater Our always popular Getting Started with OpenStack class is 11:00 in the Main theater. This one is always crowded to show up early to make sure you have a seat. Introduction to RESTCONF/YANG is a hands-on workshop at 2:00 in Classroom 2 And maybe you ought to stop by one of our workbenches -- perhaps for Ken Owen's hands-on seminar on Using Shipped, which will be on Workbench 1 at 2:00. We'll see you Tuesday in the DevNet Zone! ... View more

(Written by Joel Obstfeld, Distinguished Engineer on the VIRL Team) In November we released the 1.0 version of the VIRL tool. The Virtual Internet Router Lab is Cisco's networking simulator, allowing you to design, model and test networks across simulated loads and failure situations. It allows you to create a network environment and then test it against different load and problem scenarios and visualize how the network responds to and manages the traffic, all without having to buy, install or manage test hardware in a lab. In the last year, we've been honored by your reaction to VIRL and how well it's been received. Our YouTube Channel has well over 50,000 views, our use base has grown to over 10,000 users and VIRL has been used for over 160,000 simulations using almost a million VM instances. Over the last year we've added many features and capabilities, including latency and packet loss simulation, data-plane traffic generation and a unique control-plane traffic injector. We've been amazed at some of the uses people have found for VIRL beyond the obvious: studying for their CCIE exam, for instance (passed first time!) or using it in their university studies. Seeing VIRL create these kind of opportunities for users gives us motivation to keep working on and improving VIRL for you. We've accomplished a lot in the last year on the VIRL team, but we're just getting started. Interested in learning more about VIRL and see what we're up to? Come join us in the DevNet Zone in Berlin and find out all about this important network tool. You can meet the VIRL development team at our VIRL meetup on Wednesday Feb. 17th, 18:00 to 19:30 in the DevNet Zone Theater. Snacks and drinks will be provided! Please RSVP if you are interested in attending. VIRL in the DevNet Zone We have a VIRL Learning Lab in the DevNet Zone, so you can sit down at a Learning Lab terminal any time the show is open and get hands on with and start learning how to use the system. There is also a VIRL booth where you can stop by and talk to some of our team to get your questions answered. We're holding two sessions in the DevNet Zone: VIRL - Your network simulation swiss-army knife is in the main theater on Tuesday February 16 at 3:00, and will give those of you new to VIRL an introduction to the system and basic information on its capabilities and usage. The DevNet Zone VIRL workshop is Wednesday at 10:00 in the workshop booth and is an intermediate-level discussion of the VIRL system. There are also two other VIRL activities elsewhere at Cisco Live: You can register for our Breakout Session Three Secrets of VIRL Networking - BRKRST-3003, to be held on the 16th at 11:15 in Hall 7, room New York 3 on Level 1. This is an intermediate to advanced session. There's also a leader-led lab: Dr. Evil's secret VIRL hands-on Lab - LTRRST-3003 which is in Hall 2, Level 2, Lab 6 on the 18th at 9AM. This is an intermediate to advanced hands-on session. There's a lot to learn about VIRL in Berlin, and we're looking forward to having you join us to dig into this useful and capable network tool. See you in the DevNet Zone! ... View more

As we get close to the opening of the Cisco Live DevNet Zone in Berlin, we wanted to put the spotlight on some of the sessions we have planned that are bringing some of the industry's top experts and thought leaders to the event to share their knowledge and insight with you. To help you better understand the evolving world of IoT, we again bring our panel of Cisco thought leaders to Berlin to explain their view of the Internet of Things and help you see where these technologies are headed. Come listen to Cisco executives Tony Shakib, VP, IoT Vertical Solutions Engineering, Cisco John Apostolopolous and Maciej Kranz along with  moderator Susie Wee to discuss the current and future opportunities around the Internet of Things. Please join us in the main theater on Thursday at 1PM as our panelists share their thoughts, experiences, and learnings on the direction of cloud collaboration platforms. Our lineup for this session: Tony Shakib, VP, IoT Vertical Solutions Engineering, Cisco John Apostolopolous, VP CTO, Innovation Labs, Cisco Maciej Kranz, VP GM, Strategic Innovation Group, Cisco See you in Berlin ... View more

As we get close to the opening of the Cisco Live DevNet Zone in Berlin, we wanted to put the spotlight on some of the sessions we have planned that are bringing some of the industry's top experts and thought leaders to the event to share their knowledge and insight with you. We work with lots of partners and companies to help solve the complex needs of our customers and we again are bringing some of these partners to the DevNet Zone at part of our Innovation Partner panel. In this panel, you will Listen to technologists from some of Cisco's innovation partners as they discuss what they are building and how they have succeeded in doing business with Cisco. Please join us in the main theater on Tuesday at 4PM as our panelists share their thoughts, experiences, and learnings on the direction of cloud collaboration platforms. Our lineup for this session: Steve Laskowski, Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Strategy, Flashpoint Mark Adams, VP Corporate Development, eSentire Paul Hopton, CTO, RelayR See you in Berlin ... View more

As we get close to the opening of the Cisco Live DevNet Zone in Berlin, we wanted to put the spotlight on some of the sessions we have planned that are bringing some of the industry's top experts and thought leaders to the event to share their knowledge and insight with you. DevOps means different things to different people - developing and implementing software in an agile way, adding operations disciplines to application delivery - but what does it mean to you? How do you navigate through the myriad of DevOps tools available? How does a DevOps frame-of-mind and process affect your development and deployment of cloud-based micro-services applications? And what's this got to do with Cisco? Hear a panel of DevOps experts give you their perspective and clarify some of the 'whats, whys and hows' in this new world of DevOps. Please join us in the main theater on Tuesday at 2PM as our panelists share their thoughts, experiences, and learnings on the direction of cloud collaboration platforms. Our lineup for this session: Mitchell Hashimoto, Founder, Hashicorp Brent Salisbury, Software Alliance Engineer, Docker Brian Wheeler, CIO/Corp VP of Technology, NWN Corporation Markus Riedinger, Cloud Architect, SAP See you in Berlin ... View more

As we get close to the opening of the Cisco Live DevNet Zone in Berlin, we wanted to put the spotlight on some of the sessions https://developer.cisco.com/site/DevNetZone/panels/we have planned that are bringing some of the industry's top experts and thought leaders to the event to share their knowledge and insight with you. The tech industry experienced a love affair with open source in the past several years, and some brave souls have engaged in a long term relationship. As prototypes and lab trials progress to live deployments, we check in with our distinguished panel to see if the marriage with open source software and with the open source community has been all they hoped it would be. Listen in as our panelists share their experience and reflect on the good and bad of betting big on open source. Please join us in the main theater on Wednesday at 3PM as our panelists share their thoughts, experiences, and learnings on the direction of cloud collaboration platforms. Our lineup for this session: Phil Rob, Senior Technical Director for OpenDaylight, Linux Foundation Chris Price, Open Source Strategist for SDN and Cloud, Ericsson Chris Wright, VP and Chief Technologist, Red Hat Ken Owens, CTO and Strategy, Cloud Solutions Group, Cisco See you in Berlin ... View more

As we get close to the opening of the Cisco Live DevNet Zone in Berlin, we wanted to put the spotlight on some of the sessions we have planned that are bringing some of the industry's top experts and thought leaders to the event to share their knowledge and insight with you. Does keeping your data and network secure keep you awake at night? Security is one of the biggest concerns for organizations when considering a move to the cloud. Ensuring that data is secure is more complicated across cloud models, especially where there is shared ownership. In this session, industry security experts will discuss customer vs. cloud partner security challenges and responsibilities, and look at what shared risk means when leveraging both private, public, and hybrid cloud models. They will talk over how compliance, local data residency, and industry vertical requirements are all related to ensuring data protection on multiple clouds for global customers. And what compliance and standards customers should look for when selecting cloud providers and solutions. Please join us in the main theater on Wednesday at 1PM as our panelists share their thoughts, experiences, and learnings on the direction of cloud collaboration platforms. Our lineup for this session: Linda Strick, Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems Sasha Jeltuhin, Director of Business Development, Apprendra David Ulevitch, VP OpenDNS/Cisco See you in Berlin ... View more

As we get close to the opening of the Cisco Live DevNet Zone in Berlin, we wanted to put the spotlight on some of the sessions we have planned that will help you take full advantage of the technologies and capabilities we offer here at DevNet. One key technology we offer is the Cisco DevNet Sandbox, which is a hosted lab environment which allows developers and partners to access hosted Cisco environments in the cloud. At the DevNet Zone Berlin we will be introducing the sandbox to you at 2PM on WEdnesday in the main theater during the Introduction to the DevNet Sandbox and IVT session. In this hour long workshop , we will dig into the Sandbox and unearth its true potential to the developer. We will be covering: Sandbox Overview Available technologies Always on vs Dedicated. Choosing the right Sandbox for you! Making a reservation Look at the always on Sandbox’s Remote Access (VPN and Expressway) IVT Sandboxes Sandbox Content The session will be mainly an interactive technical demonstration of the Sandbox. Want to learn more? Then dig into the sandbox at two other sessions we'll be giving: The DevNet Sandbox: a deep dive will be at 10AM on Wednesday in Classroom 1 The DevNet Sandbox: a hands-on workshop will be held in the workshop area on Thursday at 4PM We will also be giving Sandbox demos at various times during the show. You can keep an eye on the schedule at the show or ask at the information desk to find out where and when these will be given. See you in Berlin ... View more

As we get close to the opening of the Cisco Live DevNet Zone in Berlin, we wanted to put the spotlight on some of the sessions we have planned that are bringing some of the industry's top experts and thought leaders to the event to share their knowledge and insight with you. If you're interest is networks, SDN and Device Programmability, you'll want to join us for Device Programmability, Controllers, Automation and the Customers That Love Them. During this panel we'll reveal the value SDN controllers, device programmability and automation offer the enterprise business. Cisco executives will lead the discussion describing Cisco's direction and view of enterprise technology and the market. Leaders of corporate businesses share how they've leveraged Cisco controllers, device programmability and automation to drive growth and revenue in their companies. Please join us in the main theater on Wednesday at 10AM as our panelists share their thoughts, experiences, and learnings on the direction of cloud collaboration platforms. Our lineup for this session: Christine Bakan, Senior Director Enterprise Software and Solutions, Cisco Mike Cohen, Director Cisco ACI, Cisco Markus Voegele, Senior Network Architect, IBM Aviation Services Martin Klein, IT Architecture, SAP See you in Berlin ... View more

As we get close to the opening of the Cisco Live DevNet Zone in Berlin, we wanted to put the spotlight on some of the sessions we have planned that are bringing some of the industry's top experts and thought leaders to the event to share their knowledge and insight with you. Cloud Computing is changing how we collaborate and share, and there is tremendous business need for enterprises, partners, and developers to be able to deliver differentiated and customized solutions. An open platform with APIs and SDKs allows developers to change experiences by creating, integrated applications and workloads. Why does it matter? Please join us in the main theater on Thursday at 10AM as our panelists share their thoughts, experiences, and learnings on the direction of cloud collaboration platforms. Our lineup for this session: Jose de Castro, Principal Engineer for Tropo, Cisco Kevin Chatow, Director, Product Management for Tropo, Cisco Jason Goecke, Director GM for Tropo, Cisco See you in Berlin ... View more