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Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins said this week that the company’s No. 1 priority going forward is to enable IT organizations to better manage application experience via abstraction layers that make to possible for developers to programmatically manage infrastructure.
Speaking at its annual Cisco Partner Summit, which occurred online, Robbins said Cisco is working toward making it possible for developers to not only programmatically provision IT infrastructure but also impact how services are delivered using application networking services the company is currently developing.
Over time, the entire Cisco portfolio will either be cloud-delivered or cloud-managed as Cisco increasingly delivers its technology as a service, he said. As part of that effort, Cisco is now exposing application programming interfaces (APIs) across its portfolio.
At the core of the initiative are investments Cisco is making in AppDynamics, ThousandEyes and its Intersight IT operations management platform. Those tools will be employed to provide insights and observability across a diverse application environment that increasingly includes cloud-native applications running on Kubernetes clusters, Robbins said.
In effect, Cisco is signaling a more aggressive transition toward managing infrastructure as code inside and out of the cloud. This week Cisco announced it has added an Intersight Workload Optimizer to optimize infrastructure consumption along with adding support for dynamic provisioning of Kubernetes clusters via Cisco Intersight. The company also added a Cisco Nexus dashboard to provide visibility into networks spanning multiple clouds, on-premises IT environments and edge computing platforms, and expanded the Cisco Identity Services Engine to now secure a wider variety of internet of things (IoT) endpoints.
Cisco, like every other provider of IT infrastructure, is shifting toward a cloud operating model that promises to enable IT teams to manage on-premises IT infrastructure in the same way IT teams consume public cloud resources. As part of that effort, Robbins noted Cisco has been disaggregating all the software functionality it provides from hardware whenever possible, which will provide IT teams with more flexibility and control over highly distributed IT environments.
The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated a transition to managing IT as service, as organizations rely more on applications to engage their end customers, he added.
Of course, Cisco is not the only provider of IT infrastructure with similar ambitions. Not only is networking software is becoming accessible via APIs, but it’s also now possible to deploy a software-defined network on commodity processors almost anywhere. That transition is also the primary reason that network operations are increasingly being folded into DevOps teams seeking to manage compute, storage and networking as code across an extended enterprise.
It may be a while yet before network and storage operations are fully assimilated into DevOps processes. However, it’s now no longer a question of if as much as how long before most IT organizations achieve that goal.
