 Two decades ago, network administrators and IT teams provisioned new devices, secured them, and maintained them manually. Most often via a slow, tedious, and error-prone command line interface. These days, there are certainly automated tools to make large-scale deployments easier, but by and large, the nuts and bolts work is still done exactly the same way. Why? Well, that's a great question, and it's one that Cisco sponsored a little jaunt over to their Vancouver office here to explore. So, let's find out, shall we? The answer is that it doesn't have to be that way anymore, and the Cisco folks created a fun little demo for me to show you guys what they're calling intent-based networking. So to get things started, I go ahead and connect to their Wi-Fi, and then right away, I get a ping from the community bot built into WebEx teams with some useful information to help me find my way. After a short conversation, community bot, or CB as I like to call it, let me know that the people I'm supposed to meet are in the Quadro room, and then asks if I'd like a group chat where I can arrange to join them, invite them for coffee, or do whatever it is that executive types do on a Friday afternoon. Turns out with the Cisco folks, it's grabbing pints. Surprisingly cool here, by the way. 10 out of 10. Wood pint again. Anyway, the next part of the demo was supposed to have me have some kind of Wi-Fi trouble with video streaming or something, but it was really hard for an office full of Cisco access points to have Wi-Fi trouble, so I'm just gonna have to walk you guys through like a hypothetical what could have happened. Now, 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi isn't as fast as 5 GHz, but it still has one key advantage, range. The problem is that the instant someone fires up one of those puppies, it basically jams every 2.4 GHz device in the vicinity. So, a Cisco intent-based network can be constantly monitoring for this kind of interruption, it can let CB know so she can make sure that you're not like tearing your hair out trying to, you know, find a spot with better reception or something stupid like that, and then this is the part where it gets really crazy. She can even fix it for you in the background, moving you over to a 5 GHz channel or recommending that you do so yourself depending on your configuration. Like this is the kind of thing that for years has been impractical or even impossible with traditional troubleshooting, because by the time a tech were to wade their way over here through the queue of my printer won't print messages and finally get to my desk to diagnose my Wi-Fi, well, you know, Barney from Accounting's lunch is not only not in the microwave anymore, it's like down the street there at the treatment plant. And so anything intermittent like that has been traditionally very hard to diagnose. That is why we needed a new way. And before you freak out, the idea behind this data collection is not to get rid of the entire IT staff, but rather to stop wasting their time. Now, Internet of Things has become kind of like an annoying buzzword, but that doesn't change that the sheer number of connected devices that needs to be managed per IT staffer is going to explode when a room like this one goes from, you know, three Ethernet jacks over here and a handful of people on their laptops over there to every, you know, phone and thermostat and speaker and TV and even light bulb having its own connection. I mean, you don't want to be provisioning every stupid light individually, do you? Although that said the jokes about how many sys admins does it take to change a light bulb do basically write themselves at that point. But anyway, the idea here is with intent-based networking, the manual work goes away. So you plug the light in, it announces itself, then based on its identification, it can be provisioned on the network, secured and then cordoned off from higher priority devices like, say for example, a video streaming smart board over here and all of that without the lengthy setup process. Because remember guys, even five minutes is a long time when you're doing it a thousand times like you would with the lights in an office building like this one. And hidden away in this corner of what they call the lab are some of the hardware keys to what's going on here. So this, this right here is their 4800 series access point and this is one unique piece of kit because in addition to being a sick Wi-Fi access point, it has dedicated hardware to gather location data. Like remember how the network was helping me find my colleagues from before? So you used to be able to find out where a user was, but the old way used multiple access points to triangulate the location and frankly it didn't work very well. The new way uses what's called a phased antenna array to detect nanosecond differences in the time of arrival of beaconing signals from your device to determine where you are to within a meter and it can do it even if you aren't actually connected to the hotspot. I can't believe they're just letting me wander around in here, like there is no one supervising me right now. Then there's these guys here. So this here is a pair of Cisco's catalyst 9000 switches which are apparently selling like hotcakes. These not only do real-time monitoring, but they can actually, going back to our microwave example, log data as well to help DNA Center, which is the software brain that controls the whole operation, find patterns that will make diagnosing intermittent issues much easier. And DNA Center enables some other fancy tricks. So with encrypted data, which is becoming more and more common, the content of a data packet can't be read directly by the piece of equipment that it's traveling through. So whether it's an unauthorized user trying to gain access to the network or a nasty malware in a Word document, you can't see it. But using machine learning, it can look at the behavior of it, how big it is, where it's going, what it's trying to do. And then using decades of experience along with AI and machine learning, it can guess with a high degree of accuracy. This packet is bad and this one is safe. Now, obviously, this stuff isn't perfect yet. This is just the beginning. I mean, I got to tell you guys, CB let me down big time when I asked for directions to the bathroom, for example. So it is a really good thing that Anju was here because that could have been a really bad scene. But that's OK, because the point of this technology isn't replacing people anyway. It's about leveraging the power of the community of developers that Cisco is building called DevNet to make our networks more efficient and more secure through software. If the network itself is a software platform, then it can use all the data that it has, data that would have otherwise been wasted intelligently based on intent, whether that's the intent of the administrator or the intent of the user. That's intent based networking. And a really cool example of this was completed just last year at UBC's main library. So they were able to use location data from student smartphones to determine which parts of the building needed air conditioning and heating. And they were able to save 7% on their energy costs. That is a big deal and frankly, a fairly rudimentary example. So for the network admins out there, the message here is that it might be time to start dabbling in programmability. And as for you developers, well, it might be time for you to explore the networking side too. And you can both learn more at developer.cisco.com. So thanks to Cisco for sponsoring this video and thanks to you guys for watching. If it sucked, you guys know where that button is. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Also linked down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should definitely join. So do you need some tech tips? You want it? No, I got nothing for you. Oh, so it's just still going? That seems dangerous. I think we need to reboot it. We broke Cisco's microwave.