Cisco Live Barcelona 2020 is the third Cisco Live EMEA I’m attending, as with the previous two I had high expectations for the networking with peers/colleagues and was ready to learn new things and deepen my knowledge within the Cisco Datacenter area. (This blog post in English to cater for the international readers of this subject).
On Sunday I started my travels early, at 07:30 in the morning, in my car in Southern Sweden. The flight from Kastrup (Copenhagen Airport) took of at 11:40 and landed at 14:30 in Barcelona. We went to the conference venue (Fira gran via, entrance north) to register for the conference and received the nice complimentary backpack and water bottle.
Sunday night was spent together with my Swedish travel colleagues, we had a nice dinner and I shopped for some clothing that I had forgot to pack.
Kickstarting Cisco Live Barcelona – Tetration & Intersight
Bright and early Monday morning I started with an four hour Technical Seminar about Tetration Analytics (I know Tetration isn’t a Datacenter product anymore but is very useful when doing microsegmentation in the DC). this was followed by a 45 minutes DevNet workshop name ”Intersight automation and monitoring with Ansible”. In the afternoon I attended an technical seminar named ”Extending your datacenter policies to the cloud with Cisco ACI Anywhere”, I believe this will be a really good way of doing multi/hybrid cloud for many customers that want to extend their applications to the cloud with the same security policies etc. as in their onprem Data Center.
Monday Night was spent together with all my Conscia Sweden colleagues and our customers eating dinner and having a really nice time and I got to bed too late.
Tuesday morning, I started with 2 interviews, the first called Onboarding Experiences Research, this interview was about my experiences working with Cisco. This interview was supposed to take two hours, but we did it in one (because of my schedule). In return I got a gift card to the Cisco Store at Cisco Live. This gift card I used to buy me a nice jacket with the CCIE logo on it.
The second interview was called People of Cisco and was video recorded in The Gateway Rockstar Lounge and was a cool experience. I’m looking forward to viewing this video when it is released, I will off course share it on my social media accounts.
The rest of the day continued with seven technical sessions/workshops:
Container Networking Deep dive- The DevNet sessions/workshops:
- UCS Programmability for the Rest of Us
- Network verification with pyATS/Genie for non-programmers
- Automating ACI operations on AWS
- ACI troubleshooting VMware vDS VMM integration (when we were let into the session room, we were given a newly released book, see right)
- Openshift and Cisco ACI Integration
Tuesday night was spent together with all my Conscia Sweden colleagues and our customers eating dinner and having a really nice time and …I got to bed too late.
Wednesday was spent going to two technical sessions and two DevNet sessions/workshops:
- Hyperflex Storage integration for Kubernetes
- From CLI Hero to API superhero: Manage and Automate ACI L2-L7 infrastructure-as-Code
- Cisco UCS & Intersight Programmability Automation & Orchestration Overview
- Instructor-led lab called Kubernetes, HyperFlex, ACI – OH MY! it was a really good hands-on-lab with Cisco Container Platform (CCP) running on HyperFlex and integrated with ACI.
Wednesday evening was spent together with all my Conscia Sweden colleagues and our customers eating dinner and having a really nice time, I got to bed at a reasonable time for once. (!).
Thursday I had yet another day packed with technical sessions and one DevNet workshop:
- How to extend your ACI fabric to Public Clouds (AWS and Azure)
- How to setup an ACI Multi-site with single POD and Multipod, this was a really good and funny session held by Max Ardica and Ramses Smeyer
- Cisco Container Platform for Infrastructure Teams
- DevNet Workshop: Managing Cisco UCS with the Python SDK
I also had an interview with Upshot by Influitive, i will share this interview on my social media platforms when it is released. I was a little late to this interview because I had a ticket in the drawing for a Lego Millennium Falcon set, sadly I didn’t win it.
And of course, we can’t forget the Customer Appreciation Party on Thursday evening, this I spent with my fellow Gateway Rockstars and Cisco The Gateway employees in their own VIP area, it was located to the right of the main stage. There was a skateboard half pipe where some really good skateboarders was running, live music at the main stage with Austin Powers as the master of ceremony. During the party I got to meet famous figures on the party floor. I didn’t stay to late at the party because of my knees and feet, they were hurting really badly from walking and standing a lot during the day – and I got in bed in time!
Ending Live 2020 on a technical note
Friday is always a half day. I hade two sessions booked:
- Practical Application of Cisco ACI Micro Segmentation
- NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) End-to-End Configuration with RoCEv2 and Fibre Channel
For the first session around 45-50% of all that had booked the session attended, and some actually fell asleep during the session. For the second session when I booked it, I thought that J Metz from Cisco (see my Cisco Live Barcelona story from last year) was going to be the speaker, but sadly he left Cisco and handed over this session to two colleagues who didn’t disappoint me.
Then came travel home again where we had to leave the nice weather in Barcelona (17-18 degrees Centigrade).
To conclude, I can say that Cisco Live Barcelona 2020 was well worth the investment, both in time and money. For me as a CCIE because I can use Cisco Live Barcelona as training on ce.cisco.com towards my CCIE recertification.
In case any of the technologies mentioned above may be of interest for your organization, or if you wish to get updated regarding Cisco Datacenter solutions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at Conscia.
Want to come with us to Cisco Live Las Vegas in May? Check out our Swedish customer trip!
Joacim Wicander has a degree in programming and has since spent 18 years working with advanced network solutions. He’s one of Sweden’s few Cisco-certified datacenter experts (Cisco Certified Internet Expert, CCIE datacenter) and somewhat of a wiz in matters involving networks, storage, servers, drag racing and Lego. (He’s also an occasional travel reporter, see also here, and occasionally gets to bed too late).
