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For 2021 and beyond, there are a few top-of-mind predictions that look at the bigger picture for the future of work, as so many of us are re-imagining what that will be, and how some things have changed forever. Looking at predictions from AI/ML, Quantum, Edge and the future of work across supply chain to healthcare.  

Cisco is solving the connectivity and security challenges of an application-first multi-cloud world in a holistic manner. The company already solves for the complexities of connecting and securing users, devices, data centers, SaaS and public cloud properties, working with global enterprises, governments, and SMB organizations. Now, with Application-first Infrastructures, Cisco will be solving for the complexities of connecting and securing applications and APIs.

As the application’s components became thinner and thinner (microservices, functions), and geographically diverse (cloud regions, on-premises, across the globe), the connectivity problem for even a single application became much, much worse. A quick look at the service dependency graph of a cloud native application (e.g., the Monzo banking app) will give us a sense of the networking problem needing to be solved.

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Today, application experience practically is the brand. More and more, consumer loyalty is inspired by a company’s app: its feature velocity, ease of use, and trust and security.

Cloud providers, integrators, ecosystem technology partners and industry analysts will discuss what tomorrow’s cloud will be and what participants need to know to prepare during “Future Cloud: One event, a world of opportunities”

The basic gist of CN-WAN is to allow DevOps teams to lay out the WAN needs of the microservices that they deploy in a Kubernetes-managed cluster and for the network operations folks to automatically import those needs into their dynamic WAN optimizations. Vijoy Pandey, CTO and cloud platform and software VP at Cisco, explained in a blog post that the project is about “CN-WAN maps Kubernetes application attributes to SD-WAN network capabilities to automatically optimize the application performance over the WAN.”

"The edge — the way I would describe it is as a geo-caching architecture," explained Vijoy Pandey..  "It's a set of services, on top of which you can build applications. But what kinds of applications make sense there? The resources that are available to those services, differ widely from a cloud, to on-prem, to all kinds of edge locations all the way down to a camera or phone. So why would I place an application in place X versus place Y? "

SDXCentral

Cisco wants to drive connectivity through every layer of the networking stack, a move that is needed to allow enterprises to better monetize their cloud investments and one that is also becoming increasingly important as those enterprises look to drive innovation up their development stacks and deployments across the internet.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today launched a new initiative to use open source technologies to help public health authorities (PHAs) around the world combat COVID-19 and future epidemics. The new Linux Foundation Public Health(LFPH) initiative is launching with seven Premier members, including Cisco.

Distributed cloud-native applications represent a tantalizing, if complex, opportunity for enterprises looking to bring new, more resilient services to market faster than ever, Vijoy Pandey, Cisco’s VP of engineering and CTO of cloud, said during a panel discussion.

Breaking down applications on a server into discrete, containerized functions offers a wealth of benefits. There is a tradeoff, and it's at least equally as huge: It decomposes systems into colossal Petri dishes of seemingly indistinguishable micro-organisms.

Pandey says that software was being increasingly atomised, with collections of APIs and microservices woven together to form enterprise applications spanning on-prem systems and clouds. “The network is becoming the runtime for all these apps” and no longer just an underlying transport but “full-stack connectivity, security and observability from the application layer to the virtualisation bare metal”, Pandey says.

Google’s network has five control systems, and in an SDN World Congresskeynote Thursday, Vijoy Pandey, Google’s head of engineering for networking, explained why each one is needed.

The SDN Dial Tone — What Network Virtualization Should Do

CIOs of modern-day data centers are concerned about elasticity, agility, end-to-end guarantees in the face of client-device mobility as well as workload mobility, and a scale-out infrastructure that can support these attributes. This driver for elasticity and agility is realized in the network via the promise of network virtualization.

This paper looks at the use of photonics in future data center networks and stresses the need for SDN Controller and concepts - programmability, virtualization and end-to-end optimization - to control, manage and automate these elements to enable an optimized, elastic and agile data center.