On April 27 2017, NetAcad together with DevNet organized an event in Budapest, Hungary to promote the resources available in DevNet for Cisco Networking Academy students and instructors. In DevNet, we believe that interacting hands-on with the technology is the best way to learn and cement knowledge for the long term. This contributed to the planning for this event as a hands-on workshop in which the NetAcad instructors were encouraged to follow along the presentations by coding simple applications. We covered Cisco APIC-EM, the SDN controller for enterprise branch, campus and WAN, Cisco Spark and Tropo part of Cisco's cloud collaboration offering and Cisco IoX part of the Fog architecture from Cisco.
After an introduction on the DevNet value proposition for the NetAcad students and instructors we dove into the demo part of the event.
For APIC-EM we covered all the functionality and modules included with version 1.4 of the controller. I demoed the discovery process and the device and host inventory resulting from it as well as the network topology that the controller builds based on the information gathered from the network. After that we covered the more advanced features offered by the controller like iWAN configuration, Path Trace for troubleshooting, Network Plug and Play for easy provisioning and initial configurations as well as Easy and Dynamic QoS. Next, we dove into APIC-EM APIs, how to run API calls from the controller GUI itself as well as with Postman and Python scripts. We witnessed how easy it is to get a list of all the devices discovered by APIC-EM, how to gather interface information, how to easily find which host is connected to a specific switch port and how to "pretty" print all this output by using very simple Python scripts.
After a quick lunch break, we continued with Tropo and Spark. We developed simple Python applications on the Tropo platform on how to perform outbound calling and how to process inbound calls, how to send and receive SMS messages and integrate them in very simple web applications. For Spark API, we were able to see how easy it is to use the documentation available at https://developer.ciscospark.com/ and how to test the API straight from the website. We created Spark messages and sent them to specific rooms. We looked at bots and integrations and witnessed how easy it is to develop your own bot.
The last part of the event covered IoX and the DevNet sandbox. I used the IoX DevNet sandbox to have a simple Python application running on a Cisco 829 router and went over the Cisco Fog architecture and how this integrates in the Cisco DNA vision.
Big thank you to all the event attendees and the Hungarian Cisco NetAcad community. I want to thank also Ákos David from University of Pannonia in Veszprém, Zoltán Sisák Chairman of the Board for the HTTP foundation, Karol Kniewald Cisco CSR Territory Manager at Cisco for their efforts to make this a successful event.
I look forward to the next NetAcad event. Let us know in the comments section below if you would be interested to attend a DevNet NetAcad event in the future. Feel free to add questions and comments with regard to the content presented at the conference and feel free to inquire about how I might be able to assist you in your learning journey.