Cisco Automation Developer Days – Crosswork and Sustainability take center stage

With the newly released Cisco Crosswork and an increased focus on sustainability high on the agenda, there was a lot of anticipation for this year’s Cisco Automation Developer Days in Stockholm. And this year, Ductus was a main sponsor and had three speaking spots as our network automation and orchestration experts shared their expertise on wide-ranging topics. We find out more from Principal Solutions Architect, Kristoffer Hansson.

Automation Developer Days is an excellent opportunity to meet, exchange ideas, and socialize with peers and customers over three days. We speak with Cisco regularly and with individual customers, but we rarely all get together, so it’s quite unique. You get to find out the latest industry trends and how solutions are being deployed at different providers, which is a great way to get inspiration for your projects. Of course, this is a sharing environment so people learn from us too.

Crosswork Workflow Manager 

This year’s big topic was Cisco Crosswork; it was interesting to get the big picture of its capabilities and see what it can bring to the industry, even if we predominantly work with network configuration at Ductus. It was good to hear the customer perspective on this. I was particularly interested in Crosswork Workflow Manager and how it can be integrated with NSO, REST, and AWS adapters. I’m looking forward to exploring this further to see how we can use it in customer deliveries.

Cisco NSO

It was also interesting to hear about the VScode NSO developer tools that are available as a standalone and work across all releases of NSO, including the newly launched NSO 6.0. This includes things such as the option to use Yangster or create service and action classes in YANG, as well as an increased use of XML templates. Upcoming releases of NSO were also discussed, where we can look forward to improved observability and automatic error handling and recovery, among other things.

Sustainability in focus

Sustainability was another key topic of Developer Days, particularly how hardware can be optimized for energy savings. Discussions were held on the planning of a network to save energy, something I think we will see much more of moving forward. Ductus Quality Assurance Specialist, Mia Johansson, also talked about sustainability in her breakout session with Cisco’s Eva Liu. It was a well-attended session on “Building a Culture of Quality in NSO Development Teams to Support Sustainability”.

CTO talk

Our North America CTO, Scott Barvick, also held a breakout session. Together with Cisco’s Michael Maddern, he talked about Crosswork Network Controller Brownfield, Network Services Orchestrator and Service Health. Scott has a great deal of experience from developing solutions for Tier 1 providers, so there was a great deal of interest to hear what he had to say.

Customer success stories

Ductus Automation Solutions Architect James Henderson presented on the main stage, delving more deeply into one of our customer success stories. His talk focused on the benefit of bridging silos in an organization for a successful end-to-end automation of complex networks.

In general, it was another great event, and I look forward to applying lessons learned and continuing some of the discussions with partners and customers.