As topics like software-defined networking, 5G networks, security, machine learning and artificial intelligence dominate the developer landscape, networking hardware company Cisco Systems Inc. created DevNet, its new developer program.

Last week, Cisco held its inaugural Cisco DevNet Create event in San Francisco, opening a new avenue for open-source developers to mingle within network engineers to create cloud-based apps and extend the reach of the Internet of Things.

Susie Wee (pictured), vice president and chief technology officer of DevNet innovations and networked experiences, at Cisco is one of the co-founders of the DevNet program. The open-source project offers developers access to Cisco’s platforms and APIs to create and build innovative business solutions.

“What we see is that there’s this huge transition, transformation going on in the industry with IoT and cloud that changes the definition of how applications meet infrastructure,” Wee said.

She spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during the event to learn more about how developers are taking advantage of the program. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Susie Wee in our Women in Tech feature.

Engaging developers for IoT

The first DevNet Zone, an offshoot developer conference at Cisco Live, began three years ago when the main focus was the company’s infrastructure audience. The success of that conference launched last week’s standalone developer conference to concentrate on IoT and cloud innovation.

While last week’s event was extremely successful in teaming developers with technology companies, it was a risk, according to Wee, to appeal to app and cloud developers, as well as the industry overall.

“I’m very relieved and happy to see that the vibe is very positive. We have the true cloud, IoT,  have the hardcore developers here, and they seem to be very engaged and really embracing [the event],” Wee said.

Cisco is making its way up the stack to the seventh layer and by acquiring AppDynamics Inc., an application performance management company, earlier this year. The company made a $3.7 billion investment to reach the top tier of the Open System Interconnection model.

DevNet Create is not about what Wee calls “the gory details of networking”; it is about DevOps working on IoT and cloud-native applications.

Wee underscored the importance of the ecosystem and how applications will connect with the infrastructure within the parameters of the new technology evolving daily. The infrastructure is now programmable, which expands the capabilities of how applications can interact, she explained.

“We were really trying to focus on, ‘What’s the value to application developers, and what are the opportunities?’ [so] we can make those breakthroughs,” Wee stated.

Market predictions for IoT are continuously changing, and the reality is no one knows what IoT infrastructure will look like at the end of the journey. Questions surrounding infrastructure, running services, and building apps are still unfolding, according to Wee.

However, the conceptualization of what infrastructure will be in the future is emerging. Programmable infrastructure or infrastructure as code is a game changer for developers. This technology, which has been developed by companies like Docker Inc. and Red Hat Inc. to name a few, uses containers to orchestrate the configuration into the application code.

In the past, networking mentality was “set it and forget it.” The big change is the network is becoming programmable, automated and controller based, Wee explained. This also gives the developer more flexibility and control.   

“You don’t actually configure it by going one network device at a time. The network had APIs you feed into a controller. Now you’re actually doing network-wide commands. That takes out the human error, [and] makes it easy to configure and reconfigure,” Wee said.

She finds it hard to nail down what the definitive infrastructure will be. But she spoke about how IoT will be part of the infrastructure and how microservices and containers will create a different paradigm for orchestrating applications and where they will reside along with provisioning them.

“The key is … it’s all about connectivity. They [can’t] do anything without the network. And we’re pushing the boundaries of the network,” Wee concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Cisco DevNet Create 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Cisco DevNet Create. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE