If there is a singular example that shows how the cloud is paving the way for a new operating model where virtually everything will be delivered as-a-service, consider the mobile banking app.

Applications for banking services were already gathering steam before COVID-19. After the pandemic closed many traditional in-person banking functions, the app became a key interface for customers.

There is a highly complex process behind the scenes driving the banking app, which must deliver a secure and accurate service for customers countless times per day. This requires hardware, software, tooling, machine intelligence, AI, a complicated set of partnerships and, above all, the application developer to pull it off. This is more than just a delicate balancing act; it is a true networking challenge.

“It’s cloud APIs, it’s on-prem, it’s branch, it’s SaaS, it’s mobile, and you need to bring all of these things together,” said Vijoy Pandey (pictured), vice president of engineering at Cisco Systems Inc. “This complexity is very real, and it’s across the wide-open internet. How do you make it consistent and easy for the developer? That is the networking problem.”

Pandey spoke with Dave Vellante, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE. Vellante also spoke with Cisco’s Vijay Venugopal, senior director of product management for cloud compute; Kaustubh Das, senior VP and general manager of cloud and compute; Vikas Ratna, director of product management, UCS; James Leach, director of business development, UCS; and Thomas Scheibe, VP of product management, data center networking, in separate interviews.

The discussion, part of “Future Cloud: One event, a world of opportunities,” included a focus on removing friction from the work of enterprise developers, creating an app-centric infrastructure, recent updates for Cisco’s operational model, and an ongoing mission to enhance the hybrid cloud experience. (* Disclosure below.)

Watch the interview with Pandey below:

Run fast and build

The networking challenge for Cisco and others seeking to expand market share in today’s enterprise space is to make the next generation cloud model simple, secure, agile and programmable while also being cloud agnostic. For developers building feature-filled applications within this ideal state, the less they see of the cloud machinery, the better.

“If you think about the developer, all they want to do is run fast because they want to build those features out,” Pandey said. “They want to pick and choose APIs and services that matter to them and build out their app. They want the complexities of infrastructure, security and trust to be handled by somebody else.”

The problem within today’s enterprise is that developers cannot simply work in blissful isolation. They must rely on network, security and IT operations to build and ship an important application, a process that often leads to friction.

“These frictions, meetings and toil take a toll on the developer,” Pandey noted. “That’s why companies and developers and apps are not as agile as they would like to be. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

A single operating model

Cisco’s approach to challenging this status quo is to connect next-gen compute, shared memory, intelligent networking and storage resource pools, bringing automation, visibility, application assurance and security to a new decentralized cloud.

“Public cloud has completely changed the expectations of how our customers want to consume compute; customers have gotten used to consuming from the application out,” Leach said. “This means that the infrastructure basically has to meet the application where it lives. We’ve decided we’re not going to chase this single pane of glass view of the world, which frankly our customers don’t want. What they want is a single operating model.”

Watch the interview with Leach and Ratna below:

Cisco’s core solution for driving this operational model is Intersight, the firm’s cloud operations platform. Intersight combines visualization, optimization and orchestration to unite tools, infrastructure and applications in a seamless whole. The platform was first introduced in 2017 as a management and automation solution for Cisco’s Unified Computing System and its HyperFlex Systems portfolio.

“We built Intersight from the ground up to be an immensely scalable, SaaS, super simple hybrid cloud platform,” Das explained. “Intersight delivers that bridge between customer estates of today, their workloads of today, the need for them to be guardians of enterprise grade resiliency, with the agility that’s needed for the future.”

New Kubernetes integration

Cisco is continuing to add new features to its operational platform, most recently with an announcement that it would enter a multi-year deal with HashiCorp Inc. to sell Terraform Cloud Business infrastructure-as-code software in conjunction with Intersight.

In addition, Cisco announced general availability of Intersight Kubernetes Service, to simplify management of Kubernetes clusters across the full stack, including on-premises and public cloud.

“We have created a brand-new, SaaS-delivered Kubernetes service that is integrated with Intersight,” Venugopal said. “It delivers a cloud managed and cloud delivered Kubernetes service that can be deployed on any supported target infrastructure. Think of it as Kubernetes anywhere, delivered as SaaS, managed from Intersight.”

Watch the interview with Venugopal and Das below:

Applications have different needs. Some need more GPUs, others demand more memory or cores. This reality has resulted in a datacenter awash in point products to meet these various demands. Cisco is pursuing a solution for customers that combine numerous services in support of the application.

It is similar to a time not that long ago when users owned separate devices for navigation, making a phone call or snapping a picture, according to Ratna. Then, the smartphone came along and changed everything.

“When smartphones arrived, we realized that all of those cool innovations could be delivered in a much simpler, convenient and easier to consume way through one device and completely transform our experience,” Ratna noted. “We see significant challenges in the datacenter with a point product-based approach of delivering platform innovations to applications.”

Focus on the hybrid cloud

Ultimately, Cisco knows that the world is becoming increasingly cloud native and its strategy must be formed around supporting applications in this ecosystem. This means taking an API-driven approach for a programmable network that manages infrastructure in a cloud native way.

“There is the cloud native way of how applications are being built and then there is the cloud native way of how you interact with infrastructure,” Scheibe said. “We’re putting in place the onramps between clouds and then on top of it we’re exposing for all of these tools, APIs that can be used and leveraged. We have cloud native interfaces so an operator or DevOps team can interact directly with that infrastructure the way they would do today, with anything that lives on the cloud or anything that built the application.”

Watch the interview with Scheibe below:

For mission-critical applications, performance, resiliency and low latency are essential requirements. In providing its customers with APIs that can be leveraged to simplify the operational interface, Cisco is now bringing in the benefits of converged infrastructure to the world of hybrid cloud.

“Customers need to implement a strategy that takes into account everything they have to manage, in terms of their contemporary workloads, legacy, everything the developer community wants to do on DevOps and really harness the innovation built in the public cloud, open source and internally,” Das said. “That naturally leads the down the path of a hybrid cloud strategy. Cisco’s mission is to provide for that imperative the simplest, most powerful platform to deliver hybrid cloud.”

Watch the entire show below:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Future Cloud event. Neither Cisco Systems Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: SiliconANGLE