Network operators have experienced a major transition in their role over the past decade, according to Ivan Pepelnjak (pictured), network architect, celebrity blogger and webinar author. Known in the blogosphere as that “grumpy networking guy,” Pepelnjak has been around business functions for more than 30 years and wants to share a bit of realism in the cloud migration world: Despite the excitement of tech companies moving to the cloud, they fail to prepare their applications correctly, consequently leaving the operations team in the dark.

“If you look at a typical enterprise application, it still isn’t developed for a distributed environment. They use three tiers of servers, but then they try to cope by trying to solve all the problems in the [operations] phase, when they deploy stuff, and that’s the biggest problem we face today,” Pepelnjak said.

Pepelnjak spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Barcelona, Spain. During the interview, he said that he’s amazed that little has changed with distributed architecture and customers struggle to get their virtualization networking right. Most companies are not suited for redesigning applications to make them work correctly with Amazon or the Google Cloud, he added.

Breaking boundaries 

There are two main pain points for how companies work with virtualization and automation, according to Pepelnjak. “The first type of challenge is that the ops team is not invited to the table when new stuff is discussed. Application developers dream up something on their best knowledge. … Because the network security virtualization storage people are not at the table, they have to cope with whatever they dream up in isolation.”

The other challenge is that the “networking people don’t realize that their world has changed,” meaning automation has wiped out what was once manual work, Pepelnjak added.

So how is Cisco Systems Inc. helping with this scenario? The company’s intent-based networking portfolio is set to help information technology teams shift from reactive to proactive. It will address the 43 percent of time IT spends troubleshooting, while making IT operations more proactive, agile and automated, according to Cisco.

But is intent-based networking just a bunch of hype? “Device intent is really device configuration,” Pepelnjak said. Once a company understands the concepts of declarative programming and imperative programming, it’s one step in the right direction to successful device configuration, he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Cisco Live Barcelona 2018.

Photo: SiliconANGLE