Telemetry & Gaining Web Scale Operational Efficiency – Is it a Myth or Reality?

We can’t express how excited we were when Cisco was asked to sponsor and participate in an independent event, hosted by Tech Field Day, which invited experts from NetFlix, Google, eBay, and SignalFX to discuss the technical challenges some of these web scale providers face and the innovations they have helped drive in the industry to answer those challenges.  Although, the major focus of the event was on telemetry, they discussed various aspects of scale, management and operational efficiency in their environments. If learning from the industry leaders interests you – continue reading!

Tech Field Day invited six speakers to the event. The speakers presented to a delegate panel of independent industry veterans and bloggers who are respected names in the industry. During the session anyone watching the live stream could interact with the panel by using a special twitter hash tag –  #DFDR1 or https://twitter.com/hashtag/DFDR1?src=hash. If you are on Twitter you can search this # and read all the comments made during the event.  If you have never attended a Tech Field Day you are missing out! Videos from the telemetry Tech Field Day Session can be found here on YouTube.

Here is a brief recap of the day:

The first presentation was pretty intense. Matt Johnson from Netflix discussed what is necessary to deploy and maintain Netflix’s reliable telemetry platform, known as Atlas internally, in the public cloud. Watch this session and learn about the tools that allow teams at Netflix to transform telemetry into insights that ensure the reliability of their end customer experience.

The second speaker, Matt Oswalt from eBay discussed difficulties of infrastructure management in the “brave new world of web-scale” with old protocols that don’t scale well such as SNMP. This discussion clearly laid out the issues many providers face as they deal with cloud scale networking environments.

Matt Oswalt was a great set-up for the third speaker from Google, Anees Shaikh, who presented on Open Network Management and discussed one data model for configuration and telemetry. He talked about how the OpenConfig group was established and how it operates to drive changes needed in the network management and monitoring world.

Then, SignalFX’s CTO and Co-Owner, Philip Li (former employee of Facebook) took the stage to give an examples on modern telemetry and why analytics are the keystone to monitoring. He gave a SignalFx product demo to prove his point – very convincing, indeed.

Finally, the last presenter was Kumar Reedy from Cisco. Kumar explained how Cisco is addressing the above-mentioned challenges with IOS XR software innovations. Kumar’s team closed the presentation portion of the event by showing live demo’s showcasing Cisco’s innovations in action. For those techies who would like to learn more about these new Software Innovations, supporting telemetry read more here or join us on an upcoming Cisco Knowledge Network session on December 1, 2015, 8AM PST / 11AM EST / 5PM CET.

We certainly want to hear from you. Please reply back and give us your thoughts on this Tech Field Day Event and about our new IOS XR software innovations.

For more questions or comments, please tweet us @CiscoSP360.