If you asked me two years ago if I was going to write this blog – I would have told you no way. I’m a technology architect – I design things. As many that know me well will tell you, I say it often, I am “not a coder”.

“But wait, didn’t you go to college for programming?” – not really, I took some college courses (Borland Turbo C), and in high school I did some Visual Basic, and I have done some scripting. The reality is that if you write some code – I can read and understand what you are doing, but asking me to write something from scratch, is about as useful as asking a trombone player to paint like Picasso – my brain isn’t wired like that.

Micro-services and Cloud Require Coding Skills

Ok, i’ll admit that – the new world does require more skills than I have. So this year, I took some GO courses, I also did more Python. Would you like me to admit that I enjoyed it? I really tried, and for awhile it was going well, but it just doesn’t feel like me – nevertheless – it helped a fair bit.

I actually enjoy coding more on embedded stuff. Arduino, robots, Nvidia Nano’s – maybe it’s the connection to the hardware that keeps my mind interested. I have also dabbled with some ML stuff, and creating my own ML models.

The cloud requires just a tad more coding skills – and – I am working on it, but alas, my mind still doesn’t work that way. I think however, I found a hack.

Move Up Stack – Don’t Change Mentality

The good news for anyone who is used to cables, switches, routers and servers – is that this new world isn’t any different than the old one. It just shifts everything you know – up in the stack. It was when I started to think this way, everything was in focus.

Being a long time communications nerd, and someone who started off in TDM telecom – for me, communications is pretty standard. Everything has to communicate to function and work and just as I made the migration from TDM to IP, it’s time to migrate from monolithic to micro-service.

Albeit, I won’t lie, I was in my 20’s when I started VoIP, and I was the only one at my company who was even willing to go near it. People looked at me like I had two heads when I told them what it did. “How do you get ring voltage without a trunk?”. I digress.

The bottom line is that the physical, datalink and even the network layers are now being abstracted from applications. Run it anywhere you want, don’t worry about what is underneath. Yeah, that sounds like a plan – just trust the environment underneath. The reality is that you shouldn’t, and your applications should be protected from the chaos that now exists – underneath. This does however mean you have to write your applications and deploy them in an intelligent way, remember, you are the pointy end of the communications stick now, no firewall to save you. With great power comes great responsibility, a responsibility that used to sit in the hands of network engineers.

Security In The Hands Of Developers

My friends look at me like I have gone crazy around the campfire (no literally) – they laugh out loud when I make that statement. The good news is that tools exist to help, I have always said that security is a layered approach, never rely on a single thing to keep you safe.

Applications are complex beasts – and there is hardly an application that uses 100% its own code, much of it comes from open source or third party sources – so how do you know if you can trust it? What if that application is updated, what if someone else finds a bug in some code you used – but – you don’t know. These are big things to think about – but the big manufactures like Cisco, are working on tools for that (Disclaimer – I work for Cisco). Scrubbing your applications to make sure you are not using out of date tools.

Many of the tools will monitor your code, APIs, and micro-services for intrusion or bad actors, some do it through traditional “firewall” type methods, some by interrogating traffic, but there is an increasing need to analyze transaction level traffic to both ensure performance and security. AppDynamics has been doing much of this for some time, both security and performance. See more of that here from Tech Field day. That said, we have new tools we are working on.

You Need A Baseline To Detect Problems and Threats

Unless you know every single call your APIs make – how do you know what is real and what is not? What if someone messing with your services? What if some developer has written sloppy code or using an API in an unexpected way. You need a baseline. There is actually a standard for this called the OpenAPI Spec. You can specify how your API works – but what if your inter-service API is a mess, or built over time. Trying to build out a spec could be difficult – or what if it isn’t your API.

The good news is tools exist to help.

Everything Becomes Clear with APIClarity

Cisco developed an application called APIClarity – apiclarity.io that will sit inside your micro-service infrastructure and watch your API calls from inside the service mesh (like wireshark on a monitor port) and not only watch what is happening, it will ensure your services are operating as expected based on your specification. The good news is, it is free – no, seriously go get it from github and try it out.

If you don’t have an API Spec now, then APIClarity will help you generate one, by monitoring traffic and building that specification.

This works by putting the service-mesh equivalent of “PCAP” into your service-mesh to deliver all API calls to the APIClarity engine, which then builds your API Specification from scratch. Once you have built that specification, you can save it, and when something unexpected happens – it will let you know.

The beauty is actually in the tools simplicity, and at the end of the day everything is pretty easy to understand if you just – upstack your thinking.

DEMO Time

It wouldn’t be good without a demo right? How about a step by step build, no fancy code writing, no serious scripting – this is something you as a network engineer CAN do on your own.

I’m going to take a bit of a departure from what I normally write. Ok, I know what you might be thinking – I don’t write much. The reality is that since joining Cisco Systems some time ago, I have been working on some amazing projects – but as you can imagine such projects are generally internal, and many are not for public consumption.

In the last little while, we have been up to some cool stuff, one being a project call “Digital Canopy” amazing project to service over 15,000 people with free internet during the COVID-19 pandemic. This was one heck of a project, with so many hurdles to overcome. While donating free sounds like a great idea – and it is – that is just the beginning. Between lockdowns and shutdowns it took us almost a year, in the summer heat, in the winter cold – but we got the project done. Below is a quick video talking about what we did, and some of my team helping get the job done. If you catch me at Cisco Live in the future – and have a challenge coin to trade – I just might have a digital canopy one for you.

COVID Stress

I would be lying if I said I was immune to COVID stress, from having very young children at home to a changing technology landscape and so much to learn. There was no question that times were tough. It was easy for some to say “Just work in the evening” but for those of us with young children, or children with needs – after a day of dealing with our kids – working another 4-6 hours at night was just impossible.

Thankfully, Cisco was there for me, with managers that were supportive and understanding, even when it was hard to get things done. Technology was obviously my friend and helped out a ton. However it simply was not enough.

The weekends have not felt much like weekends in some time, with young children, and ongoing lockdowns and limits, there was almost no escape from the daily grind of life. My friends who were physicians told me that mental health challenges were on the rise, and they went from the majority of their day working with chronic care patients to all new acute middle aged patients who had never had mental health challenges before. We were heading for a mental health crisis.

Mental Health is Health

Well, that is pretty easy to say isn’t it. From companies who tout mental health programs to fancy hashtags, it seems to be all the rage to get on the “we support mental health in the workplace”. Yet I still have friends working for organizations that claim to really care – being let go when things get difficult.

The Canadian Mental Health Association tells us that by age 40 – 50% of the population will have or have had a mental illness of some kind. A complex play of factors can cause mental health challenges, everything from genetics, biological, personality and environmental factors. Oh, you mean like a global pandemic? It’s easy to say “You have it easy compared to…..” but this isn’t a slow adjustment, we woke up one morning and were told “Do not go to the office” – for us there was zero notice, we didn’t even know the day we left we would never return.

One in five Canadians screened for positive symptoms of depression, anxiety or posttraumatic stress disorder as a result of COVID-19. Including me. One in four women screened positive for at least one disorder, compared with 17% of men. 68% have reported that their mental health had worsened since the start of the pandemic.

Cisco Takes Action

On May 22nd, Cisco Systems, at the instruction of the CEO Chuck Robbins and Chief People Officers Fran Katsoudas announced ‘A Day for Me’ – encouraging all of its workers to take a day off to rest on May 22nd. At first, some of us even called it “Chuck and Fran Day” – this was direction from way up high that it was time for every Cisco employee to take a day off. More on that here..

“Our wellbeing always comes first, Which is why we continue to focus on our people, talk about mental health, and invite experts to our Cisco Check-In sessions. Now is the time for us to try new things in support of our wellbeing – like taking a collective break.” – said Fran

There are reasons Cisco has been named “World’s Best Workplace 2020” – and this is pretty much the explanation of why. We all feel a direct connection to our leadership, even in such a huge company.

Why “A Day For Me” Is A Game Changer

Ok, so with all of that said – why do I personally feel this is such a game changer. First, I have been living it, we just came off a recent “Day for Me” on August 3rd (In Canada) and I want to explain why this is a game changer. Many people will say “We have many civic, state, federal and other holidays, why can we not just add more”

The key is really in being just a little bit selfish, in order to look after your own personal mental health. We all have our stressors in life. Some have families with children, some have parents, grand parents or other loved ones that require our attention, our own work activities. However once the weekend comes along, or a national holiday – everything in our day to day lives grinds to a halt – and our other set of priorities, our other set of responsibilities – grabs on like an iron fist and says… ok – mode switch – just like it happens every weekend – and for many – we are trading one stressor for another.

A “Day for Me” is exactly that, it’s for ME – nobody else. So my family still goes to work, school and daycare, my job, my boss, and my co-workers all take the day off – so I will not hear from them – and for once, and for that day… I can do whatever I want, with no responsibilities for that 8 hours period…. What did I do on this day for me? Well, we are a little limited due to the pandemic, so I kinda goofed off and played with toys, I made lunch, I went shopping for an hours by myself for no reason – I had breakfast at a local restaurant a friend owns (She kinda did ask me to fix her WiFi…). I did everything without a plan… I made a goofy video while sipping a drink at a picnic table on an iPhone (Still impressed I can basically shoot, edit, product and publish a video ON A PHONE)

It was when this was happening, on luckily a beautiful sunny day where I had nobody that needed me for something, nothing that HAD to be done that minute – I started to realize that “A Day for Me” isn’t just another day off, it isn’t like a long weekend or a national holiday. This was very truly and very uniquely a very very strong Mental Health action that Cisco was taking – somehow they had figured out that we needed a break… FROM EVERYTHING.

This is something that Cisco needs to continue – and other companies should start adopting. Just shut down, for a whole day, empower that employee to let the rest of the world motor on – and for them they can just do whatever they want. For some maybe that is taking their kids to an amusement park, or visiting family they don’t get to see, or attending that Yoga class that you never get to, or going swimming because the pool will be empty.

Or maybe.. just maybe – it is so that “A day for me” can for once, really be about just me, and a chance to unwind the brain and release some mental stress, doing a little bit of nothing.

There isn’t a single employee I have spoken to after “A day for me” that feels refreshed, and every single one feels better than after a typical weekend, or national holiday.

Final Words

Ever wake up in the morning and don’t know where to start? How about worried about the next day activities, not sleeping much, maybe binge eating, not getting things done as much as you used to, feeling disconnected or just not like yourself. News flash, that is normal – and it is all about Mental Health. If you don’t go through mental health challenges, then you are simply not human. Some people can power through, some can muscle it out. Have you ever had a stomach flu or pain so bad you just had to goto the hospital? Mental health is no different – sometimes you just need to get it checked. This year I took multiple steps to address my own mental health, including talking to my family doctor, who did offer up some sound advice – and yes some of it was the normal “Eat healthy, get sleep” stuff, but others were great ways to help me get things in check. At first I thought it was all goofy advice, but my doctor insisted if I gave these things a shot – it would help, and it did, they were right.

If like me you think “Hmmm maybe something is wrong” – call your family doctor, and have a chat. It is worth it, and should you need more help, the government in your country will have resources, and your company probably also has employee self help programs and assistance programs.

Oh… and if you are working for another company that isn’t Cisco Systems…. Perhaps you should send them this blog article, because frankly… they are missing out on one heck of a game changing program.

In the USA, if you do not have a family doctor and need a referral, drop the SAMHSA hotline a call they will help you find help in your area – 1-800-662-HELP (4357)

In Canada the national hotline is 1-888-353-2273

In the last few days we have learned of a very serious cyber attack launched against many organizations by a still unconfirmed attacker. Some suggest nation states are behind it, but whomever has done it, was very very smart. This will go down as one of the most genius hacks of all time. Solarwinds one of the largest and most prolific network/server management platforms was hacked from the inside, their supply chain of software actually distributed malware, to the inside of the network, behind firewalls, into a system that is the nerve centre of networks. The hack itself is frankly genius. It’s pure evil – but it’s genius.

There are many blogs out there taking on the task of taking apart the hack itself – I will not do this here, I am not a security expert. I would encourage you to seek those out.

There is a 100% chance your organization will be attacked, and even odds that it will actually be breached. This is something that you need to understand and accept – have plans for each of these, but, what if you do not? This attack happened from the inside out from a trusted software vendor. No firewall could have protected against this.

We were all new once

Do you remember that? I do. Wow did I do some stupid things while learning. Thankfully in my early career days I had some more senior engineers who helped (or took pity) me learn. If it wasn’t for those people, I wouldn’t be where I am.

Even the experienced make mistakes

I have a confession to make. Even after years of experience, I have done dumb things. I have taken down large environments in the middle of a business day, I have broken things – all things that could have been avoided had I made the right choice. Most of those mistakes were a single command, or mouse click – followed by “Oh Sh–” and an immediate learning moment. Understand that technology engineers often have to make split second decisions that can result in either very positive or very negative outcomes, and planning time is not always on our side. Sometimes we are also working alone, with nobody to discuss the plan with, and are working against some kind of imposed timeline.

Some manufacturers say “You can replace this CPU card in the middle of the operating day” — the so called “Hot Swap”. Ok, would you do this though? Ask yourself one question.. The manufacturer says I can – but should I? What are the repercussions if it goes down when I am doing that? Remember, you are the one making that decision – do not blame the manufacturer if it goes wrong.

Limited resources result in complacency and cut corners

When people are pushed to the limit, especially those in smaller IT organizations that is where corners get cut. Maybe you used Telnet when you should have enabled SSH, or used the same passwords for a bunch of accounts. For years and years, service accounts were built with full-admin rights to the entire network and even given interactive logon rights. We did these things and didn’t think anything of it. Now we know better, but did we go back and fix every single little thing we ever did wrong?

Everyone at some point – did it wrong. The question is, did someone else go back and do it right?

We need to stop the “Blame Game” which is so prevalent in our industry. My cloud application went down, blame the cloud provider, the switch went down when I typed this command that should have been ok, blame the manufacturer.

We need to learn, and grow, and make better decisions and understand that sometimes things happen. The question is, did you think about what the consequences were, and weigh the positive and negative outcomes of what you were about to do. Now imagine doing that calculation in your brain – with – every – keystroke.

Help each other, avoid standing in the ivory tower

This week, many people will lose their jobs, as a result many will lose their homes and some their livelihoods, because someone needed someone to blame. For what? Possibly a human error. That’s right, behind every one of these electron switching super computers, firewalls, switches and lines of code, is a real fallible learning human being. Who makes mistakes, and grows from them.

Instead of being critical of each other, now is the time to band together and help everyone remediate the damage, and take this as a serious warning that we need to take certain things more seriously. Password management, inter-domain firewalls, security posture on operating systems.

So in that light, I urge you that if you, this week, are looking at your IT team, who right now might be panicking about what to do, questioning if they were attacked, questioning if they were impacted and worried for their job, and you are wondering if they know what they are doing about this. The reality is that almost nothing could have been done to protect against this.

Ask them these 3 simple questions.

1. Are we affected by this?
2. What are we doing about it?
3. How do we prevent this from affecting us again, or in the future.

Then tell them you know their job is difficult – they have literally thousands of hackers, and government bad actors against them – and they are just a small IT team running your business. It is a hard job and they need your support.

What is is like to be a staffer?

When you become a Cisco staffer, the event changes for you.  With responsibilities that involve “whatever got you there”.    Contrary to what many might think, most Cisco internal employees do not get to go to Cisco Live!, you need to have a reason.   As one of my internal mentors tells me “Find the hook, find something they need you for” and then you just might get to go.

This year, our team built the “Cisco Innovation Network” a series of booths all around Cisco Innovation and pushing the limits of Cisco technology both home and abroad.  Our Toronto Co-Innovation Centre alone had 3 demo’s we had to build.

This means the responsibility to keep things running, get things setup, and ensure everyone above and below is happy.   It must run perfectly – or at least appear that way.

Finding time for social activities is a challenge, and you have to pick your schedule carefully.    I found myself rushing to an appointment, and then rushing back to the booth to help my team.   There was little down time, lunch was often on the go – on one day it was skipped.

The event is for our customers, so even with a full pass, you still cannot just waltz into a session – you have to wait for everyone else to enter so customers can get the best seats, and then only if there is space, you can go in.    This year I couldn’t find time to go to a single session, but that is ok, they are recorded.    I didn’t get to see the keynotes, as we were in our booth, and due to space constraints we were asked to leave the space for the customers.

Event Prep

This was very busy, with one of our projects coming down to not just the wire, but being completed on the show floor.     Not due to lack of planning, that was actually our plan, with one of our partners coming with us, they finished their work only a few days before the event, and we did the integration LIVE for the first time on the show floor.

Our team setup a mock up of our demo’s here in Toronto, just the way they would be on the show floor, and then started to inventory our packed gear.   We counted every part, and brought along extra gear just in case.

We couldn’t miss anything, if we did, even shipping was not fast enough, so we brought spare parts, and even spare gear so that no matter what happened we would be ok.  So we placed everything we were going to take out.

We also made sure that we split gear across who was travelling.  We couldn’t lose an entire demo, some of these things were one off designs and proofs of concept so we couldn’t lose them.

Then we realized we needed extra things, like cables, connectors, couplers, power strips.  All things you cannot just “run out and get” in San Diego.  There isn’t a Wal-Mart or Best Buy next door, so it all had to come with us.

A view under the covers….

We arrived at #CLUS on Saturday, with the plan to start checking our booth out.    We wanted the extra day to ensure everything was going to go ok, so direct from the airport to the show floor.    We found a few issues, short cables, some cables that were trapped under some things,  and it was crazy on the floor.  You wouldn’t think we were opening in two days.   No carpets, many vendors had not even shown up yet.

As we pushed to finish our build out on Sunday, everyone was arriving, and we could finally get things buttoned up once and for all.     I had my first appointment on Sunday this year.   Meeting with the Cisco Champions at the Cisco Store.

As a former Cisco Champion before I joined the company, I was asked to host the team during the tour at the on site Cisco Store.   We have been working on Innovation in Retail for some time here, and it was a great opportunity to share what we have been doing in Toronto and what the Cisco Store has been doing with the Champions.

Monday morning came, and the World of Solutions opens at 10AM, that means arriving as early as possible to make sure nothing went wrong over night.   The floor does not open to anyone until 8:30 – that means 90 minutes.

Everything went ok with our go live, we had a small “heat” issue in our little networking closet (someone tossed something against the front of the rack, and then someone put the  back of the rack almost back on so it couldn’t get any air) and then a power problem due to lack of plugs.

Only a few minutes before the floor opened our entire network in our little pod “exploded” we still do not know what happened but every machine reported an IP Conflict, and the IR829 for our demo just stopped responding.    We took the nuclear option and powered off/on – and that problem never occurred again.    It was a tense moment.

Here is quick montage of how the morning went…

It isn’t all fun and games…

We had many responsibilities this year.  With 3 demo’s and only 5 staff from our centre, it was tight.  Add in that some of us had responsibilities outside of the booth area and the days became very long.

Hosting the Cisco Champ’s in our booth was great along with the probably thousand demos we did during the week.

Then running from demo, to theatre talk, back to demo, back to off site interview or talk.

I hosted a group from Europe on a Smart Building Tour of the World of Solutions one day,  and then 5 talks in our booth on various days and times.  One of them was before the event even opened.

Daily we had to ensure the demos were working in the AM.   Then throughout the day.

Don’t forget your roots…

The community aspects of Cisco Live are very important to me personally as well as professionally, so I did ensure to walk by andtry and stop at the Social Media Hub when I was in the area.

This year it was located near the Sails Pavilion, and was a great location.   The “hat” display was a nice touch as was the “build your own lego avatar”

This is a common place for the friends, family and colleagues who meet every year to talk and meet.   There always seems to be someone hanging out there.

As is normally the case, in and around the event conclusion daily many people find their way to the SMH to meet with friends and discuss the learning of the day.  Sometimes we get some cool visitors who stop in to share their wisdom.  A crowd generally gathers when @denisefishburne shows up.

This group is always important to me – it is literally the reason I attend Cisco Live.

Next year…

I will be there.  The question is will I find my hook, my reason.   Just because we had a booth space this year does not mean we will next year.     Either way the event is about everyone that comes to it.     The slogan this year “You Make Possible” is very fitting for this event.   Without the community, without the people, and without the passion Cisco Live would not be what it is today.

Before I sign off, I would like to just provide my wrap up video of the event

See you in Las Vegas 2020!