Cisco Live Europe 2020 Barcelona

calendar Feb 3, 2020 · 4 min read · cleur cisco  ·
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This year I had again the opportunity to attend Cisco Live Europe in Barcelona.

Cisco Live is a week that includes customer meetings to discuss incoming project with Cisco, technical sessions, Cisco Champions exclusive events and of course some socialization.

Opening Keynote

In the Opening Keynote in Tuesday morning cloud connectivity and visibility was one of the major topics. The integration with SD-WAN, Intersight and App Dynamics seems a logic step. The Cloud abstraction is getting leaky. Enterprises must apply the trust but verify principle to anticipate problems and use the collected information to improve reliability and design.

Technical Sessions

Technical sessions are a great opportunity for training. I attended mostly SD-WAN and VXLAN/EVPN sessions.

Cisco Live schedule can quickly get overbooked. Too much to do in just a few days. I tried to attend the most relevant technical sessions for my current projects and skipped may others. The recordings will be available soon:

The Champions

Being part of the Cisco Champions not only means being connected to an awesome group of people, but also having access to some exclusive events during Cisco Live.

This year front seats to guest keynote and access to the Innovation Forum where included!

The Champions meeting the DevNet team, a room full of energy and ideas:

The Party

Party time is a great opportunity to meet people in a less formal environment. I attended the DevNet Social Club and the Customer Appreciation Event.

The People

I use Twitter as my main tool to get updates and be in touch with the community of networkers and IT professionals in general.

Cisco Live gives the opportunity only for a quick chat and a selfie, everybody have a busy agenda, but sometimes that's enough to break the ice and start discussions that will continue online.

In the pictures: Lukas, Dmitry, David, Ioannis, Stuart, Antonio, Malcolm, Peter Paluch, Zig, Jeff, Michael, Peter Jones,

Last session

The last session of CLEUR, on Friday morning, is also one of my favorites: the NOC Panel. The people involved on creating a operating the network of the event share the lesson learnes, the tools, the workflow and the improvements planned for the next events.

I was not suprised to hear about tools I already know like LibreNMS and Grafana along with NSO and DNA Center.

Wrap Up

}Cisco Live is the event to attend for anyone working with Cisco Technologies. It can be overwhelming with so much information all packed in a few days, the trick is to define a schedule in advance, leave room for meetings between sessions and watch the recording later.

Next year the event will be in Amsterdam.

Info

Final advice: only one instructor-led lab (LTR) is included per attendee but quite often some people skip the session so don't give up if you find it full, there's still a chance to get in.