Company: Cisco Systems, San Jose, CA
Company Description: Cisco is the worldwide leader in IT, helping companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected. At Cisco, an integral part of our DNA is creating long-lasting partnerships with customers, employees, investors and ecosystem partners, helping them succeed in transforming how people connect, communicate and collaborate.
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Categories - Business Technology
Nomination Sub Category: Infrastructure as a Service
 Nomination Title: Cisco Systems' Unattended Atomic SWIM for Network Devices
- Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes in length about the nominated new or new-version product or service, OR written answers to the questions for this category? (Choose one):
Written answers to the questions
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the nominated video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video.
- If you are providing written answers for your submission, you must provide an answer to this first question: If this is a brand-new product, state the date on which it was released. If this is a new version of an existing product, state the date on which the update was released:
Our first internal release was December 2023, with first public announcement at Cisco Live EMEA on Feb 5, 2024.
- If you are providing written answers for your submission, you must provide an answer to this second question: Describe the features, functions, and benefits of the nominated product or service (up to 350 words):
Total 330 words used.
In order to keep your network infrastructure as secure and healthy as possible, the most impactful thing an organziation can do is to keep it updated and patched on the latest release. Many organizations struggle, and while at Cisco IT we are ahead of many of our peers, keeping pace is a constant battle. There are tools and products (including some Cisco produces such as with controller-based / software defined networking) that make this job easier - but they still require manual orchestration, testing, coordination and activity for enterprises.
What our team has built is a service which comprises of a basic application as well as data stored in your network controller (Catalyst Center, in our case) and your service management platform (ServiceNow, in our case) to orchestrate and perform upgrades automatically without human intervention. Once enabled it is
- Unattended - after devies are grouped, tagged and have relevant meta data, no human need interact other than update the desired OS version as "golden"
- Atomic - the system can guarantee if the upgrade was successful or not, and take action based on failures
- SWIM - peforms the basic SoftWare Image Management for the device type(s) in question, including any firmware or other updates required.
This is extensible, with an initial version targeting a single device type classification. A second device type is already deployed internally and development underway on the third and fourth types.
A simplified way to explain how the system works is the following:
- For each device type you have a single place where you define the version of software image you desire as "golden". Any devices not matching this will be upgraded during their maintenance windows.
- Any device you wish to subscribe, you tag and define in your service management platform a maintenance window
- During each maintenance window, devices that do not match the golden config are identified
- Upgrades are performed, with erroring devices skipped and corresponding incidents opened to fix those devices inside the service management platform
- If you are providing written answers for your submission, you must provide an answer to this third question: Outline the market performance, critical reception, and customer satisfaction with the product or service to date. State monetary or unit sales figures to date, if possible, and how they compare to expectations or past performance. Provide links to laudatory product or service reviews. Include some customer testimonials, if applicable (up to 350 words):
Total 251 words used.
We built this largely for ourselves. We believe our rate of upgrade is far more frequent than most of our peers (at a typical twice a year cycle), but we believe to really be secure and current we should exceed this. This is difficult, as our estimations are that we spend between a quarter and a third of our time upgrading devices (including planning, coordination, etc.) Our first goal is selfish:
- We want to recover this time and burden on our engineers and reapply their skills to developing new capabilities or enabling client requests. Automate our toil.
We also recognize that many of our peers struggle as well. One of our tennants was to build for us, but share as rapidly as possible. Our project start was August 2023, and we had in our mind that we wanted to demonstrate this at Cisco Live EMEA in February 2024, which we delivered. We have had many Cisco customers reach out to their sales teams already and ask to get a deep dive based on just that demo, and are challenging ourselves to scrub/redact our code as quickly as possible and share on Cisco's developer resource pages. We expect this may have several benefits, but are beyond our ability to measure:
- The SWIM features in DNAC are already a key driver in license renewals; this would make them even more compelling
- Our peer organizations in other enterprises are also struggling. Sharing the process we have built and code examples will reduce their toil.
- You have the option to answer this final question: Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
Total 136 words used.
Attached is a PPT that includes some highlights from the Cisco Live presentation, as well as some statements around the problem we are trying to solve. We have good tools, and do thousands of device upgrades or patches each month - with a peak of almost 40k devices patched in one month. The ability we have today to do batches using our Cisco controllers is a force multipler, but there's still a human coordinating down time, creating change records, clicking buttons, seeing what failed.
Our goal is to stop doing these with human interaction, with a high-degree of predictable outcome - and share this with our peers. Our first few hundred have been successful, and we will have thousands of upgrades that will be handled by this automation, without human interaction over the next 6 weeks.
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