I’d like to share some of my favorite things inside Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA). Before we get going, I thought it would be fun to just spend a moment on what DNA is, from a layman’s perspective. Cisco DNA revolutionizes the way you deploy and manage your network for the digital era through a software-driven architecture focused on automation, security, and analytics. The diagram below may not be perfect, but it should suffice to explain this perspective.
Cisco DNA creates a platform that makes it so you can connect everything from the data center to the IoT device, with security and high performance. Furthermore, the parts that are not readily apparent in a network diagram, are actually even cooler than the parts you can see. While all of the networking is handled superbly, in typical traditional Cisco fashion, there’s a few extra really interesting things that I want to talk about:
First, and my favorite thing in DNA, if you add CMX to this network, you can create indoor location services. Imagine you walk into a big hardware store, and you want to find the electrical expert. Now imagine that you bring up the store’s app, and you see a store map. The map has a blue dot showing where you are and a pull down menu to select what you want. You select “Electrical” and up pops a dot showing where that expert is. You walk up and say, “Hey are you the electrical expert?” And, now you are connected! Fast and efficient, life made easier by a mobile application. Here’s the question: if you didn’t have a Cisco DNA platform, with CMX and its Hyper-Location services, how would you actually do that? Yeah, good luck, their locator feature doesn’t work like this.
Second, if you have a mobile application that requires some priority in the network, you can set that up lickity split with APIC-EM. Maybe you want to prioritize video over Wi-Fi inside the app and you want it to be high quality. Or, maybe you just want to push a bunch of data back and forth with high performance. Whatever the reason might be, if you want to make sure that when someone goes from using their phone as a guest, and then logs into your app, that their network traffic gets first-class treatment, APIC-EM can do that for you.
Finally, let’s talk about security. Cisco DNA has a robust set of security features designed into it. One example of that is Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE). Cisco ISE is easily configured to work with your Mobile Device Management software and it has an API that makes it easy to use from within your mobile application. So, if you want your application to be secure, the DNA platform and its security APIs make that possible. Below, is a diagram of what that might look like.
Moving forward, I’ve just explained three elements of Cisco DNA, which can be utilized by a mobile application to make it more innovative, more secure or higher performance. What do all of these things have in common? They all have the high-level architecture diagram, below, in common. As you can see in the simple diagram, at the bottom of the stack is a Cisco DNA platform. Above that is the “middleware”, depicting the APIs that are part of Cisco DNA. And on top of that, is the application, which makes calls to the various APIs in order to work. Obviously, there are going to be other APIs, like customer databases, which are not part of DNA, required. But this platform, developers, is why you should check out Cisco DevNet – where you can learn all about these APIs
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