As developers become accustomed to configuration of resources up and down the stack, networking technology is also seeing a resurgence of innovation to keep pace with the rest of the industry. Just as a developer is able to reconfigure a virtual server or database on the fly in today’s cloud computing environment, networking hardware is also becoming increasingly configurable through the cloud.

“It has to be simple enough that people can feel that their network is nimble and changeable and can be configured, managed and changed over time to react,” said Todd Nightingale (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Meraki, a cloud managed information technology company, about his goals for networking infrastructure, especially for Internet of Things applications.

Parent company Cisco Systems Inc. has been a market leader in networking infrastructure, Nightingale said. Meraki was a recent acquisition of Cisco, and the resulting organization is in an excellent position to drive innovation in networking technology, he added.

Nightingale spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during Cisco’s inaugural DevNet Create conference in San Francisco, California. They to discuss Cisco Meraki’s role as a leader in networking infrastructure. (* Disclosure below.)

Optimization is the name of the game

While cloud computing infrastructure has the luxury of spinning up servers based on load demands, networking infrastructure performance is limited by the physical hardware installed in the data center. The optimization instead comes from re-configuring the hardware to prioritize certain workloads over others, Nightingale explained.

“The infrastructure is always optimizing whatever networking resources you have. There is only so much bandwidth coming to your site. … What the infrastructure has to do is automatically optimize your most important apps and prioritize that through your network, and optimize the rest to do its best in whatever limited resource it has,” Nightingale said.

Burris and Nightingale also hinted at a more intelligent future for this hardware optimization by means of machine learning.

“We talk about the next generation of network intelligence and really using some type of machine learning to predict these type of load events. … But it’s also about making the next recommendation about how you’re really going to need XYZ change in physical hardware in two months,” Nightingale concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Cisco DevNet Create 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Cisco DevNet Create. Neither Cisco DevNet nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE