Internet of Things and cloud applications raise fuzzy questions about the underlying architecture of information technology: Do IoT apps run on infrastructure? How do cloud apps mesh with infrastructure? Could IoT in fact be the infrastructure?

“It’s all still evolving, and we think that the community needs to come together to solve this to make the most of the opportunity,” said Susie Wee (pictured), vice president and chief technology officer of DevNet innovations and networked experiences at Cisco Systems Inc.

The meeting of apps and infrastructure is still controversial, after all. “Some people should say, ‘They should never meet. Why would they ever meet?'” Wee said.

At the Cisco DevNet Create event in San Francisco, California, the company’s democratic approach shows in the one-to-nine Cisco-to-ecosystem ratio of sessions. Through this collaboration, some features of the app-infrastructure synergy are becoming clear, Wee told John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

Cloud-native applications, for instance, radically differ from traditional ones, Wee stated. “As you’re going to microservices, applications aren’t applications; they’re being written as microservices. And then once you put those microservices in containers, they can move around,” she said.

For visibility into what all these bits of code are up to, IT needs eyes on the network, she explained, adding that Cisco’s new acquisition, AppDynamics Inc. application performance management software, provides this.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation just announced Container Networking Interface, which also holds huge promise by connecting container orchestration with the network “so that the network is informing the cloud layer, and the cloud platform’s informing the network,” Wee said.

IoT apps are perhaps even more network-involved, or even “inherently network,” Wee and Burris agreed. “In the Internet of Things, things are part of your infrastructure — that’s just different,” Wee said.

Net worth control switch

To make the network programmable for developers building these and other next-gen apps, application program interfaces, automation and controller-based networking come into pay, Wee stated.

With these technologies,”you don’t actually configure it by going one network device at a time; you feed these into a controller and then you’re actually doing network-wide commands,” she said.

Easy visibility and segmentation allows non-experts to manipulate network functions to optimize outcomes, Wee added. “And that’s where you’re saying, ‘What? The infrastructure just gave me business value in a very direct way. How did that happen?'” she said.

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