This weblog is a collaboration between lead writer Quinn Snyder, Developer Advocate, Cisco DevRel and Ravi Balakrishnan, Senior Marketing Manager.
Within the Developer Relations ecosystem, quite a lot of focus (each by way of creation, in addition to dialogue with others) is on the content material that enables folks to discover and develop their expertise. Naturally, this tilts outreach (and blogs like these) in the direction of our superb sandboxes and thorough studying labs. It can be fully comprehensible why we’d bias ourselves in the direction of these modalities; we’re technical folks, and we like to study and train folks by way of hands-on exploration, whether or not its guided or self-paced. “See it, learn it, code it” has served the neighborhood very effectively and it’s one thing we’re pleased with.
However, we wish to write this weblog rounding out the entire portfolio of labor that helps our infrastructure builders and automation engineers, when the sandboxes and studying labs don’t present all of the solutions to the questions they’ve.
The Developer Centers
The Developer Centers (or DevCenters) for brief serve a single supply touchdown web page for all issues programmability associated to a product or software. From updates to product APIs, bulletins from the enterprise entity supporting that product, webinars and how-to, and documentation pages – every part wanted by an infrastructure developer may be discovered right here.
As a part of our dedication to developer expertise, these Decenter are stored updated with any newest data or modifications to the APIs to make sure that everybody has entry to the related content material they want, once they want it. We have DevCenters for information heart applied sciences, equivalent to ACI, NX-OS, Nexus Dashboard. We even have particular DevCenters for Infrastructure as Code, together with one particularly for cloud networking, in addition to for every IaC software supported throughout the DevNet ecosystem, Ansible and Terraform. There is a ton of data that may be gleaned simply from these assets – however that is only the start.
API Documentation
We have touched on this in earlier weblog posts, however nonetheless want to dive a bit deeper into how we’re improving our API documentation, offering for a greater developer expertise. Every API-enabled product (and the cloud networking product strains aren’t any exception) has an API documentation microsite. This microsite (an instance for ACI is proven beneath) incorporates not solely the API information, however background and context in regards to the APIs and their design ideas, mannequin references (the place applicable), and hyperlinks to exterior pages, equivalent to IaC modules/suppliers, sandboxes that can be utilized to discover the APIs, studying labs, and developer neighborhood help boards for questions which will come up throughout API exploration. These documentation pages additionally help a number of variations of the API – that means that whatever the model you’re working – you could find an API reference for it on our portal.
While these pages is probably not as visually “flashy” as our DevCenters, they comprise a wealth of data and supply numerous exterior hyperlinks to different helpful instruments. Some of our hottest documentation pages embrace:
But proceed to examine again, particularly as new services or products are launched. If it exists – you may be positive we have now API documentation for it!
The CiscoDevNet GitHub Organization
While not straight hosted on our personal web site, a lot of our hyperlinks (particularly to assets for Ansible and Terraform) redirect to our Github group for that particular repository. Because we prefer to follow the ideas that we train to our clients and companions, our GitHub group is the one supply for all code samples, third celebration IaC assets, and pattern initiatives inside DevRel. These public-facing repositories may be forked to your individual group, modified, or improved upon, and submitted for merge into the primary upstream department through a pull request (PR). To prime it off, it’s not solely DevRel advocates and engineers inside these repositories, however members of the technical gross sales, engineering, and product administration groups – enabling you to have unfettered entry to the groups which can be growing automation and programmability options.
The different added benefit of utilizing our GitHub group is that it permits us to make use of the “Issues” web page as a reference for the changelog of our infrastructure as code assets. While TAC does help the assets, it’s potential to have interaction with our builders to work by way of enhancements or bugs inside Ansible modules or Terraform suppliers with out opening a direct service request with TAC. These points will likely be aggregated, fastened, and talked about as a part of a given launch of the useful resource and the barrier to opening a difficulty is extremely low – showcasing how utilizing a VCS like GitHub can show invaluable to a developer’s workflow.
Our present record of IaC assets on GitHub are:
But once more – hold checking – as we’re always including particular actions to these assets, in addition to including new assets on a regular basis!
Code Exchange and Automation Exchange
One closing (and sometimes ignored) part throughout the DevNet web site is the Code Exchange and Automation Exchange platforms. Each of those platforms permit you to seek for curated content material related to your wants and use-case, every with a unique bent: Code Exchange (CE) focuses on easy code samples that can be utilized as a place to begin for creating a bigger answer, whereas Automation Exchange (AE) focuses on driving a single use-case by way of to its automated completion. Both CE and AE assist builders, each novice and skilled alike, get began on a mission by utilizing different prior work as a supply of inspiration or a constructing block for additional duties. I do know that I’ve been impressed on a number of events to create one thing utilizing another person’s work as a place to begin (with correct attribution to the unique developer, after all). You can discover Code Exchange and Automation Exchange by clicking on the embedded hyperlinks of their names.
Putting It All Together
From the record above, you’ll be able to see that there’s greater than the spectacular studying and sandbox content material that we create inside DevRel. Everything that we do is supposed to drive up the developer expertise, decrease the mean-time-to-API-call (MTTAC, one thing I simply made up), and make sure that our cloud networking infrastructure builders are supported at each step of their journey and in each method potential.
We would love to listen to about your experiences utilizing any of the DevRel assets, not simply those listed above. Good, unhealthy, detached, or in any other case – we’re right here for all of it. You can discover Quinn on Twitter @qsnyder or on LinkedIn and we’d like to have a dialog about what’s working for you, what isn’t, or how we will enhance to drive one of the best developer expertise potential.
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