התמלול המלא של Ep 5 - Cisco's NEW Cloud Connectivity Certification (300-440) with Hank Preston

China thing like this, you know, they just have 05:44 terrible healthcare, and so that's all that's happening over there. Like nobody could have foreseen, right? But man, it's good to see you again. Yeah, same. And yeah, appreciate that. So, okay. So yeah, so we brought you here because we saw the announcement from Learning at Cisco and I would love to get into the cloud cert. But for those who may not be aware, and it's a lot of people, Hank, you're actually with Learning at Cisco now, right? How long have you been there? 06:12 I am, I am. So it's been, I think it's four, four, four and a half, five, somewhere in there. I'd have to go back and look at the calendar and figure out what it went through. But the journey in the switch is just kind of the nature of being in large corporate or large enterprises, right? HR changes happen, like groups kind of come together and split up. And so I joined the learning and certifications team when at the time DevNet and learning certifications came together and it made total sense, right? We're all focused on kind of educating and 06:41 getting knowledge that was out there. And so we spent for about a year, a little more than a year, it was one organization. And then as kind of the evolution in that year went through and it was, I mean, a lot of that was in the pandemic time as well, right? So things were adjusting as it went through and we came out the other side and DevNet split back into focus hard on developer relations, less on the education side, more on the developer relations piece. And it was a strange opportunity to be given the choice as to like where, like I... 07:09 Not everybody got the chance to kind of weigh in on where to land at this when the split and the rework happened again. Um, but I was given the opportunity and I went to DevNet originally because I wanted to focus in and help people, network engineers understand what automation was all about, right? Educate folks on Python and APIs and model driven programmability. And so when we looked at, when I looked at what the change was going through, it just made complete sense for me to stay where the education side was going. Stay with where. 07:39 trying to do on that spot. Not that the developer relation side and kind of partnerships with the business units inside of Cisco and bringing a higher quality APIs and experience isn't important, but my passion is really kind of on that education piece. And so that's what had me stay on the learning side. And so for the last, man, what's it been now? Two and a half, maybe plus almost three years. Yeah, I carry a learning and certifications badge. 08:07 I still talk a lot with the DevNet folks, right? Lots of friends over on that side. We just got back from Cisco Live Amsterdam. And as always, I was in the DevNet zone for a bit doing some sessions and whatnot. But yeah, officially learning in certifications and very much enjoying my time over here. Still doing a lot of the same automation focused

work. Very heavily involved with the DevNet certifications. I led the team, the project team that brought the DevNet expert lab out. 08:33 which was hugely rewarding to watch and see us get from network engineers not having any idea what automation was about to launching the newest Cisco expert level certification. So yeah, it's been great these last couple of years. That video series from the DevNet fundamentals, that's how I obviously recognize you most from. I'm sure many other people have seen that as well. I know. It's funny, man. 08:59 Those are the types of projects I look back on over my time when it was at DevNet. And I'm really, really proud of the work that we did as a group. My face was over a lot of the pieces. My face and name, and it was fantastic. But it really was a team effort with everybody that was on the DevNet team at the time. And a lot of them are still there. Some folks have kind of split off into other spaces as well. But having the chance and talking with folks that they learned how to make their first API call. 09:25 right, by watching one of my videos or they picked up something that I was doing on Twitter and it helped them out. Really means a lot to see. And it's still out there, right? I still get people coming up to me and saying, hey, I just watched your video. I was like, man, some of that stuff's really old, but I'm glad it's still helping people out. Yeah. Are you there? I mean, I still get random people, not as impressive, of course, but I get random people comment on like YouTube videos and stuff that I've done years ago. And I'm like, dude, how did you find this? Like, it's so old. 09:52 Right. So I totally get it. But it is really, it is really good feeling, you know, when somebody's like, Hey, something you did really helped. I enjoyed it. Right. That's an awesome feeling. Yeah. A lot of that stuff relates to the kind of like the foundational elements of the cloud too. So I'm sure people that are doing the transition to cloud are probably, have probably benefited from those courses as well. So, yeah. That's actually, yeah, no, that's a great, that's a great segue, Chris. So, okay. So we know Cisco just released a new cloud cert. 10:22 was it called? Designing and implementing cloud connectivity, right? That's the name of it. So talk to us a little bit. Everybody's excited. We're traditional network engineers. We've made the transition to cloud so we can appreciate the entire, I guess, lifecycle type of thing here. Talk a little bit about the cert. Tell us how you guys came up with it and what you're targeting or thinking here. 10:46 Yeah, oh man, and it was quite the journey from initial inception to thinking about what a certification that this turned into could be about, where the fit was, and kind of walking through the process to get there. There's a lot of steps that are along the way. For me, the idea around Cisco cloud certifications are kind of a bit of an important topic and a big topic for me personally. 11:14 I have my name as an author on one Cisco or Cisco press book, and it's the CCNA cloud book from ages and ages ago. And I don't want to go into that one super deep because that was like an interesting kind of foray into Cisco's first round of cloud certifications. But what I didn't want was for whatever we did kind of in this next round of cloud related certifications to be like that. And so we were sitting around talking about where should we fit into this space. 11:42 push and what I really kind of stuck to is we wanted to, I wanted us to pick things related to the cloud that Cisco had relevance in, that Cisco customers and network engineers were actually doing, right? Not widely generic cloud stuff, not corner case technologies or little open source projects that we're still trying to figure out what the future was gonna be. I wanted to find an area and I felt that there had to be places that touched this cloud topic that Cisco had. 12:10 relevance and really like had a story to tell, had something that really made sense that a network engineer, somebody that likes to go through and get certifications kind of in the Cisco area, would look at and be like, yeah, that makes total sense. That's the type of things I'm being asked to do as a network engineer today. And that's what this one is the first of what we're working on in that space that relates back to specific types of job tasks in the cloud space. And so my original pitch for this certification was we know that we're going to, I mean, 12:40 Everywhere organizations are trying to figure out how to connect to the cloud, right? They've got branch offices, they've got data centers, right? Even though everybody's going cloud, we all still have data centers. And then there's cloud resources and there's infrastructure resources and there's SaaS offers as well. But every network engineer I talk to is trying to figure out how do I actually build a network that connects all these things together? 13:06 and does it securely and does it efficiently and does it in a way that we can kind of operationalize and engineer and doesn't feel like it's this weird bolt on to the side of the network. And so that was kind of the idea behind this is okay, can we put together a blueprint or a certification that says, okay, the right way, right's always a tough one, right? Cause it's so opinionated, but we'll say like, well-designed and architected options to connect your different networks together to the cloud. 13:36 And that's what this is about. It's called designing and implementing cloud connectivity. And it's all about creating, we'll go back to the analogy, the common one, right? Creating the pipes to connect to the different parts of the network together, where part of the network is something off in a public cloud someplace. And then I'm sure we'll go into the details on the blueprint, but that was kind of the part of it, was like basically... 14:00 This generation's WAN design and

engineering, right? We're doing this to the cloud. What does that look like? How can we build a certification about that? Yeah, no, that's awesome and super relevant. You mentioned a couple of things there that caught my ear. You said this is the first, and you also said basically about the product fit, right? So I guess the obvious question is, are there going to be other tracks? Is there going to be networking in the cloud with some kind of like ACI or cloud network controller kind of element? 14:30 Right, I guess that's my first question. Yeah, so I can't go into specifics. I think you guys can all understand why, right? Because there's so many things that are still in motion. But cloud and how cloud fits into enterprises is still a growing area. And I think nobody's going to shoot me inside of Cisco, right? Maybe that's a really bad analogy. But nobody's going to get too upset with me if I say, yeah, we are working on, and there are plenty of other 14:59 cloud-related certifications that are in different stages of development, right? And there is a large development process and we look at building out new certifications, because when we put something together, there's a lot of energy, effort, and resources that go into building a certification. And then anybody that is going to go and study for it and earn the certification, right? We don't want something that's only going to be relevant as a flash in the pan. 15:23 And so we're looking at the things that make sense moving forward across all of the different spaces that Cisco plays in. And so really kind of like, I know not terribly specific answer, but I guess, yeah, we are working on some other places. And so keep your ears open. Um, we do have our roadmap published for when we hit and talk about updates to each of the architecture tracks of security, collab, data center, DevNet. Um, and I would say, listen for updates that kind of come in and align to that roadmap. 15:52 Yeah, so I'm curious as well. So obviously, for Cisco to kind of start this back up again and go kind of very focused on cloud connectivity. I'm just curious, what was the feedback you were getting from the community and that kind of spawned the need for potentially looking at these certifications again? What was that feedback loop like? Oh, man. So we definitely engage with our extended group of SMEs from the community to get feedback on what might come from. 16:21 A lot of what we do when we try to figure out what changes to certifications or what new certifications make sense is we go back and we look at the types of jobs that people are getting hired for, or at least jobs that people want to hire people for, because gosh knows it's really hard to hire anybody for anything these days. I've got job positions open right now that I can't for the life of me find candidates for. So... 16:45 And so we look at the job descriptions. What are organizations trying to hire for? And so we knew we wanted something kind of network related and hybrid cloud related. And so we looked at postings, right? Things that are posted on LinkedIn and then job postings and our HR partners kind of help us with that. And so we go through those and see what's in there and try to find the commonalities of the topics that go in. What are the job titles that are after? And then we interview folks. We interview IT directors. We interview network engineers that are specialists. 17:15 a group of SMEs from inside of Cisco that kind of span from engineering to sales to our support partners and tack, right? What are the types of problems that are coming up, the designs that are being done, our CX organization, which works with customers on design. And then we have a small group of some of our advisory board members that weigh in as well. And we float things past. The feedback we got was cloud is definitely important. 17:41 primarily similar to what I'd already mentioned, right? Focus in on the things that people are trying to accomplish today, things that fit into the challenges that are in front. There were plenty of folks, I think that kind of echoed some of my own concerns is don't go too far, right? Don't try to jump into the areas that maybe Cisco isn't seen as kind of the lead player on that side. Like we're never gonna write a certification that's gonna go super in depth on any one of the public cloud providers, things that are specific to those, right? 18:10 That's places for them to deal with. But you'll see, and even in our blueprint for cloud connectivity, we're connecting to public clouds. And so there's elements of AWS and Google and Azure that show up, because those are the lead clouds, at least currently, across the globe that people are connecting to. And so we try to hook in the pieces that make sense for the cloud connectivity side that we have. An AWS or a Google or an Azure certification isn't a mandatory requirement. 18:40 for our cloud connectivity piece, but we expect people that probably have kind of are dabbling on both sides of those if their organizations are going really heavy into hybrid cloud. And so there's a lot of that that factor. That's a good question. So I noticed that and having gone over the blueprint and looked at it pretty heavily, you know, okay, actually, let me save that for later. I wanted to ask, well, I wanted to first ask the question. It's like almost like a follow up, if you will. 19:09 This doesn't have a CCNA, CCNP, blah, blah. It doesn't have a tiering with it, right? Is the goal with these, and we know that there may be other ones that are in development, is the goal for these cloud-specific certifications to be more tied to the ecosystem of the products that are interfacing with the cloud and less around a tiering of expertise tier? Man, so there's a lot to unpack in that one. 19:39 Um, so the, this certification is, is what we, we count as a con it's called a concentration certification. Um, and we have ever since the, the change in the, how

the certifications were done. We, we, we internally call it cert, I think 2.0 or 3.0 or something, but it was when we kind of announced the adjustments and the DevNet certifications came out and we went down from like seven CCNAs just to one CCNA and made a bunch of changes. 20:07 And so concentrations have been around since then. And so to earn a professional level certification, say your CCNP enterprise as an example, you have to take the enterprise core exam and then you have to take one of the enterprise concentration. This certification is an enterprise concentration. OK, got it. Yeah, so it factors into earning your CCNP enterprise. You could take this instead of advanced routing. 20:35 You could take this instead of, what do we have? We have wireless implementation and a wireless design. So this is like an alternative to those for people that wanna earn their CCNP enterprise, so the professional certification there. There's still just one CCNA. So from an associate's perspective, we have one CCNA, one DevNet associate, one CyberOps associate. 21:01 If we talk about the expert level certifications, right? This fits into the CCNP enterprise. And so potentially we could see topics in the future related to the CCIE enterprise that maybe have some of this that factor into it. I, I'll say that there's no active kind of plans right now to do significant revamps in that space, but there's always an opportunity, but like this isn't. 21:24 This isn't like the old days where we had like, you could take a Cisco certification exam that really didn't tie into like the traditional certs. I had a bunch of those, right? Cause I was a partner before I was at Cisco. So I had a whole bunch of those for different product spaces. That's what not this, that's not this, right? This is very much a concentration fits into our associate professional expert level kind of progression of career certifications. I just want to make one point that, you know, internally you guys might call it 21:52 cert 2.0, but for the plebs like us, we called it certpocalypse because it was like, whoa. We use that term as well. It was a very dramatic, very, very drastic change, but it was needed. I think we had- Absolutely. It was getting too wide. Yeah. I mean, we had cert sprawl all over the place. I mean, I still got in my closet here behind me, like all my old certifications. And I did. I mean, I earned like every CCNA we had. I had- 22:19 a bunch of the professional level certifications. And it just got to the point where it was, it was too much in broad, the recognition that at the associate level, at the entry level into jobs, like people are expected to be kind of not super deep, but lots of broad. And so we've tried to model that in the certifications. And so we still get people complaining that like their CCNA wireless expired and they can't renew it. I'm like, mine did too, but things change, right? Yeah. That was years ago. I remember, and I was at Cisco at the time. 22:48 And I was, I remember there was a workshop in RTP that I was involved with, with, uh, with that whole thing where we were doing the EN core, that all that was, I remember it also being a very, even internally to Cisco, it was a very heated discussion for those few days, you know, and across Cisco. So yeah, it wasn't done lightly. I just wanted to, yeah, I agree with you on that one, Hank. It was definitely not done lightly. 23:10 Love them or hate them, right? Certifications are a passionate topic for lots of people, right, we see it all over the place. And we know that, and we talk to our certified community a lot, and we want to support everybody. And that does sometimes mean that we have to make decisions that are not always super popular with everybody. We're not quite as good at it as the folks over in Apple. I mean, I like to think, right, Apple took away like the floppy drive and the CD drive, and everybody was up in arms. 23:39 We're not quite that cool, right? I don't want to say that we're up at the Steve Jobs level of telling people what they need. But there is a level of that that goes through. No, some things, the industry is evolving and topics drop off and new topics have to come in. I teach Net-a-Cad at my local college. I teach CCNA Net-a-Cad classes and I'm going through that. I was like, man, when I took my CCNA, we taught RIP. We don't even teach RIP in the CCNA programming. Yeah. 24:08 And things are just changing. I'm kind of glad that one's gone, to be honest with you. Yeah, RIP, literally. Literally RIP. It's a good protocol to learn how dynamic routing works, right? I like the OSPF there. But OSPF's harder to teach people that have never done any networking before. RIP was fairly easy. That's true. It's six hops, right? We picked this one because it's six and that one's 12. Trying to teach LSA databases to college students that have never done anything. I was like, OK. 24:38 We're gonna break it down really easy. It's not that hard. So I wanted to dig a little bit into the blueprint, if that's all right, since we... Yeah, yeah. That's okay, I just wanna ask a few questions about the... I'm sure these guys have questions as well. But when I read the whole blueprint, it looks like it's like half SD-WAN, which makes sense, because I think SD-WAN is generally what Cisco is kind of banking on for hybrid cloud connectivity. And then there's actually a decent amount of this that, and I don't know if this is intentional or... 25:05 is the intention or not, but is more, I would say generic, like IPsec based because of course, you know, internet connectivity to the cloud is IPsec based, but it doesn't reference SD-WAN specifically. So was that conscious or is it just like, hey, really we want SD-WAN to be like the focus of this cert, you know, or was it kind of like, yeah, some people use SD-WAN, some people don't, let's kind of cover the board. Oh man, great question. 25:31 Great question. I will say the short answer is it was

very much purposeful. And it was one of the things that myself and a couple of the other kind of, um, kind of tech leads that are, that are kind of, that help with some of the certification pieces were really very focused on at the start. And so I'll speak for myself. When I looked at the certification and we were going through it, I very much wanted it to be relevant for what people are actually building today. 25:58 Um, not what we want people to go towards, not the, the, the marketing in the strategic direction and what people might kind of build and, and be standard in five years, right? I was okay if we had like an SD WAN, certainly it's not like SD WAN is not happening today, but it's not everywhere. We talk to customers all the time that their, their connection to the cloud is just a simple IP sec tunnel. Right. 26:23 And sometimes the IPsec tunnel is between a Cisco device on-prem and then a Cisco device in the cloud. And sometimes it's a Cisco device on-prem to a native termination point in the cloud. And then sometimes they're trying to figure out how SDNWAN works. And so the pitch for the certification early on was we wanted it to be relevant today for what people are actually doing when building and designing cloud connectivity today. And so... 26:51 There were multiple ways that we know people are doing it today. I don't know what the breakdown is. It's probably some percentages kind of, we'll call it the more traditional kind of IPsec based model. Other ones are more software defined approaches. Maybe it's 50-50, maybe it's 60-40, doesn't matter. But there's enough of it happening in both directions that we wanted it, we wanted the certification to test on both sides of that. To show that if you are truly. 27:18 If you want to be a specialist in secure cloud connectivity, you need to understand all of these. Because maybe you're taking the certification because you work at an enterprise, right? You are part of a team at one company that is doing this. And if that's the case, sure, you've probably picked one or the other and you're heading in one direction. 27:38 But a lot of our target market for these are going to be network consultants, partners, that are working with lots of customers doing this. And they have to understand all of these potential options and make good design recommendations, good architectural decisions that align to the business requirements and the technical requirements. And so we couldn't just say, oh, well, SD-WAN is the future. It should just be SD-WAN. We needed it, at least for this version. 28:04 Right. And we now that we have the published blueprint roadmap and updates, right, we will adjust this over time. And if we get to a point where nobody's doing just old school IP sec anymore, that'll age off the exam. But for now, it needed to cover them all. The other thing is we already have two certifications just about SD-WAN. Right. And so it made no sense to do another certification that was just SD-WAN. And that was a big part of what we did during the blueprint development process is 28:33 We didn't want to replace the SD-WAN implementation or design exams. We didn't want to just be a subset of one of those. And so it was like, we wanted this one to very much to focus on the use case of cloud connectivity, not the technology of SD-WAN. Because you could also say, well, Hank, you've also got a security concentration on VPNs. And we do. And so this is one of those. It's one of, and part of this will be, we'll see how the community adapt. 29:02 like the feedback is, but this is kind of like a bridging hybrid type of a certification that touches a few different places. And one of the questions and conversations we had is like, which track does it go in? Does it go enterprise? Does it go security? Does it go data center? And we went back and forth on a lot of pieces and eventually the decision was made, okay, let's focus in. We're going to focus this in kind of at the enterprise level, because again, the pitch is this is around helping organizations design. 29:31 a WAN that includes the cloud. We pitched that as more of an enterprise topic versus data center security. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Alex, I know you had, when we were first talking about, man, I remember you were like, hey, why didn't they do data center? Cause data center connects to the cloud more than the enterprise does. So I actually kind of want to hit that over to you. Like, does that make sense to you? Do you? Yeah, yeah, it does. I'm glad he clarified a lot of these points. Cause yeah, I did. This was my first reaction, Hank, was a lot of. 29:59 I'm big in the data center world with ACI and cloud ACI. Now it's cloud network controller. That's why my question was, is there going to be another track around that? Because there's so many, like you said, it just happens that you fit this towards enterprise. It could have easily been data center and then that might have been the topic. So it's awesome to hear you just clarify that part of it. Yeah, to some extent we have to pick and choose. Cisco is huge and everybody thinks we've got unlimited resources. Right? 30:26 There's not that many of us that go through and do and focus in on this part of it. And so we have to kind of pick and choose where's the best entry point at any given point in time. We did the same thing with the DevNet expert. I had a lot of people be like, well, it's very enterprise-y focused. What about all of us that are doing automation with Cisco, but collaboration? I was like, yeah, we had to pick one place to start. So we started at the network automation side of it. Similar here. 30:54 When we talked about cloud connectivity, yes, most of the cloud connectivity is connecting to the data center, but it's more like, and it's up for debate, but the position we took is, is the technology used to connect the data center to the cloud is more WAN types of technology, enterprise types of

technology, than traditional like in the data center technology, right? Nobody's standing up like a Nexus switch at the edge of the data center to terminate like a VPN. 31:21 Lots of reasons we don't support IPsec on a Nexus switch. So clearly that's not going to be there. Maybe we can tunnel some VXLAN over the, but I don't know if that's a great architecture to go through. And so when we looked at it, we're like, okay, if it's going to be IPsec SD-WAN based, right? It's enterprise or security. And then when we sat back and said, okay, we're going to focus in on. 31:43 kind of the building of the network, a well-designed WAN type of a piece. And sure, it's encrypted and there's some security implements Tom had, but it's more enterprise than what we would expect a security professional will be dealing with today. And so it's kind of- More about radio connectivity than security itself. I see what you're going. Well, on that note, real quick. So in the design section, there's actually, I wanted to bring this up specifically, because it actually talks about the cloud native security and not like a Cisco security product. 32:13 So is that also intentional? Is there like bringing in other products as well that might happen with updates? Yeah, on 2.4, I think is what you're talking about, right? Yeah. So I was just scrolling to that part of the Blueprint over here so I could look at it. So it's an interesting one. And in the conversations that go back and forth, sometimes I always wish we never would do it for all sorts of reasons. But the different development versions of the Blueprints along the way and how it goes through and the things that showed up. 32:42 One of the things to look at, if you look at the design section, we have the first three are recommend, recommend, recommend, and those all kind of tie back to things that are kind of very specific. And there's things that are in there related to the network architecture and how you might deal with it. Basically make decisions based on is it IPsec, is it SD-WAN, all of those. And then 2.4 is describe. 33:04 This is one of those things that I learned really heavily when I got onto the learning and certifications team and really started to get into the sausage making of certifications, is those first words in every blueprint, those determine the level of cognitive knowledge that we expect on a particular topic. And so if you look at 2.4, it's describe the cloud native security policies for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Describe is kind of the... 33:30 I want to know if it's the lowest, but it's like a lower level of cognitive understanding and expectations. We just like, do you understand the terms that are there? What's possible kind of like what's, what's available where recommend is a higher level. We want you to be able to kind of understand it, make this determinations that are there. And then you'll see like in 3.0, we get into some configure tasks that are in there. The reason I go through

all this is we knew early on when we went through this, like we couldn't ignore. 33:57 public cloud specific pieces that are there. Like there's a certain level of understanding of how the public cloud works, particularly for once traffic gets into the public cloud. But we didn't want to write certification questions and tests on the specifics of any one of the public cloud security pieces that are there. But we do want to make sure that the people that are getting the certification understand them enough that are there. And so that's why like describe is in there. It's a... 34:24 basic understanding of these topics. So if you're going to plug your WAN in to AWS or Azure or Google, you know what you're gonna have to deal with once you get there. And so that's kind of why that's in there at that point is it's an acceptance and understanding that you're going to eventually pass traffic into the public cloud, and you need to understand what those security policies are because it's different, right? You're not gonna log into your... 34:51 your AWS router and type IP access list. Right. Someplace maybe that gets typed into an actual switch or router in the cloud, but you're not going to do it. You have to know how to do that with security groups in AWS and then whatever the other clouds call them. And so hopefully, does that make sense? Like how we kind of fit those in at an appropriate level? Yeah, if you're going to play in their playground, you got to know the rules, right? So yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, actually the recommend thing is a good call out Hank, cause and again, I've been... 35:20 you know, out of Cisco for a year now. But when I was helping write questions, recommend seems like a new one. I hadn't seen recommend before. But I do like describe, configure, all that level. I think recommend's a new one. I haven't seen that before. Yeah, I was gonna say Tim and I pretty much lived and died by that when we were doing our CCIE. We were like looking at the blueprint for the lab and it's like, no, it just says describe, man. It's like, not configure. Absolutely. 35:46 And it's amazing how much time we spend when we're working on these certifications on verb selection. Tim, you probably dealt with some of our psychometricians and our learning experts and like learning science folks, and they are brilliant people and getting on calls with them and say, no, no, we use this word because it means this and it fits in. And we try to be consistent so that when people are studying for the CCIE, they can look at it and say, okay, I only need to know it to this level of depth because there's so much potential that's there. 36:16 And if we've just got describe, which you don't need to go to the depth of like analyzing logs and troubleshooting and knowing how to debug it, can you describe it? Right. And for me, it's always like, is if it's at the describe level, you should be able to go to either a junior engineer and help them understand kind of fundamentally what's going on. Or you should be able to sit down with your boss and in about five sentences explain what's going on. Right. That's the describe. 36:42 the explain like I'm five. I always put it at that level. Yeah, I know we're coming up on time. So I just want to kind of shoehorn this question in here. So probably, I know you just released the announcement for the certification. Everyone's, there's been quite a bit of buzz about it. I know people are making YouTube videos. There's been a lot of chatter about it. So I guess maybe one of the pressing questions is when can we expect to see training for the certification? 37:12 You're going to do a book, Hank? No, no, no, no more books for me. Nope, I did one. That was enough. I've got an ISBN. I've still got stacks of them actually in my closet if anybody wants an old kind of vintage CCNA cloud book. So one of the things that we changed kind of as part of certpocalypse and all these other pieces is we didn't, we wanted to decouple training from certifications a little bit. And there's pros and cons to doing that. The biggest pro for us is we no longer were blocked. 37:41 on either side of it. It gives us the ability to create training that we hear from our customers that they need, even if there's not necessarily a certification specifically for it. And it also allows us to put out a certification without waiting for a training class to be built. I know a lot of people build training that's out there. I love the fact I've done them, right? We were talking before we started recording about training that I've done. And so there's lots of different ways to get training that are out there. 38:10 And there's different types of training material that's put together. But when we at Learning and Certification build a training class tied to a certification and a blueprint, it takes us a little while to do that, right? Because we have to build, we have to make sure it aligns to the blueprint. We have to get labs written. We have to buy the infrastructure because all of our training, right, that's one of the things that's unique about Cisco's learning and certification classes is all of our training classes come with hands-on labs. 38:37 Users can get access to the infrastructure, run through the exercises and the blueprint. That takes a little while. And so we don't wanna have to wait to put something out there because there are people that are doing this job today that we feel would benefit and want to go use a blueprint and earn a certification and go out there and do it. And so sure, we don't have kind of, here's the specific class for this new certification that's there. What we do try to do is provide links and recommendations for. 39:05 learning that aligns to the Blueprint. So maybe it's not as kind of cookie cutter and completely aligned and here's a class to take, but go check this out that's here. We've got these webinars that have been done that are related. We have these other

parts of these other classes that do exist that you can take advantage of. And so we no longer hold up for those. That said, there are several people involved in putting a Blueprint together. One of the... 39:32 representatives, one of the stakeholders on every one of our Blueprint discussions, is the team from our group that does the training. And so they are working through the process. And so when a Blueprint comes out, we've already started the process of figuring out what training is going to be needed, but it will take some time to launch. Another adjustment we're doing on our own training development is moving from what used to be a very, we'll use the terms, right, very, very waterfall model of training creation to a more agile model. 40:01 We've had a few courses that have already started to be released this way where we don't wait until we have the entire 40 or 60 hour course ready to push out there. We will start trickling them out in different modules and assemble them in ways. So again, a long answer to what could have been a short one is soon we'll start to see official training for it. But even before then, there are if you look at the blueprint, you can find what places you can go and pick up the training on some of those topics. Yeah, for sure. 40:29 Yeah, I think that is one of the cool things about this particular certification is all these things are kind of just like concrete elements from networking that were used to connect to the cloud. So you can find this in a lot of other places, especially from Cisco because these are all pretty foundational elements that are involved in other Cisco trainings and certifications and things like that. So I think that's really cool. Okay. Yeah, I think you're right, Chris. 40:58 just about at time. Any last thoughts, Alex, Chris? Yeah, I guess maybe one last thing we should probably plug since this is an episode about the certification itself. So Hank, when can people get out there and take the certification? Man, I should have looked. It's the one question I looked at before it went through. So it's in the fall. I don't know the exact date and I can probably dig it up and you guys can attach it or post-production like insert it. 41:24 But it's in the fall and that's one of the other things we do with the new certifications is we try to give folks, like we expect people to probably take three to six months kind of to do a study and prep for a certification. So we put the blueprint out that far in advance. So it's going to be sometime in the fall, September to October to November-ish. But I'll check with the team and look up exactly when it's out there. I think we've released what the date for first testing is. I just don't happen to know it. So. 41:51 September 20th. I had it on the screen. Oh, he's a junior. That doesn't seem fair. That's a trick question, man. Look at him trying to set traps. I cheated, but I thought I was throwing him a softball, man. I thought he had it. Yeah. To be honest, to my credit, I knew it was the fall, right? September's definitely the fall. But I'm an Australian, and it's not going to be fall in September for me. That's spring, baby. Ah, that's a good point. That's fair. Just kidding. Just kidding. That's true. 42:18 No, yeah, I don't have anything. This was a great conversation. Thanks for coming on, Hank. You know, you answered a lot of questions I had. I'm sure there's a whole bunch of other questions that could be asked, but this was great for an introduction to all this. Yeah. I think it's very exciting to see Cisco having these kind of conversations about cloud connectivity and things like that. I think it kind of reassures our point that, you know, cloud is important. Cloud is cloud networking, especially is important. 42:46 It may have taken a while for the networking people to get a seat at the table for the discussions within cloud, but I'm glad to see Cisco reinforcing that a little bit and hopefully we see more. I'd love to see some kind of maybe some multi-cloud, inter-cloud type certifications in the future. So we'll see where that goes. But yeah, thanks, Hank, this has been great. Thanks for coming on, man. Really appreciate it. Oh, of course. Thank you guys for inviting me to come and chat. 43:16 It's funny when Tim sent me the note. We've been working on this one for so long, I didn't even realize it had gone public. And I was like, oh, is it public now? Sure, yeah, happy to talk about it. Let me know. Surprise. Yeah, exactly. No, it was great. I was really glad we could make this work. Where can people find you online, Hank? We ask all of our guests this. 43:34 Yeah, yeah. So I'm not quite as active on the social media as I used to be. My day job is actually, I'm kind of back into engineering and operations. We're building a new data center. We're trying to do some migration and some updates and implementation, but I am still out on Twitter. So at HF Preston is probably the best way to grab me. And you can find me over on LinkedIn, but I don't spend a whole lot of time over there these days. An interesting place to follow me if you're looking for pieces, I do blog on the... 44:00 Cisco's blog platforms over on the learning and certification side. So blogs.cisco.com slash author slash Hank Preston You can find and kind of follow the pieces that are there and I'm I'm looking at kind of getting Some more regular status, right? I was peaks and valleys I'm kind of getting some content out there But my our marketing team is working and pushing me hard to get a little more consistent So keep an eye out for that and we'll see what what new goodies I can come up with cool 44:28 All right, everybody. Well, if you liked what you heard, go ahead and what, like, subscribe, pod catcher. These guys are way better at doing the plug than I am. Follow us on YouTube, smash that like button. I'm like, I'm counting all the ones in my head here. Go to our website, cablestoclouds.com, and I'll let somebody else do the outro next time because I suck at it. Oh man, you're doing great. Yeah, you did great. 44:52 That was good. All right. Catch us on the next episode and see you later. 45:18 You can also visit our website for all of the show notes at cablestoclouds.com. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.