Dave Lively is up to his neck in cloud. He's been with Cisco for 20-ish years, he's been involved in our cloud efforts for quite a while now, and he's been involved in the open source community just as long. And the best part is-he really gets it. Gets the inherent value of cloud, as well as the potential value. Gets the enormous variety of deployments out there and the endless array of tools that can tweak the way those clouds are managed for maximum benefit. He understands the legal challenges, the regional challenges, the vertical challenges, and the cultural challenges. He has clear insight into why things have progressed as they have to date, and a pretty good idea of how they can improve as we all move forward in our efforts to squeeze as much benefit out of cloud technology as we possibly can. Specifically, a few of the topics he touches upon during this episode of Cloud Unfiltered are:

• Who is buying cloud and why
• How Service Providers are using the cloud
• How technical debt impacts your ability to implement cloud
• Why containers remain such a hot topic and how their use is evolving (excellent tutorial for anyone still wrestling with containers)
• The role of the network in cloud environments
• How Cisco solutions like Contiv and Meraki can be the difference between loving your cloud and not loving it so much

See the video podcast on our YouTube page, or listen to the audio version on SoundCloud (although note that it is a truncated version). And if you like what you hear, we invite you to subscribe to our channel so you don't miss any of the other exciting podcasts we have scheduled over the next several months.