Welcome to the October newsletter!
September was the month of plot twists. Julio Gomez “finished” his post-quantum IPsec series, then kept going. NetGru explained how ChatGPT works without a single equation. And our Latin & Hispanic Heritage Month series told four engineers’ stories entirely in Spanish. Now it’s October, which means spooky season and Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and we’re kicking it off by building an AI agent to handle your security grunt work: network recon, log triage, and Secure Access housekeeping, all powered by Cisco MCP servers. You’ll want the help, because what really haunts networks isn’t ghosts. It’s the attacker recording your VPN traffic today to decrypt it with a quantum computer tomorrow. 🎃🔐
Luckily, September handed you the garlic. Julio took quantum-safe IPsec off the laptop and onto three Cisco 8000 routers, starting with ML-KEM hybrid key exchange and a zero-outage rollout, then ML-DSA certificates, measured byte for byte on the wire. Part 11 was billed as the finale, but Part 12 automates the whole thing with Ansible over NETCONF, because at DevNet a series isn’t finished until it’s automated. And on NetGru, we closed the loop between NetBox and the network, since a network that silently drifts from its source of truth is its own kind of horror story.
Save the date: on October 27, Cisco DevNet and Outshift by Cisco present Shift.forward(), a virtual conference for builders who want to move emerging tech from idea to implementation. Follow the journey from research and ideation through building, landing, and scaling real enterprise outcomes across agentic AI, quantum networking, and next-generation infrastructure, with plenty of familiar DevNet faces on the agenda. Save your spot!
