>> From Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, if the queue recovering Vita Winter warmer, twenty nineteen Brought to you by Silicon Angle media. >> Hi. I'm stupid men. And this is the cubes coverage of V tug Winter warmer. Twenty nineteen here. A Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots. Happy to welcome to the program. A community member, Someone I've known for many years at this point. Jonathan Frappe here. Who's with V Brown bag? Thanks so much for joining us from >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, so, you know, I watched this event, and when it started, it was, you know, originally the V mug for New England. And then it became vey tug And one, there's some of the politics stuff which we don't need to go into, but part of it was virtual ization and cloud. And what's the interaction there and what will users have to do? Different. And part of that is jobs. And one of the reasons I really wanted to bring you on is, you know, you started out heavy in that virtual ization base and you've been going through those machinations. So maybe just give our audience a little bit about, you know, your background, some of the things skill sets. You've got lots of acronyms on your on your you know, resume as it is for certification. You've done. So let's start there. >> Sure. So my background. I started this help desk. I did Windows two thousand Active Directory, administration and Exchange Administration all on site and moved into Mohr server administration. And when the empire started to become a thing, I was like, Wow, this is This is a game changer and I need to sort of shift my skill set. I understand the applications of music. I've been supporting him. But virtualization is going to change change That so started to shift there and saw a similar thing with Public Cloud and automation a cz, That same sort of next step beyond infrastructure management. >> All right. And you've had a bunch of certification. The real off a few. You know what? Where are you today? What? What have you added gives a little bit of a timeline. >> My first certification was a plus which come to you seemingly has come around and joined the ranks of posting toe linked in for everybody. So a plus was my first one. EMC PM, CSC on Windows two thousand. Took a little bit of a break in back into it. Bcp five era so four, five years ago. Cem Cem. Other of'em were Certs NSX Cloud see Emma and most recently, the solution's architect associate for a Ws. >> OK, great, in when you look at the kind of virtual ization and cloud, it's not like you thirst, which one day and said, Okay, I no longer need the VM were stuff. I'm going to do the cloud tell us a little bit about you know what led you to start doing the cloud and you know how you you know how your roles that you've had and you know the skill set that you want to have for your career. You know how you look at those. >> So for me, it is about being able to support what my business is doing. And sometimes the right answer's going to be VM, where sometimes it's going to be physical. Sometimes it's going to be containers or public cloud, or, you know, new fancy buzzwords like server lists. And I've always in my career tried to support what where, what application we're delivering to get the business, the information they need. So for me to do that properly, I need to be well versed across all of that infrastructure so that when when it's time to deliver something in public cloud or time to deliver something in the container, I'm ready to go when you do that. >> Yeah. What? What? What's the push and pull for some of the training bin? Is this something that you've seen? You said, like Veum, where you saw it, like, Oh, my gosh, I need to hop on that. You know, I remember back to those early days I remember engineers I worked with that were just like, this thing is amazing. That was like preview motion, even. Yeah, but you know, just what? That that impact we've seen over the last, you know, ten to fifteen years of that growth has there been times where the business is coming said, Hey, can you go learn this? Kaixian orders have been you driving most about yourself. Uh, >> it's it's been both. There are times when the business has come and said, Hey, we would really like to take advantage of virtual ization or public cloud. And it from a technology perspective, there may have been other factors that would impact the ability to do that. So that's why for me. I tried to sort of stay ahead of it when, you know virtual ization was taking off and everything I had was on physical servers. I knew I needed to have the VM where peace in my pocket so that when the business was ready and when other things like compliance, we're ready for it. We could move forward and sort of advanced that same thing with Public Cloud. Now that that's Mohr prevalent and sort of accepted in the industry a lot more cos they're moving in that direction. >> Yeah, and you know, what tips would you give your Pierre if they're a virtual ization person? You know, how are the waters in the cloud world is there are a lot of similarities. Is it? You know, do I have to go relearn and, oh, my gosh, I need to go learn coding for two years before I understand how to do any of this stuff. >> I think it's helpful. Tto learn some level of coding, but do it in an environment that you're comfortable in today. So if you're of'em were admin today, you know there's power, see Ally and be realized orchestrator and and even if you're on via Mars Cloud platform there's there's some basic power shell on bass scripting you could do in the cloud Automation. Get comfortable with the environment, you know. And then as that comfort grows when you move Oh, look, there's power shell commandments for a ws. If that's the route, you go so oh, already understand the format and how I how I glue those things together so you could get comfortable in the environment you're in today and sort of get ready for whatever that next step is. >> Yeah, I've always found I find it interesting. Look at these ecosystems and see where the overlaps and where two things come together. You know, I actually worked with Lennox for about twenty years. So I you know, back when I worked at Emcee the storage company and I supported the Lenox Group and Lennox was kind of this side thing. And then you kind of saw that grow over time and Lennox and virtual ization. We're kind of parallel, but didn't overlap is much. And then when we get to the cloud, it feels like everybody ended up in that space and there were certain skill sets that clinics people had that made it easy to do cloud in certain things that the fertilization people had that made it easy do there. But we're kind of all swimming in the same pools. We see that now in the, you know, core bernetti space. Now I see people I know from all of those communities on, but it's kind of interesting. Curious if you have anything you've seen in kind of the different domains and overlapping careers. >> Yes, you. For me. I think what's help is focusing on how the applications the business uses consumed, what some of the trends are around, how you know whether finance or marketing teams are interacting with those applications. If I know how the application works and what I need to do something to support it, the concepts aren't going to be vastly different. If I know how Exchange's install their sequel servers install, there's some custom application is insult. I could do that across the VM, where environment native US environment and should it supported into Docker by leveraging Cooper Netease. >> All right, so you've mentioned about the time the application, can you? How has it changed your relationship with kind of the application owners as you go from, you know, physical, virtual, the cloud. >> I don't think it should change much. The problem probably the biggest shift that you have is that at some point now, things are out of your control. So when I've got a server sitting in my data center that I can walk down the hallway to if something's not working, I have access to it. If there's an application down in the public cloud, or there's an A Ws outage or any public cloud provider outage, I have to wait. And that sort of I think the thing that I've seen business struggle with the most like, well, it's down, go fix it. It's like, I can't get to it right now, and I'm probably not driving to Virginia, Oregon to go reboot that server for Amazon. >> Whoever absolutely big shift we've seen right is, you know a lot of what I is. It I am managing is now things that aren't in my environment. You know, there was my data centers. My might have had hosted data centers where I'd call somebody up, you know, you know, tell the Rex paper person to reboot the servers or it's right, it's in the public cloud. In which case it's like, OK, what tools. What can I trouble shoot myself? Or is there some, you know, out of that I'm not aware of, you know, is affecting me. Yeah, >> it's Ah, it's a good shift to have for a infrastructure person because we're really getting to the point now. I think the tails, the scales have tipped to focusing more on delivering business value versus delivering infrastructure. The CFO doesn't necessarily think or care that spinning up a new V m faster is cool. They care about getting their application to their team so that they could do their work. So I think taking, you know, going to public cloud or going to other platforms where that's removed it sort of forces you to move to supporting supporting those business applications. >> So I'm curious it every time we have one of these generational shift time. Time is like, Oh, my gosh, I'm going to be out of a job on the server ID men Virtualization is going to get rid of me. I'm a virtual ization Had been cloud's going to get rid of me. This whole server listing will probably just get rid of all the infrastructure people I've read article yesterday was called the Creeping Apocalypse a CZ what they called it. But, you know, you know what you saying is there general fear in your peers or, you know, do you just, you know, dive in and understand it and learn it? If you could stay, you know, up with or a little bit ahead of the curve, you know you're going to keep employed. >> I would say that there's a mix there. Some people, even just a few months ago, some some folks I talked to and they were just sort of breaking into automation and like how they can automate deploying their applications in their legitimate concern, was I won't have a job anymore and sort of the way I looked at that was my job's going to change. I don't spend my entire day administering Windows two thousand active directory boxes any more. So I need Yes, I need to shift that and start thinking about what's next. If I can automate the routine task, you know, deploying an application, patching and application, bringing things up and down when there's some sort of failure than I, uh, I'm going to naturally grow my career in that way by getting rid of the boring stuff. >> Yeah, and I've been here in this argument against automation for decades now, and the question I always put two people is like, Look, if I could give you an extra hour a day or an extra day a week, do you have other projects that you could be doing or things that the business is asking for? That would be better. And I've yet to find somebody that didn't say, Yeah, of course, on DH. What are the things that you're doing that it would be nice to get rid of, You know, other people is like I love the serenity of racking and stacking cabling stuff. And nothing gets people more excited than beautiful cables in Iraq. I thought yesterday I saw people like going off about here's this data center with these beautiful, you know, rack, you know? So with the cable ties and everything, but I'm like, really, you know, there's more value you can add absolutely out there. So >> automate yourself into your next job. It is sort of the way I think I like to think about it. It's not a meeting, >> so let's you know, just look forward a little bit, you know? There's all these waves, you know, Cloud been a decade data was talking to keep downs in this morning on the Cube on we said, you know, when he talks to users, it's their data that super important applications absolutely is what drives, uh, you know, my infrastructure, but it's the data that's the super important piece. So you know, whether it be, you know, you're a I or, you know, you figure various buzz word of the day I ot You know, data is in the center. So what do you looking forward to is? Are there new search or new training that that are exciting? You are areas that you think you're Pierre should be poking out to help try to stay ahead of the curve. >> Yeah, and back to my earlier point about leveraging the thing you know today and how to sort of grow your career. And that next skill set is how I can look at data and make. I understand what's going on around that. So maybe maybe today that's taking some stats from any SX. I hosted an application and correlating that data together on help. You underst Yes. And you know what that means for the applicator action before or use their calls in. And that's going to help you grow into sort of this new realm of like, machine learning and big data. And in analytics, which I think is really the next thing that we're going to need to start doing as Mohr and more of that infrastructure shifted away into surveillance platforms and things that were not worried about How can I understand? How can I take that data? Transform it, use it, correlated together to, you know, help make decisions. >> Alright, on final thing, give us update on our friends at V Brown bag. So, you know, we talked Well, I always say, you know, when we go to V m world, it's like we're there. I'm trying to help kind of balance between the business and the technology. You want to go a little deeper and really geek out and understand some of these things. That's where you know the V brown bag. You know, people are going to be able to dig in with the community in the ecosystem. There was the V and V brown bag for virtual ization. But he brown bags doing much more than just traditional virtualization today. You know what? What? What's on the docket? >> Eso upcoming This year, we're gonna have some episodes around Python so helping add men's get to know Python start to get comfortable with it, Which would be a great language to a automate things that maybe you're doing today in your application, but also to be able to take data and and use Python, too. Manage that data extract value out of that data so that you can help make decisions. So look for the throughout this year and, you know, learn new things. >> All right, Jonathan, from pure pleasure to talk with you on camera after talking to off camera for many years. Thanks so much for joining us. All right. And we appreciate you joining us at this virtual ization and cloud user event. Ve tug Winter warmer. Twenty nineteen on student a minute. Thanks for watching the cue

>> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCube! Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Presented by SiliconeANGLE. (energetic music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCube's coverage of the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, the 12th year of this user group, fifth year we've had theCube here. I happen to have on the program a first-time guest, Kyle Ruddy, who's a Senior Technical Marketing Engineer with VMware, knows a thing or two about virtualization. >> Maybe a couple of things. >> Stu: Thanks for joining us, Kyle. >> Oh, thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here. >> All right, so Kyle, I know you were sitting at home in Florida and saying, "What I'd like to do is come up in the 20s. "It kind of feels like single digits." Why did you leave the warmth of the south to come up here to the frigid New England? >> (chuckles) Yeah, well, it was a great opportunity. I've never been to one of the VTUGs before, so they gave me a chance to talk about something that I'm extremely passionate about which is API usage. Once I got the invite, no-brainer, made the trip. >> Awesome! So definitely, Jonathan Frappier who we asked to be on the program but he said Kyle's going to be way better. (Kyle chuckles) Speak better, you got the better beard. (Kyle laughs) I think we're just going to give Frappier a bunch of grief since he didn't agree to come on. Give us first a little bit about your background, how long you been VMware, what kind of roles have you had there? >> Yeah, absolutely! So I've probably been in IT for over 15 years, a long-time customer. I did that for about 10 to 12 years of the IT span doing everything from help desk working my way up to being on the engineer side. I really fell in love with automation during that time period and then made the jump to the vendor side. I've been at VMware for about two years now where I focus on creating content and being at events like these to talk about our automation strategy for vSphere. >> Before you joined VMware, were you a vExpert? Have you presented at VMUGs? >> Yes, yes, so I've been a vExpert. I think I'm going on seven years now. I've helped run the Indianapolis VMUG for five to six years. I've presented VMUGs all over the country. >> Yeah, one of the things we always emphasize, especially at groups like this, is get involved, participate, it can do great things for your career. >> Yes, absolutely! I certainly wouldn't be here without that kind of input and guidance. >> Indy VMUG's a great one, a real large one here, even though I hear this one here has tended to be a little bit bigger, but a good rivalry going on there. I want to talk about the keynote you talked about, automation and APIs. It's not kind of the virtualization 101, so what excites you so much about it? And let's get in a little bit, talk about what you discussed there. >> Yeah, absolutely! We were talking about using Ansible with the vSphere 6.5 RESTful APIs. That's something that's new, brand new, to vSphere 6.5, and really just being able to, when those were released, allow our users and our customers to make use of those APIs in however way that they wanted to. If you look back at some of our prior APIs and our SDKs, you were a little more constrained. They were SOAP-based so there was a lot of overhead that came with those. There was a large learning curve that also came along with those. So by switching to REST, it's a whole lot more user friendly. You can use it with tools like Ansible which that was just something that Jon knew quite well. I thought that was a perfect opportunity for me to finally do a presentation with Jon. It went quite well. I think the audience learned quite a bit. We even kind of relayed to the audience that this isn't something that's just for vSphere. Ansible is something you can use with anything. >> For somebody out there watching this, how do they get started? What's kind of some of the learning curve that they need to do? What skillsets are they going to build on versus what they need to learn for new? >> Sure. A lot of the ways to really get started with these things, I've created a ton of blog posts that are out there on the VMware {code} blog. The first one is just getting started with the RESTful APIs that we've provided. There's a program that's called Postman, we give a couple of collections that you can automatically import and start using that. Ansible has some really good documentation on getting started with Ansible and whichever environment you're choosing to work or use it with. So they've got a Getting Started with vSphere, they've got a Getting Started with different operating systems as well. Those are really good tools to get started and get that integrated into your normal working environment. Obviously, we're building on automation here. We're building on... At least when I was in admin, I got involved in automation because there was a way for me to automate and get rid of those tasks, those menial tasks that I didn't really enjoy doing. So I could automate that, push that off, and get back to something that I cared about that I enjoyed. >> Yeah, great point there 'cause, yeah, some people, they're a little bit nervous, "Oh, wait, are these tools going to take away my job?" And to repeat what you were just saying, "No, no." There's the stuff that you don't really love doing and that you probably have to do a bunch. Those are the things that are probably, maybe the easiest to be able to move to the automation. How much do people look at this and be like, "Wait, no, once I start automating it, "then I kind of need to care, and feed, and maintain that, "versus just buying something off the shelf "or using some service that I can do." Any feedback on that? >> Well, it's more of a... It's a passion thing. If it's something that you're really get ingrained in, you really enjoy, then you're going to want to care and feed that because it's going to grow. It's going to expand into other areas of your environment. It's going to expand into other technologies that are within your environment. So of course, you can buy something. You could get somebody from... There are professional services organizations involved, so you don't have to do the menial tasks of updating that. Say if you go from one version to a next version, you don't have to deal with that. But if you're passionate about it, you enjoy doing that, and that's where I was. >> The other thing I picked up on is you said some of these things are new only in 6.5. One of the challenges we've always had out there is, "Oh, wait, I need to upgrade. "When can I do it? "What challenges I'm going to have?" What's the upgrade experience like now and anything else that you'd want to point out that said, "Hey, it's time to plan for that upgrade "and here are some of the things that are going to help you"? >> We actually have an End of Availability and End of Support coming up for vSphere 5.5. That's going to be coming up in here later this year in September-October timeframe. So you're not going to be able to open up a support request for that. This is a perfect time to start planning that upgrade to get up to at least 6.0, if not 6.5. And the other thing to keep in mind is that we've announced deprecation for the Windows version of vSphere. Moving forward past our next numbered release, that's going to be all vCenter Server Appliance from that point forward. Now we also have a really great tool that's called the VCSA Migration tool that you can use to help you migrate from Windows to the Appliance. Super simple, very straightforward, gives you a migration assistant to even point out some of those places where you might miss if you did it on your own. So that's a really great tool and really helps to remove that pain out of that process. >> Yeah, it's good, you've got a mix of a little bit of the stick, you got to get off! (Kyle chuckles) I know a lot of people still running 5.5 out there as well as there's the carrot out there. All the good stuff that's going to get you going. All right, hey, Kyle, last thing I want to ask is 2018. Boy, there's a lot of change going on in the industry. One, how do you keep up with everything, and two, what's exciting you about what's happening in the industry right now? >> As far as what excites me right now, Python. That's been something that's been coming up a lot more with the folks that I'm talking to. Even today, just at lunch, I was talking to somebody and they were bringing up Python. I'm like, "Wow!" This is something that keeps coming up more and more often. I'm using a lot more of my time, even my personal time, to start looking at that. And so when you start hearing the passion of people who are using some of these new technologies, that's when I start getting interested because I'm like, "Hey, if you're that interested, "and you're that passionate about it, "I should be too." So that's kind of what drives me to keep learning and to keep up with all of the latest and greatest things that are out there. Plus when you have events like this, you can go talk to some of the sponsors. You can talk and see what they're doing, how to make use of their product, and some of their automation frameworks, and with what programming languages. That kind of comes back to Python on that one because a lot more companies are releasing their automation tools for use with Python. >> Yeah, and you answered the second part of my question probably without even thinking about it. The passion, the excitement, talking to your peers, coming to events like this. All right, Kyle Ruddy, really appreciate you joining us here. We'll be back with more coverage here from the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCube. (energetic music)