(click) >> Stu: Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is a special on-the-ground here at the VTUG: Summer Slam 2019. It's the 16th year of the event and unfortunately it's actually the final event. I've been to a few of these in Maine. I've been to many more of them at the Winter Warmer at Gillette Stadium and welcoming back to the program someone that's been to many more of these that I have, Chris Collotti, who's a principal technologist today at Cohesity but you know, who is doing many other jobs and actually used to live here in New England, southern New Hampshire before. >> Chris: That's right. Chris, welcome back. >> Chris: Thank you, good to see you as always. >> Yeah, give us a little bit of your history with these events and you know, what you've been seeing at you know, user groups and regional events and what brought you back for the final one. >> So this one was interesting cause even last night when I showed up for the night before, I think I knew everybody in the room, it was all hugs and you know, it's just, it's all about the people, I mean, this is all the same people that we've had up here. But, yeah, I grew up in southern New Hampshire, since moved to Tennessee five years ago but I was actually at another event before this and when we found it was the last one, well, Cohesity has always sponsored it but I actually decided to fly over here, being the last one cause knowing the Harneys really well and see all you guys it's just, it's kind of an odd thing to have the curtain go down. >> Yeah, you talk about the people and communities, Chris, I think back to the earliest days that I came to this event I'm like, there's that guy on stage, he's almost always wearing a Patriots jersey there and >> (laughs) I did make that famous. >> Figuring out it was I believe P90x and some of the other things there so, you know, what's the workout regime today? >> Uh, this morning I actually jacked up my neck, um, back in to lifting heavy a little bit but yeah, it was always great to be the guy who always came up on stage and always had a Brewsky jersey on or something. I remember the one year that someone told me they were practicing that year and I was in the middle of the presentation and I was, you know, conflicted on what to do but, um, no I think it's always been good to come back and talk, not just about technology, but I've had so many conversations over the years about where my career's gone and the changes and it was always that opportunity a couple times a year to figure out what changed for everybody. And even now, I mean, there's guys that I've seen that have different shirts on that we're, you know, I have one different from last year when I was at the Winter Warmer. >> Yeah, 16 years it's safe to say almost everyone here has changed what logo they had here. Many of the companies >> We've lost a little more hair, we've got a little more gray. >> So a lot of changes. One thing I tell you, 16 years has been a good run for the Patriots over the last 16 years >> People don't like us when we talk about that for some reason >> We're here in New England, we're allowed to talk about it. >> That's true, that's true. >> At this event, Chris, it's The Cube, you always like talking about sports and if they don't like this piece of it that's all right but, you know, I tell you talking to the vendors here, they're always hiring, like, SEs, technical people, you know, if they understand that latest in technology, usually they can find a job here. What else are you seeing? What are some of the you know, kind of in-demand jobs, of course, you know, the space that your company is playing in, data, is at the center of so much of what we talk, >> Absolutely. Data protection, data management, is a super hot space. >> Yep. I think, I've definitely seen a lot of, all the new companies are always hiring SEs, right? They got to get their sales up and running. For Cohesity, it's a bit similar. I mean, we took over another couple of floors in one of the other buildings in San Jose, which is great, the growth is unbelievable. For people who don't know, you know, we've got a truck rolling around the country that John Hildebrand and I personally, pretty much built over the course of a couple a months, but I think that speaks to it. There's all this stuff happening and everybody's trying to find a different way to get out in front of customers, right, whether it's a salesperson, whether it's the marketing, whether it's creative videos or something else and we're always trying to figure out what's the next, well, not even technical ability, but what's just the next ability you want to hire, right, is it a coder, is it, I mean, we always have developers, we're always hiring developers, but around here, I've been out of the area so much I'm really not sure, like what the hotbed is right now around the Boston area and southern New Hampshire. >> Boston's such a hotbed lately for, you know, everything that's going in IoT, of course, Cloud's having an impact, those people that hadn't been to the Seaport District, oh my gosh, it's great to see those buildings go up. >> Oh yeah. >> You know, not just, you know, Red Hat put in a big facility there, AWS and Amazon, of course, has a strong presence, but between Cambridge and Boston there's so much growth here. Chris, want to give you the kind of final word, as you've been at more of these events than many people, you know, what's it like to see kind of the end of an era and any final memories you have from these shows. >> The only, and I've been talking about this memory, and you may remember this one, and Ed Hartley would too, I think, Tex, he will, when my Challenger broke down. Were you here for that one, when I pulled into Gritty's? That's my worse memory of these but it's the one that always comes up when I come back and everybody saw it on the flatbed driving by, you know, Luigi and everybody. What made it interesting was a horrible situation for me because I drove up here but it speaks to the community because everybody ran out to ask what happened, do you need a ride home, what's going on? And I do think the Harneys have done such an incredible job over the years just bringing all these people together. It's a little bit sad I think, you know, my wife came up for this, Julie actually flew up because she knows everybody and being the last one. She also won't turn down lobster, at all. I'm happy for them though, I think, a lot's happened in their lives in the last couple years and to finally get down to Florida and spend more time down there, I'm happy for them, I think it's great, I think they've done a, they've left a legacy, really I think, I don't think anybody can match up here. >> The intersections of great information, great people and you throw in >> Great food. a great New England Lobsterfest, you really can't go wrong with that, Chris, thank you so much for sharing the update. Always great to catch up with you. >> Yeah, great seeing you again. We'll see you tonight at the bake. >> All right and we'll see Chris and many others at VMWorld later this year as well as lots of other shows. Be sure to check out thecube.net. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thanks for watching. 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>> From Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hi I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE at VTUG Winter Warmer 2019 at Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots, AFC Champions week out from going to Super Bowl 53. Joining me is a user from the great state of Maine, Dawnna Pease, who is the Director of Computing Infrastructure and Services for the state of Maine, thank you for joining us. >> Yes, thank you. >> Alright so Dawnna, you've been to a few VTUGs, of course the Summer Fest, which is, you know it might not be quite as big, as the winter one, but it is known even broader, I've known people come from out of the country because there's a giant lobster bake at the end of the day. I've been a few times, but you know tell us, you've been to VTUG before, yes? >> We have, so I have been to many, especially in Maine. And this is probably our fourth or fifth one that I've broughten the team from the state of Maine here and I feel it's really crucial and important because it allows them to network, to talk with their peers and to look at the technologies of how we can provide services for the constituents of the state of Maine and for our services that we offer within our office. >> Yeah so we always love talking to the users, we love to be able to help you share with your peers what you've been learning and actually I've had lots of great government discussions over the last few years, even attended, I attended a public sector show in the cloud space last year, and it's always fascinating because people have a misconception when it comes to what it's like to be IT in government, so let's dig into that a little bit. Tell us a little bit about your role, your group, what's kind of under your purview. >> Sure, I've been in state government going on 33 years as a public servant, very proud of that. I have a great group and I am the Director of Computing Infrastructure Services and it's really directory services, Microsoft stack. We have VMWare environment that we been probably nine years now and we're just implementing SimpliVity our hyperconverged, and after extensive research on that, we really solidified and selected HPE SimpliVity because in state government we had a lot of aging servers that needed to be replaced as well as our VM environment which was 44 nodes and it was a huge investment so not only on the licensing, hardware, storage, the compute part as well. So lookin' at the hyperconverged that was just one of many of our technologies that we looked at. >> So Dawnna take us back, how long ago did you start looking at that initiative? >> Oh 18 months. >> Okay, and was it a single location, multiple locations, can you give us any, how many you know servers or VMs or locations that this solution was going to span? >> For me it was actually spannin' and takin' on many of our on-prem solutions that we have. Like our SQL environment, our application hostin', the one offs, we're bringin' into that. As well as upgrading our existing VM cluster. So it's really taken on and morphed even more. We have a lot of net new as that want to participate in this environment so for us it is literally like a cloud solution, but it's for within our own private cloud solution on that. >> And these were critical business productivity applications that you're talking about? >> Absolutely >> This wasn't a new project to do, you know, early days of hyper converged, it was like oh I'm doing desktop virtualization, let me roll this out. I mean you're talking about databases and applications. >> Absolutely so we run close to, little over 600 servers for virtual and physical, so when all said and done within our hyperconverged our goal is to really be under 60 physicals left within state government. And currently today we have probably over 400 in our virtual environment today. So we're really expanding that more and bringing the services all into one knowing that we're going to have compute network and everything in our storage will all be in this environment. Plus we have a legacy storage environment, so when you're thinking of your legacy storage environment and you're looking at your refreshment of hardware and all the licenses around that our return on investment was huge for the state of Maine. So it was literally the wise choice for us to do within state government for tax payers, saving money. Also for the state as a whole. >> I have to imagine in addition to kind of the Capex piece if you're saying going from 900 to 400 and looking to get down to 60, operationally hopefully it makes the jobs of you know you and your team, a little bit easier once things are up and running. And that's one of the promises of hyperconverged, is it should be that cloud layer, it should be almost invisible when you talk about, it's just a pool that my virtualization lives on but I don't need to touch and rack and stack stuff the way that I might have in the past. >> Exactly, exactly, good point on that. Also on that we've really taken a broad look at how we can leverage the cloud so from a disaster recovery aspect and not only havin' the site resilience between two data centers, but how we can leverage the cloud for that continuity aspect. So we're really broadening that and the team's doing a fabulous, excellent job at that. >> Are you doing the Cloud DR today or is that a future plan? >> That is future. >> Okay, going to leverage a public cloud as that Are you far enough down? >> Government. So we have Azure today and we have a government tenant on that so we will use that aspect within the government tenant as well. >> Great so primarily Microsoft applications, you've moved into hyperconverged and you leveraged the Azure government certified cloud pieces. >> Correct >> Okay, awesome, when you started going down this path did you have in your mind hyperconverged or is that, how did you end up on that type of solution? >> So no, we didn't. Doin' the research on that and lookin' at all options, and really doin' the research with that, hyperconverged was more of makin' sense from the return on investment and also from a ... I want to say the simplified fashion, like you said it's simple you want to make it not so complex, it provided everything within that environment, and it was really based on how we were structured today, the investment that we would need to do if didn't go down this path. And taking in, so we did go with the hyperconverged. >> In your previous environment were you using HPE for the servers or the storage? >> So we were HPE, we are an HPE shop. And we have VMC, we have Pure Storage, we have different aspects of our storage today that exist so lookin' at that as well, we had an investment that we either needed to upgrade, replace, and, or invest. >> What I was poking at a little bit is were you HPE before, was that part of the decision to buy SimpliVity which is part of the HPE family or was that not a major factor? >> It was not a major factor, I mean we were ... We have always been a HPE shop, however we had criteria we were lookin' at, so you know after doing the research and we had 15, we were lookin' at 15 vendors at the time. We narrowed it down to like eight, and out of that we really narrowed it down to two that were in the quadrant, in the Gartner quadrant. And in doing our own research and study and bringin' all the vendors in and everything and what we had already invested what we currently had, it really came out to SimpliVity as the choice. >> And your 18 months into this, you've got some Cloud DR in the future, how are things going? What have you learned so far, is there anything you would have done differently or any advice you'd give to your peers if they're starting to go down this path? >> Do the research, do the research, be very thorough in what you're lookin' at for your requirements. And you know not only the research but look at what you've already invested in and take that into consideration and what your return on investment, what you're looking for your return on investment because you need to look just past not only your hosting environment but it really goes into can your network support that environment? Do you need to upgrade your network, your storage aspects, licensing aspects of that as well? So it's a huge investment, however look at the money they already pay in. >> Yeah licensing, one of those things when you talk about that great reduction of servers, are you today or do you expect in the future some of those licensing costs from the database, the virtualization, will those actually be able to be scaled down? >> Absolutely, and that was part of our ROI as well. By a lot, you know and that is one of the benefits of the hyperconverged as well. Once you set that up and purchase the proper licenses, I mean like data center licenses, you can put in as many VMs as you need within that environment and that's important. So you're really just looking at your compute at that, what you need for storage and compute. >> Yeah, I'm curious just spoke, cause we have, we've worked with clients for years on that and often times I've got a ELA or I've got a multi-year contract there and I have to renegotiate it, has that gone smoothly? Have there been any bumps along the road or is it pretty straightforward that licensing can be a huge chunk of your budget and like oh great, I'm two years later and I'm going to save myself a lot of money. >> So I actually am the administrator of our enterprise agreement with Microsoft, had been for many years, so I know what we have. And so I work very closely with that and I as far as the licensing and what we have, so for the renewals, I will say it gets easier. I found that being consolidated because when the agencies own their IT, at the time, we had many enterprise agreements and that was more complex so if you can actually consolidate and go into one, we have one enterprise agreement, or under the three I would say, it's much more manageable on that. So I don't find that that's a show stopper on that, it's gotten easier over the years. Simplified, it's more simplified. >> It's great to hear that and actually Microsoft has made great strides, Microsoft today is not the Microsoft of fives years ago or 10 years ago. >> Correct, I would agree. >> So, Dawnna Pease, pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and be sure to check out thecube.net for all the recordings from the VTUG Winter Warmer 2019 as well as all of the other shows. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.

>> From Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of the VTUG Winter Warmer 2019. Just had Rob Ninkovich from the New England Patriots on the program. And, happy to bring on the program, one of the co-leaders of this VTUG event, Chris Williams. Whose day job is as a cloud architect with GreenPages, but is co-leader here at VTUG, does some user groups, and many other things, and actually a CUBE alum, even. Back four years ago, the first year-- >> That's right. >> -that we did this, we had you on the program, but a few things have changed, you know... You have a little less hair. >> This got a little longer. A little less here. >> More gray hair. Things like that. We were talking, >> Funny how that works out. you know, Rob was, you know, talking about how he's 35, and we were, like, yeah, yeah, 35, I remember 35. >> A child. (laughing) >> Things like that. Just wait til you hit your 40's and stuff starts breaking. >> Oh, so much to look forward to. >> So, Chris, first of all, thank you. We love coming to an event like this. I got to talk to a few users on-air, and I talked to, you know, get a, just, great pulse of what's going on in the industry. Virtualization, cloud computing, and beyond. So, you know, we know these, you know, local events are done, you know, a lot of it is the passion of the people that do it, and therefore we know a lot goes into it. >> I appreciate it, thanks for having me on. >> Alright, so bring people up to speed. What's your life like today? What do you do for work? What do you do for, you know, the passion projects? >> Ah, so the passion projects recently have been a lot of, we're doing a Python for DevOp series on vBrownBag. For the AWS Portsmouth User Group, we're also doing a machine learning and robotics autonomous car driving project, using Python as well. And for VTUG, we're looking at a couple of different tracks, also with the autonomous driving, and some more of the traditional, like, VMware to CAS Cloud Hybrid training kind of things. >> Excellent, so in the near future, the robots will be replacing the users here, and we'll have those running around. >> I have my Skynet t-shirt on underneath here. >> Ah, yes, Skynet. (laughing) You know if you Tweet that out, anything about Skynet, there's bots that respond to you with, like, things from The Terminator movies. >> I built one of them. >> Did you? (laughter) Well, thank you. They always make me laugh, and if there's not a place for snark on Twitter, then, you know, all we have left is kind of horrible politics, so. >> That's true, that's true. >> Great, so, yeah, I mean, Cloud AI, robotics, you know, what's the pulse? When you talk to users here, you know, they started out, you know, virtualization. There's lots of people that are, "I'm rolling out my virtualization, "I'm expanding what use-cases I can use it on, "I might be thinking about how cloud fits into that, "I'm looking at, you know, VmMare and Amazon especially, "or Microsoft, how all those fit together." You know, what are you hearing, what drives some of those passion projects other than, you know, you're interested in 'em? >> So, a lot of what my passion projects are driven, it's kind of a confluence of a couple of different events. I'm passionate about the things that I work on, and when I get into a room with customers, or whatever like that, or with the end users, getting together and talking about, you know, what's the next step? So, we as users, as a user group and as a community, we're here to learn about not just what today is... what's happening today, but, what's going to keep us relevant in the future, what are the new things coming down the pipe. And, a lot of that is bending towards the things that I'm interested in, fortuitously. Learning how to take my infrastructure knowledge and parlay that into a DevOps framework. Learning how to take Python and some of the stuff that I'm learning from the devs on the AWS side, and teaching them the infrastructure stuff. So, it's a bi-directional learning thing, where we all come together to that magical DevOps unicorn in the middle, that doesn't really exist, but... >> Yeah, I tell you, we've had this conversation a few times here, and many times over the last few years especially, is that, there's lots of opportunities to learn. And, you know, >> Too many. >> is your job threatened? And, the only reason your job should be threatened, is if you think you can keep doing, year after year, what you were doing before, because chances are either you will be disrupted in the job, or if not, the people you're working for might be disrupted, because if they're not pushing you along those tracks, and the tools and the communities to be able to learn stuff is, I can learn stuff at a fraction of the cost in faster times. >> Yep. >> Might not learn as much, but I'm saying I can pick up new skills, I can start getting into cloud. You know, it's not $1000 and six months to get the first piece of it. >> Exactly. >> It might be 40 to 60 hours online. >> Yep. >> And, you know, cost you 30 to 100 bucks, so, it's... >> Yeah, the lift in training, is a lot easier because, you're basically swiping your credit card, and with AWS, you have a free tier for 12 months, that you can play with and just, you know, doodle around, and then... And figure things out. You don't have to buy a home lab, you don't have to buy NFR license, or get NFR licenses from Vmware. But, the catch to that is, you do have to do it. There's a... remember Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? >> Of course. >> Remember the dad was doing the toothpaste tubes, he was the guys screwing the toothpaste tubes onto the machines. At the end of the story, he got, you know, automated out of a job, because they had a machine screwing the toothpaste tubes on. And then, at the end, he was the guy fixing the machine that was screwing the toothpaste tubes on. >> Right. >> So, in our world, that infrastructure guy, who's been deploying manually virtual machines, there's a piece of code, there's an infrastructure code, that will do that for them now. They've got to know how to modify and refactor that piece of code, and get good. And, get good at that. >> Yeah, you know, I've talked to a couple of people, we talk about, you know, there's big, you know, vendor shows, and then there's, you know, regional user groups and meet-up's, and the like. Give us a little insight into, you know, let's start with VTUG specifically, and, you know, what you're doin' up in the Portland area. Would love to hear some of the dynamics now, you know, it feels like there's just been a ground swell for many years now, to drive those, you know, local, and many times, more specialized events, as opposed to bigger, broader events. >> Yeah, it's interesting, because we like the bigger, broader events, because it gets everybody together to talk about, things across a broad spectrum. So, here we have the infrastructure guys, and we have the DevOps guys, and we have a couple of Developers, and stuff like that. And so, getting that group think, that mind share, into one room together, gets everybody's creative juices flowing. So, people are starting to learn from each other, that the Dev's, are getting some ideas about how infrastructure works, the infrastructure guys are getting some ideas about, you know, how to, how to automate a certain piece of their job. To make that, you know, minimize and maximize a thousand times, you know, go away. So, I love... I love the larger groups because of that. The smaller groups are more specialized, more niche. So, like, when you get into a smaller version, then, it's mostly infrastructure guys, or mostly Dev's, or some mixture thereof. So, they both definitely have their place, and that's why I love doing both of them. >> Yeah, and, you know, what can you share, kind of, speeds and feeds of this show here. I know, it's usually over a thousand people >> Yep. >> You know, had, you know, bunch of keynotes going on. You know, we talked about The Patriots, in, you know, quite a number of, you know, technology companies, people that are the, kind of, SI's or VAR's in the mix. >> Yeah, so, we had, I think, 35 sponsers. We had, six different keynotes, or six general sessions. We talked about everything from Azure to AWS, to Vmware. We covered the gamate of the things that the users are interested in. >> You had... don't undersell the general sessions there. (laughing) There was one that was on, like, you know, Blockchain and Quantum computing, I heard. >> Yep, yep. >> There was, an Amazon session, that was just, geekin' out on the database stuff, I think, there. >> Yes, yeah, Graph tier, yep. >> So, I mean, you know, it's not just marketing slideware up there, I saw a bunch of code in many of the sessions. >> Oh yeah, yeah. >> You know, this definitely is, you know, I was talkin' with the Amazon... Randell earlier, here on the program, and said that-- >> The Amazon Randall. (laughing) >> Yeah, yeah, sorry, Randall from Amazon, here. >> He's a very large weber. >> Gettin' at the end of the day, I've done a few of these, but, you know, remember like, four years ago, the first, like, cloud 101 session here? >> Yeah, yep. >> And, I was like, you know, I probably could have given that session, but, everybody here was like, "Oh, my gosh", you know, I just found out about that electricity. >> Right. >> You know, that, this is amazing. And, today, most people, understand a little bit more of... We've gotten the 101, so, you know, I'm getting into more of the pieces of it, but. >> Yeah, it was really gratifiying because, the one that he gave was, all of the service, all of the new services, of which, there were like, more than 100, in 50 minutes or less. And, he talks really, really fast. And, everybody was riveted, we... I mean, people were coming in, even up until the last minute. And, they all got it. It wasn't like, what am I do... what am I going to do with this? It's, this is what I need to know, and this is valuable information. >> Yeah, we were having a lunch conversation, about, like, when you listen to a Podcast, what speed do you listen on? So, I tend to listen at about one and a half speed, normally. >> Me too, yep. >> You know, Frappe was sayin', he listens at 2x, normally. >> Does he really? >> Somebody like, Randall, I think I would, put the video up, and you can actually go into YouTube, and things like that, and adjust the speed settings, I might hit, put him down to 0.75, or something like that, >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Because absolutely, you know, otherwise, you can listen to it at full speed, and just like, pause and rewind, and then things like that. But, definitely, someone... I respect that, I'm from New Jersey, originally, I tend to talk a little faster, on camera I try to keep a steady pace, so that, people can keep up with my excitement. >> I do, I speed up too. He actually, does this everyday. He flies to a new city, does it once a day. So, he's, he's gotten... This is like rapid fire now. >> Alright, want to give you the final word, you know, VTUG, you know, I think, people that don't know it, you go to VTUG.com, A Big Winter Warmer, here. There's The Big Summer one, >> The Summer Slam. >> With the world famous, you know, Lobster Bake Fest, there, I've been to that one a few times. I know people that fly from other countries, to come to that one. What else should we know about? >> So, we're about to revamp the website, we've got some new and interesting stuff coming up on there. Now that, we also have our slack channel, everybody communicates on the backhand through that. We're going to start having some user content, for the website. So, people can start posting blog articles, and things of that nature, there. I'm going to start doing, like a little, AW... like learn AWS, on the VTUG blog, so, people can start, you know, ramping up on some of the basics and everything. And, and if, that gains traction, then, we'll maybe get into some more advanced topics, from Azure, and AwS, and Vmware of course, Vmware is always going to be there, that's... Some of the stuff that Cody is doing, Cody Jarklin is doing, over at Vmware, like the CAS stuff, where it's the shim layer, and the management of all the different clouds. That's some really, really cool stuff. So, I'm excited to showcase some of that on the website. >> Alright, wow. Chris Williams, really appreciate you coming. And, as always, appreaciate the partnership with the VTUG, to have us here. >> Thanks for havin' me. >> Alright, and thank you as always for watching. We always love to bring you the best community content, we go out to all the shows, help extract the signal for the noise. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watchin' The CUBE. (energetic music) (energetic music) (energetic music)

>> 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

>> From Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, if the queue covering Vita Winter warmer, twenty nineteen brought to you by Silicon Angle media. Hi. >> I'm Jackie Sampson here with stew Minutemen wrapping up the show today. Ah, we're here. Gillette. >> So to this's the fifty year Vito, what's changed? >> Yeah, Jackie, so much has changed. So I've actually been coming to show for about >> eight years, and it was known as the >> New England V Mug back then. So when it switched for the tug, number one is a little bit more independent than a V M, where users group >> itself so broader on virtual >> station. But they actually made a conscious effort to expand beyond >> virtualization and talk about cloud computing. And four years ago, cloud computing while it had been gone, gone for about five years, most people coming to this show really didn't understand much beyond. I'd heard a cloud computing. I might have seen it on, like commercials from Microsoft, you know, to the cloud or some stuff like that. But they really didn't understand it. So I loved an event like this that brought in. They brought an >> Amazon. Microsoft had them give presentations, and they were breaking out from the ecosystem. This ecosystems >> gone through a maturation. Most of the vendors, I believe there's about >> five vendors here have a basic organization but have grown in decline. So we see in the users the ecosystem of the show. Make sure it's still over a thousand people here every year, and it's one that I was loved. >> That's awesome. So I was wondering. >> There are a lot of interesting guests that were on the Cube today. So what were the calm >> Dan's in virtualization >> space that you think company should >> start paying closer attention to twenty nineteen? >> Eso a common thing when I look back to twenty eighteen and continue here in twenty nineteen share >> really defines our industry today. So when we talk about going from virtual ization to cloud, we understand that that's gonna have to some disruption. We're at a user conference here, love talking to these users, and I talkto one user talked about the their hyper converge roll out, and they're going to be extending that for d R to the >> clouds I had a guest >> on today. Actually, the first one I've done it, Vito. He used to do virtualization, but in his day job today, all he does is a ws, and he does coding with PHP and he helps build out. Actually, Jackie, you gotta listen to this one because they're company does hair in massage, but for senior citizens on Lee. So it's really interesting based out of Cleveland. He's based locally. But you know, it's a nice niche and understanding the technology underneath that helps them at all of their location to do that. So you know, the common theme is, you know, it's a great time to be in technology. There's a lot of change going on, and there's great opportunities at events like this and training material for people tto learn and grow and keep themselves relevant and keep their business moving. >> That's pretty cool. So, >> speaking of relevance, who are some >> of the key players in >> space over some of the key players and talk? Teo? >> Yeah, so, >> you know, look, my first two guests were probably >> the two that have >> the biggest market share in the most relevant. So that >> is somewhere, you know, dominant in the virtual ization place and Amazon. Think clear Leader came for stuffed services going beyond actually supposed to have a guest on from microphone >> soft. Unfortunately, she was sick today. And look, it is not a winner. Take all. There is broad ecosystem and a lot of diversity out there in the ecosystem. So look, there's lots of virtual ization that isn't VM, where there's lots of cloud activity that's happening, both of them. What they've done really well in our balancing is their ecosystem. So a lot of change going on there. Neither of those companies is nearly as >> don't say the New England Patriots were going to their third Super Bowl in a row on DH talking. Did you know I'm a little excited about being here? A. Gillette? I wore my season ticket pin here. They just turned the lights on for us. Behind here, I >> can see my season ticket here. I was here. >> Wade. Rob Ninkovich on the program so way didn't talk to rob about too much. But, you know, even he was talking about the charitable works it does on new technologies. >> The underpinning he was actually telling me off camera, he's like, you know, Helen, I'm not doing football is like I should be in tech. You know, text. There's a lot going on. It's really interesting. And you know, that's the analogy we always have with the Cube is you know, one of the earliest clients said, where the pen attack. Let's give independent coverage, you know, help understand. Watch those waves and change justice in sports. If you want them long enough, things do change. You know, the NFL today. There's a very past happy league, and I think backto, when I was much younger, it was like, you know, defense running wins game today, you know, I mean, cloud computing is all the rage and rightly so, and there's still a lot of growth there. But, you know, virtual ization >> important. And there's >> so many different areas for people to be able to dig in. And that keeps >> us hopping from show to show on Keeps me excited. Teo. Find ofthe community people on technologists, users that >> will share their experiences. >> That's pretty cool. So did you have any favorite interview today? Or interviews? Plural. >> Yeah, you know, Jackie, >> it's always tough for me to, you know, choose a choose a favorite. >> So no right way has taught leadership pieces. You know where you talked about it? We talked about >> career with some computer people we talked to use, or so >> I hate to say it always liked to be like, Yeah, yeah, thiss one. But you know, overall, it was really good. I'm really happy to be able, Teo, participate. Even It's tough when I look back. In the years >> that I've been doing this, >> it's just the diversity of the new things that we get to learn your aunt and that keep >> me excited. You know, from year to year, >> it's awesome. So, Stew, thank you so much for wrapping up the show today. >> And, Jackie, I really appreciate you helping me. You know, wrap this up. You know, you're No, >> you know that. Love to say that. Thank you, everyone. I'm Jackie with student. Thanks >> for watching.

from Gillette Stadium in Foxborough Massachusetts it's the cube covering Vita winter warmer 2019 brought to you by silicon angle media hi I'm Stu minimun and this is the cube at V tug winter warmer 2019 at Gillette Stadium home of the New England Patriots the AFC Championship team going to the Super Bowl third year in a row yet again Randall right yeah paying it's my Los Angeles Rams oh so happy to welcome to the program Randall hunt who's a software engineer with AWS did a keynote this morning I believe it was a hundred AWS features in 50 minutes and felt like you we added a couple more than 100 and went a little over 50 minutes but I think we probably hit 57 minutes that was what the slide counter said but yeah I added a couple of the updates since reinvent you know reinvent is not the end of our innovation we continued releasing new stuff after that all right so our program we're not going to be showing JavaScript we're gonna take a deep breath and slow down a little bit because you know our audience absolutely knows Amazon I tell you this show remember like four years ago first time AWS presented me at Microsoft and AWS here and people heard cloud 101 and I was like come on I could have given this presentation and they were walking around like oh my god I just you know found out that you know who you know horseless carriages and I can do that do them and things like this so you know cloud we've been there for a decade but we're still I believe you know day zero day one is what Amazon always likes this is day one it's always day one so there's no way we can shove the entire reinventing keynote into this discussion so you know want to start first Tulsa rent a little bit about yourself your role what you work on and what customers you talk to sure so I studied physics and then I found out physicists don't really make any money so I became a software engineer and I worked at NASA I worked at SpaceX and worked with this company called MongoDB back then it was called Tianjin and then I am an Amazon I was my second time around in Amazon I'm a software engineer there but I'm also a Technical Evangelist and what that means is I get to travel around the world and make make all of the demos and chat with all of our customers and kind of solicit feedback from them and then kind of try to act as the voice of the customer for the service teams whenever I can get them to listen yeah so probably not going to go into open source versus software licensing of things with you because we want to make sure that we can publish I tell you space is one of those things I love it when I've interviewed people that have been in space I've talked to lots of companies that have our code in space Amazon you have I loved you know robotics and space are hard and we make it easy and I kind of laugh cuz I was an engineer as an undergrad I mean I studied a little bit of you know what it takes to break gravity and understand I always love watching you know all the shows about space and track SpaceX would you work for and things like that give me a break you haven't made space easy well I think space as a whole is getting easier this industry is becoming more approachable one of the things that we launched to reinvent this year was a ground station and this is something where if you have an S band or UHF you know satellite and leo which is low Earth orbit or mio which is medium Earth orbit you can basically down stream that data to one of these ground stations which is you know essentially attach to a region you know in this case us East 2 which is in a like Ohio area and you can go and say hey just stream this data into s3 for me or you know let me access this from my V PC which is pretty gnarly if you think about it you know you have a you have an IP address which is a satellite in space yeah I love I worked on replication technology 15 years ago and it was like okay can the application take the ping off the satellite or you know how do we do this so look we're leveraging satellites a little bit more I understand it's a great tagline to make those useful and more readily just you know it's amazing you think about when you think about my availability zones and regions it's now you know that things aren't just on the Terra Firma well I'm looking forward to the first availability zone on the on the moon or on Mars that that'll be you know when we have utopia planitia 1a that'll be the really cool AZ alright we heard the first blue origins working to Mars no well the latency you know if you have 300,000 and fit three hundred fifty thousand kilometers on average between the Earth and the moon so you know you can go around the earth it would speed of light 7.5 times every second to go to the moon is a fool I hang it's like six seven seconds or so so the latency requirements become a little bit harder there I roll more my wrong pin I have I have the Grace Hopper nanosecond which is the wit which is you know curled up and if you follow the white thing it's how long light would take to travel that and it does it in two nanoseconds so you got me I'm a physics lover and love space as does a lot of our audience so bring it down to the thing one of the things that amazon has done really well is I don't need to be a physics geek to be able to use this technology we're having arguments as to you know if I'm starting out or if I want to restart my career today do I go code or heck you know let me just use lambda and all these wonderful things that Amazon have and I might not even need to know traditional coding I mean when I learned programming you know it was you learned logic and wrote lines of code and then when you went to coding it's pulling pieces and modifying things and in the future it's it seems like serverless goes even further along that spectrum I definitely think there's opportunities for folks who have just you know I don't want to say modest coding abilities but people who were kind of you know industry adjacent scientists you know data scientists folks like that who may not necessarily be software engineers or have the they couldn't recite in Big O notation for mergesort and things like that from scratch you know but they know how to write basic code there's a lot of opportunity now for those developers and I'll call them developers to go and write a lambda function and just have it accomplishing a large portion of their business logic for their whole company I think the you know you have a spectrum of compute options you have you know ec2 on the one side and then you have containers and then as you move towards service you get this this you know spectrum between Fargate and lambda and lambda being the the chief level of abstraction but I I think in a couple cases you can you know even go further than that with things like amplify which is a service that well it's an open source project that we launched and it's also a service that we launched and it takes together a bunch of different AWS services things like app sank and kognito and lambda and it merges them all together with one CLI call you can go and say hey spin up a static site for me like a Hugo static site or something and it'll build the code pipeline build all that stuff for you without you having to you know worry about all the stuff and if developers are starting new today you know I remember when I started I really had to go deep on some of the networking stuff you know I had to learn all these different routers and like how to program them and these like the industry router so you know the million dollar ones and having to rack and stack this stuff and the knowledge is not really needed to operate of large-scale enterprise you know if you if you know a Ralph's table and you you you know V pcs you know you can run you know a multi-billion dollar company if you want yeah it's been interesting to watch too and you know I think the last five years the proliferation of services in AWS got to a point where is like oh my gosh if I wanted to kind of configure a server for my datacenter or configure an equivalent something that I wanted at AWS there was more choices in the public cloud than there was there and people like oh my gosh how do I learn it how do I do this but what we start to see is it's more don't need to do that because what do I want to do if there's an application that I can run where services that will help make it easier for me to do that because the whole it's not let me replicate what I was doing here and do it there but I have to kind of start with a clean sheet of paper and say okay well what what's the goal what data do I need what applications do I need to build and start there I'm curious what you see and how do you help companies through that so that this is a really common scenario so I this is a kind of key point here is enterprises and companies have existed since before the cloud was really around so why do we keep seeing so much uptick why do we keep seeing so many customers moving into the cloud and how do we make it easier for customers to get into the cloud with their existing workloads so along that same spectrum if you have greenfield projects if I were running my own company and I were doing everything I would absolutely start in the cloud and I would build everything as kind of cloud native and if you want to migrate these existing workloads that's part of the one of the things that we launched this year in partnership with VMware is VMware kind of interface for AWS so you can use your native vCenter and vSphere kind of control plane to access EBS to access route 53 and ec2 and all the other kind of underlying stuff that you are interested in run it you can even do RDS on VMware in my environment so that line is definitely blurring between my stuff and my stuff somewhere else and when people are talking about migrating workloads right you know you can take the lowest hanging fruit the most orthogonal piece of your infrastructure and you can say hey let me take this piece as an experimental proof of concept workload and what kind of lift and shift it into the cloud and then let me build the accoutrement the glue and all the other stuff that kind of is associated with that workload cloud native and you'll get additional agility your you know 1:1 ops person can manage this whole suite of things across 19 20 regions of AWS and you know there's kind of global availability and all this kind of good stuff that typically comes with the cloud and in addition to that as you keep moving more and more workloads over it's not like it's a static thing you know you can evolve you can adjust the application you can add new features and you can build new stuff as your move these applications over to the cloud yeah and it's interesting because just the dynamics are changing so much so there's been there's still so much movement to the cloud and then oh well some people I'm pulling stuff back and then you see you have a WS outposts so later 2019 we expect to Amazon to have you know footprint in people's environments and then you know Jeff just to make things even more complicated well the whole edge computing IOT and the like which you know everything from snowball and these pieces so the answer is it gets even more complicated but you know your your AWS I know is trying to help simplify this for use right the board I think I can say anything at all about AWS it's that if a customer is asking us to build something we are gonna do our best to make that customer happy we take customer feedback so incredibly seriously in all of our meetings all of our service team meetings you know we that voice of the customer is very strong and so if people are saying hey I want a AWS in my own datacenter you know that's kind of the genesis of outpost and it's this idea that well we have this control plane we have this hardware let's figure out how we can get it to more customers and customers are saying hey I want into my data center I want to just be able to plug in some fiber and plug in some power and I want it to work and that's the idea right we're gonna when I think of every company that I've watched there's usually something that people will gripe about and what I've been very impressed with Amazon Amazon absolutely listens and moves pretty fast to be able to address things and if you see you know if I'm a competitor of Amazon I'm like oh well you know this is the way that we get in there you know where we think we have an advantage chances are that Amazon is addressing it looking to you know move past it and you know absolutely the Amazon of 2019 is sure not the Amazon of 2018 or you know when you thought about it you know 2015 and it's big challenge for people as to because usually I think of something and you never get a second chance to make a first impression but it changes so much right everything changes that you know I need to revisit it it's like oh well this is the way I do things well Amazon has five different ways you can do that now um you know which one fits you best and I think that's important is different applications gonna have different characteristics that you want to be able to pull in and run in different ways yeah you know honestly I'm a huge fan of service I I think service is where a ton of different workloads are going to move into the future and I just see more and more companies migrating their existing you know everything from elastic Beanstalk applications so like vdq you know VMware images into the service environment and I like seeing that kind of uptick and someone recently I I can't remember who it was someone sent me a screenshot of their console with their ec2 instances in 2010 and maybe it was part of this 10-year challenge thing on Twitter where it's 2009 versus 2019 but they sent me you know they're in one large and the screenshot of the console from back then and they sent me a screenshot of 2019 and Wow things really have changed and you don't really notice it as much when you're using it every day but I can imagine you know their their Ops teams where they haven't logged into the console in three years because you know everything is done kind of in an automated fashion they set up their auto scaling group you know three years ago and then the only time they ever log in is to update to new instance types or something for the cost savings and I get messages on Twitter sometimes from people who are like whoa console got an update this is so cool and then sometimes we we get messages from people where you know we changed the EBS volume snapshotting things we had somebody who had it was like 130,000 EBS snapshots or something and they were like hey you removed my ability for me to select multiple snapshots it what it's like well you have a hundred and thirty thousand so we went in into the UI and we added a little icon that works better for large groups of snapshots you know if there's a customer pain point we will do everything we can to address it all right Randall Hunt really appreciate you sharing with us your experience what's going on with customers and absolutely that 10-year challenge we know things change fast we used to measure in decades I say now it's usually more like you know 18 to 24 months before between everything AWS in 2029 it's gonna be crazy and I can't I can't imagine what its gonna look like then all right well the cube we started broadcasting from in 2010 we appreciate you staying with us through 2019 check out the cube net for all of our programming I'm Stu minimun and thanks so much for watching the key

>> 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)

>> Announcer: Live from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering #VTUG's New England Winner Warmer 2017. Now, your host, Stu Miniman. >> And we're back, with SiliconANGLE Media's presentation of theCUBE, we're the worldwide leader in enterprise tech coverage, happy to welcome back to the program, Steve Pao, who's the CMO of Igneous Systems, Steve flew out from Seattle here to, welcome to the home of the New England Patriots. >> Oh my gosh. Number 12, number 12! >> The 12 man representing here, you've got, I have to say, I almost canceled my season tickets when Pete Carroll was our coach, so, luckily he's worked out better for you than he did for us. My wife's a Brown fan, she says the same thing about Bill Belichick. So, it's the coaching fraternity is kind of like the tech world, it's a small group, you all kind of get to know each other and move around, so, thanks for joining us. >> Yes, well thanks for having me! >> Alright, so Steve, we've been talking to you guys since you were coming out of Stealth, why don't you give our audience, what's the update on Igneous? >> Okay, well for those of you who don't know us, what Igneous really does is we offer an onsite private cloud storage service, and that's our first offering, it's part of our greater mission of providing true cloud for local data, and what we basically offer today is an unstructured data store that's completely delivered as a service, we take our own equipment, we install it, we monitor it, we manage it, we even refresh it when necessary, and all the customer has to do is really subscribe, and that's it. It's all pay-as-you-go, and it's all zero touch for the customer. We launched back in October, as you recall, and one of the things that I think that it's been really great since launching is that we've really started to see how customers that didn't know us are actually really evaluating, really, I think, the convergence of two trends, one is there's this data growth, data trend that goes on, and pretty much everybody we talk to, citing data growth rates on the order of doubling every three years, where IT budgets are growing less than 5% a year, so there's this mismatch where, basically everybody's hitting this juncture that what they used to do can't work because the data's growing faster than the budget. And at the same time, there's this data growth that's actually happening, and the data growth is not from relational databases and structured data, but rather, a lot of new applications that are logging sensor data that are supporting machine learning, AI, really, it's machine-generated data being analyzed by machines, with humans really just training the AI and the machine learning. >> Yes, Steve, I want to unpack that a little bit, let's talk it, because many of us that watch storage, it's been like, well the storage industry, it needs to change, it's not about selling boxes, it's not about capacity, and even on unstructured data, it was kind of like, okay well, what's creating data and what's actually valuable? How much is it just, do I stick it on a cheap tier, what do I actually do with it, what's interesting you guys do, some of those use cases, throughout machine learning, machine data, things like sensors, every time I hear that word, that IoT buzzword kind of pops into our head, but maybe you could talk to some of those, what's bringing customers, what's that driving challenge that they have, that you're helping to solve, that's different from the way storage has been done for many years? >> Yeah, I think, that's a great question, and I think that there's just been a real transition, and I think the transition has been largely created by the kinds of data that we want to manage and that we want to curate, and as we're seeing these sort of large unstructured data sets, it starts with the data, so as an example, you take equipment that used to exist in the past, like let's say in scientific computing. You used to have flow cytometers, which were just time-series data, and then what's now happened is is associate with ever flow cytometers, now a real-time video feed. When you look at the old world of microscopy, what you used to do is you used to flash freeze a sample, and basically take a picture of it, and now what you can do with lattice light-sheet microscopy is you can actually look at cells in vivo, while they're alive, and you can, I've personally gotten to watch a T cell move through a collagen matrix, and that's all microscopy, but generating orders of magnitude more data. That is, we're looking at these very, very different data sets, we're looking at very, very different kinds of computing, and what that requires is very, very different kind of infrastructure. And so, the infrastructure has just had to get a lot more intelligent, and the architecture has had to get a lot different, and what we've noticed is is that, that a lot of the patterns that are actually being built in the public cloud as they've taken kind of a fresh look at the computing models, have really become appropriate for this new kind of computing, and we don't see that on the premises, and that's really what we set out to go do. >> Yeah, it's interesting, it's probably the wrong term, but it sounds like we're describing kind of object storage 2.0. 1.0, I remember this healthcare use cases, everybody, when I was doing radiology, when you're doing certain healthcare and sciences, I need metadata, I need to understand that, but now there's just orders of magnitude more data, and technologies are making, it's denser, prices have come down, so the idea has been around for a little bit while, but it sounds like the technology's matured to allow kind of an explosion-- >> Well, and it's just a computing model, it's like one of these things where we're really, because of the emergence of microservices, one of the things that we've seen is applications want a restful interaction with the storage layer, and so, so it turns out that that tends to be very, very perfect for a cloud-like implementation where you can actually implement high volume, unstructured data really, really well via a restful API, where in the old world of POSIX semantics and that kind of transactional model, you just lost scalability. Either you had a lot of proprietary hardware, with that VRAM, you had proprietary interconnects data with things like InfiniBand, and nowadays, being able to loosely couple distributed systems is really the name of the game, and that's ultimately what we aim to build at Igneous, and that's all the technology, in terms of our commercial offering, the customer doesn't care what's behind it, but fundamentally, what you're looking for is the scalability and resilience that the cloud offers by doing that on premises. >> Yeah, so Steve, we had a really interesting crowd chat about a month or so ago talking about hybrid cloud, and the thing I've been saying for the last, probably year, is, as customers try to figure out what goes where in the cloud environment, you know, I've got SaaS, I've got public out of, I've got my private cloud, it's follow the data and follow the applications. In the cloud, things like mobile and even some video streaming, I think we understand how to do that, but why does on-premises make sense for your customers, your workloads, and your solution? >> Yeah, absolutely, and so, first, a little bit on hybrid cloud, there are kind of two different definitions of hybrid cloud, one is kind of the AWS VMWare scheme where what you're really looking to do is run your old stuff that you were running on-prem, in the public cloud, and you call that hybrid. But there's another way to look at it, which is to say, hey, let's take a look at the computing patterns that are being run in the public cloud, how do I bring that down to the premises? And the reason that you might want to do that is, it's really twofold, one is the gravity of the data, so it might just be that the datasets are too big to move back and forth over very thin internet pipes, and so you want to actually keep the data close to its source. The other is something that we've seen, which is really more of a preference, which is that while I think that cloud technologies actually have a lot of capability for security, there are a lot more hoops for folks to run through to ensure that they're compliant with their own internal policies, and where they've already set out a set of policies for how they run the stuff behind the firewall, sometimes it's just simpler for them to actually keep all of the data on the premises, and not actually have to worry about some of the issues in tracking, and compliance issues associated with how you move the data around. >> Yeah. One of the things we've heard from users is when they use public cloud, one of the things they really like is, sometimes the CFO's not fully onboard, but buying things as a service, so, they want to understand predictability, but they want to buy it as a service, understand, how does your solution fit into that kind of paradigm? >> That's great, I think our solution fits into both trends really, really well, because what we're really offering, we talked a little bit about technology, but really fundamentally, we're offering a service, and so when Igneous goes to a customer, our interaction is as a service. Customers interact with our service via APIs, and they get a bill for a subscription, and so it's an as-a-service model, you don't buy hardware, you don't install software, you don't have systems to manage. At the same time, there is a predictability that's a little bit of the downside of the public cloud, because there's a fee, generally, to access your data at a storage, and often, when people don't actually understand their data access and their data movement patterns, the costs of running applications in public cloud become quite unpredictable, and you actually don't run into that unpredictability with a solution like Igneous, because our data is on your local area network, and we don't charge you to access the data that's on your own network. >> So, I've come to an event like this, if I'm thinking about my storage today, the conversation in the marketplace has been, well, the new choices out there is, there's, the HCI, the hyper-convergence infrastructure, and there's flash, the AFA devices out there. And of course, even the lines between those are blurring, because I can have an all-flash configuration of hyper-converged, and some of the all-flasher a things are getting converged and put into more things, how do you help customers as the, what's the bullet point as to, well, this is for this kind of application, this is for this solution, and hey, there's this whole new category that you need to be thinking about. >> Yeah, I think that's perfect, and I think the real trick here is is that there's a difference between your hot tier and your flash tier, and your capacity tier, and fundamentally, the flash tier is really good when Time To First Byte is very important, so that might be for your relational database applications and things of that sort, where there tends to be a lot of searching through an index, and so you've got a lot of low-latency requirements. And then on the other hand, what you have is a capacity tier, they may be your video surveillance, they may be your large, unstructured documents, they may be your censor data, and in those contexts, you don't necessarily need the Time To First Byte, what you really need is capacity throughput, and so the overhead of setting up, for example, a restful connection is not significant when compared to the amount of data that actually needs to go through the system, and that's actually where restful semantics actually gets superior to positive semantics, when you have very, very large, unstructured data sets. Hyper-converge is actually a little bit of a different world, and I think that while hyper-converge has worked out pretty well, I think, for virtualization workloads, we've really found that when it comes to these very, very large unstructured data sets, hyper-converge isn't necessarily always the way to go, you tend to find a utilization issue between your compute and your storage layers, where you have to actually think about how you're balancing all this stuff, and so, really, the world that we've really seen emerge as new applications come forward, is there's really a trend to write microservices that are stateless, and to have them talk to a stateful layer, that's why in the public cloud, there's a pattern of having things like elastic container services talking to an S3, and we definitely see on premises that same type of things that's going to emerge. There's going to be some time to get there, admittedly, as I was mentioning kind of at the beginning, we've seen this really interesting set of interest patterns, one is from the folks who are developing these new applications that are utilizing unstructured data, there's a lot of interest we're getting right now from IT folks that are just getting started with object storage to do secondary workloads, to do backups, to do archives, and it's been interesting that we've been getting a lot of interest in our service as a new way to approach some of these data protection workflows. >> Alright, so Steve, last question I've got for you, came out of Stealth Q4 last year, what do we look for in 2017 from Igneous? >> Yeah, so I think that you'll see it on both of those fronts, I think that one thing that's going to be seen in 2017 is a lot more development on our side around building up a tool chain for folks to use for a data protection tier, and so, we've got a new offering coming online, we're calling it Igneous Insights, which provides information about what's currently on your primary storage tiers, we've got a whole set of replication services, they're coming up to do backup, archive, things like replication to the cloud, but what we're also really moving forward with is a lot of what's needed in the tool chain to really support hybrid and multi-clouds, so how you facilitate the data movement in and out of the cloud, as well how you do the auditing and management of the data, no matter where it lives. >> Alright, Steve Pao, really appreciate you catching up, and if you want to find out more about this category, check out cube365.net/trueprivatecloud, that's C-U-B-E, number 365.net/trueprivatecloud, which has resources from the whole industry, including from Igneous, including from Wikibon and theCUBE, as to what's happening kind of this true private cloud, hybrid cloud environment. We'll be back with lots more coverage here, thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music) >> Announcer: Since the dawn of the cloud, theCUBE has been there.