>> 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

(light peppy electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman And I'm here with John Troyer. And you're watching theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's live production of VMworld 2017. We're in Las Vegas. Happy to have back to the program Alastair Cooke, who is the Chief Video Officer of vBrownBag. Al, great to see you, thanks so much. It is of course not only great to see you, but great to see vBrownBag here at VMworld which was for I think 24 or 48 hours, actually in question. >> It was probably the most stressful 48 hours of my life when it looked like we might not be as welcome on the floor here at VMworld as we have been for the last five years prior. >> Yeah, you know, Pat Gelsinger last year said I couldn't imagine VMworld without theCUBE. I think most of the community couldn't imagine the show without vBrownBag. So we don't need to hash through all of it. Everybody in IT knows that sometimes you get those stressful periods and you look back and say we went through it. The outcome worked. >> The outcome is awesome. So for those who have not come across what we do, vBrownBag is a community podcast. You guys have followed the rise, and John's been instrumental in part of the rise. The podcast is about education for the practitioner of IT, the person working in data centers or designing solutions to go into data centers. We focus on education, so we're a video podcast. I was looking at our stats. There's a couple of thousand videos sitting in our YouTube channel that we've produced over the last six or seven years. And in the last six years at VMworld, we've had an open stage. We sort of set a little bit of a parallel to the rise of theCUBE at VMworld, the massive estate that you have here now. We also have grown over the years, not nearly as massive, but we have an open stage for those same IT practitioners, the hands-on engineering people to come and share the things they've learned with the rest of the community. >> Could you speak a little on the breadth and depth of the offering that you'll do during this week here? One of the differences here, we get a lot of people that come take photos, they'll come watch for a few minutes. You guys have an audience coming through the entire time, participating and the like. >> Well this year, we have a big upswing in our audience because all of our sessions are listed in the schedule folder. So normal attendees at the show are seeking out our content and saying that's interesting, I want to hear about that. And that's always been previously our issue, was discoverability. Nobody knew that there were these really awesome speakers who were presenting at VMworld. Now they're in the schedule folder, and so we have a space for 50 people. We've had a few talks where pretty much every seat's been full. And the walkway past our stage has been filled with another 30 people wanting to see and consume the content that we produce. >> That's super nice. How many videos over the course of the week? >> We have 77 booked in for this week. >> I think you'll have more than us then. >> Yes, so we're already at 16. We do a much lower production standard than you do here on theCUBE. But we do a really high velocity. So as I walked away from my station to come to yours, I'd already uploaded the previous presenter's videos up onto YouTube. So as I walked away, 16 presentations were complete, 16 videos were on YouTube. My awesome crew still manning the stage while I'm away, and while I've been here I think we're now into the second video that's been produced as I've been watching you guys talking with your previous guest. >> Come on, video's all in. As long as the internet's solid, we get 'em up pretty fast too. >> Oh yeah. The key thing for us is that we do it with next to nothing. We do it on a shoestring compared to what... Your rent and people bill here is probably larger than my equipment bill. >> Well hey, that's the beautiful thing about tech, right? I started filming stuff at VMworld years ago, right? And you just buy a consumer camera and just go. And you can stream, and you built it up from there. It's a sort of affordable tech that anybody can do. And even, you use CommonWeb, GoToMeeting, and things like that on your weekly podcast. This is super. You don't need a lot of money to reach a global audience. What are some of the themes that you're seeing this year at VMworld in terms of the tech talks? >> It's a little challenging to try and work out a theme out of the 77... Because there isn't so much coherence to what we get. We don't have streams or anything like that. On the stage, we accept everything that comes in. And my acceptance criteria is chronology. The order in which you submit your session is the priority in which it's scheduled, rather than doing a lot of reviewing. I've seen quite a bit of container stuff in there. There's a lot of interest in AWS, and vSphere on AWS. And there's quite a lot of interest in free tools. So we had two sessions today on free tools for vSphere adminstrators. They're things that can get you going in your job without having to go asking cap-in-hand for money to buy a new tool. >> Which is nice, because these are things that might not be in an official session at VMworld with 800 people in it, but free tools are very relevant to the technical community. >> And that's the thing. Our audience is all about that engineer who's going to be hands on the keyboard, building things. Quite possibly you're still going to be racking and stacking hardware. And configuring the products that are being bought that are being chosen by somebody further up the management chain. >> I know some of the more popular sessions are when you touch on certification type issues. Did those happen here, or is that different pieces? Maybe speak a bit to the broader charter of vBrownBag. >> So the broader objective is that the virtualization community and the data center infrastructure community can teach one another. We all feel like we know a little tiny amount of this vast amount that everyone around us knows. The reality is that each of us has our own little island. And if I share my island of knowledge with you, and you share your island of knowledge with me, then we all learn more. And the internet and the use of podcasts and the rise of iTunes has given us the ability to do that at massive scale. We only need a very small number of people who are prepared to share their circle of knowledge, to be able to educate a vast number of people. >> But what I also think is interesting, you started with VMware certs, right? >> We did. >> That was a brownbag to learn and study for our certifications together. And now, over the years, it's brought OpenStack, it's brought AWS, containers. Can you talk about some of all the different topics that you're dealing with? >> So we absolutely cover as far as I'm aware, every released VMware certification we've got some content for. And have done since ESX 3. Those kinds of days. And that's how long the podcast has been running. We've always been helping community members to study for their VMware certifications. And then we found that VMware didn't release certifications as fast as we could produce training for them. And so we started looking broader, and started looking at, well, you work in virtualization, you need to know storage, you need to know networking. And so we started covering some elements of those. And then, oh, there are certifications in these things! And that's good for career advancement for the engineer. And so we started covering some of the Cisco certifications. And we did have the foray into OpenStack, because Cody Bunch, the guy who started the podcast, who I refer to as the Podfather, his work took him from building a product based on vSPhere, for a large hosting provider, to a product based on OpenStack. And so he was very much keen on OpenStack. Unfortunately our audience weren't so keen. So the OpenStack series went for a little while and didn't get a huge traction. But we started doing AWS last year. We covered the Solution Architect Associate certification early last year. Huge interest from the community! Really popular content. Another popular certification content is NSX. One of the top videos for a long time was Frank Buchsel doing an introduction to VMware's NSX. We're covering the VCP-NV certification. >> That's really interesting. What kind of people attend a vBrownBag? What are the characteristics? Obviously there are people who, some are of sort of driven, they want to expand their horizons, they want to advance their careers. I mean, any comments on that? >> I see a split between those of us who produce the content who are very much forward looking, getting excited about the next thing, and so now we're doing Kubernetes, and we're just starting a series on API's. Every Christmas we do a thing called Commitmas where we cover source code management in Git. With Git commits. So we've got this whole group of forward thinking, telling the infrastructure people, these are the skills we're going to need to be relevant in the future. If the cloud is eating your lunch in your data center, here's a whole set of skills that you're going to need in order to still be able to learn. What we see is there's a huge middle audience who are just starting virtualization. So crazy as it seems, there are customers who are just starting to virtualize now. And they're not all in Southeast Asia. >> Stu: Laggards! >> But the people who are coming into the industry, also younger people coming into the industry who don't have 20 years of virtualization or 200 years of virtualization in their back pockets. Using the vBrownBags is a way of getting some education and getting education that they don't need to get a purchase order for. >> John: This is all free, right? Everything you do is free. >> Everything we do is free to consume. That's one of our core principles. All the content we produce is free to consume. We do produce... in a typical month we'll produce six hours of video training content. And stack that up over a few years. >> So Al, put your consultant hat on. What so far, I mean we're only day one here. But what's your take on what VMware is saying, Pat Gelsinger gave his morning keynote, applause for Andy Jassy coming out. We spend a lot of time talking about VMware and AWS. But kind of across the board, what's your take so far? What are you liking, what aren't you liking? >> Well I'm liking that the video production on the vBrownBag stage has been really smooth so far and that I have an awesome team of volunteers there. To be honest, that's been the biggest thing because that's what I'm here for. The keynote... To an engineer the keynote's not hugely interesting because the keynote is a business-focused message. And I want to know, when I am deploying a vSphere on AWS environment, what does it look like? So there's some quiet briefings going on that you can book in for if you get the invitation to see how it's actually going to work. That's the stuff that would, if I were still doing regular day-to-day working for a company, that's the stuff I'd be wanting to get while I was here at VMworld. Yes, we've got Andy Jassy here, well that's great, there's a serious commitment from AWS to the conference. >> Pivoting back a little bit to new technology, video is really democratizing at some level. The affordability of the equipment and the ability to do it from anywhere. vBrownBag to support itself does have sponsors. You have some sponsors here. So the webinar's all free, and mostly very educational. You're here on site. You also do several tech events throughout the year, all around the world. And you've actually started a new exercise where you go and you work with a vendor or something as a technologist, and basically it's build day, where you build something with your hands, some system, some rack of something, and stream the whole thing live. Can you talk a little... Again, fascinating from a production and technology point of view. But can you talk a little bit about what you're trying to bring as a trainer and an educator and a community member with that kind of an offering. >> Sure, so vBrownBag's content is all free to consume, but it's not free to produce. And so we have wonderful sponsors that help us to be here, make sure I can bring a crew of people here to be able to make those 77 videos. And I haven't done the count of how many we're doing in Barcelona, but I'm doing an outrageous number of miles in a month because I'm going home to New Zealand in between the two VMworlds. I've got to pick up my wife and take her to Barcelona. So awesome sponsors for that, and we go to other events. This is I think the second event in Vegas where we've been making TechTalks this year. But John you're talking about the wonderful new thing we started doing this year of the vBrownBag build days. And the objective is really to show day one experience of implementing a piece of technology. And it's the engineer's day one experience. So we're very used to seeing keynote demonstrations. I'll show you this wonderful new technology, and it is an awesome piece of technology. It's just that A, you're not going to get it fr two years' time. And B, when you do get it, it's going to be possibly very difficult to deploy, or possibly really easy. A lot of vendors say, our technology's really easy. And so we put them to the test on that. We work with a vendor, they bring us in to usually their site. The two that we've done, we go to their site. I bring in a customer's vSphere environment. So I have a pelican case full of servers, and we turn up with that, and then on top of that vSphere environment we deploy whatever the technology is. Be it a hyper-converged platform, a storage platform, management platform. And we livestream that process. So the requirement for them is we need to start as it arrives to the customer from the factory. And we need to go through the actual deployment process. We need to hit the fissures that real customers are going to hit. Because I've been the engineer who turns up on site thinking he's going to deploy Product A, when the salesman said he was going to be deploying Product A, and in fact he's deploying Product Cucumber. And that's what he's got to go and push out. And that terror, of I've got to not make this go wrong, I've got to look good deploying this and give my customer a good experience, when I've not really had any preparation. Now it wouldn't help me if it was the day that I arrived, but often it's a new piece of technology. The first time we deploy it, we're rather concerned. And we don't believe what's in the marketing, and we don't necessarily believe that the steps in the installation guide are current. So vBrownBag's objective is to go through that process and take an educational approach to showing you how that first day goes. And as you mentioned John, my background is as a trainer. I taught VMware's public sector training courses for years. And so I very much like to go into this process as training. And you can see that reflected out in what we do with vBrownBag. It's all about education. That's part of what attracted me. >> One last question I have for you is vBrownBag has been doing this for many years. Any major shifts, changes... Of course the scope has broadened quite a bit, you're talking about things like NSX and everything like that. Anything else in kind of the community, in educating, and what people look for from your organization that you could share? >> So there's sort of different angles on that. We definitely have seen that move from being, I really need to get my VCP or my VCAP certifications, and then my career will be complete. Which of course we know is a little naive. Now we've seen a diversification that there are additional skills required. The other thing that we're seeing is that although VMworld is home base for this community, it's not the only place this community is. And so as I go to other conferences, I'm often surprised by the proportion of the people there that are actually my friends from the virtualization, the VMware community are at other things. And I suspect if I was to go to AWS re:Invent I would find a fair few of my friends there. >> Absolutely. Lots of them. Especially I'd say last year was where I saw a significant uptick. Are we going to see you at re:Invent this year? >> I've not had any interest from AWS to bring me there and I can't afford to come out to these conferences on my own dime until I sell a few more build days. >> I really appreciate everything that vBrownBag's been doing here with the community. Always a pleasure to catch up with you. Here on theCUBE we always love to support the community and many of those organizations. We will be at AWS re:Invent. Definitely lots of need for education there, lots of growth in what's happening there. And here, so for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here at VMworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (light peppy electronic music)

>> 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)

(upbeat techno music) >> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we're here live in Las Vegas for VMworld 2018 coverage. It's the final analysis, the final interview of three days, 94 interviews, two CUBE sets, amazing production, our ninth year covering VMworld. We've seen the evolution, we've seen the trials and tribulations of VMware and it's ecosystem and as it moves into the modern era, the dynamics are changing. We heard quotes like, "From playing tennis "to playing soccer," it's a lot of complicated things, the cloud certainly a big part of it. I'm John Furrier your host, Stu Miniman couldn't be here for the wrap, he had an appointment. I'm here with Dave Vallente and Jim Kobielus who's with Wikibon and SiliconANGLE and theCUBE team. >> Guys, great job, I want to say thanks to you guys and thanks to the crew on both sets. Amazing production, we're just going to have some fun here. We've analyzed this event, ten different ways from Sunday. >> So many people working so hard for such a steady clip as we have here the last three days, amazing. >> Just to give some perspective, I want to get, just lay out kind of what's going on with theCUBE. I've get a lot of people come up and ask me hey what's going on, you guys are amazing. It's gotten so much bigger, there's two sets. But every year, Dave, we always try to at VMworld, make VMworld our show to up our value. We always love to innovate, but we got a business to run. We have no outside finance, we have a great set of partners. I'm proud of the team, what Jeff Frick did and the team has done amazing work. Sonia's here's, the whole analyst team's here, our whole team's here. But we have an orchestrated system now, we have the blogging at SilconANGLE.com and Rob Hof leading the editorial. Working on a content immersion program. Jim you were involved in with Rob and Peter in the team, bringing content on the written word side, as fast as possible, the best quality, fast as possible, the analysts getting the pre-briefing and the NDAs, theCUBE team setting it up. Pretty unique formula at full stride right now, only going to get better. New photography, better pictures, better video, better guests, more content. Now with the video clipper tool and our video cloud service and we did a tech preview of our block chain, token economics, a lot of the insiders of VMworld, the senior executives and the community, all with great results, they all loved it, they want to do more. Opening up our platform, opening up the content's been a big success, I want to thank you guys for that. >> And I agree, I should point out that one of the things we have that say an agency doesn't offer, I used to be with a large multi national solutions provider doing kind of similar work but in a thought leadership market kind of, let me just state something here, what we've got is unique because we have analysts, market researchers, who know this stuff at the core of our business model, including, especially the content immersion program. Peter Boroughs did a bit, I did a fair amount on this one. You need subject matter experts to curate and really define the themes that the entire editorial team, and I'm including theCUBE people on the editorial team, are basically, so we're all aligned around we know what the industry is all about, the context, the vendor, and somebody's just curating making sure that the subject matter is on target was what the community wants to see. >> So I got to day, first of all, VMware set us up with two stages here, two sets, amazing. They've been unbelievable partners. They really put their money with their mouth is. They allow us to bring in the ecosystem, do our own thing, so that's phenomenal and our goal is to give back to the community. We had two sets, 94 guests this week, 70 interview segments, hundreds and hundreds of assets coming out, all free. >> It was amazing. >> SiliconANGLE.com, Wikibon.com, theCUBE.net, all free content was really incredible. >> It's good free content. >> It's great free content. >> We dropped a true private cloud report with market shares, that's all open and free. Floyer did a piece on VMware's hybrid cloud strategy, near to momentum, ice bergs ahead. Jim Kobelius, first of all, every day here you laid out here's what happened today with your analysis plus you had previews plus you have a trip report coming. >> Plus I had a Wikibon research note that had been in the pipeline for about a month and I held off on publishing until Monday at the show, the AI ready IT infrastructure because it's so aligned with what's going on. >> And then Paul Gillan and Rob Hof did a series in their team on the future of the data center. Paul Gillan, the walls are tumbling down, I mean that thing got amazing play, check that out. It's just a lot of detail in there. >> And more importantly, that's our content. We're linking, we're open, we're linking to other people's content, from Tech Field Day what Foskett's doing to vBrownBag to linking to stories, sharing, quoting other analysts, Patrick Moorehead for more insights. Anyone who has content that we can get it in fast, in real time, out to the marketplace, is our mission and we love doing it so I think the formula of open is working. >> Yeah Charles King, this morning I saw Charles, I thanked him for, he had great quotes. >> Yeah, great guy. >> He's like, "I love with Paul Gillan calls me." John, talk about the tech preview because the tech preview was an open community project that's all about bringing the community together, helping them and helping get content out into the marketplace. >> Well our goal for this event was to use the VMworld to preview some of our innovations and you're going to start to hear more from the siliconANGLE media, CUBE and siliconANGLE team around concepts like the CUBE cloud. We have technology we're going to start to surface and bring out to the marketplace and we want to make it free and open and allow people to use and share in what we do and make theCUBE a community brand and a community concept and continue this mission and treat theCUBE like an upstream project. Let's all co-create together because the downstream benefits in communities are significantly better when there's co-creation and self governance. Highest quality content, from highly reputable people, whether it's news, analysis, opinion, commentary, pontification, we love it all, let the content stand on it's own and let's the benefits come down so if you're a sponsor, if you're a thought leader, you're a news maker, you're an analyst, we love to do that and we love talking with the executives so that's great. The tech preview is about showcasing how we want to create a new network. As communities are growing and changing, VMware's community is robust, Dave, it's it's own subnet, but as the world grows in those multiple clouds, Azure has a community, Google has a community, and people have been trained to sit in these silos, okay? >> Mm-hmm. >> We go to so many events and we engage with so many communities, we want to connect them all through the CUBE coin concept of block chain where if someone's in a community, they can download the wallet and join theCUBE network. Today there's no mechanism to join theCUBE network. You can go to theCUBE.net and subscribe, you can go to YouTube and subscribe, you can get e-mail marketing but that's not acceptable to us we want a subscribe button that's going to add value to people who contribute value, they can capture it. That was the tech preview, it's a block chain based community. We're calling it the Open Community Project. >> Wow. >> Open Community Project is the first upstream content software model that's free to use, where if the community uses it, they can capture value that they create. It's a new concept and it's radical and revolutionary. >> In some ways were analogous to what VMware has evolved into where they bridge clouds and they say that, "We bridge clouds." We bridge communities all around thought leadership and to provide a forum for conversations that bridge the various siloed communities. >> Well Jim you and I talked about this, we've seen the movie and media. In the old school media days and search engine marketing and e-mail marketing and starting a blog, which we were part of, the blogging was the first generation of sharing economy where you linked to other bloggers and shared your traffic, because you were working together against the mainstream media. >> It's my major keyboard, by the way, I love blogs. >> And if you were funded you had to build an audience. Audience development, audience development. Not anymore, the audience is already there. They are now in networks so the new ethos, like blogging, is joining networks and not making it an ownership, lock in walled garden. So the new ethos is not link sharing, community sharing, co-creation and merging networks. This is something that we're seeing across all event communities and content is the nutrients and the glue for those communities. >> You got multi cloud, you got multi content networks. Making it together, it's exciting. I mean there were some people that I saw this week, I mean Alan Cohen as a guest host, amazingly articulate, super smart guy, plugged in to Silicon Valley. Christophe Bertrand, analyst at ESG, a great analysis today on theCUBE, bringing those guys, nominate them into the community for the Open Community Project. >> You know what I like, Dave, was also Jeff Frick, Sonia and Gabe were all at the front there, greeting the guests. We had great speakers, it all worked. The stages worked but it's for the community, by the community, this is the model, right? This is what we want to do and it was a lot of fun, I had a lot of great interviews from Andy Bechtolsheim, Michael Dell, Pat Gellsinger to practitioners and to the vendors and suppliers all co-creating here in real time, it was really a lot of fun. >> Oh yes, amen. >> Well Dave, thanks for everything. Thanks for the crew, great job everybody. >> Awesome. >> Jim, well done. >> Thanks to Stu Miniman, Peter Burris and all the guests, Justin Warren, John Troyer, guest host Alan Cohen, great community participation. This is theCUBE signing off from Las Vegas, this is VMworld 2018 final analysis, thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi I'm Stu Miniman joined by John Troyer and we're at VMworld 2017. This is SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. The show's hashtag is #VMworld. There's also a lot of sub-hashtags, so if I was going to make this one the VMworld three word, it's developers, developers, developers. Happy to bring onto the program first time guest Byron Schaller, who is the DevOp's practice lead at RoundTower and Rebecca Fitzhugh, who's Technical Marketing Engineer at Rubrik. Thank you both so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Alright, Byron, I want to start with you. Both of you I've known through the community for a bunch of years but tell ya, how long have you called yourself a developer and, you know, tell us a little bit about what you do these days. >> These days I'm more of a friend to developers, I think, than an actual real developer myself but I started writing code professionally 20 years ago. I've been, kind of in an Ops role, and went back into Dev, and now try to help really bridge that gap and get Ops folks to write better code, and get Dev folks to have some more sympathy and empathy I guess for the Ops side as well. Try to get them to play nice together. >> Yep, but Byron, those of us who haven't been in tech in a while, last time I was coding we called it programming. (Byron laughing) So, I thought that shift happened like 15 years ago. But, Rebecca, tell us a little bit about your background, how you fit into the DevOps community. >> So I would say I am more of Dev adjacent. So I work in Technical Marketing as an Engineer at Rubrik, so while I do write some code and help with some of the integrations, I'm primarily public facing and helping evangelize our software, and work hand-in-hand with the developers as well. >> Absolutely, and maybe talk a little bit about that, you know, we know the Virtualization community, what's different about the developer community, and DevOps versus kind of the traditional administrators? >> One of the things that I've noticed that, in my opinion, is the difference between the events, like comparing VMworld to a DevOpsDay. VMworld is very technically focused, a lot of time. And when I go to DevOpsDays, I always notice they make an effort to show sessions on culture, and to talk a lot about culture of development, and what we can do better as a community. >> What's the connection here, between VMworld and the developer community, right? We're the VMworld has been, I dunno, how many VMworld's have there been Stu? We've been, there's been 15 of them or something? At least. So, very operationally focused, IT people who call themselves IT, operators maybe, even broader than that, Enterprise Architects, and now, we've been talking about DevOps for a few years. So, maybe, Byron, what's the relationship of DevOps to the VMware community? >> It really comes down to the API integration. And at what point do you stops being an Ops person if you're writing a bunch of API code, and you become a developer. That's become a lot fuzzier lately. >> Are you saying Ops people have to become developers? >> They don't have to, but a lot of them are going that way. There's API explorers now that make it really easy to write rest calls and things like that to kick off jobs, and it just makes their lives easier to adopt that trend. It's not that they have to, but if they want to, it's definitely there and moreso than it ever has been. >> Yeah, I definitely think that we're seeing more and more large enterprises, Microsoft, VMware and so on, moving away from kind of this proprietary model, and more into an open model where they want their APIs to be consumed, they want you to help improve their product, and they want you to write code that integrates with their software. >> I have another question about DevOps, right? So, developer plus operations, and breaking down that wall. Can you do DevOps if you don't Dev, right? There are IT shops that just consume packaged software, and they run them, and they do things in the cloud, and they do everything else, but that particular company doesn't make bespoke software, at least they don't think they do. So, can you do DevOps without Dev? >> No. >> Okay. >> So, it really comes down to the fact of most everyone writes code whether they think they do or not. They may not write core business apps, but they could write a lot of other integrations, or they have off-the-shelf software that they write customized reports for, whatever, but there is something going on, something is being created. And as long as you have that thing being created, you can have a DevOps model. But I think it's a lot broader than just in-house applications at this point. >> I mean even if you were writing a script, you're writing code, right? If you're creating Power Serialized scripts or PowerShell scripts to automate something in your environment, that's code. And that would absolutely fall into that DevOps mindset. >> Speaking of the show itself, I know a couple of years ago they had a little breakout with keynotes, and they've done some sessions, my understanding there isn't a dedicated developer track or mini Dev show inside of it. So what do the developers or people do in DevOps, what's attractive to them here at the show? >> There's always the hallway track, right? And then there's the side events like the vBrownBag, things like that where you see a lot people talking about Ansible and other things like that, that you won't see on the show floor itself. And I think with the hackathon tonight, and lots of stuff like that, there's a lot of adjacent activities that are very much worthwhile. >> You mentioned the hackathon, you participated last year, if I remember right, you won, your team won the hackathon. So, tell us a little bit about that experience, this is the third year they're doing it, so-- >> It was great, I mean it was just nice to see a lot of folks in the community come together to build interesting things out of nothing, in like three hours, and that's, doing that itself is just really kind of amazing to me, but then those projects, a lot of them have carried on and gotten adoption, and now there's going to be some things created long term, because of this one interaction. I think that's just really special. >> When I've loved to see the difference between last year and this years, I felt, while last year was amazing, and seeing the people write these scripts and these codes, it felt like it was a lot of shooting from the hip, and what I've noticed this year is that there's been a lot of pre-work done by these teams, these groups, that they've been talking and communicating for weeks, planning what they're going to code tonight. That's very exciting. >> The code program Code by VMware, I think they call it, it actually is expanding, they're doing a lot to touch both developers and kind of the API side of the IT, more traditional IT side. Rebecca, one way to characterize DevOps, or one element is I say part of DevOps would be time to value, right? Rapid time to value, we don't plan for a year, sit in a war room, and like hope we don't lose our jobs when we push the button to launch, you know, the next generation of whatever we're about to launch, right? We've recognized that's a hard way to go about launching something, so instead, we're more iterative, smaller bites, faster time to value. As you go out and talk with IT pros, like again, your commercial side, right? You have a product that has fast time to value, I mean, how much of a mindshift is having to happen inside IT where you can go, "Oh no, I could set this up in an afternoon, "and maybe I could write some code around it "over the next couple weeks," rather than, "I got to plan this out for a year "before I do anything." >> Yes, I mean I think we're definitely moving from kind of a bureaucratic type of development to more of an agile, where we have to iterate, and so, like in my experience, prior to joining Rubrik, I was very involved with VMware and did lots of virtualization stuff, and you would have like one major release a year. Right, and then a couple of updates, and there's a lot of planning that would go into it, and involved, and that gave a lot of lead time. And now, like working with Rubrik, we're on like a quarterly release cycle, and so we're just constantly, so I think a lot of its mindset. So, I don't want to say it's shooting from the hip because it's not, but it's just adapting and moving forward, and then getting ready for the next thing. There's not time to question and plan, it's we're doing this, and let's do it now. >> The thing I'd noticed is just in conversations and in the keynote, APIs were brought up more this year than I remember in previous years, you know you brought up the VMware Code Team, they've been doing the flings now for a couple years, so even if it might not be developer centric, it seems like they're adopting some of the things that you know, are attractive to what the developer community would do. >> Yeah, and there's a lot of really good marketing going on there too, especially around flings. Flings are great, and there are so many useful tools there, that people just don't know about until they get the press, and now that they're talking about it, there's a really great community built up around it, especially with VMware Code, I think is a great initiative, there's an awesome Slack channel that they have, and just getting the word out, more than word of mouth, and getting that stuff in the keynotes is so key to helping reach everybody else who's not already there. Word of mouth only goes so far when you have like the CEOs getting up there and talking about this as a core initiative, that's really important, we need to see more of that. >> Anything specific around the flings you could highlight, like you know, this one was really cool and it turned into something, or? >> The HTML5 client was a fling forever, and it was so much better than the actual web client. >> And now it's becoming the actual official supported client, and the older client is going away, finally. >> Yeah. >> Everyone's happy about that. >> It's very, there's stats feeder, is a super cool one that not many people know about but you can get all this information out of your vCenter, pump it into some kind of like noSQL database, and make these really creative reports, that just, there wasn't a way to do that before that existed, and something like that's really cool. >> Byron, as you go out and talk to IT pros and IT departments, you're trying to be a trusted adviser, you're bringing along a team from your company, are there elements of cultural change or kind of adaptability that when you go into a conference room and start giving your first presentations, and the questions that get asked, do you sometimes you go, what are the signs that you're going to go, "Oh this is going to go well," versus "Hoo boy, these folks are not ready yet." >> So we try to ask some probing questions to kind of pick a fight to be totally, not really pick a fight, but see who's going to take the bait, right? And then how communication resolves itself. And seeing that pattern happen, you know, okay, there's something missing or something as far as how the team constructed that leads to this animosity, right? Find that out as fast as possible, and then find a way to remediate that, is how you get that cultural change. But until you actually see it organically, it's hard to say well you know, just be more empathetic and hug it out, that all sounds nice, but you've got to really find what the dynamic is that's causing the tension or breakdown. >> John: Are there any particular signs that you could point to-- >> Yelling is a good one. (laughing) >> On a positive sign or a negative sign? >> Both sometimes. >> That group's not invited to this meeting, right? >> It's just a lot of finger pointing, it's a lot of you can tell they don't talk. And a lot of it starts with just having a conversation on a daily basis of what do you do, what's your job, how can I understand that, have that empathy, cause until you have that empathy, no one's going to care. And once you build up that, and get this understanding that, "Oh, what you do is valuable to the business as well," then people start to actually, you know, work, or I dunno, be friends or something at work, I don't know, it's really important to build that up. >> Byron, your title has DevOps in it, because you're addressing a function, but should there be people inside IT groups with a DevOps in their title, if you're here at VMware, and you're kind of coding, and you're a little bit interested in that, should you be looking for something, a title of DevOps? >> I think anybody can do DevOps. And I think that's something that we need to change our mindset on. I hear a lot of people say, "Why would I join the VMware Code community, "I don't write code," and it's, anybody can write code. It doesn't have to be the most beautiful elegant code in the world, you just creating a script, you've done it. Now contribute. Put your work on Github, let other people use it. You consume from other people, it's a community of sharing, share. >> That's great. >> It's all about contribution, right? It doesn't have to be code, you can write documentation, you can work on bug reports, there's so many things you can do that are not code related, that people can give back with. That's the important thing there. >> Reminds me a lot of just some of the discussion we've been having about community in general for a while. Rebecca, we're here at a big show, 20,000 plus people, do you spend all your time at meet-ups though, how do you deal with reaching kind of a broad community, or is it kind of smaller, more intimate things? >> I try and balance both, because I have obviously work obligations and I have speaking obligations, and then, but I do try and spend time one-on-one with people as well as at group functions, so I personally like to get out of my comfort zone, so like that was one of the big reasons I attend certain events, like the hackathon last year. My code is rudimentary. I don't want to pretend like I'm some amazing developer, but that was me getting out of my comfort zone and interacting with that community, because I knew that was a community I wanted to be more a part of. >> I guess the question is too, from like, your marketing role-- >> Mm-hmm. >> Do you have to go reach out to those thousands of meet-ups or, you know, how do you balance that kind of small versus large? >> So, yeah, I think like in a large group it becomes sort of an echo chamber in a way, where it's more of you talking at them than talking with them. I personally prefer to be in smaller type sessions, as well as one-on-one type discussions. I think we get more out of it that way. >> You mentioned DevOpsDays, that's a group independently organized, all over the world, kind of a meet-up user group on steroids all day, you've been to some of those as you said and that-- >> Yes, so one of the things I noticed from DevOpsDays that's different than a lot of user groups, is that a lot of user groups will jam pack the schedule, and you might have a 15 minute break there, and you have lunch, and that's it. Maybe a social hour afterwards. DevOpsDays, a lot of them create free spaces, of an hour, two hours, and sometimes, I think the one, I'm attending one in Detroit, in September, and I was looking at the schedule, and I think there's a three hour block of just talk to people, go and find your little community of people, talk to them, spend time with them, and then move onto another community and get to know each other. >> Byron, anything in open source community, and how it is different than, a little bit maybe, than this one here? >> The V community, if you want to call it that, it has been built up, is very unique, from an enterprise software standpoint, no other enterprise software company has what VMware has with that. It is a lot like the open source community, you go to something like OzCon or something, there's the same kind of interactions, the same kind of feel that we have here. >> John: Helping each other. >> Yes, I mean it's all about reaching out saying, "I don't know how to do this, someone help!" And, people saying, "Okay, this worked for me. "This hasn't." And just that feedback loop, and once you pay that forward to five more people, that's just really really great. You see it with the hang space here, the community, the sessions and things here, there are just so many people that want to volunteer and give back, there's not enough time to hear them all speak. And that's awesome. >> That's why we have things like vBrownBag. >> Yeah, right. >> Contribute there. >> There's so many different aspects of what's going on at the show, I'm curious if you have any, if you were talking to VMware and say, "Hey, next year, VMworld, you know, you should do this." Anything you'd like to add? >> Hmm. That's a really good question. >> That is a very good question. >> I mean firstly I'd love to see more developer track type items, especially as VMware is moving towards more consumable APIs in their platform, so I'd like to see more in that realm. >> Yeah, there could always be more work around that. I think I'd like to see more interaction, from the VMware Devs themselves. Talking about stuff going on, inside VMware, as much as they can I guess. That'd be super interesting, you don't see a lot of behind the curtains stuff here. And I think that'd be neat to see more of that. >> Yeah, I always love to look at the kind of similarities and differences between those communities. We do, we've done Red Hat Summit for a number of years, I'm going to be at the Open Source Summit, you know, coming up soon, we're at Amazon re:Invent, where the enterprise folks and the developers always argue about which keynote for them versus the other person, and striking that balance is always tough. Well, Byron, Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us here, really appreciate your insights onto what's happening in the community, and thanks for all you're doing there. For John Troyer, and I'm Stu Miniman, we've got lots more coverage here in three days of theCUBE at VMworld 2017. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)