(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)