It’s July, and that means it’s officially time to start your VMworld planning. This is a show for which you really need a game plan. I’m not just saying this because I work for VMware now, I’m saying this from years of experience. VMworld has everything: You (or your company) has already committed the money […]
State of the vCommunity: where do we go from here?
Over the last several weeks, the stability of the “vCommunity” has been called into question. Is this still a community, or is it time to start anew someplace else? As is my custom, I think it’s worth looking at our history to understand the true state of the vCommunity. In 2011, I was recruited by […]
Surviving Digital Transformation with a Navigational plan
If you have built your career in the world of IT infrastructure, you know that our world has been going through a digital transformation for several years. It started with virtualization. Did you know in the early days of VMware, many people believed that hosting many virtual machines on one physical host was an insane idea? […]
Container Technology Deep Dive – Getting up to Speed on its History
The IT industry isn’t that old, so we don’t have a very long history. Even with the short history, we’ve been able to detect repeatable patterns in technology. The Negroponte Switch (about how wired signals become air-born, and air-born signals become wired), and Moore’s Law (computing power doubles every two years) are two examples. With the […]
AWS outage lessons can help you harden your cloud strategy
I’ve done it, and I bet you’ve done it too. As evidenced by the most recent AWS outage, even cloud engineers do it. I’m talking about taking down a system with a typo. I’m talking about configuration errors caused by human mistakes that take systems down. In my case, I was a junior Unix systems […]
Data Scientist – The Next Highly Demanded IT job? Or Not?
Data scientist is the hot new job role. Some have even called it the sexiest job of the century. However, when you look at some of the job postings for data scientists, it seems like this job title could mean many different things. I’ve seen everything jobs advertised as “data scientists” that are actually descriptions […]
It’s a new calendar year, what will you *stop* doing
It’s finally 2017. There have been plenty of posts with predictions for the new calendar year, as well as posts with resolutions and goals. If you are going to spend energy on doing new things, that means you won’t have energy for some of the old things you’ve been doing. You’ll have to stop doing […]
Operational Excellence in DevOps
What is the OPS part of devops? Some of you are purists, and maybe thinking that devops is a movement, one where dev and ops are joined in harmony and everyone can do everything to ensure operational excellence. To some early adopters of devops, the mere suggestion that devops engineers are anything like on-premises sysadmins […]
When good technology is used for bad
Technologists love to talk tech. Many times we default to discussing the what: What does it do? How fast can it go? Sometimes we forget that technologies does amazing things for people. As the mom of an autistic person, I’m grateful for tech that allows me to communicate when my child is non-verbal. I’m amazed […]
Let’s get real about devops
Last week at Microsoft Ignite, the monumental shifts in our industry were pretty hard to ignore. Ignite is Microsoft’s spotlight conference for the technical users of their products, or in Microsoft terms “IT Pros”. It is fascinating to watch Microsoft, an old-school software behemoth, make the switch from licensed on-premises software that required lots of hardware […]