Newsletter - March 2, 2018

February wasn’t very socially active month for me – due travel and getting up to speed at work, family obligations and a bit of traveling made it pretty quiet. 

Also Vancouver with the most of the planet got cold which made me to try to limit any possible commutes including events participation.

There are only two event to cover today:

•  I’m happy to report that as new VMware User Group leaders in Vancouver – Carlo and myself had our first VMUG meeting. All credits go to Carlo as the organizer and the presenter. Also it was very dangerous to have non-sponsored VMUG meeting, but at the end of the day it was complete success. We have a couple of ideas for the next group meetings, but please feel free to reach out to us with your own ideas. Also thank you to Fortinet for providing us with a great meeting space and taking us on a tour around the facility afterwards.
• The only other meeting that I got invited to was Nutanix User Group. I have no idea how I got invited, but since I’ve never been to one – I registered. The meeting was in a different format with much more networking activity and almost no death-by-powerpoint side. Also Veeam as a sponsor was great in their very condensed presentation. I don’t think I’ll go back as (a) I’m not a Nutanix user and (b) the experience was good but there is no need for a repetition.

 What really shocks me when I attend local Vancouver technology meetings on

• how legacy technologies rooted in so many datacenters that there is no way to escape unless you rip everything off and re-architect your DC from scratch
• negative discussion about public cloud – c’mon it’s 2018 – everyone should accept it’s a question of ‘when’ not ‘if’
• cost discussion around the first two items. How it can be really done precisely when you have risks, regulations, security concerns, unpredictable loads and surprising requirements of the applications that business decided to onboard. All cost discussion reminds me a quote from “Security Metrics” by Andrew Jaquith – “you can use the numbers to proof any statement you’d like”. Do you want to keep your DC – look numbers prove that, you want to go to the cloud – look number prove that you’re right again!

I personally tired of wasting my time on interesting but pointless problems that public cloud already figured out for you and would like to spend my time on something that has value and unique for my customer or employer. Today my article is on ChatOps – if you’ve heard of the term in 2017 – you’re ahead of me and can skip my blog post on Packet Pushers web-site.