 Live from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering VTUG's New England Winter Warmer 2016. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE, live at Gillette Stadium here for the virtualization technology user group or VTUG at the 10th year of the show. It's our third year here with theCUBE. Happy to have on the program, if we've got Chris Williams, who's Cloud Architect with Chronos, and Sean Markham, who's Senior Systems Admin with IDEX Labs, and both of them are newly added as co-leaders for the VTUG. Guys, thanks for coming on the program. Your second time on the program, you were with me as a user last year and now you're both co-leaders, so we'll start and just give us a little bit of your background and what led to you becoming a co-leader. So background, a lot of the things that I do at work are virtualization using VMware, PowerShell, Scriptin, and AD, a bit of a jack of all trades in the infrastructure group. What brought me into the VTUG? I've been coming to these pretty much since the inception. I've known Chris Harney for several years and in an official or a non-official capacity, I've helped say, hey, maybe you guys ought to do this and so I think he finally just got tired of that and said, well, let's put a title on you and get more out of you. So now I'm on the spotlight now, I guess. All right, so Sean, right, you've known the Harneys and it just kind of got pulled in. Is it, those friends always tend to do, you got to get a little more, a little more and then you can grads. All right, Chris, how about tell us a little bit about your role, what's your company do and how'd you end up as a co-leader of this user group? Sure, so I work for Chronos Incorporated. They're the time management services software and so I'm a double VCAP. I've been working for them for a year and a half now and I've been coming to the VTUG events for years and Chris indicated that my enthusiasm for technology and my drive and my sociability were assets that he would like to bring on and so they graciously offered it to me and I accepted and so here I am. We have a lot of new ideas about things that we want to do with the VTUG. Great, love to, always when you've got these user groups, it's driven for the users and by the users. So, right, the enthusiasm sometimes, you kind of, you know, you've raised your hand without even knowing it and it'll pull you more. So maybe, I'm back for us a little bit. You know, what do you see as the role of the user groups? What kind of things do you think need to change going forward and how do you promote and get more people to attend and participate? Yep, absolutely, so the user group is just that. It's a user group. It's not a couple of guys thinking of wouldn't it be cool if we did this and then having a bunch of people attend. So what we've been planning on doing is making this much more iterative, much more of a back and forth conversation with the users, survey monkeys, going out and making sure that the website is updated with much more relevant information other than just going to register for the events. Starting to set up a newsletter. And again, having the community talk to each other and us and have a single place for us to share all that information. Building the social network and getting the information out there that we have information for people. Yeah, so one of the things we were talking about, Chris, in the intro and we've been, you know, watching kind of the maturation last couple of years. I mean, the VTUG itself, you know, has gone from it's not just virtualization. Cloud is part of it. Chris is talking, you know, DevOps is being pulled anymore. You know, Sean, maybe start with you. You talked about, you know, you handle virtualizations kind of a lot of your day to day job. You know, what do you see? What are your peers asking for? You know, how ready are they to kind of, you know, move towards some of these technologies and, you know, give us some commentary on that. In my organization, we know it's there. We know it's common. We're trying to prepare for it, but it's a bit of a moving target right now. You know, if you asked five different people, what does DevOps mean to you? You probably have five different answers. You know, and then there's a time and a place for everything. You know, DevOps isn't for your payroll system. It isn't for your exchange environment or your mail system. So, you know, the buzzwords at the office and that all of us as users are dealing with on a day-in-day basis, you know, trying to figure out which way to go. And I think a user group will help people share those ideas and make them a cohesive thing. Chris, you want to share your thoughts on kind of the discussion of those technologies and kind of people's readiness to understand them? So, I come from it from the completely opposite side. So, Kronos is a cloud company. We have a SaaS offering. And so, for us, DevOps is an integral piece of our environment. We create our own application. We have our cloud offering. And then, you know, everything in between is DevOps. So, for us, it's the thing that we're living and breathing every day. So, we're right in the middle of that step forward into the future. A lot of cool stuff happening over there. Stuff I can't talk about, so... Yeah, but I guess from an education standpoint. So, I would think, you know, boy, it would be interesting for you to present and where at least I'm sure you talked to your peers. You must get a lot of questions as to, you know, you've gone there before. I mean, I think back to the early days of virtualization, that was everybody was, you know, writing about it, talking about it, getting really excited about it. Do you see some of the, what's getting people excited these days, I guess? From my perspective, bridging the gap into that DevOps realm, learning about the programming stuff. I mean, we have a lot of VCPs, a couple of VCAPs and we are all learning how to bridge the gap into the application layer and how to start the automation pieces. Chris spoke about automation, huge for us, absolutely huge. Being able to crank out a ton of customers every day is the holy grail, and that's exactly the space that we're working in. Yeah, I guess, yeah, one of the concerns people always say is, oh, this thing like automation in the cloud, is that going to, you know, get rid of my job? So, you know, what are you guys here? You know, are people excited? Are they nervous? A little bit of both, you know, when it comes to some of this. I think it's a little bit of both. You know, looking at my environment, you know, we're concerned about the word cloud, but as we're getting into the cloud more and more, we're finding that, yeah, we don't have to worry about our jobs. You know, there's so much to do and so much to figure out, so much to explain and share, if anything, we're finding out that we're going to be the matriarchs or the people that are going to help our company go through the cloud process. Yeah, I mean, the thing I always look at is, if you talk to most people in IT and say, hey, if I could give you an extra hour in a day, do you have stuff to do? And they're like, oh my gosh, yes, the worry is, okay, what if I got rid of 90% of what you were doing? Do you have stuff to do? And most people I talk to are like, oh my gosh, yes. You know, that security project I was thinking about doing or, you know, these new applications that, you know, the business asked for. So, you know, is that what you see? It's kind of, you know, there's some shifting, but a lot of it is just the things that might not have been priorities, but take over what I was doing that, you know, automation and the like, and help me actually do the job that I was hoping to do. Oh, absolutely. That is the place that we're trying to get to. Once we've automated the entire stack as we're building it, that frees us up for the monitoring pieces, the DR pieces, the business continuity pieces. There's tons of stuff that get reprioritized based upon not having enough time because we're not automated enough. We're always looking for bright new people. We're on a massive hiring spree right now, so we're not worried about losing our jobs over this. All right, so Chris, you said you guys are doing DevOps. Question, I'm hoping to talk to more people about this year. How often do you guys push code, you know, refresh cycles, you know, what does that look like in your environment today, and maybe, has that changed over the last couple of years? It's very nascent in our environment. There's a couple of different branches that do different life cycles. We have agile, we have waterfall. There's different timings for those different methodologies. And it's all in its initial stages right now. So it's stuff that we're all working on. Okay, but it sounds like you have some parts of the organization that are pushing on more, is it daily basis versus, you know, we're... No, no, not daily. Okay. I would say weekly, monthly. Yeah, but not the six to 12 months of certain things or patching. So I guess the same question for you is, what's your refresh cycle? What's your code? Do you, you know, do you patch on a quarterly basis? Is it a weekly basis? You know, how does it refresh cycles? We're in a monthly cycle right now for patching and pushing things through the system. You know, my role is probably not so much DevOps. I mean, that's maybe that's why we are leaders because what Chris does in his company is different than what I'm doing in my company. I'm probably more at the corporate level. It's probably more of the corporate apps where you don't really DevOps those. I mean, the words are coming into us and we're infrastructure at our company. So we're the ops side of the dev. And we're in that crossover transition stage where the devs are trying to figure out how to interact with us and vice versa. So the whole food chain isn't there yet, but we know it's coming and trying to figure out how to make that happen. Okay, great. So last question I have for both of you is, are there things you guys are looking for from the users or takeaways you would want them to have either? Not just from this event, but in general for the VTUG? We need to learn to get better at communicating together. What's working? What's not working? What do you want to see more of? What are you seeing too much of? All of that stuff we need to get feedback for. So hence the surveys, the new information on the website, we just need more feedback to how are we doing? Yeah, and what do people want to see? I mean, it's user group, so we need to get out into the field and ask you to use what you want and then drive that, drive what we get from them. Okay, well great. Chris and Sean, congratulations again for being officially co-leaders of the VTUG. Thanks so much for joining us and definitely recommend everybody, get involved in your user groups, give that feedback. Please. Not saying that everybody needs to step up and be the leader, but it's a community effort. Talk to us. Lots of good opportunities. All right, we'll be here with lots more coverage. Stay tuned, the Cube at VTUG 2016. Thanks for watching.