 from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, presented by SiliconANGLE. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, the 12th year of this user group. Fifth year we've had theCUBE here. Have and have on the program a first time guest, Kyle Ruddy, who's a senior technical marketing engineer with VMware. He knows a thing or two about virtualization. Maybe a couple things. Thanks for joining us. Oh, thank you for having me, I'm happy to be here. All right, so Kyle, I know you were sitting at home in Florida and saying, you know what I'd like to do is come up to, you know, in the 20s, kind of feels like single digits. You know, why'd you leave the warmth of the South? You know, come up here to the frigid New England. Yeah, well, you know, it was a great opportunity. I've never been to one of the VTUGs before, so they gave me a chance to talk about something that I'm extremely passionate about, which is API usage. And so once I got the invite, no brainer, you know, made the trip. Awesome, so I definitely, Jonathan Frappier, who we asked to be on the program, but he said, Kyle's going to be way better. And you know, speak better, you got the better beard, you know, I think we're just going to give Frapp a bunch of, you know, grief since he didn't agree to come on. Give us first a little bit about your background, how long you've been in VMware, what kind of roles have you had there? Yeah, absolutely. So I've probably been in IT for over 15 years, a long time customer. So did that for about 10 to 12 years of that IT span, doing everything from help desk, working my way up to being on the engineering side, really fell in love with automation during that time period, and then made the jump to the vendor side. And I've been at VMware for about two years now, where I focus on creating content and being at events like these to talk about our automation strategy for vSphere. Before you joined VMware, were you a vExpert? Have you presented vMugs? Yes, yes, so I was, I've been a vExpert, I think I'm going on seven years now. I helped run the Indianapolis vMug for five to six years, and I've presented vMugs all over the country. Yeah, one of the things we always emphasize, especially at groups like this, is get involved, participate. It can do great things for your career. Yes, absolutely. I certainly wouldn't be here without that kind of input and guidance. Yeah, Indie vMug's a great one. We're a large one here, even though I hear this one here has tended to be a little bit bigger, but good rivalry going on there. But I want to talk about the keynote you talked about. Automation, APIs, it's not kind of the virtualization 101, so what excites you so much about it? And let's get in a little bit, talk about what you discussed there. Yeah, absolutely. We were talking about using Ansible with the vSphere 65 RESTful APIs. That's something that's new, brand new to vSphere 6.5, and really just being able to, when those were released, allow our users and our customers to make use of those APIs in however way that they wanted to. If you look back at some of our prior APIs and our SDKs, you were a little more constrained. They were soap-based, so there was a lot of overhead that came with those. There was a large learning curve that also came along with those. So by switching to REST, it's a whole lot more user-friendly. You can use it with tools like Ansible, which that was just something that John knew quite well, and I thought that was a perfect opportunity for me to finally do a presentation with John. And it went quite well. I think the audience learned quite a bit, and we even kind of relayed to the audience that this isn't something that's just for vSphere. Ansible is something that you can use with anything. Yeah, maybe for somebody out there watching this, how do they get started? What's kind of some of the learning curve that they need to do? What skill cells are they going to build on versus what they need to learn for new? Sure. So a lot of the ways to really get started with these things, I've created a ton of blog posts that are out there on the VMware Code blog. The first one is just getting started with the RESTful API as we've provided. There's a program that's called Postman. We give a couple of collections that you can automatically import and start using that. Ansible has some really good documentation on getting started with Ansible and whichever environment you're choosing to work or use it with. So they've got a getting started with vSphere, they've got a getting started with different operating systems as well. And those are really good tools to get started and get that integrated into your normal working environment. And obviously we're building on automation here. We're building on, at least when I was an admin, I got involved in automation because it was a way for me to automate and get rid of those tasks, those menial tasks that I didn't really enjoy doing. So I could automate that, push that off and get back to something that I cared about that I enjoyed. Yeah, great point there. Because yeah, some people, they're a little bit nervous, oh wait, are these tools going to take away my job? And if I repeat what you were just saying, no, no, there's the stuff that you don't really love doing and that you probably have to do a bunch. Those are the things that are probably, maybe the easiest to be able to move to the automation. How much do people look at this and be like, wait, no, once I start automating it, then I kind of need to care and feed and maintain that versus just buying something off the shelf or using some service that I can do. And any feedback on that? Well, it's more of a, it's a passion thing. So if it's something that you're really getting grained in, you really enjoy, then you're going to want to care and feed that because it's going to grow. It's going to expand into other areas of your environment. It's going to expand into other technologies that are within your environment. So of course you can buy something, you could get somebody from their professional services organization involved. So you don't have to do those, the menial tasks of updating that, say if you go from one version to a next version, you know, you don't have to deal with that. But if you're passionate about it, you enjoy doing that and that's where I was. Yeah, the other thing I picked up on is, you said some of these things are new only in 6.5 and one of the challenges we always had out there is, oh wait, I need to upgrade, you know, when can I do it? You know, what challenges am I going to have? What's the upgrade experience like now and you know, anything else that you'd want to point out that said, hey, you know, it's time to plan for that upgrade and you know, here's some of the things that are going to help you. Yeah, so we actually have an end of availability and end of support coming up for vSphere 5.5, that's going to be coming up in here later this year in September, October timeframe. So you know, you're not going to be able to open up a support request for that. So this is a perfect time to start planning that upgrade to get up to at least 6.0, if not 6.5 and the other thing to keep in mind is that we've announced deprecation for the Windows version of vSphere. So, you know, moving forward past our next numbered release, that's going to be all vCenter server appliance from that point forward. Now we also have a really great tool that's called the vCSA migration tool that you can use to help you migrate from Windows to the appliance. Super simple, very straightforward, gives you a migration assistant to even point out some of those places where you might miss, you know, if you did it on your own. So that's a really great tool and really helps to, you know, remove that pain out of that process. Yeah, it's good. You got a mix of a little bit of the stick, you know, you got to get off. I know a lot of people still running 5.5 out there. Oh yes. As well as there's the carrot out there, all the good stuff that's going to get you going. All right, hey, Kyle, last thing I want to ask is, you know, 2018. Boy, there's a lot of change going on the industry. One, how do you keep up with everything? And two, what's exciting you about what's happening in the industry right now? So as far as what excites me right now, Python. That's been something that's been coming up a lot more with the folks that I'm talking to. So even today, just at lunch, I was talking to somebody and they were bringing up Python and I'm like, wow, that's, you know, this is something that keeps coming up more and more often. So I'm, you know, using a lot more of my time, even my personal time, to start looking at that. And so when you start hearing the passion of people who are using some of these new technologies, that's when I start getting interested, because I'm like, hey, if you're that interested and you're that passionate about it, I should be too. And so that's kind of what drives me to keep learning and to keep up with, you know, all the latest and greatest things that are out there. Plus when you have events like this, you can go talk to some of the sponsors. You can talk and see what they're doing, what, you know, how to make use of their product and some of their automation frameworks and with what programming language is. And that's kind of comes back to Python on that one because a lot more companies are releasing their automation tools for use with Python. Yeah, and you answered the second part of my question, probably that, even think about it. Passion, excitement, talking to your peers, coming to events like this. Yes. All right, Kyle, Ruddy, really appreciate you joining us here. We'll be back with more coverage here from the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE.