 San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2015. Brought to you by VMworld and its ecosystem sponsors. Now your host, Stu Miniman and Brian Graceley. Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon. My co-host for this segment and also part of the panel is Brian Graceley. This is the director set in Moscone North. Mixing it up a little bit. We're doing a bunch of panels here on Tuesday and Wednesday and our guests for the first panel we're doing can actually teach us a bunch about doing panels. So we've got Alastair Kroll and Cody Bunch representing the V Brown Bag Group, which is regulars for anybody that have attended VMware shows, Vmugs, lots of industry events. Alastair and Cody, thank you for joining us, guys. Absolutely, a pleasure. Thanks for inviting us on. All right, so we've always, I've known you guys for a bunch of years and we've talked, we have kind of parallel missions in the industry. We're both involved in kind of educating, explaining, working, you know, our audiences are a little bit different. You know, we've done a couple of shows and genes but you guys tend to get a little bit deeper into the technology than we have time and even when we do kind of our half hour 45 minute segments, even though Pat Gelsinger's coming on and he tends to go pretty hard and deep into some of the technologies. But maybe guys, if we could start out just tell us a little bit about, you know, VBrown Bag and, you know, your experiences there. You want to cover? Oh, so you're looking at me now. Oh, I can cover this one. So VBrown Bag is fundamentally the idea is that the community of people who use the VMware products are the best people to teach each other about how the products work rather than getting all of the marketing story of how it's supposed to work. We're about sharing and spreading the story of how it actually works. Fundamentally, we start with a video podcast, a weekly video podcast that is helping one another to study for certification and initially just certification around VMware products. But as we started to cover all of VMware certifications, we then realized that our audience, our community, needed to know more than just VMware. And so we started covering Cisco and storage and general automation using non VMware tools and trying to help our engineers who are working with the VMware products become more rounded engineers and giving them that content that they consume in their own time and for free. And yet is all generated by other members of the community. And it's kind of reflect something that I as a trainer learned on the first couple of weeks when I started teaching was another trainer told me, when you're out there in front of the classroom, the knowledge is already in the classroom. You don't have to necessarily be the source of that knowledge. And I found through the VBrown Bag, the knowledge is always out there in your audience. It's just a matter of teasing it out of them. Yeah, it's interesting. In fact, I spent years working in the vendor community, so I've been involved in white papers and white boards and supported the educational groups many times and started out blogging myself and participate in it. Cody, maybe you're heavily involved in the open source community. Who documents it? You're more than involved, so you're making it happen. So what's your viewpoint on this is how is education changing? How does the community participation, but both people creating it and educating, been changing the last few years? That makes sense? It's a very, very long question. Yeah. Essentially, how have things grown up over the last couple of years or so? I mean, how do you view kind of in the open source era education, I guess? I really don't have an answer to that. One of the things I say is that the whole basis of the open source is that everybody who uses and contributes to that is part of a community. So the idea of community-generated knowledge is inherent in open source, but it's totally foreign to commercial software. I think that's one of the things we're seeing is that because more commercial organizations are using more open source and relying on it, that they're having to come to terms with the fact that the best content is actually generated not by the person who is trying to sell you something, but by the people who have built it. And for open source, it's the developers, the teams that are building that things like the cookbook, which is what you're alluding to, that Cody's been involved in book sprints on cookbooks. That content doesn't come from some vendor somewhere. It's a group of enthusiastic people using the software that create the best content. Yeah, I think he framed the question up better than I did. So maybe you want to comment on that, Cody? So that isn't entirely different, which is it is a much more community-driven effort all around software development, education, documentation, all of it is very grassroots. You will have your corporate sponsors, your red hats and your rack spaces that show up and dump a ton of money into it and a ton of effort into getting things developed, but it's all with the mind of continuing for the better good of the software project as a whole. Yeah, I mean, one of the challenges of software always is how much time gets spent in development and then is documentation and afterthought. Is education something we do or do you just throw it over the wall and say, hey, good luck? And so in the open-source space there is nowhere over the wall to throw it. The guys implementing this are also the ones writing the code a lot of times. Maybe not directly, but very closely related to. Yeah, so years ago, a lot of us have been coming to VMworld for a long time. It used to very much be kind of VMware's message. At one point you guys would host the VBrown Bag events, but they had to be sort of off-premise, if you will, or they had to be outside of the four walls. You're now downstairs, you're in the hang space. You're sort of like an integrated part of the VMware fabric. How has sort of the community-driven efforts that you guys are doing, how's that changed? What's the relationship with VMware changed? How much do they, Lee Way, do they give you to help shape the community, teach the community all those things? Well, this is our fourth year actually being in the hang space with the support of the VMware communities team. And the communities team, I think, have been learning over that time how to work with us, how to enable us and shield us from the people who would like to control, because always there's marketing people who want to control a message, and we simply won't let the message be that controlled. So over the years, we've seen less and less of the people outside of the communities team having any kind of influence back towards us. It still happens a little. Every year we have some little bites that occurs, but they've gotten very good at just letting us run everything. And I think last year was the first year where they just handed control of the stage and said, you run the schedule. We'll let you know if we need to book something in, but we're booking it in with you rather than us booking in with them. We just have our stage and we run it. It's now all presented by V Brownbag and we're very pleased to see that we are the lead for that space and that VMware have embraced having the community doing that. I think one of the changes I've seen over the last two years with VMware is the change to embracing more open source. I really didn't expect what we saw last year when they started open source some of their products and some idea that that is a good thing for them to do. It's a complete turnaround from what we saw in the past. Yeah, so one of the things, we've talked a little bit is, building a schedule for something like this, boy, it's a lot of work. And boy, you're jugging a lot of pressures is, if you've got sponsors, how much are they involved? The community, which topics are you gonna cover? Which are the ones that everybody wants to go into and which are the ones that are important that we cover? So maybe give us a little bit of insight as to how you built the schedule this week. What are the things that you hear from the community that's exciting and anything that surprised you that you might be willing to share. That's a largely a cat herding exercise right there. Yeah, that's why we wear long sleeves here so you can't see all the scratch marks that we've gone through. Generally about a week, week and a half after the session acceptance announcements have gone out, we go ahead and open up a Google form that says, you know, we are running the tech talks again if you're gonna be at VMworld and would like to present your thing and can consolidate your message down into a good 10, 12 minute window, we can get you taken care of. And then from there, you know, 100, 200, 300 responses ago? Well for VMworld, we typically see around 60 sessions proposed and we have space for somewhere around 40 in our schedule. We see you guys at OpenStack Summit. OpenStack Summit is amazing for us because the organisers firstly invited us to come in rather than saw that something was going to happen and accommodate it. They invited us and when that email goes out to their session saying thank you for your proposal but we can't accept it, our sign up URL that Cody mentioned is actually in that email. And so we get 100 and 110, I'm expecting 120 for Tokyo proposed, far more sessions than we can fit for OpenStack Summit. So it then becomes that cat herding of who's gonna turn up, who's proposed lots of sessions and I can only give each speaker one because we try to be very inclusive. What's the, you guys cover a ton of topics. I mean, there's a ton of VMworld topics. You're covering OpenStack. I mean, you've done couch to OpenStack so beginners to advance stuff. You've done a lot of automation. What are you hearing from people? Like what's the big things that people want you to do more of or what are you seeing more people show up to listen to and learn maybe over the last year, year and a half. Certification tracks are always really big. So anytime VMware or Cisco announces a new certification or an update to, there's a whole lot of demand around that. We generally try to stay out in front. Normally somebody with the on the brown bag team is in on one of their betas and we can within reason start preparing a lineup of speakers to get that going. Certification tracks are always big. There's been some mumblings around Docker networking, containerization, microservices, really figuring out what that means. And we recently kicked off a devop series that was fairly well attended as well, so. Yeah, so you guys are staying, you're staying on it and then people kind of gravitate towards it as that makes sense to them or good for their job. We try to be out in front of where our audience needs to be once we have that content together. So it may take us two or three months to cover a particular subject area because we're doing one hour at a time every week. And so we want to have that content altogether and cohesive when somebody comes in six months later and says well now I heard that this was going to be important now it really is so I need that content this week. Yeah, so one of the things I think is kind of interesting but Brian and I have talked many times about it is just the career development type aspects and you guys help foster the community and get people that want to learn about new technologies and help others to do that. Can maybe talk a little bit about that? Sure, one of the things I see is particularly the people who are contributing to it. So all of the content that we get is from grassroots people doing contribution. That can be extremely good for careers. We often lose contributors because they're no longer working for some small company somewhere. They started showing their face out there, they're showing that they can communicate and they get snapped up by vendors and then it's much harder for them to be coming out and doing the community stuff. So we have this constant cycle of people moving upwards assisted by VBrownbag but by their own presence on it. But in terms of career development, if you're standing still in our industry then you're going backwards at a very fast pace and so we do try to be that looking forwards and we take a lot of guidance from other forward looking people in our industry. People like Scott Low, you always look at where he's showing some interest because as an engineer you want to be in that space at least no more than 12 months from now because it's going to be important. How about you, Cardi, how did you see it? That's actually a very good piece and then we've very recently been trying to branch out into the non-technical career development path as well. So as some of these people that have gotten snatched up by vendors they find themselves extracted from a hey I was the engineer, I reset passwords and built VMs and so forth and in a oh my god I need to propose a project or product or whatever and I'm pitching to a CXO and they speak an entirely different language. So we're trying to help folks with that level of the transition as well. We've got some great content coming up toward the end of this year, beginning of 2016. All right, so I'm curious, all the big vendors have big education arms and some of the things you're talking about, certifications in not just the traditional kind of CCIE, VMware certifies, but cloud architect certifications, DevOps, I don't know if we've got certification classes yet, but do you guys have interactions with some of the other kind of ed services groups out there or how's that interaction go? On and off, our core over the past bunch of years has been VMware technologies. Our core audience comes to us for information around VMware technologies. 2013, we started branching out into the OpenStack world. Building a brand takes time to get a nurse to get awareness, get folks really on board with what you're trying to do. We've had to adapt some for the OpenStack folks and they've accepted us into their world. And we're trying to do that in a couple of other spaces, but still early days. Yeah, and the challenge is that a lot of the commercial software organizations see education as a profit center and that we're a competitor to the profit center. So education has an edgy relationship with us. Certification absolutely loves us because we help to convert the people who have been to the paid training into the people who hold the certification. And that transition, that conversion is for the certification teams, one of the big challenges. Lots of people are seeing the course, but not many go on and do the cert and we help bridge that gap for them. Yeah, it reminds me of the conversation we have about software these days, is there's a lot of competition with free. The developers are going to find that things are available. How do you keep finding? I mean, you talked about that funnel of people and that dynamic of, well, somebody needs to pay for some of it, but you're giving away, you know? It's fine because all of our content is free to consume. There's nothing that you have to pay to consume. Everything we do is funded by our awesome sponsors and we find that it is a cat herding thing around getting the content in. That's one of the pieces. And we have an expert cat herder in Jonathan Frappier who makes sure that the U.S. catalog, and so as Cody says, we've got catalog out to next year and that's entirely down to Jonathan who does an awesome job. But then the other side is I'm the cat herder for the sponsors. And what I have found is that there are sponsors who understand community contribution who will just say you guys are awesome and we'd like to bask in the reflected, the glory. And then there are people who don't quite get it so much and they'll sponsor just the once with you. So obviously anybody can watch the videos, jump on the weekly call that gets recorded as a podcast. Now what are some of the other ways people can get involved whether they're kind of cool side projects or just making contributions? What's, a lot of times people don't know what's the first step they should do or what's a good second step? Also the first step for everyone past me and the Brown Bag crew has just been reach out to me. And so like we weren't on iTunes, Nick Marshall reached out and said, hey, you should be on iTunes and suddenly he's now the iTunes Marshaler, right? Al reached out and wanted to get involved in something and now Al is... That's not quite accurate. Somebody else reached out and volunteered me. Well, yes. So raise your hand but not that high sometimes. And so like if you want to get involved in contributing, presenting, shoot a DM to, or a tweet to Brown Bag or just reach out to us while we're on the show floor here. We had that yesterday where she had a chat who's been a long time consumer of our content, follows us onto it, he came up and said, hey, I'd like to contribute. He's now, yesterday during the day was scheduled up to take part in and co-host a couple of shows and then scheduled in to be an actual live host. So we're absolutely, we love to have new people coming in. The fundamental thing is being the presenters who come and generate the content and then coming to the inside to being the crew who make it actually happen. But we know that people coming in as the crew will pass out because they move on to other roles. We've had people who are now part of our family but are no longer sitting down to dinner with us when we're making these videos. They're still, we still see them regularly but they're not actively making stuff with us. All right, so guys, we're about halfway into, VMworld 2015. I want to get your initial impressions. Anything different from a technology standpoint, community standpoint, buzz, feel of the show that that's worth noting. The dancing app buttons were a little exciting. That was the best thing you've seen so far? I missed the morning keynotes this morning. I'm dealing with travel flu, so. Keep looking that way please. You've been busy working, Cody, is what you're saying. Busy working. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I saw a little more of the same message that we had last year. So it seems to be a little more of the messages being delivered on and historically that's what VMworld does. They message what they're going to do along before they're actually doing it. This morning's keynote, I'm an EUC person so this morning's keynote was interesting. I hope they're now delivering what they said they were delivering last year because I've done real implementations of some of the products and the seamless integration had significant seams when I was doing this six months ago. But that was because this is a whole heap of acquisitions that have to be glued together and it takes time to take away those seams and get the meshing. I'm hoping that that's what's actually turning out. Okay, so yesterday's keynote, if you didn't catch it, there's a lot of discussion of that cloud thing. Cloud. Cloud, cloud, cloud. If you found Bragg, virtualization, you're doing OpenStack, what about the public cloud? So we did a month, month and a half long series on Google Cloud. We've got AWS pinned up or lined up for the end of the year. We've got some Microsoft content also in the pipeline. So we are expanding out into various flavors of cloud. Yeah, and depending upon what you mean by the cloud, you have a very different constituent audience. A little while ago, I did my due diligence and went on some of the AWS training and it was just a completely different story and space to all of the things that I as a VMware trainer had been teaching for eight years beforehand. It was clearly written for a different audience, not an infrastructure audience. And that's one of the challenges VMware has if they want to actually play in that cloud space, they need to be talking to a whole other group of people. Yeah, it is. We've done some research on this. The skill set is very different. I mean, once it's up and running, it's not like we can't cross train them or understand it. But yeah, in the discussion we've been having in hybrid cloud is there's a lot of people that were doing AWS and now want to pull it back on site and they don't want to be configuring Luns or setting up VLANs. I mean, they don't want to do any of that. So there is this shift that's happening and a lot of retraining. I think there's a lot of this in what Brian does for the cloudcast, but there's a whole heap of other ways of thinking about things and working with things that is absolutely essential if you're going to be in the DevOps space. But it's not where the conventional VMware administrator architect thinks about it. No, it's a different language. It's a different skill set but it's just, it ends up being different priorities. They got different goals and but yeah, it takes, you're right, it's not the conversation about just change your skills. I don't know is always necessarily relevant. You can grow them, you can improve them, but the really different disciplines, it's hard to just kind of flip flop them. It's the kind of Venn diagrams of skill sets and I was thinking about it yesterday that it's not the usual two dimensional Venn diagram. You're getting to a sort of 16 dimensional Venn diagram of I'm a little bit of a developer but I do this configuration management piece but I understand VLANs but not Luns. Those kinds of challenges of meshing together the different skill sets. I don't think we'll see this DevOps takes over all of operations that I think we were hearing last year was going to happen. I think we're a little more mature and we realize that it's actually an interaction between the two sets of teams rather than a replacement. So, you guys serve the community, you take from the community. What are personally, what are you guys passionate about? Like what are you excited about? Whether it's, you know, came out of this week or something else you're working on. What are you guys kind of personally passionate about right now, technology-wise? I think to a certain extent it's passed that the early in your career, I feel like you, the technology change is new and it's exciting for its own sake and that as you see the cycles of change and 10 years later the same words about we're getting 80% keeping the lights on, 20% to actually innovate and that's apparently something new even the way I heard it 10 years ago. It hasn't changed in the last 10 years, I mean Alistair, that's one of the problems, right? I mean, you know, talked about all this great utilization, we got better with the solutions that we had for this 10 years ago, didn't do anything. I wonder if I'm cynical about the solutions we have now. So, for me, the thing that excites me, the thing that makes me absolutely love spending a week here at VMworld and going to most of the other conferences is actually the people that I come and hang out with. So, hanging out with Stu and Cody and hang out with Brian for nearly enough years. But talking to really interesting people who have good opinions about what's happening in the industry, that's actually the highlight for me of coming here, that the learning about an individual piece of tech, that doesn't happen here. I do that back in my lab, but it's being exposed to other people's thinking that is really important to coming to the in-person events. All right, yeah, just the last question I have for you guys is the virtualization community, what I love about it over the last decade is there were those people that contributed, those people that were exciting to kind of ride this wave and push this change. And my fear is that as some of these new changes are coming, the ones that said, well, I built this and therefore I want to hold onto it. And are they ready to understand that some things are changing? And I'm not saying virtualization's going away or anything's happening fast, but how many of them are going to be ready for that next change? And it's a challenge because we know the only thing that's constant in this industry is it keeps changing faster. Tell me if you keep the feelers out there, if you're skimming Twitter and so on, you can spot the folks that they rode the first wave, they got up onto the crest, they saw where the next wave was going to be, and they're already attempting to start riding that next wave. So there's a lot of folks that are already making that transition through. But there will be people who are going to be the mainframe engineers of our generation who say it's a VM and VMs do everything and this modern application stuff is just rubbish. It's a poor way of doing things. Well, you're always going to have the naysayers and the folks trying to drive you. I'm going to the grumpy old man beard. Yes, I've had the grumpy old man beard for ages now. And if they try to hang on too much, like Blockbuster tried to hang on too much, things, you will be out-innovated, you'll be out-performed or out-maneuvered. It's an interesting little chess game. And the ongoing phrase of if you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less. Yep, absolutely. Technology venues, if you're not setting the table, you might be on the menu. So, all right, well, Alastair and Cody, thank you so much for joining me. People want to find out more, participate, everything. Where should they go? Professionalvmware.com or vbrownbag.com. All right, well, gentlemen, thanks so much. Brian, thanks for joining me for this segment. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2015. Thanks for watching.