 From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of the VTUG Winter Warmer 2019. Just had Rob Nicovic from the New England Patriots on the program, and happy to bring on the program one of the co-leaders of this VTUG event. Chris Williams, whose day job is as a cloud architect with green pages, but his co-leader here at VTUG does some user groups and many other things. And actually, CUBE alum even, back four years ago, the first year that we did this, we had you on the program, but a few things have changed. You know, we had a little less hair, more gray hair, things like that. We were talking, you know, Rob was, you know, talking about how he's 35, and we were like, yeah, 35, I remember 35. Things like that. Just wait till you hit your 40s and stuff starts breaking. Oh, I just look forward to it. So, Chris, first of all, thank you. You know, we love coming to an event like this. I got to talk to a few users on air, and I talked to, you know, get a just great pulse of what's going on in the industry. Virtualization, cloud computing, and beyond. So, you know, we know these local events are done. You know, a lot of it is the passion of the people that do it, and therefore, we know a lot goes into it. I appreciate it, thanks for having me on. All right, so, bring people up to speed. You know, what's your life like today? What do you do for work? What do you do for, you know, the passion projects? So, the passion projects recently have been a lot of, we're doing a Python for DevOps series on VBrownbag for the AWS Portsmouth user group. We're also doing a machine learning and robotics autonomous car driving project using Python as well. And for VTUG, we're looking at a couple of different tracks. Also, with the autonomous driving and some more of the traditional VMWare to CAS, cloud hybrid training kind of things. Excellent, so in the near future, the robots will be replacing the users here, and we'll have them running around. I have my Skynet t-shirt on underneath here. Yes, Skynet. You know, if you tweet that out of anything about Skynet, there's bots that respond to you with like things from the Terminator movies. I built one of them. Did you? Well, thank you. They always make me laugh. And if there's not a place for Snark on Twitter, then, you know, all we have left is kind of horrible politics, so. That's true, that's true. Great, so, yeah, I mean, cloud, AI, robotics. You know, what's the pulse when you talk to users here? You know, this started out, you know, virtualization. There's lots of people that are rolling out my virtualization. I'm expanding what use cases I can use it on. I might be thinking about how cloud fits into that and looking at, you know, VMWare and Amazon especially or Microsoft, how all those fit together. You know, what are you hearing? What drives some of those passion projects other than, you know, you're interested in them? So, a lot of what my passion projects are doing, it's kind of a confluence of a couple of different events. I'm passionate about the things that I work on. And when I get into a room with customers or whatever like that, or with the end users, getting together and talking about, you know, what's the next step? So, we as users, as a user group and as a community, we're here to learn about not just what today is happening, what's happening today, but what's gonna keep us relevant in the future? What are the new things coming down the pipe? And a lot of that is bending towards the things that I'm interested in, fortuitously. Learning how to take my infrastructure knowledge and parlay that into a DevOps framework. Learning how to take Python and some of the stuff that I'm learning from the devs on the AWS side and teaching them the infrastructure stuff. So, it's a bi-directional learning thing where we all come together to that magical DevOps unicorn in the middle that doesn't really exist. But... And I tell you, we've had this conversation a few times here and many times over the last few years especially, is that there's lots of opportunities to learn. And, you know, is your job threatened? And the only reason your job should be threatened is if you think you can keep doing year after year what you were doing before, because chances are either you will be disrupted in the job or if not, the people you're working for might be disrupted because if they're not pushing you along those tracks and the tools and the communities to be able to learn stuff is I can learn stuff at a fraction of the cost in faster times, might not learn as much, but I'm saying I can pick up new skills. I could start getting into cloud. It's not a thousand dollars and six months to get the first piece of it. It might be 40 to 60 hours online. And, you know, cost you 30 to 100 bucks. Yeah, the lift and training is a lot easier because you're basically swiping a credit card. And with AWS, you have a free tier for 12 months that you can play with and just, you know, doodle around and figure things out. You don't have to buy a home lab. You don't have to buy NFR licenses or get NFR licenses from VMware. But the catch to that is you do have to do it. There's a... Remember Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Of course. Dad was doing the toothpaste tubes. He was the guy screwing the toothpaste tubes onto the machines. At the end of the story, he got automated out of a job because they had a machine screwing the toothpaste tubes on. And then at the end, he was the guy fixing the machine that was screwing the toothpaste tubes on. So in our world, that infrastructure guy who's been deploying manually virtual machines, there's a piece of code. There's an infrastructure as code that will do that for them now. They've got to know how to modify and refactor that piece of code and get good. And get good at that. Yeah, I've talked to a couple of people. We talk about there's big vendor shows. And then there's regional user groups and meetups and the like. Give us a little insight into, let's start with VTUG specifically and what you're doing up in the Portland area. We'd love to hear some of the dynamics now. It feels like there's just been a groundswell for many years now to drive those local and many times more specialized events as opposed to bigger, broader events. Yeah, it's interesting because we like the bigger, broader events because it gets everybody together to talk about things across a broad spectrum. So here we have the infrastructure guys and we have the DevOps guys and we have a couple of developers and stuff like that. And so getting that group think that mind share into one room together gets everybody's creative juices flowing. So people are starting to learn from each other. The devs are getting some ideas about how infrastructure works. The infrastructure guys are getting some ideas about how to automate a certain piece of their job to make that minimize, maximize a thousand times, go away. So I love the larger groups because of that. The smaller groups are more specialized, more niche. So like when you get into a smaller version then it's mostly infrastructure guys or mostly devs or some mixture thereof. So they both definitely have their place and that's why I love doing both of them. Yeah, and what can you share, kind of speeds and feeds of this show here? I know usually over a thousand people had a bunch of keynotes going on. We talked about the Patriots and quite a number of technology companies, people that are the kind of SIs or Vars in the mix. Yeah, so we had I think 35 sponsors. We had six different keynotes or six general sessions. We talked about everything from Azure to AWS to VMware. We covered the gamut of the things that the users are interested in. Don't undersell the general sessions there. There was one that was on like, blockchain and quantum computing I heard. There was an Amazon session that was just geeking out on the database stuff I think there, so I mean, it's not just marketing slide were up there. I saw a bunch of code in many of the sessions. This definitely is, I was talking with the Amazon, Randall earlier, here on the program and said that- The Amazon Randall. Yeah, Randall from Amazon here. He's a very large one. Good to the end of the day, I've done a few of these. But I remember like four years ago, the first like cloud 101 session here. And I was like, I probably could have given that session, but everybody here was like, oh my gosh. I just found out about electricity, that this is amazing. And today, most people understand a little bit more of we've gotten the 101, so I'm getting into more of the pieces of it. Yeah, it was really gratifying because the one that he gave was all of the services, all of the new services of which were there were like more than 100 in 50 minutes or less. And he talks really, really fast. And everybody was riveted. I mean, people were coming in even up into the last minute and they all got it. It wasn't like what am I gonna do with this? This is what I need to know and this is valuable information. Yeah, we were having a lunch conversation about like when you listen to a podcast, what speed do you listen on? So I tend to listen at about one and a half speed normally. Frapp was saying he listens at two X normally. Somebody like Randall, I think I would put the video up and you can actually go into YouTube and things like that and adjust the speed settings. I might put it down to 0.75 or something like that. Because absolutely, otherwise, you can listen to it at full speed and just like pause and rewind and things like that. But definitely as someone, I respect that I'm from New Jersey originally. I tend to talk a little faster on camera. I try to keep a steady pace so that people can keep up with my excitement. I speed up too. He actually does this every day. He flies to a new city, does it once a day. So he's gotten, this is like rapid fire now. All right, wanna give you the final word. VTUG, I think people don't know it, you go to VTUG.com. A big winter warmer here. There's the big summer one with the world famous lobster bake fest there. I've been to that one a few times. I know people that fly from other countries to come to that one. What else should we know about? So we're about to revamp the website. We've got some new interesting stuff coming up on there. Now that we also have our Slack channel, everybody communicates on the backend through that. We're gonna start having some user content for the website. People can start posting blog articles and things of that nature there. I'm gonna start doing like learn AWS on the VTUG blog so people can start ramping up on some of the basics and everything. And if that gains traction, then we'll maybe get into some more advanced topics from Azure and AWS and VMware, of course. VMware is always gonna be there. That's some of the stuff that Cody Diaklin is doing over at VMware, like the cast stuff where it's the shim layer and the management of all of the different clouds. That's some really, really cool stuff. So I'm excited to showcase some of that on the website. All right, well, Chris Williams really appreciate it coming. And as always, appreciate the partnership with the VTUG to have us here. Thanks for having me. All right, and thank you as always for watching. We always love to bring you the best community content. We go out to all the shows, help extract the signal for the noise. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE.