 From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of VTUG Winter Warmer 2019 here at Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots. Happy to welcome to the program a community member, someone I've known for many years at this point, Jonathan Frappier, who's with V Brown Bag. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right, so I watched this event, and when it started, it was originally the V-Mug for New England, and then it became VTUG, and some of the politics stuff, which we don't need to go into, but part of it was virtualization and cloud, and what's the interaction there, and what will users have to do different, and part of that is jobs. And one of the reasons I really wanted to bring you on is you started out heavy in that virtualization space, and you've been going through those machinations. So maybe just give our audience a little bit about your background, some of the things, skill sets. You've got lots of acronyms on your resume as it is for certification you've done, so let's start there. Sure, so my background, I started this help desk. I did Windows 2000 Active Directory Administration and Exchange Administration all onsite, and moved into more server administration, and when VMware started to become a thing, I was like, wow, this is a game changer, and I need to sort of shift my skill set. I understand the applications I'm using because I've been supporting them, but virtualization's going to change that, so started to shift there, and saw a similar thing with public cloud and automation as that same sort of next step beyond infrastructure management. All right, and you've had a bunch of certification. Can you reel off a few, where are you today? What have you added, give us a little bit of a timeline? My first certification was A+, which CompTIA seemingly has come around and joined the ranks of posting to LinkedIn for everybody. So A+, was my first one, MCP, MCSC, on Windows 2000, took a little bit of a break, went back into it, VCP five era, so four or five years ago, some other VMware certs, NSX, Cloud, CMA, and most recently, the Solutions Architect Associate from AWS. Okay, great, and when you look at kind of virtualization in cloud, it's not like you first switched one day and said, okay, I no longer need the VMware stuff, I'm going to do the cloud. Tell us a little bit about what led you to start doing the cloud, and how your roles that you've had, and the skill sets that you want to have for your career, how you look at those. So for me, it is about being able to support what my business is doing, and sometimes the right answer is going to be VMware, sometimes it's going to be physical, sometimes it's going to be containers or public cloud, or new fancy buzzwords like serverless, and I've always in my career tried to support what application we're delivering to get the business the information they need, so for me to do that properly, I need to be well versed across all of that infrastructure, so that when it's time to deliver something in public cloud, or time to deliver something in a container, I'm ready to go and do that. Yeah, what's the push and pull for some of the training bin? Is this something that you've seen, you said like VMware, you saw it like, oh my gosh, I need to hop on that? I remember back to those early days, I remember engineers I worked with that were just like, this thing is amazing, that was like preview motion even. But just what that impact we've seen over the last 10 to 15 years of that growth, has there been times where the business has come and said, hey, can you go learn this to certification, or has it been you driving most of it yourself? It's been both. There are times when the business has come and said, hey, we would really like to take advantage of virtualization or public cloud, and from a technology perspective, there may have been other factors that would impact the ability to do that, so that's why for me I try to sort of stay ahead of it when virtualization was taking off and everything I had was on physical servers, I knew I needed to have the VMware piece in my pocket so that when the business was ready and when other things like compliance were ready for it, we could move forward and sort of advance that, same thing with public cloud, now that that's more prevalent and sort of accepted in the industry, a lot more companies are moving in that direction. Yeah, and what tips would you give your peer if they're a virtualization person? How are the waters in the cloud world? Is there a lot of similarities? Do I have to go relearn and oh my gosh, I need to go learn coding for two years before I understand how to do any of this stuff? I think it's helpful to learn some level of coding, but do it in an environment that you're comfortable in today, so if you're a VMware admin today, there's Power CLI and vRealize Orchestrator, and even if you're on VMware's cloud platform, there's just some basic PowerShell and bash scripting you can do in vCloud automation. Get comfortable with the environment you know, and then as that comfort grows, when you move, oh look, there's PowerShell commandlets for AWS, if that's the route you go, so I'll already understand the format and how I glue those things together, so you can get comfortable in the environment you're in today and sort of get ready for whatever that next step is. Yeah, I've always found, I find it interesting to look at these ecosystems and see where the overlaps and where do the things come together. You know, I actually worked with Linux for about 20 years, so back when I worked at EMC, the storage company, and I supported the Linux group and Linux was kind of this side thing and then you kind of saw that grow over time and Linux and virtualization were kind of parallel but didn't overlap as much and then when we get to the cloud, it feels like everybody ended up in that space and there were certain skill sets that Linux people had that made it easy to do cloud and certain things that the virtualization people had that made it easy to do there, but we're kind of all swimming in the same pools, we see that now in the Kubernetes space now. I see people I know from all of those communities and it's kind of interesting. I'm curious if you have anything you've seen in kind of the different domains and overlapping careers. Yeah, for me, I think what's helped is focusing on how the applications the business uses consumed, what some of the trends are around how, you know, whether finance or marketing teams are interacting with those applications. If I know how the application works and what I need to do to support it, the concepts aren't going to be vastly different. If I know how exchange is installed or SQL servers installed or some custom application is installed, I can do that across a VMware environment, an AWS environment and should it support it into Docker by leveraging Kubernetes. All right, so you've mentioned a bunch of time, the application, how has it changed your relationship with kind of the application owners as you go from physical to virtual to cloud? I don't think it should change much. The probably the biggest shift that you have is that at some point now things are out of your control. So when I've got a server sitting in my data center that I can walk down the hallway to, if something's not working, I have access to it. If there's an application down in the public cloud or there's an AWS outage or any public cloud provider outage, I have to wait. And that's sort of I think the thing that I've seen business struggle with the most is like, well, it's down, go fix it. It's like, I can't get to it right now. And I'm probably not driving to Virginia or Oregon to go reboot that server for Amazon or whoever it is. Absolutely, big shift we've seen, right, is a lot of what I as ITM managing is now things that aren't in my environment. There was my data centers, my might have had hosted data centers where I'd call somebody up and tell the Rackspace person to reboot the server. Or it's right, it's in the public cloud, in which case it's like, okay, what tools? What can I troubleshoot myself? Or is there some outage that I'm not aware of and is affecting me? It's a good shift to have for a infrastructure person because we're really getting to the point now, I think the scales have tipped to focusing more on delivering business value versus delivering infrastructure. The CFO doesn't necessarily think or care that spinning up a new VM faster is cool. They care about getting their application to their team so that they can do their work. So I think going to public cloud or going to other platforms where that's removed, it sort of forces you to move to supporting those business applications. So I'm curious, every time we have one of these generational shifts, I'm just like, oh my gosh, I'm going to be out of a job. I'm a server admin, virtualization's going to get rid of me. I'm a virtualization admin, cloud's going to get rid of me. This whole server listing will probably just get rid of all the infrastructure people. I read an article yesterday, it was called The Creeping IT Apocalypse is what they called it. But what are you seeing? Is there general fear in your peers or do you just dive in and understand it and learn it and if you can stay up with or a little bit ahead of the curve, you're going to keep employed? I would say that there's a mix. There's some people, even just a few months ago, some folks I talked to and they were just sort of breaking into automation and like how they can automate deploying their application because in their legitimate concern was I won't have a job anymore. And sort of the way I looked at that was my job's going to change. I don't spend my entire day administering Windows 2000 Active Directory boxes anymore. So I need, yes, I need to shift that and start thinking about what's next. So if I can automate the routine task, deploying an application, patching an application, bringing things up and down when there's some sort of failure, then I'm going to naturally grow my career in that way by getting rid of the boring stuff. Yeah, and I've been hearing this argument against automation for decades now. And the question I always put to people is like, look, if I could give you an extra hour a day or an extra day a week, do you have other projects that you could be doing or things that the business is asking for that would be better? And I've yet to find somebody that didn't say, yeah, of course. And one of the things that you're doing that, it would be nice to get rid of. Yeah, there's people is like, I love the serenity of racking and stacking and cabling stuff. And nothing gets people more excited than beautiful cables in a rack. Yesterday, I saw people like going off about, here's this data center with these beautiful, rack with the cable ties and everything. But I'm like, really? There's more value you can add out there. So automate yourself into your next job is sort of the way I think, like to think about it versus automating yourself. All right, so let's just look forward a little bit. There's all these waves. Cloud's been a decade. Data, I was talking to Keith Townsend this morning on theCUBE and we said, when he talks to users, it's their data that's super important. Applications absolutely is what drives my infrastructure, but it's the data that's the super important piece. Whether it be your AI or your various buzzword of the day, IOT, data is in the center. So what are you looking forward to? Is there new certs or new training that are exciting you or areas that you think your peers should be poking out to help try to stay ahead of the curve? Yeah, and back to my earlier point about leveraging the thing you know today and how to sort of grow your career and that next skill set is how I can look at data and make or understand what's going on around that. So maybe today that's taking some stats from an ESXi host and an application and correlating that data together and help you understand what that means for the application before our user calls in and that's gonna help you grow into sort of this new realm of like machine learning and big data and analytics, which I think is really the next thing that we're gonna need to start doing as more and more of that infrastructure shifted away into serverless platforms and things that we're not worried about. How can I understand? How can I take that data, transform it, use it, correlate it together to help make decisions? All right, and final thing, give us an update on our friends at VBrown Bag. So we talk, we always say, when we go to VMworld, it's like we're there trying to help kind of balance between the business and the technology. You want to go a little deeper and really geek out and understand some of these things. That's where the VBrown Bag, people are gonna be able to dig in with the community and the ecosystem. There was the V in VBrown Bag for virtualization, but VBrown Bag is doing much more than just traditional virtualization today. What's on the docket? So upcoming this year, we're gonna have some episodes around Python, so helping admins get to know Python, start to get comfortable with it, which would be a great language to, A, automate things that maybe you're doing today in your application, but also to be able to take data in and use Python to manage that data, extract value out of that data so that you can help make decisions. So look for the throughout this year and learn a new thing. All right, Jonathan Trapp here. Pleasure to talk with you on camera after, talking to you off camera for many years. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right, and we appreciate you joining us at this virtualization and cloud user event, the VTUG Winter Warmer 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks for watching theCUBE.