VMUG - a platform for us to learn from each other.

This week I do not have any technical information to share because I have to prepare for the Southern California VMUG Conference that was held on Sept 24, 2014.

I think VMUG is a good platform for us to learn from each other.  I always like to say “I know some and you know some, let’s share what we have”.

 

Southern California VMUG Conference is a one-day event and we are fortunate to have Scott Lowe to be the Keynote speaker.   

Scott is a well-known author, speaker, and blogger.  His blog is here which has tons of useful information.  Scott said that he did not blog as much as before because of his busy schedule at VMware.  Scott is a very dynamic speaker.  A seasoned IT guy told me even if Scott talks about XML(a very boring subject), he will still listen with eagerness.

Scott has a slide to introduce himself.  This slide has his name, him being a VCDX, his twitter handle, blog URL and interestingly also include his life guiding principle – Col 3:17 NIV. 

The title of Scott’s keynote is “Closing the Cloud Skills Gap”.   The basic idea is that we need to venture out to sharpen skill to stay relevant.  According to IDC there will be 7 million cloud related jobs worldwide in 2015.

Scott asked what kind of skills that we are working on.  There were many answers from the audience.  Some say Docker, some say OpenStack and so on.  All the answers are technical skills.  Scott show us this slice:

This got us all by surprise.  I have never thought of this before.

The top 5 job skills that are needed in a cloud computing environment are:

1. Risk Management
2. IT service management
3.  Project/program management
4.  Business-IT alignment
5. Technical skills in cloud implementation

As you can see from the list technical skill that we got the answer from the audience is only the 5^th in the order.  Business leaders will not care if OpenStack or CloudStack is used.  As long as the ROI (Return On Investment) is met or business goal is met the tool used is not important to the business leader.

The cloud industry needs someone to bridge the gap between the technology and the businesses leaders.

After the keynote, there are other breakout sessions and the agenda can be found here.

After lunch was the vExpert panel and various things were discussed.  The hottest topic is EVO:rail and the hyper-convergence platform.  One panelist mentioned that Hyper-convergence is only good for SMB. One of the panelists Alastair Cooke mentioned that we need to understand the application and the work load before choosing a hyper convergence platform.  VVol was another topic being discussed.  When I looked up VVol I was surprised that this was around in 2012.  You can find a good blog about VVol here.

After the vExpert panel was other breakout sessions.

This year I did not attend any breakout sessions because I was fortunate enough to have 2 vBrownBag presentations at the conference.  I like the idea of sharing what we know. Check out my vBrownBag presentations on VXLAN and Virtual Design Master.

For me twitter is also one good platform to share ideas besides technical conferences.

After the conference there were parties hosted by Veeam at Marriott where the conference is held and Nutanix at Morton's Steakhouse.  I met different people at both parties and had good conversations.  Sometimes you can learn more by talking to different people than going to technical sessions in a conference. 

The sliders at Morton’s were very good.  I wish they have draft beers also.