This was my third VMworld and I had a great time mixing and talking to people. My favourite areas were the Hang-Space and Solutions Exchange. The purpose of this post is to summarise my thoughts on where the industry is heading and how we as participants need to adapt.
VMworld merely confirmed what I have believed for quite some time now; that we, as Architects, Administrators and Operators, need to multi-skill and master multiple technology silos. Here are some posts I wrote alluding to this last year:
Cloud-native applications are already here in the “Public Cloud space” and the “Enterprise space” is merely playing catch-up. Hence, VMworld had their first Hackathon, introduced the “unofficial” DevOps track (kudos to Eric Nielsen for championing both) and “VMware vSphere Integrated Containers” with the “Photon Platform” was the most significant announcement.
What do you need to do to evolve? I will use my last year of efforts as an example:
- Educating myself on Amazon Web Services (AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Level)
- Learning about DevOps methodology and the tools that enable people and process to maximise the throughput of work through an organisation
- Submitted my second VCDX (NV track) – expecting the result in early October
- Working on my NPX submission (Nutanix Hyper-Converged Infrastructure) – hoping to defend in December
For 2016, I am planning the following:
- Continue my AWS Certification to the Professional level
- Working on my third VCDX (CMA track) – hopefully I will make it to triple VCDX (the SDDC super-track!)
- Educating myself on Pivotal Cloud Foundry
- Return to coding with a modern language: eg. Python, Ruby, etc. I started out as a Software Developer in the 90’s, but the last languages I used were Assembler/Pascal/C/C++ over 20 years ago.
I do not think that you need to become an expert in each area. But you do need to have a functional understanding of each region and the ability to have an intelligent conversation with an SME from that silo.
The clock is ticking, register for VMworld EU 2015, plan your travel and reserve your sessions:
vcdx133.com 