Over the last 8 years I have built my career around VMware. I remember the first time I installed VMware Server at one of my jobs just to play around with and imported my first virtual machine. I had no idea what I was doing or how any of it worked, but I felt there was a future for me in this technology. As I moved on to other companies, the VMware implementations just got larger and larger; from 3 hosts all the way up to well over 1000.
Having spent time in these environments and with other users at local VMUG events and VMworld, I’ve seen that the skills required to be a VMware administrator are becoming commoditized. More people know about it than ever before, more blogs exist than ever before, and the necessity of meetings that revolve around VMware specifically seems to have run its course. While VMware remains integral to the datacenter today, there are skills we need to be developing and technologies we need to be exploring to ensure we’re not the ones being replaced when the next generation joins the workforce.
Enter Cloud Natives.
Cloud Natives was the idea of Dominic Rivera and myself as a means to bridge the gap between user and these new technologies. Cloud Natives looks to bring together the leaders in a technology space to present their solutions in one location. Rather than just letting vendors spew marketing material, we take a different approach. Vendors are required to provide actual customers to present how their solutions have impacted their job and their business. No more outlandish claims, no more vanity numbers that don’t depict actual workloads, just real stories from real users.
We are kicking off 2016 with our first event on July 14th in Portland, OR. This event will be focused on one of the hottest technologies in the datacenter right now: Flash Storage. We’re bringing together the top players in the Flash Storage space and you’ll hear their customers discuss the benefits and challeneges they faced when moving away from legacy spinning disk arrays and even newer hybrid arrays.Our goal is to educate our members one event at a time.
Cloud Natives looks to bring together all the datacenter technologies into one place. Whether it’s a focus on hypervisors, traditional or next-generation storage and infrastructure, cloud providers, DevOps and automation, or anything else that is hot in the datacenter, we will be that go-to resource in the Pacific Northwest. Each event is an opportunity to evaluate multiple vendors from the perspective of the customer. With no overlapping session schedules, you can walk away better informed and get any questions answered in one event.
I encourage everyone in the Portland area to register for this event at the Cloud Natives site. Our goal is to bring a sense of community back to Portland. We want to be a place to meet and network, to encourage, to mentor and to grow in our careers. No matter the stage in our career, we all have knowledge and experience that can help someone else and it’s time we all do our part to give back to the community.
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