I have been steady, since the beginning of the “public cloud”, in saying that private cloud is HERE TO STAY. I’ve told multiple managers, executives at VMware and even in the Office of the CTO that while I agree that Private / Hybrid cloud is all the rage right now, the expansion of private cloud instances will continue and will accelerate in the coming years. i made the statement that “I will retire from this career while continuing to roll out designs & instances of Private Cloud”.

Time is undefeated, it always wins – and by that I mean that once we have hindsight, we are all very wise in that regard — and in this case, the early adopters have really gained huge insights from their public cloud efforts. Many of them have proven to be very fruitful, the scale, the dynamic nature of cloud “on demand”, the ability to have a single management plane which covers all your cloud instances, private, public, hybrid etc with one management plane is simply amazing control. Amazon AWS also provides amazing analytics, the “powered by AWS” branding has really taken off and people are looking for new insights from their data and their business.

But… There have been costs and they are not insignificant in some cases. There have been migration headaches, there have been lock-ins and failure to move workloads around with impunity. (as previously promised).

As a result, i would like to welcome people BACK TO THE PRIVATE CLOUD. This is, of course, great news for the hardware vendors, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Oracle among many others will continue to sell very competitively priced racks of gear, much of it consolidated Storage, Compute and network in the same rack just like when we designed VCE vBlocks back in 2005 on a white board in the Atlanta EMC office ( Story for another day – yeah i did help with that).

The key in all of this as we MOVE BACK INTO PRIVATE, it to remember all of the lessons from the CLOUD-NATIVE world because THEY APPLY. (These are the updated Cloud Commandments)

1. Security is job 1
2. Build for interoperability
3. Build Cloud Agnostic
4. Automate all things (this means the management plane & standards are important)
5. Use industry standards (for micro-services, for blueprints, for designs, etc)
6. Abstract, Abstract, Abstract
7. Get early answers to questions on: HA, DR, RPO/RTO
8. Leverage Infrastructure as code
9. Watch ingress/egress if leveraging hybrid or public
10. If you can code to VMware Cloud Foundation as a standard, VCF, your life will be better.

Tonight we celebrate the 1 year anniversary of the founding of @ETRVMUG in Knoxville. We are meeting at JTV (Jewelry TV) and tonight is sponsored by EPlus

We are having cake, nuggets and a great presentation in HyperConverged infrastructure.

Great event, you should be here! Follow @ETRVMUG on Twitter and presenter Hermie Cloete

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Over the years i’ve had a theory on IT upgrades, they are generally a bad idea and generally have some issues. it could be a config file lying around, or a library that doesn’t get upgraded correctly, or a dependency that isn’t mapped. There are a MINEFIELD full of pitfalls that can hit you. The purpose of my blog today is to convey the following message.

CloudMakerBrian Axiom #1:

IF YOU CAN DO A FRESH INSTALL FROM A GOLDEN IMAGE, THEN CHOSE THAT OPTION.

I am wise enough to know that the above axiom is NOT ALWAYS in play, but IF there is a choice, please choose the FRESH INSTALL option.

I’m working with several different partners in their labs and they have upgraded their environments from n-3 or greater versions and things just are not ALWAYS as they should be.

I’ve just celebrated the 8th anniversary of my employment at VMware and i’ve had a change of management, a change of perspective and of course, a major life change. I’m going to try my best to pivot everything to the positive. My first new tech venture is right here at the CloudMaker Blog where I will be writing of my Tech Experiences from the BowTieRacing.Org site..

I am working on Several very Large RFP and several very interesting projects as well as getting started on the next release of the VMware automation suite. I’m so proud of my company and so honored to be recognized by our VMware Executives for my contributions in 2018.

2019 will be UP and TO the RIGHT.

I was just recognized at the VMware World Wide Kickoff as one of the “Hero’s of the Year” for the very very large IBM ELA which my effort, project “BlueSky” helped land for us. Grateful for the IBM partnership and I can’t wait to see what the future holds.

Thanks for joining me!  This is going to be something new for me.  In the very hard time in the last 8 months when I lost my soulmate to cancer in July 2018, i’ve done some things.  Lots of therapy and lots of attempts to find a reason to be here on earth. Ultimately, my faith pulled me thru it. I believe I am here to make the journey easier for my fellow humans and my family & loved ones..

With our children, we’ve started a foundation to change the world, one child at a time.  if you are interested in learning more about that, please visit http://LaRoseFoundation.Org   

For this venture, this blog, this effort – i am going to focus on HIGH TECH, focus on my career and on helping customers and partners with their Clouds (both Private & Hybrid) and I’m going to spin the propeller a bit (a geek joke).

Thanks for checking in with me here.  Hope you enjoy my ramblings and the journey

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton