It’s 2019! Year in Review and A Few Twitter Recommendations

Happy New Year!! I don’t plan on this being a long post, but as I type this I think “Well I don’t really even have a plan on what this post will be”. So I take that back–this post will be of an indeterminate length.

2018 was an interesting year–for better or for worse I suppose. Let’s put politics and world affairs aside for now. Not enough time in the day for that.

2018 was great year for me personally, I got married, enjoyed a lot of backpacking, camping, and traveling with my wife. Had more than a few Ballast Point Sculpins. Played the heck out of Zelda Breathe of the Wild.

VMware and Pure

Pure and VMware had a big year:

• VVols went GA! They have been out now for Pure for 12 months and we now have hundreds of arrays and customers running them.
• vSphere HTML-5 plugin is in beta. GA’ing soon to a VMware environment near you.
• vRealize Orchestrator plugin 2.0 came out. Tons of new workflows and actions. v3 will be out shortly.
• VVol workflow package for vRO came out! An update to that is coming soon as well.
• Kicked off a project to update our vROPS management pack–this will be coming out soon too.
• VM Analytics for VMware topology discovery and performance troubleshooting was released in Pure1
• Log Insight content pack was updated
• I published my Pure/VMware PowerShell Module–which I continuously update which is on the PowerShell Gallery
• At VMworld 2018 showed a beta of NVMe-oF with RoCEv2 with VMFS and the FlashArray
• We announced Cloud Block Store, which among many things dovetails nicely with the data mobility options provided by VVols
• Added Alex Carver to our VMware team–who has been a fantastic addition
• We updated our Site Recovery Manager SRA to offer support for our active-active replication
• Also released an implementation guide for our Active/Active replication and vMSC

Also some personal work things:

• One of my goals was to improve my speaking at non-US venues. From the feedback I got on my VMworld Europe sessions, I definitely made progress on that which was great to see
• Do more user groups! 8 VMUGs and 8 Pure User Groups in 2018 for me which was just about perfect. A half dozen or webinars as well.
• Learn! A big focus for me this year was learning public cloud–so the second half of the year was AWS and VMware Cloud. Playing around with both of those and specifically digging into API usage of AWS. I’ve had a lot of fun in that area.
• Improve my PowerShell. Moving my scripts into a PS module was a big next step for me–making my code much more re-usable by customers. Also helped enforce PS best practices in my scripts. Use of VSCode helped a lot there too. And of course guidance from my coworker and friend Barkz

What’s the plan for 2019?

Well a lot. VMware Cloud is a big focus. As is AWS in general for me. I hope to start digging into Azure as well.

NVMe-oF will be a running theme throughout 2019 as well, as application/OS/hypervisor support continues to grow.

VVols of course. Both VMware and Pure have a lot of plans for VVols. For us, this includes working on:

• Improving scale
• Multiple vCenter support
• Working with VMware on SRM support
• Active-Active replication support
• CloudSnap support and other Purity features

Also continuing to improve our vRealize integration, as well as investigating options around VMware CAS, vCD and other VMware products. Expanding our VM Analytics tool. We have A LOT going on right now internally and alongside VMware–a lot of which I cannot quite get into right now. Rest assured, it will be a busy year.

Twitter

One thing that has happened in 2018, is that I have continued to use Twitter more and more (or maybe more specifically, reduce the usage of other social media platforms.

To keep on top of things (what customers are doing, whether they be ours or not), what they like, what they don’t like, what they struggle with, etc. I watch a variety of Sub-Reddits, Twitter, certain communities, Slack channels etc. It helps me decide what we need to do at Pure. What are focuses should be. I am listening as much as I can.

Twitter is of course a great source of information for me. So one thing I want to do here is make a few recommendations on who to follow.

This list is not exhaustive of course–many of these choices are people who not only share their technical expertise, but a lot more. It makes their feeds entertaining, insightful, and alive.

I am excluding for the most part a lot of the VMware folks a lot of us know–the people that if you follow me, you very likely also follow. Go to vsphere-land and look for the top blogs for those. Or simply look at who the VMware Twitter account follows. Pretty much the same group.

• Michael White. Not only is he just a great person–he has a wonderful blog with all sorts of good pieces of information around virtualization or tech in general
• Chloe Condon. Awesome resource at Microsoft (as of very recently) and developer advocate. Gives inspiring tech talks and is just flat out an interesting person to follow. Loves La Croix. Also very candid about being a woman in tech and shares her experiences. Sometimes very cringworthy–is very helpful to see what it is like and helps me try to improve myself. We can all always do better. On those note, both Diana Kris and Abby Fuller are both great follows (developer at Tumblr and AWS Cloud respectively) for both technical insights and perspective. Containers, cloud, development, k8s, and more. Following these three people have I think made me a better person. Hopefully…I guess that’s not for me to say.
• Marsha Pierce. SQL Server expert–also works at Pure 🙂 Super smart person and a joy to be around.
• Cody De Arkland. Have to get some love to Codys of course. Great resource at VMware doing some really cool stuff with automation and cloud. Excited to see his content in 2019.
• Howard Marks. Want opinions, information, and insight into storage trends? Look no further.
• Katarina Wagnerova. Has a ton of implementation experience. A lot of us just fool around in our labs–she actually puts this stuff into reality.
• Jason Massae. Core Storage at VMware. Enough said there 🙂
• Steve Kaplan. Automation wizard. I feel like anyone who has ever done VMware automation, has at some point been helped by Steve.
• Wendys. Just do it. Trust me.