I have not blogged here for a while, I think I have a pretty good excuse and some of that I am going to cover later on in this post.

Roughly around a year ago, I started this journey into the cloud-native and open-source world with an amazing opportunity to raise awareness and drive the adoption of Kasten technologies. My initial reaction was that this was going to be a big mountain to climb and don’t get me wrong it is as there is an endless amount of content and things to learn however the biggest takeaway I can give you is that you just have to dive right in and get going, the benefit of that is you will know more about the topic than if you put it off!

I had or have an interesting task in that it is my job to raise awareness and drive the adoption of Kasten technologies whilst also learning and finding the cloud-native community. Coming from the virtualisation community it was not hard to find people that have either walked the same line or at least had the same community ethos that I have seen for many years within the virtualisation community.

This brings me to my second point, most of the people that read this blog are going to be from the virtualisation and storage community, some will have some knowledge of Kubernetes, Cloud-Native and Open-Source and some won’t and that might change in the next 6 months or 12 months depending on job and interests. The important thing I have found though is that these DevOps, Developers etc are not just spawning out of the ground! People are moving into these focus areas and roles!

Community

I think it is important to raise awareness of the community and go into a little more detail about this experience, not only is the cloud-native community or developer community similar to other communities we could really say it is one massive community where we help each other to thrive to where we want to be!

My goal has always been to be in a friendly and helpful community, I don’t know everything, nobody does but the community is the greatest place to learn from all the different perspectives. The important part here is that not only can you learn so much from members of the community but you should give back by sharing your perspective and learning in public. This has been my community ethos for years, learn something new and share it, if it helps just one person then the content is worth the effort.

Over the years I have been part of many community advocacy groups, probably starting with the #NetAppATeam #vExperts #CiscoChampion but as my scope of role changes so does the area of interest and focus which brings new community groups that have invited me or I have applied and been accepted to.

HashiCorp Ambassadors – I think this might be the 3rd year I have been part of this community and this is a great one to start with given that the products and projects behind HashiCorp are very much spanning all the communities I am part of.

HashiCorp Ambassador 2022

EddieHub Ambassador – A very recent thing for me was being accepted into the EddieHub Ambassador program, an area of focus for me is around Open-Source, I strongly believe that this is going to be part of our requirements industry and community-wide moving forward. The power of Open-Source is amazing and we only have to look at the Open-Source projects that we are talking about on a daily basis such as Linux and Kubernetes. I am massively looking forward to representing EddieHub out and about at events but also as part of my learning in public.

Open Source community aimed at encouraging and promoting communication, best practices and technical expertise in an inclusive and welcoming environment

EddieHub Newsletters

Open UK – This program is again very much focused on the Open-Source ecosystem and raising awareness but this time not as global and more so focused on the UK. I have a very strong passion for technology as you can hopefully see but I equally have a passion for the country I live in so I want to ensure that we are as a country are making the right decisions when it comes to open technologies and how they are used across the board.

OpenUK - OpenUK

#90DaysOfDevOps

I have mentioned my newfound passion for Open-Source but also my longer-term passion for learning in public. You have probably seen many of the other great community “challenges” 100DaysOfCloud, 100DaysOfCode, and 100DaysOfKubernetes? Well the idea I had was to take a topic but I didn’t want to take all of that time on just one topic, the beauty of DevOps is that it is surrounded by all sorts of different processes and principles and with that comes a lot of tools and platforms. I wrote a blog on the Kasten blog.

FrontCover

It was this blog that gave me the idea to then start a 90-day “challenge” of putting pen to paper and getting hands-on around some of these areas and focusing on getting a good foundational knowledge of the whole ecosystem and driving force behind DevOps. The biggest thing for me, as I had played with a lot of the tools and processes in the past be it around virtualisation or cloud but it felt like I was missing some of the fundamentals and the best way I found to explain this was it is a bit like Swiss cheese, for the most part, you have a block of cheese but there are lots of holes in it. So the idea of the challenge is to fill some of the gaps and be more like a cheddar! Ok, probably a very bad analogy but hopefully you get the first intentions of this project. Clicking the image above will take you to the repository, take a look around and give me some feedback.

2022 04 20 08 26 25

Back to Travel

For a lot of us travel seems to be ramping up again and part of me cannot wait to get back to those community events across the globe, but appreciate that some people will be hesitant about this and we will see a slow ramp to be anywhere near where we were in 2019!

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