I once had the CEO of a company tell me that I helped bring the company he led out of the stone ages. The sales manager thought less of my work. The experience was one of my first understanding of the importance of identifying my customer. I spent 3-years as the Network Manager at Quixote Corp – a mid-sized publicly-traded company at the time. Over two years, my team took Quixote from a collection of 7-business units with separate collaboration platforms, networks, and IT operations to a company with shared messaging and advanced file services. The Business Challenge Quixote Corp. was the hold ..read more

I’m re-visiting a report I wrote for one of my first independent advisory customers. I cringe at some of the structural parts of the report. I didn’t provide an overview of the customer’s business or restate why they engaged me. I’ve lost some of that fidelity over the five years. I want to critique some of my recommendations with my modern knowledge of infrastructure. So, let’s grade 5-year younger Keith’s work. Overall Report Mechanics First off, I love the technical recommendations and that ultimately the customer paid us. You have a commanding knowledge of the technology and a deep underst ..read more

When I interviewed for an Analyst role at Gartner Inc., I had to participate in a panel defense of an unpopular position. I had to show that I could hold my own in conversations with customers, analysts, and vendors. The position? VMware is a developer-friendly organization.  The interview was about 5 or 6-years ago. A bold argument indeed ensued. However, we're going to discuss why VMware isn't considered a community for developers. Microsoft Envy Both VMware and Red Hat ($REHL corrected me. It's Red Hat and not RedHat) desperately wants to be in Microsoft's position. Microsoft has every ..read more

I’m about as interested in Kubernetes distributions as I am Linux Kernels. It’s an implementation detail. At least that’s the theory. In practice, I’ve heard presentations from VMware, Redhat, HPE, Nirmata, NetApp, and a host of other purveyors of Kubernetes. What’s the one thing that they are all trying to sell? Hint, it isn’t container orchestration.  Application Development Platform  IT organizations want to enable the building and operations of modern applications. I’d argue adopting public cloud services provides a better platform for most organizations—yet another blog post for ..read more

Are VMware public cloud options such as VMware Cloud on AWS cloud washing? Each of the major cloud providers has released a public cloud offering loosely based on VMware Cloud Foundation. However, VMware vSphere isn't a private cloud. vSphere is the foundation for virtual machine management in the private data center. The platform doesn't provide cloud extensibility. VMware public cloud offers something that on-premises installations do not – stability in API. That stability in API powers simple to maintain automation, at least compared on on-premises vSphere automation. Infrastructure as code ..read more

Managed service providers (MSP) offer a compelling deal. An MSP may write a customer a check in the first year of a contract in some arrangements. In the traditional outsourcing model, they will hire a subset of your staff and buy all of your equipment. To make up the cost difference, and make a profit, most MSP leverage a centralized resource sharing model. For example, a storage administration team may support a dozen customers. What took the customer 3-Full-time employees (FTE) to run an IT silo now takes a fraction of a single-FTE. Contracts ensure snowflake customer requirements incur add ..read more

Warning: I don't have an answer to this question. What's the future of the data center control plane? AzureStack, Google Anthos, AWS Outposts, and Oracle Cloud all offer a public cloud control plane residing in the customer's data center. I'm not talking about these services. I mean good old-fashioned VMware vSphere, Microsoft Windows Server, and Linux. The platforms that make up the majority of most enterprise IT application landscapes. Let's first state the problem. Keeping the lights on I've talked about the 80/20 rule plenty of times on my platform. 80% of the IT budget got to maintaining ..read more

How would you handle a situation when a developer can open up a point-to-point tunnel between their Kubernetes hosted application and node on the internet inclusive to a public cloud resource? OpenFaaS project founder Alex Ellis created such an application called Inlets. I sat down with him for a one-on-one. How do I an old school firewall guy view this SDN-lite solution in the hands of developers? Or am I looking at it from the wrong perspective and the solution is actually for operators ..read more

When I was a kid, I didn't have the internet or even a phone modem to connect my computer to the world. It was just me, my keyboard, and my monitor. I get in front of my Tandy Color Computer 2 and type "10 Print…" and let the creative juices flow. I'm day 15 of 100 days blogging. That's this blog post. I don't have anything to structured to write. There isn't a concept of migrating SAP to the public cloud. It's just me showing up as I committed. The act of showing up puts us in a position to be in the moment. It's hard The CTO Advisor as a business is at a pivot point. We are trying to read th ..read more

What's the most unlikely place to find Function-based computing (Serverless)? What if I told you VMware has a Functions as a Service platform that's relatively popular. So popular that the company that leads the underlying project won Best of VMworld. What if I also told you that the solution targets administrators vs. developers? That's precisely the case with VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA).  I recently sat down with Alex Ellis, founder of OpenFaaS LTD. Alex leads the extremely popular open source project OpenFaaS. OpenFaaS provides the abstraction between the developer a ..read more