Thwack a "v" on that Head Geek: Kong Yang

kong.yang

Hello thwack! My name is Kong Yang and I recently joined SolarWinds as the Virtualization Head Geek aka vHead Geek. I am super stoked to join my fellow Head Geeks and THE community for IT pros – thwack.

 

A little background - I earned my BS in EE and MS in ECE from UNR and UIUC respectively. After that, I spent 13-years grinding experience in performance tuning & troubleshooting enterprise stacks, virtualization sizing & capacity planning best practices, tech community management, and tech evangelism at Dell. For the last 14-months, I was the Cloud Practice Leader at Gravitant, a hybrid cloud software startup.

 

I am passionate about understanding the behavior of the entire application ecosystem – the analytics of the interdependencies as well as qualifying & quantifying the results to the business bottom line. This encompasses: 

• Virtualization & Cloud technologies.
  • VMware vSphere and vCloud Air.
  • Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure.
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS).
  • IBM SoftLayer.
  • Google Compute Engine (GCE).
• Application performance.

  • Tier 1 Application performance best practices – bridging what’s done in ideal lab environments, i.e. vendor reports & benchmark results, and real world IT lab environments.

  • Best practices for proactive performance optimization and reactive performance troubleshooting.
• Hybrid Cloud best practices – on-premises, off-premises, private & public cloud services.

  • How do I efficiently and effectively monitor & optimize my application assets across hybrid cloud ecosystems?

  • What skills do IT pros need to add in order to not only survive but thrive?
• Containers, hypervisors, cloud native best practices – vehicles for IT application stacks.
• DevOps conversations. Gene Kim co-wrote an awesome book entitled The Phoenix Project that annunciates DevOps well.
• Converged Infrastructure technologies.
  • Nutanix, SimpliVity, Scale Computing.
  • VMware EVO family.
  • VSPEX, FlexPod.
  • VCE Vblocks.
  • Microsoft Cloud Platform System.
• Data analytics – ask the right questions, pivot points, and correctly interpreting & applying results.

  

Rather than continuing to bore you with my CV, I will leave you with my seven tips on a long and prosperous IT career:

 

1. Do what you love and love what you do – be passionate about IT, technologies, and people.
2. Know your IT and do IT – there is no substitute for experience and know-how.
3. Don't be afraid to fail. My greatest successes have followed failures. Character is built from failures so always learn & keep moving forward.
4. Don't strive for perfection. Perfection limits innovation by setting an arbitrary & unnecessary ceiling. Innovation is unbounded!
5. Build your network of trusted advisors - techie friends, peers, professional mentors, colleagues and resources – know whose info you can trust. Return that trust by continually earning & maintaining their trust.
6. Strength and honor – policies, processes & people-in-charge change; but your principles should never waver.
7. Remember those who have helped you grow and those who have stood in your way. Be thankful for both of them.

  

I look forward to the opportunity to make your acquaintance and earn your trust. I am @KongYang on Twitter and Kong.Yang on thwack.

 

Let’s close with some fun because IT work can be a real PITA at times. Below is picture of me with two of my friends - @virtualTodd, who is a Sr. Staff Engineer on VMware’s Perf R&D team, and @CiscoServerGeek, who is a Cisco Consulting Systems Engineer. I’m wearing the green & yellow Jester’s hat with the green feather bola and throwing the peace sign while Todd is posing as Captain America and Scott is sporting Wolverine’s claws and the red & black top hat.

 

   

 

 

emilie

Welcome to our team of Geeks, kong.yang! I simply can't contain my excitement to have you here.