kong.yang

rschroeder‌, I am a fan of the original as well; but I changed the order because I wanted to focus on the process and not the person. I wanted to convey optimism and positivity - it is the beginning of the New Year

Updated with the new URL from the OpenStack Foundation channel.

Yes, the SOAR series is the basis. This series will go deeper and have more applied use cases with VMAN as the tool.

tcbene‌ - great suggestion. Might not be feasible for Ignite but potentially for Cisco Live or VMworld. Let me ask cpsolarwinds‌‌‌ and DanielleH‌‌‌.

Great point Jfrazier​ about provisioning.

Trust but verify holds true with people as well. Sorry to hear about your experiences. Unfortunately, "politics" are prevalent in our industry especially in large enterprises where there's stack ranking, bell curves, and fixed number of advancement opportunities/budget for training, promotions, etc. I've experienced my…

I like to mix different flavors of bacon to bring out the bacon goodness. Applewood smoked bacon with maple cured bacon go really well together in a bacon salad.

A great report will inform management of the right decision to make. Whether they make the right call or simply sit in idle on the report and recommendation of an IT pro speaks to their managerial competency or lack thereof.

Thank you scuff​ for sharing. And love your closing - participation in the community and always learning. Those two actions can take an IT pro to any heights that they want.

That's great on the technical side. But do you discuss with them potential career moves or what a fair market salary should be for someone of your experience/expertise or if you should take a position with a company? This is part of the business aspect that I want to have discussions with the THWACK community on.

Relevant to the discussion here, an interesting article from Ted Chamberlin (@tchamberlin on Twitter) on "Why 2015 will NOT be a game-changing year in cloud." Definitely worth a read.

designerfx​ that is so true. Trust and the truth are hard because it is one part a leap of faith and the other may be finding out that you are woefully underpaid. But without visibility, other data points and other points-of-view, there's no way to truly gauge your market value as well as get an honest assessment of your…

Great point. All applications even with fast rates of change must never do harm to the end-user. Successful firms like Uber, FB, Airbnb, Amazon, etc all aim to do harm to the end-user with changes in their app stack. Again, they're building their applications with loosely coupled services that do one thing well, are…

We, IT Ops professionals, play by a set of rules that is published (think NIST cybersecurity framework, etc). Those who commit these cyber attacks do not abide by those same rules and they give no quarter. Plus, they are sometimes backed by the vast amount of resources, of which only a nation can provide. And yet we stand…

It was a wonderful event. The same can't be said about the lunches that they served attendees and Booth staff. Top 3 worse conference food I've had. The saving grace was their coffee - fantastic!

Talking conferences. Don't forget to attend thwackCamp 2015 on July 15th and 16th. Two tracks for you to choose your own adventure. Come for the awesomesauce prizes and stay for the IT 411. [UPDATED with registration page] Forum: thwackCamp 2015 | thwack

_stump‌‌ - thank you for sharing! Awesome post!

jeremymayfield‌, Thanks for sharing!

Hi xlr8r‌, SolarWinds will not have a booth presence at VMworld Europe this year. Kong

Great points jkump‌! Thank you for sharing. Agree that IT rigor and discipline is required in services and apps deliverables. Compliance, governance and security are key deliverables of IT pros. The evaluation and integration time for new tech, ultimately, will vary depending on the IT pro's experience and expertise.

jtroyer - the pi shape is so apropos. The IT Generalist does need another IT leg to stand on. Your pi-shaped IT pro is what I've been calling a versatilist (a Gartner term originating in the mid-2000s) - aka an IT pro who is a specialist (technically adept & deep) in more than one tech domain. Great read!

Great points @bentao. Agreed that hybrid cloud definitely spreads an application's tiers across multiple, different service providers including internal IT and external service providers. It's focused around the integration of all these internal / external providers of infrastructure, platform, and software services to…

tinmann0715​​ - I think you should write about your own personal experience on the same topic and cross-link to my post. P.S. Great minds think alike :-)

You did it again jbiggley​​. Excellent post and thank you for sharing. And kudos for advocating your fellow colleagues. It doesn't happen a lot in our industry. BS on that "remote" pay scale btw. And thanks for sharing the salary info from Glassdoor. Payscale does provide salary info as well. And job sites like Indeed,…

Christopher, Thanks for sharing your experience and insights with the thwack Community. Kong

Yikes, that's terrible. If something is not worth caring about and considering, then it isn't worth the time to do it. With respect to non-technical management, I've many CMOs add and absorb CIO duties (you may have seen them brand themselves CxOs) because of the marketing automation, orchestration, and business…

"S" can cover all manners of sin indeed.

Each of those technology still requires skills and knowledge from multiple domains and base technology constructs.

Great point jtroyer‌. Many of our thwack community members have made similar feedback about it being associated with Jack-of-All trades master of none (this is what an IT generalist is in fact), when a versatilist actually is defined as master of many. Whatever one calls it, IT pros need to continue to evolve - even at the…

Thank you. I have been in orgs where reporting was just a check mark in someone's To-do box. And it taught me well because I never wanted to be like them. Reporting has opened up opportunities that I never dreamed of -- from presenting at VMworld to being a Practice Leader at a cloud startup that was acquired for $100M to…