Support your local Sheriff used to the common phrase at one point.  Today, we need to nurture our IT communities by providing mentoring and coaching to elevate all of the community.  In an open discussion, we tackle the challenge of providing content as vendors while avoiding the “pitch”.  Angelo Luciani is a co-leader of the Toronto VMUG, who also launched the Silicon Valley VMUG and runs the Nutanix .NEXT community. 

If you are a vendor who sponsors community events and conferences, this is a must-listen.  Together we can elevate our message and bring the community with us. 

Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

Join the conversation as we discuss how to think like an architect with Rene van den Bedem.  Having achieved his VCDX and NPX certifications, Rene is a phenomenal example of elevating ourselves through community and learning.  The chat touches on the key points to progress from admin to architect and how the community opens the doors to a broad group of peers and mentors. Learn about Virtual Design Master and how Rene thinks we can all make the jump to architectural thinking in IT. 

Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

Join us for a great chat with Ken Hui of Rackspace as we delve into the overall OpenStack community, the results from the Summit, and a little look back over the history of the Summits. Ken brings some great insight into the challenges of the OpenStack ecosystem while highlighting the very important advances we’ve made. Also, we talk about some of the Rackspace updates from the Summit and in their Developer advocacy area with a few very cool projects.

Photo by imgix on Unsplash

In this episode, we chat with Rob Hirschfeld (@zehicle) about the evolution of OpenStack, interoperability, abstractions and APIs, and more.  We also talk a little about RackN and we even find out the origin of the Twitter handle Zehicle.  The episode was recorded while at the OpenStack Summit in Austin which gave a perfect background for us to really dig into where the evolution of OpenStack and the big tent approach has brought us, and what may be next in the open cloud ecosystem.

Photo by Taylor Vick on Unsplash

We chat with Ben Nye, Managing Director of Bain Capital and CEO of VMTurbo, as we discuss the importance of company culture, the art of growing a product into a business, the state of the venture capital environment in IT and much more. 

Ben is a dynamic speaker and inspires a large team at VMTurbo. Having a storied career in business and technology, it was a pleasure to dive into how the challenges of creating trust in the organization can prove to be the path to success for organizations. 

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

We chat with Matthew Brender on his role at Intel as a Developer Advocate as well as the overall concept of developer advocacy and supporting open source communities. This was an enlightening chat which will really open up some eyes as to the importance of our participation as advocates for every aspect of open source projects.

Photo by Headway on Unsplash

In an exciting chat about the rebirth of private cloud, we talk with Nick Colyer and Amy Manley on their 2Ninjas1Blog project, succeeding in a private cloud, and also the challenges of thinking cloud in a virtualized environment. 

We discover some great tips on what the common pitfalls are, and how teams can surpass them to succeed in adopting a private cloud.  Technology is a strong part of the solution, but the central focus is around people first, process second, and technology as the solution to solve the pain points.

Photo by Helloquence on Unsplash

With the OpenStack Summit in Austin, the timing is perfect to catch up on the OpenStack Nova project with Stephen Gordon. We had a great chat with Stephen on Nova updates in Mitaka, the overall OpenStack ecosystem, real-time KVM and much more.

Photo by Hello I’m Nik 🇬🇧 on Unsplash

In this episode, we talk with Matthew Brender about some of the work happening in the Intel SDI-x team. We talk about project snap, the announcement on March 31st and more about open source goodness. 

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

In this episode, we talk with Erica Windisch about a new venture, IOpipe.com and about a very interesting history in technology.  Having been involved in PaaS building, OpenStack, Docker, and much more, Erica continues to lead the curve with startups taking a very interesting direction to solve today’s and tomorrow’s problems with technology. 

You can find out more about IOPipe at the website IOPipe.com

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash