Cloud Field Day 6 Preview - Solo.Io

September 24, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Enterprise, Appearances

Solo.io is set to present to the Tech Field Day delegates and audience at the upcoming Cloud Field Day 6 event September 25-27 in Silicon Valley. Different events sometimes hit upon repeating themes. At Security Field Day 2, microsegmentation was the consistent theme. Cloud Field Day 6 is shaping up to be very much about kubernetes + service mesh. Solo.Io is a vendor in the service mesh business. Right now, that’s a good business to be in because it’s one of the hottest trends in the IT industry at the moment. Solo.io will tell us more about their offerings and what sets them apart from the numerous other companies operating in that space.

Cloud Field Day 6 Preview - HashiCorp

September 22, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in DevOps, Enterprise

Cloud Field Day 6 will take place in Silicon Valley September 25-27 2019. Cloud Field Day is a focused version of the Stephen Foskett’s Tech Field Day series of events. While Tech Field Day covers a broad array of IT topics, Cloud Field Day places the spotlight on cloud technology vendors. The events gather a group of independent delegates from the tech blogosphere to hear presentations from emerging and established technology vendors. The vendors often demonstrate either new products or features of existing offerings. The vendors I’m most interested in hearing from is HashiCorp. This could be a mini-recap of HashiCorp announcements made at their recent HashiConf conference, a deep dive on an existing product, or maybe an announcement of some sort. The beauty of Tech Field Day is that you never know.

Liqid - Is Composable Hardware the Future of the Data Center?

May 15, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Enterprise

Liqid Inc. is a company at the forefront in the composable hardware market. I was able to learn about their composable hardware solution during a presentation for Tech Field Day Extra at Dell Technologies World. It was my first time hearing about the technology, and it was eye-opening. Composable infrastructure takes compute, network, storage, and GPU from various servers and allows them to be reconfigured into virtual computers composed of some, or all, of the resources. This takes place by leveraging the commonality and speed and low latency of the PCIe bus. A special PCIe switch with the Liqid OS defines the computers and resources allocated to them. It’s a very clever idea that can be leveraged in some interesting ways.

Podcast Appearance! - The On-Premise IT Roundtable

March 25, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Appearances

I’m still getting used to this whole podcast thing, but I appeared on one recently. I had the immense honor of sharing a panel with some fellow Tech Field Day delegates as we discussed the future of Microsoft Windows.

I’ve embedded the video below. I’ve also included a link to the audio.

I recommend going to the Gestalt IT On-Premise website to check out so many more awesome conversations https://gestaltit.com/category/podcast/

Tech Field Day Delegate - Part Deux

January 31, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Conferences

One week from now I’ll be in Austin as part of the Tech Field Day delegate crew for Tech Field Day 18. This is my second Field Day event having attended Cloud Field Day 4 in Silicon Valley last year. I remember being completely terrified going into the trip. I had no idea what to expect. Sure, I’d watched presentations over the internet for years, but I hadn’t considered what happened once the cameras stopped rolling. It’s also fair to say I suffered from a fair bit of impostor syndrome. I didn’t feel my voice was as strong as the other delegates’. I couldn’t have imaged the sense of camaraderie, conversations, and history gained from attending.. Long story short, it turned out to be one of the most fun work-ish experiences I’ve had in my adult life.

Up in the Air

August 07, 2018 by Nathaniel Avery in Conferences

I’m on my way to Silicon Valley to serve as a delegate for Cloud Field Day 4 (http://techfieldday.com/event/cfd4/). Delegates aren’t industry analysts. They are regular, in the trenches IT people who love what they do and co tribute to the community. Many of the delegates have blogs and/ or podcasts as well as present at local user groups or trade shows.

And then there’s me... my profile is nowhere near as high as many of my peers. But I’m going, in part, due a decision I made a few years back to put myself out there. I got on Twitter. I started a blog. I tried to keep myself open to meeting people at conferences. I joined the greater community.

I’m just as introverted as the next person in this field (maybe even more so), so much of this isn’t easy for me. But it is rewarding. Maybe not financially, but being a part of any group who shares similar experiences provides comfort. There are certain things that only people in your tribe can ever truely “get.” Late night & weekend SAN upgrades, fixing Domain Controllers that stop controlling, migrating legacy enterprise apps from old on-prem server to the cloud - these are situations that only make sense to people in this business.

Blog. Tweet. Slack. Do whatever suits you, as long as you do something. We all get better when more experiences are shared.