St Baldricks was this weekend and we raised over $43,000 to help Pediatric Cancer Research.
For more details, check out my previous video at:
https://futrtech.org/thefeed/2020/1/13/welcome-to-2020-now-lets-end-childhood-cancer
If you would like to donate, you still can at:
https://www.stbaldricks.org/participants/cbrandt
I got a F#@!ing Speeding ticket!
40MPH in a 25MPH zone. I did it, I was speeding. I was in a hurry and I was trying to get around some cars that were getting backed up behind someone who was turning, and I got caught.
I am not here to complain about the police, he got me, fair and square. $210 ticket with the 4 hour safe driving course. What I did want to talk about is unintended consequences.
I received a ticket for 15 MHP one the speed limit, but for the most part everyone drives between 30 and 35 on this 4 lane stretch of road. Were the limit on this stretch of road to be what most people travel at, I would have only been going about 5 over.
Hello everyone, Welcome back to the first video or 2020. I put a new slightly shorter intro together, I would love to hear your thoughts. Let me know if you love it or hate it, or worse, are indifferent.
This first video is not going to be about tech. One of the other areas of focus for FUTRtech is to give something back, and that is what I am going to talk about today.
It is St Baldrick’s time again!
I will be shaving my head on January 26 to raise money for childhood cancer research, and who doesn’t want to help end childhood cancer.
As we approach the new year, I reflect on the past year. It has been incredibly busy, but satisfying. This FUTRtech website and YouTube channel have really matured, and I hope to make more videos in the new year, with more diverse content, more interviews, more cool companies and more great tech. There are also some very exciting things in the works for next year, all I will say at this point is keep April 30th open. More announcements to come in 2020.
As I mentioned in Part 1, attendance was high. Now in its 8th year, Re:Invent had the capacity for 65,000 with over 3,000 sessions.
This year, “Transformation” was the main theme. The main take away was that you should be moving more aggressively to the cloud. Andy Jassy in his keynote kept coming back to this theme, and much of it was aimed at senior leadership. He laid out some key points to accelerating the journey.
Hi Everyone, this is Chris Brandt with another AWS Re:Invent update. Before I get started I just wanted to say, if you enjoy these videos, please like and subscribe, click the bell to get notifications when I post new content. I usually do that at the end, so I thought I would try it up front for a change.
AWS Re:Invent was held once again in Las Vegas Nevada. This show has grown so large, there are few cities that can house it. Re:Invent this year had capacity for 65,000 attendees, and by all accounts they were pretty close to maximum capacity. The show spanned 6 properties in Las Vegas, and rumors have it that they are going to be adding in Mandalay Bay next year in an attempt to hit 80,000 in attendance which is absolutely mind-blowing.
Managing complex environments has always been tricky, and having good tools to provide you with actionable information is invaluable. When you start talking about cloud native applications and micro services, this challenge is magnified.
I have always felt that Application Performance Monitoring tools are very under deployed. They can be such an invaluable tool to IT, but the value proposition has often been hard to translate up the chain to CFOs. While there isn’t a direct line to greater profits, reducing the time to resolution or proactively addressing problems can have enormous value. In a micro services world, having some sort of APM in place is simply a requirement.
We all know the story that data is a strategic asset and this is causing companies to become IT organizations at their core. Companies are also increasingly leveraging SaaS applications. Companies now often have hundreds of SaaS vendors. With all of this comes data sprawl.
Since data is critical to organizations now, collecting and analyzing that data is key, but that can be a challenge when the data lives on many different platforms in many different forms, so bringing all of it together into a data warehouse can be hard.
I am back from AWS Re:Invent in Las Vegas, and it was quite spectacular. Estimates of attendance put it over 60,000 with some putting attendance at 65,000. It was a jam packed show, and I am working to put together a complete overview of the event, but until I get that done, I wanted to share some of the interviews I did while at the show to whet your appetite.
A lot of the show floor was taken up by NetApp itself. The show floor was divided into different sections. Some for the Partner community, some focusing on their products and some focusing on specific use cases. And there were areas devoted to play and areas to relax.
Like other shows this year, there has been a focus on Social Media, which mostly involves tracking Twitter feeds talking about the company and show. I probably need to get plugged in with these folk a bit more.
NetApp held their annual Insight conference in Las Vegas again this year. There is always a lot going on in Vegas, and there were several shows in town. There was a Crypto Currency conference happening in my hotel. I can only imagine what kind of shenanigans a bunch of risk taking crypto math geeks could get up to in this town.
There were not a lot of new product announcements this year, it seemed to be more focused on delivering of promises previously made. This is not a bad thing. This is an opportunity to refocus on the fundamentals of the business and realizing their multi-could/hybrid-cloud data fabric story.
Hi welcome back to Part 2 of Pure Accelerate conference coverage.
By the Book
One of the things that came with the swag bag at the show was this book, “Flash Was Only The Beginning. The creators of Pure Storage who reimagined data storage and built the fastest growing enterprise technology company in history.
It walks through the history of Pure. Probably really for the extreme fanboy crowd, but I did enjoy the pictures. They highlight a lot of the folks who were there in the early days and have some pictures and a little blurb.
In September, Pure Storage's annual Accelerate Conference in the great city of Austin Texas. There were a couple of awkward moments, a bunch of announcements, an interview with Pure President, Dave Hatfield, and a whole lot of fun.
So I have talked in the past about the rise of disaggregation and compassable infrastructure, and a lot of that was on display at VMWorld. I first ran into Liqid at the Open Compute Platform summit a few years back. They drew a lot of attention for showing how you could provision hardware assets as easily as you could provision VMs. Because it is all REST based, you could add physical hardware provisioning into your DevOps process. Basically, all of the components are joined together over a PCIe fabric to allow the dynamic provisioning of components.
Confluera is a newly launched security company that provides real-time attack interception and defense to detect and stop attackers navigating your infrastructure. Confluera is headed by Abhijit Ghosh and is backed by VCs like Lightspeed Venture Partners. Recently Bipul Sinha who is a legendary investor, a founder of Nutanix, CEO of Rubrik among other things came on board to Confluera as co-CEO. This company has attracted investment from the likes of John Thompson, chairman of Microsoft’s board. I was able to catch up with CEO and founder Abhijit Ghosh at VMWorld, and here is that interview.
