Changes Ahead

As the title suggests, there are changes ahead for me. Both the company I work for and my primary technology focus will be changing.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the previous two years at Xtravirt, working with some of the brightest people in the VMware community. My highlights over the last couple of years are:

Why the Change?

What has really excited me over the last 12 months or so is Kubernetes, the wider Cloud Native ecosystem and the open source community that goes with that. The open source community around Kubernetes is buzzing at the moment. It’s a buzz that is created when people are still trying to advocate the technology and sharing the new, innovative way they’ve used it. One thing that is very clear is that Kubernetes is going to be a significant part of IT platforms for the foreseeable.

The other element that is really exciting is to get the most out of a Kubernetes platform teams and methodologies need to evolve. In the same way that when we moved from bare metal to VMs, new best practices are forged and adopted. One such practice is GitOps, which involves keeping all your Kubernetes configuration in Git and leveraging a controller to reconcile that configuration with the current state of the cluster.

All that said and done, I stumbled across an advert for Weaveworks. For those of you who haven’t heard of Weaveworks, their CEO (Alexis Richardson), coined the term GitOps.

Knowing that I lacked some of the development skills but that I could offer value elsewhere, I wasn’t sure if I was what they were looking for. After a couple of chats with their Customer Success team, it became apparent that it was what I was looking for. I was still unsure about my lack of development skills but figured I could learn that along the way. The feeling was obviously mutual as I’m pleased to say they offered me the role of Customer Reliability Engineer.

This is still a professional services role, but focused around helping businesses adopt Kubernetes in a production sense. This is the first role I’ve worked on without a VMware product focus for ~15 years, so it’s a huge change for me. It’s not going to be easy, there’s a ton of stuff I need to learn, but I’m really looking forward to it.