Where Have You Been?

You may have noticed that I’ve been awfully quiet out here lately. That’s because I’ve been adapting to my new role and making certain I had a clue what I was talking about before I came out and posted a bunch of things.

But it’s been long enough that it is time to start getting back in the groove of regular blogging, before the many interesting threads I’m following start knotting up all of my time. So here I am.

I’ve moved to the role of Product Management Engineer for BIG-IQ Cloud. In terms of responsibilities, I’m working on labs for BIG-IQ and OpenStack (separately, for those trying to read something into this), and API utilization for BIG-IQ Cloud services. It’s a great job, but the learning curve is pretty steep. I’ve learned more about the guts of OpenStack in the last six weeks than I ever intended to.

Thankfully, F5 has some really bright folks that have done some of what I’m working on, and have lent hands to help get me up to speed and help me work around technical problems.

Which brings me to my blog. I’ll be focusing more on Cloud and SDN issues moving forward, with my usual side jaunts to discuss things that interest me, but less “all over the board” blogging about a huge variety of topics. Cloud is big enough that I’ll still be all around, but in the context of cloud.

Over the course of my “uptime”, I’ve also toyed with Amazon, done more with VMWare and kvm than I had in the past, and got to try out eSata. So there’s a broad array of things I’ve got opinions on, this blog is to bring you up to speed, and commit to actually spouting at least once a week about the important stuff.

In the short term, expect me to talk about what BIG-IQ Cloud is, and talk about my thoughts regarding OpenStack, its current state, and what could be, or is, getting better in OpenStack. And I’ll probably slip a Node or Python blog in there too. Longer term, I want to delve into the cloud APIs and talk about cloud and pricing, but that is further down the road.

Short term, I’ll sing the praises of VirtualBox by Oracle. If you have a quick-n-dirty virtualization project, check it out. Up and running in no time, and far fewer management/administration headaches than a full-on virtualization system. Sure, it’s designed mostly for desktop use, but it’s very good at what it does.