Having Fun with Marketing Fluff

Imagine you could walk up to someone and know their soul. Imagine they could know yours. To some extent, we all have a thirst to be able to get to the quintessence of someone or something like this, but I realized today that there are two breeds of people that especially seek this: yoga practitioners and techies. For me this is an interesting common ground…

Living in Silicon Valley with lots of yogis and techies, and falling into both categories myself, I realized that the hardcore folks of either category have something in common indeed. They tend to have a low tolerance and appreciation for marketing, and quickly want to get to the underlying truth. Working in marketing for the last few years and having done a panel session on marketing OpenStack yesterday, this is even more interesting to me, but let me come back to that. First, let me step back and explain this coincidence.

Hardcore techies – There’s little patience for the sales pitch, messaging or the value proposition because these folks pride themselves on scientific skepticism and understanding the details. They’re keen to physically or logically dissect and reassemble technology. They don’t associate their job and work value with their organizational brand and commercial success, but rather with the speeds and feeds, features and functions, and technological progress.

Hardcore yogis – Although most of them have a physical asana practice, life is an inside job for the hardcore yogi. The heart of the practice is one of noticing ebb and flow in participation in the life that is given with care and without judgement, resistance or attachment. This is not about gymnastic ability, striking the perfect pose, an idyllic beach setting for the yoga shala, nor the latest style of Lululemon.

Both of these personalities desire the truth, and both of them alike often snub marketing and branding as a veil or an illusory distraction from the truth they represent.

On one hand, I concede that buying into anything based on its marketing is a precarious undertaking because there’s obviously a lot inauthenticity out there. I’ll also add that sensationalized and adamant unpermissive promotion really can mar a product or cause, especially for those of us that are not ever-hungry oblivious consumers.

On the other hand, I have a lot of respect for authentic marketers. Thinking about the way you’re seen in the world matters in practice because it is your interface to the environment. No one has the ability to see the soul of a person straight away, nor can anyone fully determine all the facets of a product or service in an instant. This is why marketing identity and branding matters. Marketing is innate to interaction and nature.

“Marketing is innate to interaction and nature.”

Just as the bee notices a flower in part because of its beauty in color and aroma, we also make decisions based upon, not just logic, but also how inviting something is from psychological and sensory perspectives.

If you’ve ever thought that marketing is fluff or inconsequential, the core truth is that you’re right. It is not the essence of a thing or a being. However, occupying a universe of duality and matter, everything has a perspective and an interface, everything shows up somehow, some way. In this world, impression and influence do matter. Just like the yogi participates in the dance of life for the wonder of it all, so you should participate in meaningful marketing and have fun with it all.

*Random Footnote: Interesting how today “software” more than “hardware” is really becoming the core practice in both of these areas of tech and yoga.

Getting to GIFEE with SDN: Demo

A few short years ago, espousing for open source and cloud computing was even more difficult than touting the importance of clean energy and the realities of climate change. The doubters and naysayers, vocal as they are, are full of reasons why things are (fine) as they are. Reasons, however, don’t get you results. We needed transformative action in IT, and today, as we’re right between the Google NEXT event and the OpenStack Summit in Austin, open source and cloud are the norm for the majority.

After pausing for a moment of vindication – we told you so – we get back to work to improve further and look forward, and a good place to look is indeed at Google: a technology trailblazer by sheer necessity. We heard a lot about the GCP at NEXT, especially their open source project Kubernetes, powering GKE. What’s most exciting about such container-based computing with Docker is that we’ve finally hit the sweet spot in the stack with the right abstractions for developers and infrastructure & ops pros. With this innovation now accessible to all in the Kubernetes project, Google’s infrastructure for everyone else (#GIFEE) and NoOps is within reach. Best of all, the change this time around is less transformative and more incremental…

One thing you’ll like about a serverless architecture stack like Kubernetes, is that you can run it on bare-metal if you want the best performance possible, but you can easily run it on top of IaaS providing VMs in public or private cloud, and that benefits us with a great deal of flexibility in so many ways. Then of course if you just want to deploy workloads, and not worry about the stack, an aaS offering like GKE or ECS is a great way to get to NoOps faster. We have a level playing field across public and private and a variety of underpinnings.

For those that are not only using a public micro-service stack aaS offering like GKE, but supplementing or fully building one internally with Kubernetes or a PaaS on top of it like OpenShift, you’ll need some support. Just like you didn’t build an OpenStack IaaS by yourself (I hope), there’s no reason to go it alone for your serverless architecture micro-services stack. There’s many parts under the hood, and one of them you need baked into your stack from the get go is software-defined secure networking. It was a pleasure to get back in touch with my developer roots and put together a demo of how you can solve your networking and security microsegmentation challenges using OpenContrail.

I’ve taken the test setup for OpenContrail with OpenShift, and forked and modified it to create a pure demo cluster of OpenContrail + OpenShift (thus including Kubernetes) showing off the OpenContrail features with Kubernetes and OpenShift. If you learn by doing like me, then maybe best of all, this demo cluster is also open source and Ansible-automated to easily stand up or tear down on AWS with just a few commands to go from nada to a running OpenShift and OpenContrail consoles with a running sample app. Enjoy getting your hands dirty, or sit back and watch demo video.

Those that want to replicate the demo. Here's the link I mentioned in the video: https://github.com/jameskellynet/container-networking-ansible

Automation is Killing the Knowledge Economy

Still standing at the top of 2016 for only a few more hours, January that is, I’m compelled to follow-up on my outlook on the rise of IoT and setting of the Information Age, with a forecast on the nearer-term workings of automation to slay the knowledge economy as we know it.

The push towards technological automation has allowed us do to more with less. Working in technology, I sell this vision to our customers everyday: better scale, more agility, go faster, spend less OpEx, etc. To be sure, automation has been a boon to business and consumers for a long-time, but it has also been a treacherous progress.

We have long-since been educated on the automation-caused job loss and redundancy to laborers in the manufacturing sector. Closer to home, you may have recently started seeing self-serve queues at your grocery stores. Okay you don’t work in a grocery store. It’s too bad for those poor clerks, but at least you’re safe. You have a university degree, expertise and experience. You work smart, not hard. You’ll be fine. Right?

Wrong! Today’s knowledge worker is dead. Many industries are already disrupted, and if yours isn’t already, it will be.

“Today’s knowledge worker is dead.”

I’m not talking about automation here in the form of robotics and the physical. Sure we’ve all heard about that dystopian future where robots do everything. Look already at the self-driving cars, or drones now that can deliver your mail, parcels and even coffee. That and more, is all coming too. But what I believe most people don’t imagine, is the redundancy that will soon be created in so-called desk and office jobs.

A good desk job in a nice glass tower and the honor of a white collar (maybe not in Silicon Valley) has been the reward of the knowledge worker for a long time. Today, automation is affecting these people too. However, a lot of these people are also shielded from the blade of automation. Why?

Let me briefly examine people that work in technology, as I do, as an example. A person goes to school to study computer systems, science and engineering, and out comes the quintessential knowledge worker in this space, the “geek” whatever the actual job title. Of those that go on to work closely with technology, in my mind, there are two kinds of these people: technologists and technicians. Sure, knowledge is critical to both of these types, but to the technician it is paramount. The technician is an administrator, operator, and integrator; thus, the technician’s job depends on their expertise and ability. The technologist, however, is a creator, an engineer of the technology that the technician will use.

Understanding the key difference between the technician and the technologist reveals something very important: knowledge alone is increasingly not enough. How can you immunize yourself against automation’s assail?

“How can you immunize yourself against automation’s assail?”

When automation has reduced the value of knowledge, expertise and ability, the prime determinant of success will be creativity. The technologist is a creator. Naturally, as for all creators, even artists, creativity must be used in service of skill and in the context of expertise. Yes, you still need to go to school to amass all of that knowledge and gain expertise and experience, but now you also need more.

This is why Google recruiters look for what they call “smart-creatives.” That’s why a lot of technical and non-technical desk jobs, the ones where you’re required to be creative, cannot be automated.

Now, is the time to practice being creative. Now is the time to align our education system for this creative future because automation is slowly killing the knowledge economy. Automation is wonderful and wicked, but I know such challenges it will cause, can be overcome with a creative solution.