Scott Lowe leaves VMware for Heptio
Transcript
[Music] hey house one is Keith Townsend from the CTO advisor calm with another CCO dose from the show floor or Interop ITX I have with me Scott Lowell a hip deal yep h EP t aisle yep and that's calm to get to the roof yeah yep yep teo calm if you want to visit the website okay so Scott we're gonna get right into it you you are extremely well known in a virtualization community a lot of us have grown up on mastering vSphere well was that
you ready to fill about 5.5 mastering bees for for master vSphere 5 and then at the five five series I can hand it off right other speak so I have the book on the shelf I when I did virtualized geek with that I I read I was like one of my first waffles reviewing the five out old book so you you've made a pretty good career out of virtualization yep yeah now you make this shift to hippie old completely I don't want to say completely different
technologies it's it's all Enterprise Ted but why did it change so you know over the last few years I had been telling folks that they needed to sort of move out of their their silo right you know I launched this podcast called the full stack journey podcast right and although the name you know is a bit controversial and has some certain connotations the idea being that look if you're down in the stack working on infrastructure II and you start moving up the stack if you're at
the top of the stack and you're looking only in applications you in Durst an infrastructure is working if you're a storage person you look at networking networking needs to look at compute compute needs to look at all of it you know you just need to mix it up you need to be sure to broaden your view stop being very very you know sort of myopic if you will about what you're looking at and kind of take a bigger picture look it's not just on premises it's
not just public cloud it's all this stuff and people need to start taking a more holistic view of all this right right and so challenging people to get out of their their comfort zones to learn something new to embrace them and developer workflows to these kind of things right and and and you saw that reflected in sort of my writing and my blog post where I was looking at some new technologies and you know you could use cloud native as a term if you wanted to
whatever that's right right but if it came to a point where I was like you know look I've been doing VMware stuff for 15 years right and you're right I've been very successful I'm very thankful for the opportunities I've had the people that I've met such as yourself and others right great great community right but I need to apply those lessons to my own career as well yeah you need to make sure the walking to talk right and you know and I've done that before right
now that myself on the back but to say you know look you need to push yourself and so I start embracing these other technologies but I needed to take a step out and say you know I've had a great successful career but I need to make sure that I am constantly challenging myself constantly moving on and when I looked at what could I do that would make sense I looked at the shape of what containers were doing to the industry how people are looking at containers
and how it's fundamentally altering how we develop software how we deploy software and then from that it kind of became obvious to me that the container runtimes a little too low right and I said I need to kind of move up above the container rent time and really look at container orchestration that is very application to where right and that's kind of where kubernetes falls in right yeah is doing this container orchestration and being away providing this sort of you know cloud provider agnostic infrastructure agnostic
api for developing and deploying distributed cognitive applications in the sense to me there's an argument that you can give developer kubernetes and the counters of kubernetes cluster he can just consume your infrastructure via kubernetes and make some incredibly portable and effective technologies a lot of past like features kubernetes in the past but a lot of pass like features in kubernetes so very powerful yes absolutely and i think that was what drew me there is saying you know this is a kind of platform that has the
kind of staying power and the kind of influence to really shape the industry and i think and maybe i'm you know thinking you're highly myself but i think that i've been effective in taking new technologies and helping it make more consumable by others like kind of bringing it down other people can begin to move on that journey as well so they felt like this was the right place for me to be i'm at the cusp of a big change we're gonna see in the industry i'm
able to help others consume help others on their journey and in so doing challenge myself and grow as well so there's no secret every technology company especially if you're a traditional technology company is odd that we're calling VMware a traditional car all right I like yeah virtualization I still remember my first V motion all right so that you know it's hard to believe we're talking VMware in these traditional senses but VMware is not sleep at the wheel when it comes to containers it's a different model
for them they're doing some good works but what did you see in hip do that made you think you know what - speaks I always say I've always said the VMware moves at the speed of the CIO which may not always be fast enough right what about hippy old made you say you know what these guys this startup call me from very calm person organizations and 55 maybe 60 at this point of the winners right organization what made you take the risk on take you right
right so there's a couple things one you know I approach this as the next sort of the next step in my career the next have my own personal development my own personal evolution my own journey right I hadn't done a start-up before and so it's pretty pretty determined I want to go to an early-stage relatively restage startup I mean hep D has done series B so we're not super early but early enough 60 people I want to do an early startup because I feel like there's
important lessons that I can learn they're not only in how I handle things and how I work in a fast-paced environment but how I can help others how I can improve my own skills as a leader not a manager but that's a leader right right those ones of things and so it was important for me to make sure that I that I did do that right so that's part of it um second part of it was the pedigree of the people who were there right founded
by Craig McKee and Joe bata who came out of Google who were two of the folks who launched kubernetes while they're at Google amazing collection of folks who have experienced across cloud native technologies and their press technologies including you know former kubernetes operators who were operating kubernetes clusters at their own organization before coming on board there's just a wealth of experience and I felt like this was a great place where I could go bring my own unique skill set right that I've cultivated over the last
you know 20 years and do whatever and then also learn from them while also sharing that information do that so couple different things that kind of Drew me there finally the last thing was and I know some marketing person in Seattle is gonna be super happy when I say this but when I when I kind of cast out or like I think you burn Eddie's is the right place for me to be what company seems synonymous to kubernetes with me and it actually was hep to
you all right so it's gotta love to keep you all day talking about careers we've done presentations don't like the the need to step out and do something different we're both I think doing something different I'm doing the CTO advisor full time I know I've made a huge career move so we're both were both faithful so praying for you absol I quess all right until then until the next time I talk to you follow me on the web at CCO visor as if you don't know
what if I will Scott it Scott so on twitter at scott underscore lo or my website blog dot Scott loaded or talk to you next CTO DOS
