Looking for the next challenge

A lot of activity to report in the first two months of 2025:

  • I started VnV DevOps in January to focus on DevOps and IT Service Management consulting. I post on LinkedIn to boost the VnV DevOps brand. I have things in the pipeline that will take time to develop, but the runway is set up to accelerate.
  • As part of VnV DevOps, I have started advising college students on the best ways to grab internships and co-ops. In 2025, most companies around the world want you to live within a 50-mile radius of an office. If you are in college and would like to talk, click on this link and set up a complimentary 30-minute session with me to discuss your next steps.
  • I volunteer with Pathful to help K-12 kids understand the benefits of a Computer Science degree and a career in DevOps Engineering. I also visit my wife’s school, Harmony Public Schools, to talk to her AP Computer Science Principles class about careers in Software Engineering and DevOps Engineering.
  • I signed up with fora.travel in February to become a Travel Advisor. I am still going through training, but I love to travel. More importantly, I love to plan travel trips for other people.
  • As of February, I am an Advisory Board Member at Houston Christian University for their Strategic AI program. As you know, I love to learn, so I am also taking the online course. The Advisor role is voluntary and is for a one-year term. This will help me understand how to help my next company tackle AI.
  • Perhaps, in a moment of weakness, I decided to sign up as an Uber driver. Now, some of you will say, why? Well, I live in the Greater Houston area, and I have had MANY friends and acquaintances ask me for rides with the offer to pay. Houston is extremely spread out, and to go from Katy to any airport takes over 45 minutes on a good day. Well, why not put two and two together and actually sign up? So, I did!
  • Is anyone interested in generating passive income? I have worked with Life Success & Legacy since 2019, and I am so glad I am a client.

I am still out searching for a Director or Sr. Director role in DevOps and IT Service Management. These things take time and I understand that better than anyone. It doesn’t mean I have to stop living and learning.

DevOps Talks week of Feb 17-21

There were lots of webinars this week in the DevOps space. I am still pushing VnV DevOps for DevOps and IT Service Management consulting. This week, while still pushing forward, I paused to attend several webinars from TechStrong and Cloud Canaries. Part 3 in the “Friends” series from OpenText talked about “the one where automation gets ship done” and another webinar about an Edge AI success story around Sports Analytics. I love the Friends series because I really like what OpenText and Don Jackson (Field CTO, OpenText) is doing in his space around really linking the DevOps Infinity Loop together and minimizing the touchpoints or approvals required in the pipelines. For Edge AI, Latent AI has joined forces with FSP to unveil a unique use case for moving AI processing from the cloud to the edge.

Cloud Canaries (Mark Callahan and Helen Beals) spoke about observability and how Open Telemetry and Agentic AI can help. Their product, Cloud Canaries, allows you to deploy canaries to strengthen observability and monitoring. Two focal points from Mark were bringing a low-cost solution to the table and providing an agentic AI solution around monitoring and observability. Do I really have to learn something new, and can I remove some the old stuff? Agents allow you to “take over” other solutions. So, eventually, a roll-up of solutions could be on tap.

(Courtesy: Cloud Canaries)

Cloud Canaries works with DataBricks and Snowflake to connect to ML AI tools. They also have their own neural network to use for a price. For forecasting, we generally look for events, not deploys or releases. A ticketing system like ServiceNow can be notified. The workflow for that canary can be displayed in the dashboard in order to determine whether the “learning” is correct or if that “learning” needs to be modified.

In 2025, autonomous remediation with low-cost tooling will be the calling for cloud service users and application developers. Increasing observability and monitoring will be part of the equation.

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