Cloud Engineer Job Training | Linux for Cloud Computing (Cloud Engineer Career Development)
Welcome everyone, it's Mike Gibbs and I'm The founder and CEO of go cloud careers, and we're here for another episode of the head in the clouds podcast. You know, in tonight's episode, I'm going to introduce people when they talk about a cloud architect versus a cloud engineer, we're definitely going to talk about cloud engineer training and building the world's greatest cloud engineers will will cover some tech career guidance. And if you have questions you can ask, if you want to know about a cloud engineer career, or cloud engineer career development, or even a cloud architect job after the discussion, please ask. We'll talk about cloud engineer interview training and cloud engineer presentation skills. And we'll even talk about hybrid cloud training. Because in today's world, it's all going to be hybrid cloud versus multi cloud. And but today's things we have a very special
night, we actually have an instructor from our cloud engineering program, and we'll introduce him soon. His name is Nathan curry, we stole him from Red Hat. Because when it comes to building cloud engineers, you need to know Linux, whether it's Linux for cloud computing, or Linux, for cloud engineers, or Linux, for beginners, Linux is one of the most critical skills for the cloud engineer. And here's why the cloud is built upon Linux, all the world's biggest servers are on Linux, and everything you do is gonna be on Linux. So
you got to know the Linux and because of that, we went to extremes. We went and hired an architect from Red Hat, someone that has 21 certifications from Red Hat, and worked at Red Hat, and we still them to teach Linux. So what's gonna happen is, first you'll hear from Elonzo Coleman, you know, Elonzo, he's my brother. He's here every week. And you know, Chris, he's my Chief Operating Officer. So I'll let those two introduce themselves.
And then we'll bring in Nathan, and I'm really excited to bring in Nathan, Charles here, cloud hired. Yeah, if you're all here, if you give me a hashtag cloud hired, give me a hashtag what your career would be either a hashtag cloud engineer, hashtag cloud architect, or some other career, let us know. And also let us know where you're from chatbox. So, Elonzo, you want to introduce yourself in this week, since nobody sees? Yeah, well, definitely. With my great friends and colleagues here, Mike and Chris, just always excited to be here. My name is Alonzo Coleman. I'm a good friend and brother. It's
just like my family of Mike Gibbs, and a great friend, Chris Johnson. We all work together synchronously. It's just a wonderful thing to be here every day, every week. And with these podcasts as we keep continuing to keep rolling and growing. I just love spending time with everyone here. So right over to you, Chris.
I'm in the middle of trying to make things happen here. You can't throw it to me that fast. All right. Oh, the man, we know how skilled you are. So I know you can handle. I'm suave. I think that's how you say it. But I want to Yeah, so I'm happy to be here. This is an exciting one, I was telling the guys behind the scenes that I think I I actually kind of get to sit back and relax, and let them drive the conversation this week. So that's gonna be fun for me. So I don't, I
don't have to do too much work. But before we move on, I do want to make sure to make everyone aware of a couple of things that we've got going on. So Mike usually gets to do this. So I'm excited, I get to do it this time. So first of all, I want to make sure that everybody votes for your next bootcamp, whether it's going to be Azure or GCP. And since I'm multitasking here, let me put this, let me put this link in the chat box. Unless
somebody else beat me to it. But there we go. So make sure you vote on the next bootcamp, we're gonna be doing one within another month or so. And it's going to be there Azure or GCP. So vote now and make sure your voice is heard. So the next thing I want to bring
up is that we had our first class, first live class of our cloud engineer Career Development Program, which officially launched on May 1. And we've decided to extend our presale discount, although I have not updated it to get rid of the pre sale, where it's, we've extended our 50% discount on our cloud engineer career development program. So I'm going to put the link for that in our chat box as well. But those are the two things that I wanted to bring up before moving on. So I'll tell ya, so let's go that one bit. One
more thing. You know, Chris sent me on vacation last week. He said you need a day off. So he sent me on vacation. I was on vacation. I said, we need to cut it continue this discount for a little bit longer. I want more cloud engineers and when we launched that first cloud engineer course today. Oh, it was so wonderful. We got to meet so many wonderful
people from all over the world and we're so excited. So yeah, I took three days off and decided We have to make this accessible to some more people. So 50% off, please, if you're looking for a cloud engineering career, and now is your time, our cloud architect program is great. And if you want to be a cloud architect, we get somebody cloud hired every day of the week. Every day you can see from coyote the other day, he never worked in tech. And now he's working in tech working for AWS, because we get our people caught, hired. The whole
world focus on certifications, I don't care about certifications, I care that everybody that enters, go cloud careers, leaves with a six figure job, and they're happy. That's all that I care about. If we do that we do our jobs. Anybody can get you certified. But it's something special to build you a career. And that's all of our focus. How do we help
you build your best life? So let's bring in Nathan, Nathan curry. And you can see he's gonna be a rock solid engineer, looks, walks and talks just like a techie. And let me tell you, we are so excited to have Nathan as part of our program. He adds so much technical depth, I'm thrilled to have let's bring Nathan. Yeah, so we're gonna bring Nathan in. And I'm gonna leave because my camera's acting up. I'll be right back. Hi, guys. Nathan,
I walk slightly better than your average techie. I'm a good Walker. But yeah, so I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to like, I love Linux. I want more people to be good at Linux, because it's my favorite operating system. It's super exciting technology. It's very powerful. You
get to you can do, you can accomplish anything you want to with Linux. And so I don't know, I'm, I'm, I'm excited. I'm excited to and Nathan, one of these days, I'm going to bring it in my house. We're going to take my third entree, sorry, 64 core threadripper system. And we're going to turn that into my normal desktop. I just need somebody that can expertly and expertly make OBS work and make all the drivers working because that you know, would you let me play that piano? Yeah, why not? Every week it's good. It's it's it's a beautiful piano. You know,
it's a Nathan's been in my martial house. And he knows that this room is a martial art studio. This room has 30 computers in it. But you know, I really do love the virtual background. Let's now talk about the workout in the garage, the gym. Yeah, so you know, Colleen, we are thrilled to have you Kelly joined our class today. It was his first day he signed up five minutes
before class and he participated. It was wonderful. So Nathan, you've been working with Linux for forever, right? I've been. I mean, it's close to 20 years that I've been I that I started tinkering with it. I've been, I mean, I started at Red Hat about four years ago and left red hat a little like about a year ago. And so I've been kind of I've been, you know, I mean, Linux has been been like I've I've used it as primarily as my primary desktop for a long time. But like my, my 100% immersion in Linux
started about four years ago, which was a huge break, for me very exciting. Because it was something that I always wanted to do was stop working on Windows. But yeah, but is, you know, like 15 to 20 years, I think, in that range.
That's a long time. I remember back in 2000, I tried using a redhead desktop permanently. And then I'll Henry from I want to get to you in a second. But I use the red hat thing. And I tried to run VMware on my single core, like one and a half gigahertz notebook to run Microsoft Visio. And ultimately, I said, No, this can't work. But now we've reached the new thing. So working at Red Hat, you get access to all kinds of training, right. I got access to tons of training. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Like, if anybody hasn't looked at it yet. I mean, they they provide. I mean, you can do like they have training,
training that goes along with their certifications. And then they have some additional training and stuff. And so I mean, I just took advantage while I was there and got my our HCA some of the Red Hat Certified architect. I think it's, I think it was 11 certs total. I mean, I took a lot of a lot of training. And, and I worked on OpenStack. So, you know, a private
cloud. And so it's like I really learned a lot about how all of that technology works out how it all goes together, how you build a cloud. And I was on the enhanced support team. So we worked with a lot of like telco clients and things like people who needed Fast turnarounds and stuff. And so and some, and a lot of those clients had like, really, really big clouds. And I got to work with a lot of talented people on the on, on the client client side as well, those people really, really knew what they were doing. And so I
got to see a lot of how how people, you know, architect do change controls on on on the on such huge environments, you know, people with like, you know, 500 to 1000, compute nodes that are split up among, among different environments, how they maintain, like, consistency between their environments, how they, how they test, and all those things like that. So it was, I mean, it was a fantastic experience. Like another great thing about about Red Hat, I have a lot of good things to say about Red Hat. But But I think it's my my second favorite thing about Red Hat, I would say, aside from just getting to dig into whatever is the like, it's, I mean, it's a very open organization. And so, you know, you, if you ever had a had a question for anybody, you could, you could reach out to them, so they like, and, and, and especially working on OpenStack, which is a very vertically integrated technology.
You have, you know, it's built on the operating system relies on the networking stack. And so it's like, I would, you know, it's like, if I needed, needed help with networking, you could reach out to these people who really, really know that networking all the way down to the kernel level, to the hardware level, know how that stuff works. I could, you know, talk to people that that, you know, their entire week worked on just like Linux services or worked on, on storage, you know, and so it's like, I, I've got, like, some of the rabbit holes, I went really far down a lot of them. I mean, there was, like, there's never enough time to learn learn everything, right. But, but, but it's like, it really gave me the opportunity to see how all of those things fit together to build the platform that the cloud is on. And of course, something like AWS, Azure, all these things are there. They're, of course, they're different from OpenStack. But but it's they're they're, they're
built using the same technologies. You know, they might be using a different hypervisor, they might be using, you know, different software for each individual piece. But it's like the way the way that it's stuck together, the way that that people have built these clouds, it's, it's relatively similar across the different platforms. So let's actually for the rest of the world, that's not super familiar with OpenStack versus OpenShift. Let me define it. OpenStack is a is a red hat based open source cloud platform.
It is run by everybody. American Express had at GE had it for a little while American Airlines runs it. Everybody that's anybody runs an OpenStack cloud inside of their data center. The OpenStack. Cloud gives all the features functionality, auto scaling, everything that you get in the cloud, but it leverages the organization's previous investments in technology. A cloud is nothing more than a network in a data center that's got a control plane that orchestrates where the stuff is, and it's been virtualized, that's it. And OpenStack
is like Nutanix. But OpenStack is for the smart people, it's hard to use, you have to be a Linux Guruji to actually figure it out. Whereas Nutanix is beautiful. Click Click, click here, and you built your own hybrid cloud. And we love Nutanix. And we love OpenStack open ship, by the way, which Nathan also knows, is the Red Hat standard of Kubernetes. So
when Nathan's coming from Red Hat, and we're talking building clouds, he's talking about building a cloud in the data center, and connecting that cloud to two or more public clouds. And we'll go back to Nathan and not but I wanted to make sure that by the way, I don't have any students in my cloud architect or cloud engineering program that don't build their own cloud. Because when everybody else goes in a job interview and says, Hey, I turned on a virtual machine, and they don't even know what's the virtual machine going to call it an easy to instance, you can say I built the cloud. Tell me what makes you more knowledgeable on the cloud design and build your own cloud or click two buttons on on something. So there's
that. So going back to keep talking about what you learned about OpenStack. And you know, you have to setup the networking and storage of Chris, you have a question. So, I think I think we got a clarification here. Aside from the fact that Mike just threw out a truth bomb about you gotta be smart to do this. I'll ask OpenStack is a red hat product. Alright. Well, there, there is a so there's a I mean, the OpenStack foundation so it's It's a it's an open kind of an open source Alliance. OpenStack
originally came from like it was developed by Rackspace and NASA. Red Hat has what it's like the official name is Red Hat OpenStack platform. It's a specific distribution of OpenStack. Like Ubuntu has a distribution of OpenStack as well, the Red Hat one is is kind of geared towards, like a lot of Red Hat stuff. It's geared towards big enterprise.
It's why IBM was interested in and Red Hat is it's things when you need real muscle and real configurability, like the Red Hat OpenStack stuff. The deployment and management is very, very robust. It is a, it's a huge headache at times, but it is really, really very, it's a very robust distribution of OpenStack. And then I wanted to make sure we well, and Red Hat is is one of, you know, one of the major contributors to the like, all of the open source OpenStack projects, which I mean, it's, I mean, actually, true of like, all of the things that Red Hat works on it's like their their model is is is they commit any any any fixes they make to their software, they commit upstream to the community. So to me, it's a very, it is a nice model. One of the good things about that, you know,
if you I mean, if you're getting into Linux at all is because it's open source, you can see, you can see the source code, one of the good things about that, is that you can, you can see engineers talking about the source code, you can go on Red Hat, like the Red Hat's Bugzilla page and see conversations about bugs. Some of the comments are private, because there's a customer information or stuff about like vulnerabilities, but you can still go in there and see a lot, a lot of discussion. You can go on on I think it's open dev.org Is the OpenStack where they do the like change control rather than GitHub. And so you can see there discussions about bugs and things like that. So it's, I mean, everything's open, and you can really, you can, there's everything is very, very well documented. And so you know, if you'd like if you're trying to get into this world, you can, if you find something that you're interested in, I mean, it maybe it's not OpenStack, maybe it's something else, but any sort of open open source project, you can see very, very talented people talking about about something that you're passionate about. It's it is really
cool. It really is, but you know, some for the for the cloud architect and training or the cloud engineer with us dealing with Linux skills, you know, tell them the difference between an Enterprise Linux versus just your average freeware Linux? And why might an organization be interested in an Enterprise Linux for their enterprise? As opposed to the freeware stuff, given that it's pretty expensive? Well, it is. I mean, of course, so. So number one, the kind of obvious answer is support. There's, you know, there's tons to know. And so let me like I said, when I was working at Red Hat, they had things there was, you know, the network experts, where it's all day, everyday networking, all day, everywhere, every day. OpenStack. So it's like, if you're
a cloud architect, or a cloud engineer, you may be working at a place and they'll say, you know, whoever your project manager, product manager, some boss of yours, will say, hey, we need you to install X thing, we want to test this out and see how this works. And so you get thrown into, into a situation where it's like, you know, it's learn this software, you know, get make it actually enterprise ready. And so, like a company will oftentimes, you know, like, you get the, those Red Hat licenses and then that allows them, you like you get support from a very, very broad range of people. So that's the the very obvious one. The other one is that the way Red Hat develops their software is you know, they have these upstream projects. So these community projects where people can can get it for free and download it. That's more likely Leading Edge. So those are those are new, it's a newer
software. That is, you know, it's it's not as unstable as like beta software. But it is new. And you'll run into these bugs, what what what Red Hat will do is they will for each release, so you say like Red Hat eight comes out. Or like 8.1, right 8.1 comes out, and then they they set the, the package versions, they'll, they grab a package version for upstream, test it all together, like so the like, all of the every single package that Red Hat includes in their operating system, we're talking in terms of products, there's, there's OpenStack, OpenShift, Sef, which is storage, right? There's, there's like they have a J boss server, they have all these different things, right? All of that stuff is is tested together to a certain standard. And of course, things get through, get, do get through slip through the cracks
from time to time. But you know, what they've done is they've frozen the version made sure that everything works together. And then during, during that 8.1 release, they will they apply bug fixes, then, you know, at that time, you know, since since technology is always progressing, and you always need like newer things, they're planning for the 8.2 release, the 8.2 release
comes out. And then there, there are new fixes and, and possibly new features for certain things. So there's a I mean, an incredibly robust, and this is something that is not like, not part of my specialty. I'm not like a software engineer, I talk to some of the software engineers there. They're brilliant and insane people. And but, you know, there's
a I mean, it's just a very robust system, like, of testing and making sure everything is stable. And and that, you know, you know, for sure that you're getting a good product. And like, I can't speak specifically to the degree that Ubuntu does it, but eventually does the L. lts. Yeah, long term support version, which is, which isn't I mean, in the cloud, that's, I think the number one distribution for Linux. It's right, because it's free, but it but it is, it is good. It's recognized as being good.
Until it breaks and you've got nobody to call. Right. Right. Right. Well, and some of the cloud, it's free, it breaks and there's nobody to fix it for you. Well, and it is, I mean, they do sell some support. And I looked at their like, you know,
they have their distribution of OpenStack. And their support is, like astronomically cheaper than the Red Hat stuff. Yeah. And yeah, and yet people do get the Red Hat stuff, because it is, you know, when it's mission critical, you know, I mean, you think, something like a bank, or or like a cell phone provider, or a payment processor, like how, like, How long could your credit card, the credit cards in a city stop working, or the cell phones stop working in a city before? Before it's like bad for the company. There's no Windows servers out there. Look, I love windows. It's an incredible operating system. And the reason it's incredible is it managed to work on a whole bunch of hardware and software combinations, which nothing else can do. But because it works on a million
in one hardware and software combinations, the drivers are challenging. And that's why Windows isn't very stable, or very secure. So other than Active Directory, and Microsoft Exchange, for the most part, Windows is a desktop user operating system. And there are no more Windows servers. But I do want to bring in one quick thing on it's pretty critical came in from colleague, colleague, a cloud architect can never work as a cloud engineer. If the cloud engineer goes and works on the cloud architects helps the cut engineering team, they will make such major architecture court major mistakes, that they will be fired from the job and never horrible again. So colleagues, I say this to the architects,
if you imagine looking out at the sky tonight, and you look at the moon and the stars and all of it, and then you take a telescope and you zoom into the moon, you can't see the sky. The engineer has to be zoomed in the architect has to be zoomed out. The second an architect tries to be an engineer, they are a disaster. Plus the architects don't know the engineering skills, they don't know how to configure things so they can't do it. So more. It's like the other way colleague. We caught architects ask the cut engineers how to help us do the job because they're the technical people were the business executives.
So we consult and communicate with the engineers but we can't do their job. We have no idea how to do their job. It's like a doctor trying to Say how a nurse for the day they don't know how, right nurse doesn't have to be a doctor and a doctor isn't helping a nurse or different careers. I mean, it's even like, I mean, when I was
in the, in the, in the the pre previous, the previous call with you, you said something similar is that like, I mean it's it's like you think of like an architect and an engineer for houses, the architect designs the house and then the engineer is the one who implements it and makes sure that the the roof doesn't fall down. Exactly. So is there they are different. There are different skill sets. They're both very important. And but it's like you don't, you don't you don't you don't there's a reason why there's the why they're typically split. There are very few people, very few people who have who like are, have the have the inclination to or capacity to really excel at both variables. The skill set is so different. You know, I was an engineer, I'm an architect, what do I do, I do ROI modeling. I buy dinners and drinks, I take people out and entertain them. I give presentations, I write magazine
articles. And I lead large groups engineers, so do as an architect, what's a cloud engineer do build everything that I designed and helped me make sure that what I designed is actually going to work. And I'm not just selling PowerPoint slides, because that's what we architects will do. We are business executives, we get a quota. We're great at selling our products and solutions. But that's our world. architects design things. Engineers build it and also fix it and make sure it works. So you know, the building architect the cause the structural engineer to make sure the building doesn't collapse. Yeah. Same thing here. So it can't
go the other way. It has to be this way. So getting back to the OpenStack cloud, which is a, which is a private cloud. You know, I love that. And I love all the things you're doing. So what kind of clients? What kind of customers use OpenStack? Everybody? Right? I mean, it's it is? It is pretty much everybody. I mean, it's like the the reasons to use OpenStack
over something like AWS is. I mean, one is, is there are people who, you know, they already have the datacenter investment, right, and so then that's a way to repurpose these monolithic servers into something a little bit more flexible. It's a, it gives you more flexibility, like you have a, like 100% control over an OpenStack deployment. So if you need if you need something
very specific, you would you would use OpenStack. If you need if you need like very specific, like performance, very high performance, you have, you have total control over that. And I know that you know that there are specialized services with with, you know, with AWS and whatever, where it's like, you know, they provide more specific hardware, right, or some GPU or some high throughput. network cards, right? We'll call that high throughput, but it's nothing like the performance we can do in the data center. Well, right. Right. And so I mean, like, and also the those
those things are, are, of course, like they're expensive. And so if you know if somebody needs high throughput, flexibility, control over their environment, higher security, higher, higher security, or and or very specific security, right? It's, you know, and I think, you know, one of the reasons to not use OpenStack. And this might mean is another way, another way to see what the difference is, is that if you know, if you have like if you have a small web application, or I need a couple servers, you don't need like to do a an enterprise level OpenStack thing you what you would need is you need data center level electric was to, you know, to allow companies to what do you call it, transformers to generators, generators and ups. So you don't have a power fair like, oh, by the way, AWS had a power
failure, and it took down the whole globe, right, every data center that has a power failure, Nathan, have you ever seen one might not know, other than Amazon, either either gave us an interesting information or doesn't know how to build a data center or was it well and I mean, and I would say that that like, I mean, even then, then then once you get past just the building, right the building and all the cables, then then for a production level OpenStack deployment, you need three controllers, which just do the control plane, and those need to be relatively beefy. You know, they're, they're not you, they can't run on Raspberry Pi's, right? They're real computers. And then you need, then you need it, like, you need compute. If you want high availability you need, you need minimum to compute you probably, like, and that is, that's cutting it incredibly close. And at that point, you're like, okay, so So, and like the error correcting RAM, all those other things? Like, what is that investment? I mean, it's, it's a ton of money, I don't know, computers alone, it's going to be what, like, 50 grand, you know, yeah. But you know, that's the thing, people don't get it. If in my OpenStack cloud, which is a data center, if I want to hire Navy SEALs,
Israeli commandos and SS commanders to physically guarded, being armed. And if I want to have two sets of firewalls, I can do it, I can use whatever IDS, IPS systems I want, right? I can wire to access control lists, which I can't do in the cloud, I can do MAC address authentication, I can do QoS, I have much more capabilities in the data center the cloud, right, I can get double the performance, I can take one server and put an NVMe RAID array instead of using block storage, and keep it a bare metal server and this thing can have millions IoT s can't do that on the cloud. So I mean, more control much more secured. One, and even so so I mean, like one of the more interesting things with with OpenStack is like edge computing, where we're what they'll do is, is you have a cluster that has an availability zone that is like, I mean, if you if you say like take like a, a, a cell phone provider, they'll have a micro cluster, in the antenna building. And that allows, so when like when you're on your cell phone, and you're using something, some app, that that hat needs, it needs to hit a special service, they can just host that service directly in that antenna building. So that it so that it doesn't have to make all these hops. And, and I, you know, and I'm not an expert on the, the like, the the telephony infrastructure, but I do know, like, I have had it explained to me and it's, it's, it's, it's the path, if you if you have to go to like a central location, hit the tower, you have to go around something like a token ring, possibly a couple, a couple rings, where you have, like, five milliseconds each hop, you know, and so so so you end up shaving off like half a second to latency by putting these things in, in the in the towers, you can't do that with AWS, because it's going to be in obviously, Amazon's let's, let's talk about why the need for edge computing exists. If we're in the data center, for the most part, we don't need edge computing. There's no point. The whole point of the edge is this here. We're in our data center. It's
fast, and it performs gray. Now we've got 1500 miles to AWS. Oh, wait, there's latency. So we get a connection between our data center, and some other data center that's close, and then we connect that to the cloud. So that's really the reality. The reality is the all this edge computing is trying to work around the poor performance of the cloud. I mean, it's internet. And it's also just, it's also just, I mean, physics, I mean, you
have the the, the, the physical differences, distances, and I mean, and like, I know, like GCP has, has some, you know, more or less similar things conceptually, where they they'll have, you know, they have entry points into their private networks in say, like Europe and like these different locations. And you can, you can, you can like shave off milliseconds by going into an entry point that is closer to you rather than bouncing around the globe, because they've, they've shortened the cables. I don't know, I don't know what they did. How that works, but I also want to dress to drill. Most engineers are hidden from the customer, unless they are sales engineers, which are really architects, sales engineers actually do the architect job they design the present and sell and never touch the technology.
So sales engineers are architects at a different name. So our design engineers would they designed it in the no touch the technology. Now, there are some engineers that are customer facing. They're usually consulting engineers, but very rare. Most companies try and keep their engineers from speaking to the customers, and they try and send their architects to speak to the customer because the engineers often killed the deals. The architects talking
about business and leadership and that engineer wants to go in there and talk talk, talk, talk, talk talk, you just you just said everything that we said, we just said, we just had an entire conversation at the chatbox. So the majority of this, I also want to address real quick, our mighty asked the question, which limits for cloud architects, no Linux certifications for cloud architects out money, if you want to be a cut engineer hands on Linux is good. But if you want to be an architect, you've got to Linux certification, I'm going to recommend you remove it from your resume when you would apply for architect jobs. Because it's two hands on hands on hands on, you need
bigger stuff. So that would be what I would recommend our lady. Yep. And I also took the opportunity while we were having the conversation in the chat box about engineers and the possibility of facing customers in certain roles. Obviously, it's dependent upon how your company is organized and operates. And that's one of the reasons why we included our soft skills in our engineer training. Because you never know if you might
take that role. We actually included for three reasons. And I want everybody to understand this Reason one, when you go on a job interview, do you know what 50% of your score is related to your competency and 50% are related attitude communications skills. So we teach the leadership skills to architects and engineers because it helps you get hired to soft skills training, on average can raise your salary 50 $60,000 per year and empathy training can add another $30,000 on a per average on year. So we can influence our salary upwards of $100,000 by teaching these skills. Here's the other reason. When I was an engineer and wanted to become an architect, my management said we don't allow engineers to become architects because you're too techie. So the next day I put on a suit, and people asked me tech
questions, and I pretended not to know anything for six months straight. I got $150,000 Raise after that wore a suit every day. And was that an architect by pretending not to know. So we have to and basically, I also spend about a quarter million dollars on business acumen skills and leadership skills and emotional intelligence. So we give that to all of our
engineers, architects so that if you want to leave engineering, go to architecture, you can, if you want to go to engineering into management, you can, if you want to go from engineering to a CEO or CTO position or CIO, you can. So we give everybody our special blend of leadership for those reasons, salary, higher ability and career flexibility, you don't want to be the person that's hidden in the back. Because like me tell you, there's $100,000 difference between not super genius engineer that stuck in the back and the one that doesn't know as much that's got better social skills. So we want you to have everything,
to get all the skills, I don't want you at the bottom. I want you to be wherever you want to be. You like being hands on tech. Great. I love that. You want hands on tech and you want to get paid more great. You want hands on tech? And when do you want to do pre sales? Great, I want to make sure you have the tools to do all the jobs, not just one. So I just want to point out that Alonzo and
I are thoroughly enjoying being window dressing. It's amazing. It's like we're not having to do anything except just sit back and enjoy and be part of the conversation over here in the chat box. Oh, so Bergson asked a very legitimate question, what do you do as a cloud engineer on Linux, everything. Every server you work with is going to be Linux. If you're building a cloud, it's going to be Linux. If you're writing a script, like a bash shell script is going to be Linux, chances are the python script you're gonna run are gonna be on Linux, you're gonna run TerraForm, it's on legs. Everything you do is gonna be on Linux. Linux is everything. There's no, there's no other operating system
in today's world. I mean, there's 10 12% of the desktop is Mac, Windows owns the desktop. And why because it enables people to play video games. I don't know why I don't play games. But people like video games. It enables people to run business applications, which I care a lot about. So you know, there's that. So kind of keep that in the back of your mind. Everything is Linux of the world's 500 Top servers to run Windows. The other 498 run Linux by meaning the big all the supercomputers in today's world run Linux. So there really
is no option to run Windows Windows, you've got to become an Linux if you're a cloud engineer or Linux workload architect, everything we designed is gonna be on Linux. Except for the desktop, except for Active Directory, which everybody uses and Microsoft Exchange, which pretty much everybody uses for mail and calendaring. I haven't used the Windows Server and in the last 15 years, have you seen any Nathan? I mean, they're they do exist, but I'm like, he says with a slight eye roll as he says it. Well, I mean, like, I was working at Red Hat.
So it's, I mean, it's not like they, they if people had Windows servers, they didn't tell me you know, like I said, I mean, people had, you know, LDAP servers, Active Directory, all right, but but but, but yeah, mean, like the fact that I run into more mainframes than I do Windows servers as an architect, right? Well, I mean, like, if you're building building an appliance, like, if you like, if you want to do like a virtual network function or so. So it's like a VM that is a switch or a router. I mean, you're not going to put that on Windows, it's going to be Linux, some or maybe BSD. Which if you learn Linux, that you're, you're reasonably close, right? Certainly closer than Windows. Oh, I missed the SD. That was such a great operating system. Yeah. Juniper routers used to run BSD? I loved it. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, I don't know. I mean, it is mostly like if, you know, if you build a website, I mean, like, it's, it's gonna be, it's gonna be Linux. And, and containers
running on Kubernetes. So it's Linux, again, is a whole, there's, there is a lot of Linux. And I would say that even if, you know, I mean, they're, you know, like, if you're, if you're in the, it seems like the place that you would run into windows would be, if you're in a, in like, in POS, like a corporate office, where you're, where you're managing, where it's like, people have a lot of Windows desktops, where people are dependent on Windows, you'll have Windows infrastructure in that in that building. But, but it's like in terms of like, its cloud, you're, it's, there's some, there's no real, there's very, there's no real upside to Windows unless you like it for the cloud, unless you need a specific thing that you cannot get somewhere else. And I'll take over on this for a little reason, and I'll explain plus is going to help with a question in their small businesses use Windows, big businesses do not, I mean, all businesses use it for Active Directory and exchange and that kind of thing. But small businesses use Windows because it's simple. I don't need $150,000 Linux engineer, I can hire a $40,000, Microsoft engineer to click a few buttons with the graphical user interface. Now that graphical user interface takes up resources,
and it's much harder to do things on the command line and the pain. But you know, because it's so easy to use, I can hire a Microsoft person, which is very cheap, compared to a Linux person. So a small business might actually hire out some Windows servers, but our real business won't have any. I mean, they'll have active directory and exchange and pretty much everything else is going to be Linux, unless they have an application that's dependent upon a Windows workload. Maybe they had somebody that, you know, made some dotnet application 20 years ago, and they haven't gotten off of it. So there still be some of that. Yeah. But it's mostly that but we try to get avoid anything with a graphical user interface, the more services we have, the more services we can hack. So if you guys do like a netstat on
your computer, and you see that it's listening on 10,000 ports, every point that it's open to is a port, you can be hacked on. So with a Linux system, you can basically take your kernel and you can shut down everything that you want, comes much more secure. And there's a question about the windows subsystem for Linux. It, it, it does work. It's so I work with some people who use who use Windows and use Windows subsystem for Linux, for stuff.
And I mean, it works, but it's a little bit more finicky. There's some some issues. I mean, I'm fair, like, there's some stuff with with the native Windows file system, where it's you kind of where you have to be operating inside this like a little VM. But if but if you're on Windows, you can run a Linux VM. Yeah. Locally, Linux is pretty lightweight. So if you do, especially if you do like a, a server with no graphics running, you can run a little VM and do whatever you need to, you can run you can use containers to run a lot of things that you need to run. So I mean, it's, uh, you can still you can still make it make it pretty far with with with Windows and work around whatever the shortcomings of of WsL are. And that's a good point because what it is
it's an Ubuntu kernel that's added to Windows so now you've got an operating system with two kernels and two system memory management. And you know, it works but why bother, just use a Linux system and have a cleaner file system, a better file system and better in every way? But no, good point. So no, that's a really good point, because you know, as it comes to containers, and here's the reason Windows probably out of the subsystem for Linux. A Linux container can run on a Linux server or a Windows container can run on a Windows Server. So that meant that if you had a container that was meant on Linux, it wouldn't run on Windows. Because containers need to take the underlying parts of the operating system, some operating system library. So Windows systems didn't do any Linux containers.
So here, smack a Linux kernel on it. And now we can do Linux containers on a Windows system. Windows system can't do Linux can't do Linux containers, by the way. I mean, a Linux system can't do a Windows containers. Right? Right. It needs the system kernel, a compatible kernel. Yeah. And you know, containers are typically orchestrated
with either Kubernetes or OpenShift, which is just Kubernetes. So what's OpenShift? So, I mean, OpenShift is a, it's a container orchestration platform. So it's for micro services. Typically, kind of, you know, the difference between a VM and a container is
a VM, a VM is running its own. I can take that, and I'll have you tested. So the difference between a virtual machine and containers this, we take of server, we add a hypervisor, each virtual machine gets their own operating system, applications and dependency libraries. By comparison, a container is basically where we take an operating system, and we logically virtualize it. So that we've got one container that's logically isolated from another container. So what happens with the container and then I'll go back to you with OpenShift, is the container takes the operating system, and the libraries of operating system and just of the applications, and it's very lightweight. So that's the main difference
between a container and a virtual machine, we use both as cloud architects but here's the thing. OpenShift is like Kubernetes. And I wondered Nathan to talk about it, because Kubernetes is much more of an engineering topic. Yeah, um, and so yes. So I mean, like, like Mike said, I mean, so the I mean, the VM is
essentially it creates, it literally creates a virtual computer that then you install the operating system on. And so the VM has its own kernel, that container is essentially just uses, uses inherent features of Linux, like cgroups, and troutt, jails and different things like that namespaces to to contain the application and any any specific libraries that it needs for that application, and then it relies on the underlying system. And so Kubernetes is, I mean, similar to the architecture that I described with OpenStack, it'll have essentially, you know, production Kubernetes system will have three, three controllers, they're called Master nodes, usually. And then you have any number of worker nodes. The worker nodes are where are what provide the compute power. And so the the kind of the difference, the shift with OpenShift, or with Kubernetes, is that it's a, it's, it's much closer to like infrastructure as code, it's really inherent in the system that its infrastructure is code. It also rather than with, with like a virtual machine, you're installing an operating system. So there's a lot of things inside the virtual machine,
usually a container is is way, way more lightweight. And so with something like Kubernetes, what you can do is you can say, I'm going to deploy this, like I need a web server. And so your web server needs the database, it needs these front end, these front end containers. And so for safer your typical workload on your off hours, you only need like three of those front end containers being served by a load balancer, the load balancer will split the traffic between the front end containers, if you get a huge spike Kubernetes will allow you will automatically scale to what you need it to. So you can set all these quotas. And so it's it's really like, I mean, it's like a micro it's microservices orchestration using containers. That was a lot of words, but they're all true. Yeah, interesting thing
about that in some things will always be server based and virtual machine based, because containers don't do things all as well as servers. And some things will be containers. But here's the reason they're efficient. You have to install the Linux operating system, you're already dealing with two gigs of DRAM that you just lost. Some of these containers only need one giga DRAM, not enough to even run the operating system. Because they're so lightweight.
Yeah. So I love all this Linux stuff. If I'm not careful, people are going to read I'm actually a techie. And they're not gonna see me as a CEO. So I have to be a little bit careful here, because other business executives reach out to me on a daily basis. So let me jump in here. Weird jump in and steer the ship after an hour of not staring. I'm used to having to do it like every five minutes with Mike and Alonzo. They just go
down rabbit holes. But this time, I decided to let you go down the rabbit holes of not not steer you. So I don't know where you guys want to go with this conversation. But I think it might be good to talk about Nathan and Mike and Alonso and our cloud engineering program and Linux for cloud computing and how it all fits into what we're trying to do. Here we go cloud careers, if you want. If you don't want to you can talk about whatever you want, obviously. Chris, I like that. And oh, my beautiful baby girl, Cindy is coming in here. And she's telling me she wants to be taken out. So Cindy, can
I borrow you real quick for the audience. You're so special. So this is my beautiful cat Cindy. She doesn't like to be picked up. But she's loving, wonderful. And the sweetest little girl in the entire world. Sorry about that. But anyway, she came to visit me. So
after we get past my beautiful cut Cindy, who is the second level my wife after my wife. Let's go talk about what we're trying to do. So me and Alonzo and Chris and Nathan and Chow. And Leo. What we are trying to do is get everybody that wants a job hired Cloud Architect cloud engineer. And in order to do that, we know certification is not going
to do it. Certification gives you the name of a service and how to configure that. And if you're looking for a junior level entry level admin job or a helpdesk job certification is going to get you there. But if you want anything better than helpdesk certifications aren't going to do it. You need to know so what goes into it? What goes into a cloud? Well, it's networking, what kind of networking, BGP OSPF you know, that kind of stuff, IP addressing, subnetting, super netting, all that kind of stuff. And we teach all that, for both architects and engineers, because you need to know not when to one NAT, when many NAT static NAT, dynamic NAT all that stuff QoS, you should know QoS and how it works, you should know when protocols such as private lines, IPsec tunneling SSL based VPN software defined networking, Ethernet over MPLS. And we're trying to give the strategy of this so you know what else goes into it knows Linux. Why? Because 90% of Linux servers
are Linux, if you want to design systems on the cloud, either as an architect or an engineer, we architects need to understand the Linux kernel, and how it works. The engineers need to know how to build this. So we have to do that. So once we get past these things about TerraForm architects don't touch engineering. Don't touch TerraForm. We don't build anything.
We don't touch it. But Cloud engineers are do, we've got nothing teaching how to configure the OpenStack cloud via TerraForm. Open shift, we've got some of that in there. Why? Well, we have to because containers are there. And whether we're on AWS OpenStack, we're all going to be using Kubernetes. And guess what is the same silly Kubernetes. So what we're teaching you how to do it is and then we're going to teach you three different clouds why three different clouds, because nobody's crazy enough to use, it's under the cloud.
87% of customers are now multi cloud or hybrid cloud, and 97% claim to be multi cloud or hybrid cloud by the end of the year. So only 3% of people are stupid enough or crazy enough to put all their eggs in one basket and hope it doesn't fall apart. Which means 97% of people are smart enough not to do that. And I hate to say it is stupid to put all your eggs in one basket and expect the basket not to get dropped and break all your eggs. So you know. So we're trying to teach that what else we're trying to put in here. The leadership
skills, the communication skills, the emotional intelligence skills, the empathy skills, the business acumen, the leadership doesn't matter what you want to do, no matter what it is, you'll always have career agility. And that way, if Alonzo decides tomorrow, and he's an architect that he wants to do something different, like work for me, he can, because he's got the skills to do it. And those are the kinds of great things that we like to build, we want to make sure that you guys are there. So Linux is critical to our strategy. And hence the reason I'm excited with Nathan, why is Linux so critical? Everything matters on Linux? Everything. Everything. I'm not joking, everything that matters is a Linux. Well, I guess I'll say something every six minutes. I'm wondering, I've been wondering if I should just start my camera. You know, I really want to know Okay, safe
roses. When you are at Red Hat. Did you have was this more of a pre sales role? Or did you have to communicate with the engineers so that they can communicate to the clients? What was the Daily day to day operations for you. I was, I was a support Technical Support Engineer. So I and I was on on the enhanced support team, they've got a specific name for the enhanced solution support or something like that. But, so we had, like customers that had, like, elevated SLA is like, needed quick responses. And so they had like a special contract. And then they, they would have a lot of times they had, so at Red Hat, you'll have like a, and at Redis, two, you have it, you'll have like a technical account manager, for, there's a lot of different roles, right, so you'll have the solution architect will do, will do the kind of planning out like at Red Hat, what is called the solution architect will will will kind of, they have a fair amount of technical knowledge, but but not specific technical knowledge, they understand the product, they understand what it can do, and they have a good understanding of what the, what the client is looking for. And they can talk to people and work that stuff out. If they have
questions, then they go to the engine, either, you know, the software engineers or the support engineers. And then you have the technical account manager. So this support this, the Solutions Architect is kind of front end sales, technical account manager would manage the manages the account, and has kind of a similar amount of understanding as as, as a solution architect, a lot of times, like, you know, and sometimes there would be like a tech a tam, that would go into it, you know, that they, they'd worked on OpenStack before, and then they, they, they, they're like, they decided to do the technical account manager thing. But in my role, I got to, because it was it was the special contracts, I got to work a lot, like closer with the TAM, and so then the TAM you know, like, I got to see a little like, firsthand a lot of that, like, soft touch, good, good customer service stuff. And, and I didn't have to, didn't really have to deal with that that much, myself. You know, like, he was always there, I could always ping him and he would always respond, right? But, but essentially, like, I mean, my, my, I got a small team of of, like on a given shift, maybe five people as part of a larger, maybe 1015 People in in kind of OpenStack.
And we would, I mean, like, we'd get tickets, and we'd work them. And so we'd have on the other side, some sort of some cloud engineer. At a certain point, there was a, one of the companies was was planning for the, you know, for their next upgrade. And so they had these,
I mean, very, very, very senior engineer, like, it's a team of people, right. But I was interacting mostly with the engineers sort of like planning things out and saying, like, you know, we have these goals, we need this to work and kind of figuring out how they were going to then deploy like, their 1000 OpenStack things, right. But but so so I mean, for me, it was it was, like, just daily is tech technical support. Although, you know, it's like, like, I do think that even if you're like, even if you're like strictly technical, it does make your life a lot easier if you understand people. And even things
like, you know, sometimes you're working with somebody and and it's like, you know, you're trying stuff, and then they get in a bad mood. And then you know, and so so then and then they're, and then they're mad at you, right? And so, so at that point, you know, like, I've got a teammate, you know, like, is I'll have, you know, have my teammate work with him because they don't dislike my teammate, right. So just, you know, like, I do think it's important, it's very important to understand people even if you are the, the troll that they call to, like, fix the stuff, you know. Yeah. And, you know, I'll actually cover this
because this has been my life. I had a question after my covers, I typically called when the engineers and the customer are angry or the engineers are frustrated, so I am not joking. One year I spent $100,000 Buying engineers lunches and dinners, and then another $100,000 Buying dinners and drink to the customers just trying to entertain them trying to find out what they wanted. Yeah, so I'm literally not joking half of the job. architectures to get everybody involved and talk. And it's all about schmoozing and kissing babies, and knowing everybody, and that way when things break down, you know who to call. So for me, you know, I have a friend, Darrell, when I knew Darrell, he was
the first architect I've ever met, he knew very little about technology. And he sold more technology than three sales reps, and a team of sales engineers. Because what did he do? He went in there, he had the best business acumen I'd seen in the team, he was the most likeable person, he would go talk to the customer find out everything that was going to go back and he'd say, Hey, you, engineer you went in, are you and you're, you helped me make this work, I have no idea. He would sell it to the customer. And they would buy it every time I think he was responsible for like 30% of the company's income, one person, and didn't even know how the tech works. At the time, that's how good he was. So yeah, having people
that have people skills will separate you from everything. And you know what, and I'll turn it to Chris, I have a really good friend that hires a lot of engineers. And you know what she told me a long time ago, she says, Mike, I need someone that can do the job. And she says, You showed me 5000 people, maybe one or two people can do the job. And then she says, If I can find those one or two people that can do the job, finding somebody that I can tolerate, someone that isn't miserable, that doesn't come to work and complain, that's not going to start fights with the people on my team, find me someone that can do the job. And some of that I can tolerate, it's not hard. And I do think that you know,
like, like before, with, I'm also a musician. And so there's, there's this, this idea that you know, and something that that young musicians do a lot is, you know, you you get on stage, and then you're still worried about, about all these little details, you know, and it's like, and once once you're performing, yes, you should not worry about it anymore, you know, you can't worry about it anymore. And so and I think it's the same thing with like, when you go into an interview, what you do is you it's like, all of the knowledge, all of th
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