Hey everyone, we didn’t get a chance to update everyone in a weekly wrap-up last week. This is because of being on the road and the small factor of VeeamON. I am going to recap VeeamON for me here from a Cloud and Cloud-Native perspective and then maybe in another post this week we can touch on one of the sessions I had last week as well.
VeeamON 2023 Overall Reflection
Wow! What a week! I am sure anyone from the community that was there and in person can tell you what a jam-packed week it was over in Miami!
I was in Toronto the week before as you might have seen from the last post and then on Saturday morning, I was able to head down to Miami to start the VeeamON proceedings. Saturday was a much-needed chill-out day following that week in Toronto for KubeHuddle. (I would like to cover this a little more in a later post, especially the session I delivered there)
Sunday started much the same until I started running through my demo and things did not look right. Something in my Tanzu cluster started updating (without me telling it to!) things went from a chilled-out weekend in Miami to on-support calls getting the cluster up and running so that I could show off the new features of Kasten K10 6.0 on mainstage…. no pressure! It took until the early hours of Monday morning but we were back up and running. I will cover the rest of the week in more detail below.
As for my reflection on VeeamON 2023 in Miami from that Cloud and Cloud-Native perspective, I have to start by stating that in 2022 we had 1 in-person session that focused on Kubernetes and 2 online sessions. 2023 saw 3 breakout sessions and a day zero workshop so we are trending in the right direction to see the Veeam Admin or the wider virtualisation administrator inheriting the responsibility for the Kubernetes platform within their organisation.
This was further cemented by a customer session that was run in 2022 and the customers there were maybe kicking the tyres around with Kubernetes and mostly OpenShift with that and probably half were nowhere near that stage. In 2023 these same groups of customers were all much further down the line and running production workloads in Kubernetes with stateful workloads mostly databases running there.
Day Zero - Kubernetes & Kasten workshop
A plan a few months ago was to deliver a workshop-style session on Day Zero, I am not sure about you but I tend to arrive the day before the event actually starts and sometimes you are ready to get going.
We planned this 3-hour session for Day zero to bring that introduction to the world of Kubernetes, Kasten K10 and the integrations with Veeam Backup & Replication. The session was at capacity in the app and we had a waitlist of people wanting to attend, I don’t have the complete numbers right now but it was not quite at capacity. I guess the Miami Sun, Ocean and Pool got the better of some people.
We did get some great feedback though on the hands-on approach to the workshop and theory mixed with scenario-based learning. For this, I have to give a big thanks to Matt Bator. Matt is working in the Product team at Kasten and has been a massive help in putting together our session for KubeCon with us and then this workshop which by all accounts did not need me, he could have landed this absolutely on his own.
Unfortunately, the workshop was not recorded, but let me know here if you would like to see some level of this publicly available.
Veeam 100 people, don’t fret I believe we are in talks with
Day One - Keynote, Launch & Sessions
I kicked off Day One of VeeamON with the early session “Kubernetes for the vSphere Admin” Again I have to make another big shout-out here to Dean Lewis. Dean is a Veeam Vanguard and up until recently was with VMware and had endured the learning journey into Cloud Native and was seriously helpful to have someone like-minded to bounce ideas and learn from, He has now jumped into a new role with a cloud-native vendor and I am sure he will have something to share about his whole journey soon enough.
This session was a whiteboard session, my iPad with an adapter plugged into the screen we were able to walk through the building blocks of Kubernetes and get into the fundamentals. This session was recorded so I am hoping this will be available on the VeeamON platform for a few months to come.
If you catch it, let us know what you think. Dean and I are always looking at new ways to engage with the audience with more than just slide shows.
Next up, we had the general session, the first of VeeamON and I am not going to spoil things too much here but after a great build-up from our CEO and then some customer stories it was time to get into some technical demos, (remember I said about my demo clusters being in a mess on the Sunday!) maybe go and catch the recording and see if everything works out.
I was demonstrating the continued integration support between Kasten K10 and Veeam Backup & Replication, whilst some of my colleagues in Product Strategy were showing some futures around v12a.
Everything in my demo is Generally Available today and at the time of the demo. This came as part of the Kasten K10 v6.0 release and you can find out more information of what was delivered here.
There was also a dedicated Kasten K10 v6.0 session that should have been recorded and is now available on the platform. I will try and get a summary post up about this as well in the coming days.
Day Two - Sessions, Media & Analysts
Day two started with another keynote, this time it was featuring SPOT and was a community-focused session with lots going on and lots more great demos and future thought leadership. I kicked started my customer meetings and analyst briefings (both analyst and media meetings happened over both days)
It was then time for our second breakout session.
I was joined by Tom Sightler who is the Product Manager overseeing the Kasten K10 and Veeam Backup & Replication integrations as well as other enterprise features and functionality across the Veeam Data Platform.
In this session, we covered the integration points between the two products and highlighted these with demos and explanations as to why we did these and why customers wanted these. This session is available to re-watch as Tom and I recorded this before I left for Canada, I will also look to summarise it in a post here hopefully later this week.
I did sneak another customer meeting in after this session before heading for the famous VeeamOFF.
VeeamOFF
As you can tell from the post, VeeamON is a full ON event and there is a lot going on. This is why Veeam is renowned for putting on a party to close out events. Not just VeeamON but you might have seen us do similar at other well-known industry events.
We signed off in style, now we just have to worry about the expense reports….
