Hi Everyone,
I am publishing this early since I am traveling this week. When it comes to the top minds at Veeam you know whose name will always be found in that list!
GEOFF: Hi Michael, welcome to the "Meet the Architect" interview series. First off I know folks are very interested in knowing how you got into IT? What inspired you or was it accidental. Of course that question has to contain the story of how you ended up at Veeam.
MC:
My journey into IT started back in school. I am from the generation where we just started getting those initial computers rolled out and I instantly was drawn to sending robots around the classroom floor and that evolved into a continued interest in technology.
From school I went to a small computer shop that supplied Cambridge universities with their custom built servers. I would build, install OS and even sometimes deliver and set them up in some of these high end and very historic Cambridge universities. From there I moved to a software developer in the newspaper vertical and it was my job to look after the physical systems across multiple sites and also deploy software and systems across these estates. This was my first endeavor into software development and systems administration.
After this I started my consulting days, starting on a local reseller helpdesk servicing tickets for local businesses. It was here I was introduced to virtualization and storage. In particular VMware, NetApp and Veeam.
I then moved into professional services. Getting certified whilst implementing solutions to these local businesses before moving to a bigger reseller and then onto leading a team at a distributor around the same technologies.
It was now 2014 and Veeam has a pre sales systems engineer role open and a good friend of mine in the community was the hiring manager. He rang me up and I joined the Veeam team, helping customers navigate their virtualization and storage data management problems. I did this for 18 months before moving into the product strategy team where I have always been a huge community fan of sharing what I learn and I continue to this day that learning journey and offering ladder to help others learn with me. It was a little over 3 years ago when I was given the opportunity to be involved in an acquisition into a new arena called cloud native and in particular DevOps and Kubernetes. Today I look after the Veeam Cloud strategy which spans public cloud offerings across AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google as well as our focus on protecting Kubernetes environments.
Geoff: I am always amazed about stories like that. Often we see people already on the big scene and their stories about how they made it up there are missed, and yet that can be extremely important for people just starting. One thing that I wanted to ask is how did you become such a good speaker? I constantly hear from good tech people that they have an enormous struggle with speaking, presenting and in general dealing with people. Did it come naturally to you or did you have to work on it?
MC:
Great question, public speaking started for me in my English literature classes at school, we would be reading a book as a class and that meant when it was your turn you would stand up and read a couple of pages.
To this day this was the most daunting, imposter’s syndrome feeling and anxious I would ever be. The book I vividly remember us reading as a class was “of mice and men”
When I left school and went into my first phases of career there was no opportunity to do any public speaking so I was hiding away and relaxing in the fact.
When I moved to that first reseller they had an event locally called EACS Optimize where they had vendors and their own consultants and customers would share their stories to an audience. One year I was invited to look after a room, funnily enough the speaker I was looking after was a Veeam SE delivering a session about this backup software and now a very good friend of mine, Mike Beevor. Seeing him talk and have the attention and interest of the audience was something I wanted to experience. His confidence but also passion was something I had never had when at school but maybe I could get that confidence and passion for technology…
A few years later and I ended up in that role at Veeam and this was the chance as an SE to replicate the Mike Beevor show he had given years before to a group of 30+ people. I will also have to mention another person I was looking up to in Matt Watts at NetApp at the time and still today was a fantastic speaker and I remember saying “I want to do what he does when I get older” well I think I can say I am doing something similar.
I started with VMware User Groups and local events where I was asked to speak, when I moved to the product strategy group it was the bigger stage at industry events such as VMworld, NetApp Insight, AWS Reinvent and more recently KubeCon. The user group gigs were also still just as important.
It would also be remiss not to mention the opportunity to speak and be on mainstage to demonstrate new and upcoming features at VeeamON in front of thousands of people on the mainstage.
Finally I will say. Speaking in public is not for everyone, for some that anxiety is not a mountain to climb which is absolutely acceptable but there will be something where you will be able to express your perspective and help others. I don’t think it came naturally to me at all.
GEOFF: That is priceless advice for young techs who want to get into roles that involve speaking. I will say this for my part, I have a very extrovert personality but before a speaking event I have to perform a technique that I learned in sports before big games, concentrate on my breathing for a few minutes, and for some reason it just calms me down. Otherwise the mind loves to run around thinking about what could go wrong or how silly I will sound and look on stage. You have now done a lot of speaking events and very often but do you ever get nervous beforehand or is that now a thing of the past? Also adding on to that question, one thing that differs enormously with "just speaking in front of an audience" is doing a demo while speaking. If something goes wrong you have to switch back quickly to your inner engineer and try to forget that you are on stage, how do you handle that and have you ever had a demo that went south and what do you advise folks to do in those situations?
MC:
Nerves are very interesting in general, you might get a little nervous on the plane every now and again when it is a bit bumpy but it's not always bumpy so they come, they go and not all scenarios are the same. I think speaking sessions are a lot like flying, sometimes you are surrounded by familiar people but most of the time the people around or the audience are different. I think that then leads to the when do I get nervous. I get nervous and anxious if I am speaking to a new group of people that maybe do not know me. For example the Cloud-Native and Kubernetes world was new to me as I mentioned so getting in front of these and speaking for the first few times were really daunting and I was quite nervous, simply because I was not familiar with the bumps and maybe was not as confident in what I had learnt, we could go on for so long about imposter syndrome and I am no different there either, but my mentality is to run towards it, continuous learning is a fact in the field of technology. In contrast to that though I could be speaking at a Veeam User Group and I would not have a single nerve when talking. I guess it comes down to familiarity, confidence and drive to want to be there, again as I said before if you do not want to speak you do not need to.
When demos go wrong, the anxiety inducing moment when you are on stage is real. I have had a few mishaps and I have had some out and out failures. The important thing is to stay calm, the second important thing is always have a backup! Whenever I run a live demo, I always have some sort of backup video on the desktop or embedded into the slides as a failsafe. There was one demo and luckily this was internal and it was only around 3,000 people! I was showing off our new NAS backup features and functionality at one of our sales kick off events and basically the demo was a backup of Wikipedia or some vast amount of data, and I obviously had Veeam Backup & Replication set up protecting this data set using the new unstructured data protection engine. I could not just delete some files and restore them though, where is the fun in that. The pop as I call it was to use Alexa to manipulate our data set, take a backup (highlighting our extensible APIs) we would then simulate Alexa to make a mistake and delete our entire dataset through a voice command, so here I am stood on stage and we do have a backup, but we have no NAS data and the next command was "Alexa, please recover my NAS Data" and I was replied to with that dreaded DDDUUUUUUUUUNNNNNN and a red flashing light on the top of the Alexa, my echo dot had lost the tethered connection to my phone which was sat under the demo laptop. That initial slow motion of realization that all the eyes were on me, was luckily met with calm, fix the connection and I was able to repeat the command and the show went on. But I will say you cannot train or prepare for this obstacles but the big thing is they might happen, and it is about finding that calm feature in yourself to deal with it.
GEOFF:
That was classic "always have a backup". Honestly I have been doing backups for so long and never thought of "have a backup plan for your demo or talk". I guess I need to walk the walk more than just talk the talk . I am glad you introduced the Cloud Native stuff in your last answer. I think everyone will find it fascinating about how you got into Cloud Native and secondly how you were able to thrive when so many others have had difficulty. Now I will say that there is a rumor that one day
MC:
Let's start there, the story is not too far from the truth actually. Rick did call me up but he handed me a parachute and said go and make some noise about this Kubernetes stuff. We called it "Project Paratrooper" and it was meant to last 6 months and now 3 and a bit years on we are still raising awareness and driving adoption whilst also educating the world on the Veeam Cloud Strategy so all things AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google then bolt on Kubernetes and some open source as my focus today. So that was how the journey really started. I had a bit of exposure to Kubernetes before but not much and we are talking 1.17 days of Kubernetes when we had the paratrooper mission and think before it was just over version 1. Now we are 10 years old of Kubernetes. I quickly realized though that Cloud native means a lot of things other than just Kubernetes, lots of different projects and products in the ecosystem. I actually also realized extremely quickly that this is just another platform made up of compute, storage and networking and that systems administrators are going to inherit the responsibility of this and where there is a platform there is data and I got in at the right time for the container storage interface (CSI) becoming a first class citizen, but i think the wider topic of interest was DevOps... which led me to start #90DaysOfDevOps as a project for me to document my learning in public and had no idea what this content would do for my own personal brand in the Kubernetes, DevOps, and cloud native space. So yeah its been a continuous journey of learning.
GEOFF: As always, incredible stories and adventures that come out of the blue! Talk about a journey from intended 6 Months to 3 years and counting! I guess if you are doing something right you just keep on doing it. So finally as always my last question revolves around the future. Where do you see IT going? What about Kubernetes, will adoption pickup?
MC:
We won’t speak about Kubernetes in 5 years time, not that it’s going away as a platform but it’s going to be embedded in everything we do in technology.
The next step to mass adoption has to be around simplicity, the evolution of vSphere was exactly this and it is why they won that virtualization race.
Kubernetes is much much bigger. It’s the cloud OS, it’s how we will run all of our software in the future if that doesn’t end up being SaaS but even then SaaS will if not already will run on Kubernetes.
The AI craze will continue to enable everyone to adopt and use models for all sorts of weird and wonderful use cases. It’s only going to help grow that data and that data will need to be protected.
GEOFF: Any personal plans to speak about or are they top secret ?
MC:
Hmmm personal plans are to continue learning and getting deeper into OpenShift, Databases and Golang. Will also think about where to take 90DaysOfDevOps for this year and into the future. I also have some ideas to raise the cloud capabilities that we have with Veeam.
GEOFF: Well I know a lot of people follow your work and will be waiting to see what happens.
Thanks again for taking part!
