Mission Accomplished: Openstack in a Month

In July I posted about my insane goal of giving a talk at VMworld on a technology I knew nothing about. I chose Openstack, which at that time was nothing more than a buzzword to me. I remember reading tweets saying VMware Administrators needed to pay attention to Openstack but couldn’t tell you what it was.

VMworld has arrived and on Monday, August 29th, 2016 I presented my talk. I am not afraid of public speaking but got some jitters as the crew started counting me down. Everyone with vBrownBag is super cool and they gave me a lot of advice. I have to thank Ariel Sanchez Mora for his support and encouragement through this whole crazy ride.

It was a rush and felt great to stand on a stage with a live audience at VMworld. I had a 10 minute window and came in just over 9 minutes. My first rehearsal was almost 30 minutes long. My original slide deck was 19 slides and my “production” slide deck was 9 total. I had to edit myself to get to the meat and taters of my topic at hand.

I honestly thought I was going to get up there and be an OpenStack expert. If you watch the video (embedded below) it’s obvious I’m not. There came a point in the journey that I was so frustrated I wanted to swap to more comfortable ground. The ultimate goal of my effort was to help the audience skip past all of the awful frustrations and hopefully avoid the problems I ran into.

I uploaded my slide deck to Slideshare and have embedded the YouTube below. Thanks for watching and let me know if you have any feedback.