In this week’s podcast, we speak with Kong Yang, Head Geek at SolarWinds. He also hosts the Wide World of Tech podcast. Key topics discussed in the podcast:

• State of cloud computing ~ entering its golden age
• IT & business units coming together to deal with shadow IT responsibly
• Building technology on services with no control over them
• CI/CD model
• Operators skills and time available
• Human aspect

Topic                                                   Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                         0.0 – 1.58 (Gina Rosenthal Podcast)
Cloud is Settling In                             1.58 – 5.18 (Entering it’s Golden Age)
Is Amazon Frictionless?                    5.18 – 6.32 (Lack of Governance Issues for IT)
Multi-Technology Issues                  6.32 – 8.05 (IT must Partner with Business Units)
Moving Away from Control Infra     8.05 – 10.40
Tooling Choices                                 10.40 – 15.10 (Managing Services is Uneasy w/ no Control)
CI/CD                                                  15.10 – 22.15 (Dev’s view vs Ops view)
Time for Operators is Limited         22.15 – 25.55 (Always have to be learning)
Pipeline Specialization per Cloud  25.55 – 36.31 (People Challenges / SRE Half-Life)
Wrap Up                                             36.31 – END

Podcast Guest
Kong Yang, Head Geek at Solar Winds

Kong Yang is a Head Geek at SolarWinds^® with over 20 years of IT experience specializing in virtualization and cloud management. He is a VMware vExpert, Cisco Champion, and active contributing practice leader within the virtualization and cloud communities.

Yang’s industry expertise includes application performance management, virtualization sizing and capacity planning best practices, community engagement, and technology evangelism. Yang is passionate about understanding the behavior of the application lifecycle and ecosystem – the analytics of the interdependencies as well as qualifying and quantifying the results to empower the organization’s bottom line.

He focuses on virtualization and cloud technologies; application performance management; hybrid cloud best practices; technology stacks such as containers, microservices, serverless, and cloud native best practices; DevOps conversations; converged infrastructure technologies; and data analytics. Yang is a past speaker at BrightTALK Summits, Spiceworks SpiceWorld, Interop ITX, and VMworld events.

He is also the owner of United States Patent 8,176,497 for an intelligent method to auto-scale VMs to fulfill peak database workloads. Yang’s past roles include a Cloud Practice Leader at Gravitant and various roles at Dell Technologies.

Follow Kong at @KongYang