okay welcome back uh this is Dormain Draywitz and we're on for another episode uh episode episode of Tanzu Talk with me today is John Pace from Dick's Sporting Goods. John say hello please hello thanks Dormain for having me on long-time listener first-time caller so it's it's great to be here awesome it's good to have you on as well so this one um today's interview is going to be a uh a sort of part two if you will in what I hope to be a little bit of a series looking at folks who've made the journey from uh vSphere Pro uh focused on more of the infrastructure side uh to more of a DevOps Pro platform engineer cloud engineer whatever you want to call it um and so uh John here has has uh another uh background that fits into this profile so I'm going to run uh similar questions by you as as we had with uh Neville George on a couple episodes ago and um let's sort of let's sort of see what we can learn from your journey um so the first question is just kind of just a little bit of a backgrounder on how you got into uh the world of of technology um and found yourself as a as a vSphere Pro sure so um my name is John Pace I'm a senior platform engineer with Dick's Sporting Goods um our platform journey is um pretty young uh we've been doing this for a few years now so um it's been an exciting change and exciting culture change within the organization as well um and yeah Neville's it was a great podcast and he's Comcast has been a good um resource for us as well and a collaborator uh in that space so that's been fun to get to know him and those guys a little bit for me as a vSphere admin um I've always been on the infrastructure side of things um I've always
2:06um in in a couple jobs past uh ran the infrastructure we used um Hyper-V at the time for our hypervisor and a company came in and kind of changed things up and when they did that was one of the things that got changed so my experience with it was diving in and migrating those workloads and updating storage and doing all those things uh that you would normally do and then you know switching that to the vSphere platform and that was really good um experience that uh I was able to take with me to a consulting gig for a while and doing those kind of things with other customers and and looking at other vSphere implementations um and and that world and then um kind of getting into Dick's Sporting Goods um I was I came over as a systems engineer on the infrastructure side doing some stuff from the consulting gig that I was at before and kind of just really liked what was going on there and and kind of stuck there and bringing bringing that experience again to that that role uh within Dick's Sporting Goods so yeah it's been a journey of a probably longer than just a few years it's probably been 10 years or something time flies I guess when you're having fun um but yeah it's been a good opportunity to to kind of use those skills it's uh across multiple jobs and platforms so yeah no that's um that's interesting to like like you know you had to be really intimate and familiar with two different um uh virtualization technologies and and ecosystems to to then go and and do that again and again um and so yeah that's uh that brings its own unique perspective um it does and it's very similar to like the the overall journey that we'll we'll get into I'm sure as we continue the conversation with going from vSphere to platform it's a lot of that same kind of mindset where you're taking similar ideas or uh that may be on different tech and then you're just kind of moving that and and
4:08making the pivot between uh different platforms or environments okay let's come back to that let's let's tuck that away because I think that's that's definitely going to come up again maybe just thinking to okay uh you mentioned uh joining the Dick's team as a as a systems engineer sort of transitioning out of consulting for a while what is the what is the day in the life for John what did it look like um in that role and because I imagine it would have been different from the consulting work you were doing but what did it what did it look like in that that systems engineering role and then maybe what does it look like now as a senior platform engineer yeah so consulting was always fun because you get that that the idea of of multiple um environments different customers and you know you get to experience a lot of really different tech whether it be mature uh very developed environments versus you know immature new things or legacy systems that you're wanting to you know update or move on with um working at um the exporting goods on the engineering side it was a lot in the um microsoft stack of stuff it was doing a lot of monitoring and everything in the scom world that's how kind of how i got brought into that and then kind of developed other i've always been one to kind of reach into other technologies and constantly try to change and learn new things and kind of experience that and so getting into you know on the infrastructure side as a whole and and still um taking those skill sets uh from the scom world integrating into like trying to do like custom monitoring different things and bridge that gap into the you know b center on that side and that infrastructure team and kind of you know keep learning and doing new things um that was kind of where it started and then you know again developed into more mindsets around public cloud um at the at dsg and kind of getting um my feet wet into that and and and looking at public cloud as an option for devops or other kind of environments that we
6:13would normally do on prem so what what kind of and also just to just to clarify scom um if i've if i dust off my oh yeah i'm so sorry yes uh acronym system center operations manager very good yes yeah so very very nice circle gets the square um yeah no um yeah so a lot of the monitoring and stuff has always been kind of a key focus whether it be on the systems engineer side or even now as a platform engineer um that space that that monitoring has always been really key to understanding you know what's going on the platform or what's going on within the infrastructure and and you know has always been kind of a route of things that i've wanted to make sure we take take you take with me as we we go to different roles yeah okay um anything in terms of just how you would describe that you know a typical day yeah so i mean a lot of the times even doing stuff on the infrastructure side i think a lot of it and this isn't like necessarily a negative connotation but a lot of it is uh can be siloed work where you're just kind of doing your own thing there are tickets out there projects that are out there and you're kind of working through that you're still collaborating with different teams um you know and working on tickets or projects or whatever it is um again just making sure the overall health of the environment is up and running and um you know just keeping the lights on basically i think is is a lot of the way that that i don't again don't that doesn't it's not a necessarily a negative thing but it's just like you know it's it's more kind of doing your own thing working at your own pace and you're collaborating you're doing different things um but i don't think it's nearly as much as it is now on the platform side but um but yeah so so just kind of keeping an eye on things within the infrastructure it was kind of a daily task you know checking in making sure um you
8:16know things haven't changed and um and working on tickets and kind of going through um through that environment okay and so you know you mentioned the like the level of collaboration and collaborative work that you're doing sounds like that's something that now as a platform engineer that's much higher but you know if you just step back and look at you know now what makes up a typical day for you what does that involve yeah so now there's a lot more i think in the old in the the other side of just doing infrastructure there was a lot less work within the product teams that um that we have now and again a lot of our journey is very uh is new so having a lot of these product teams that are working on specific areas within the e-com environments or you know within corporate environments uh those kind of things are are fairly new but working with them and um is is a lot there's a lot more of that going on working with the developer um is more of a daily routine than than it was in in the past just because a lot of times we would spin up a vm or whatever and you know hand it over to the dev team to just say hey go at it and do your thing and you know we'll make sure that it's up and running all the time whereas now with within the the developer um the devops side it's a little bit more collaborative where we're working with the product teams to make sure that not only is their application up and running but um we're working on making sure that their environment that they're that they're working in is is functioning properly and i think a lot of what we've tried to enable these teams to do is to kind of build things the way that they want to build them and kind of give them the free reign to go out and do stuff um and then but but some of that means that they still come back to us to kind of help them through that project or that that application that they're dealing with and and you know it may not be something that they're used to doing since they're always coding but we want to be able to kind of work
10:19with them and collaborate and and work together to make sure that they're running and functioning and you know getting what they need out of the application or environment that they're building so just to kind of i don't know if you can bring that into a concrete example of something where what a development team might come back to you because there's something that they want to use like i don't know like a particular technology that's yeah so we had a um yeah we had one of our product teams um that was spinning up their own um elastic instance elastic cluster um in azure and they were everything was running fine and and doing well they they started to see some latency or performance issues that they really wanted to look at and kind of narrow down to find out you know is it in the platform that's running it in the cloud foundry platform is it in their elastic vms they're running you know where was that at and so it was a lot of looking through logs but just kind of working together and sharing data between that where we you know got together on a call or whatever and started sharing things within a channel and just kind of you know collaborating together to ultimately find some some things that we were able to say hey you should probably do this you know change the iops or change your disk or whatever and you know help get that some of that performance but it was a an area where we said hey here you can go and build this we're giving you the power to build this uh so they went and built that elastic cluster and then they came back to us and said hey we we could use some help on this and you know kind of work together to solve that problem yeah and it's something you know just to to pick on that example is troubleshooting performance for elastic clusters something that you'd ever worked on before um no not really i mean a lot of the stuff that we had done like especially in this world now even though it's a new journey a lot of the change that we're seeing in exporting goods is embracing in and some of the new open not new but some of the
12:20open source technologies and tool sets that are out there that really i had not had a lot of experience with in the past because i had always really dealt a lot with the microsoft stack of tools and and stuff there and that's work in that space so this is uh given us the opportunity to kind of work on those kind of uh environments a lot more obviously linux and those kind of things where you know i had not had that experience prior to um you know join the platform team and you know still get to to kind of of mess in that world with you know the prometheus the grafana's and the you know those kind of open source things that are now very much a daily you know something we're doing every day yeah that's that's cool that you know if the part of your you know if i can sort of summarize and um and recap here a little bit it sounds like a big part of or some part of your day now involves potentially having to dive into a completely new uh technology space that one of the development teams that you're supporting has has decided to use to solve something they're trying to build and you know on any given day you might have to go in and suddenly like learn about you know how to troubleshoot performance in an elastic cluster is that a fair recap yeah for sure i mean yeah absolutely like a lot of the a lot of times what we're looking at you know there's core concepts that we're always going to be you know familiar with on like for me on the infrastructure side or the you know cloud side whatever but yeah absolutely we're gonna we've we've gone into where we really try to help enable the product teams but also uh help support them any way we can i think a lot of times we are trying to you know a lot of us on the team are going above and beyond to help in those endeavors but also i think we all are you know technology folks where we like to learn new things and get our feet wet with stuff too so uh that's always helpful um you know dealing with these new technologies or different technologies and then
14:20we're you know we're in there learning when they're helping and you know some of us are even i never really came back from like a coding background by any means but you know there's still a lot of that now a lot more of that now in the in the cloud platform side compared to you know where it was before for sure okay and that that sort of starts to tee up my next couple of questions um the first of which is thinking about coming from the the systems engineering side of things um you know dealing with v-sphere and whatnot what things there have like continue to serve you well whether it's knowledge or relationships or skills you're kind of you've kind of hinted at at this already but just you know what would you say has um you've carried with you and and just is continues to be part of how you're successful yeah um you know a lot of the the old world in the in the infrastructure side there's still a lot of there was a lot of command line stuff and a lot of um you know scripting and that kind of thing that's really amplified itself quite significantly on the in the world that we're in now um you know we're trying to do a lot of our infrastructure as code now and you know having um ansible or whatever else kind of scripting or building pipelines we've got out there you know we want to kind of kind of do that more programmatically now than than before not necessarily you know that there are areas that we're doing that still on the infrastructure side now and you're not to take away from that but that's still like a lot of a lot more of that going on now and the relationship side you know with the teams that we were working on is still really important and i think in some ways that's changed as well too i mean we've always worked with security or networking and those kind of partners within the um the infrastructure and how that's yeah um kind of set up in dsg but also too i think a lot of like what we're doing now is we're really trying to work with those parties uh more collaboratively a
16:25lot of the stuff recently with some things that we're doing in github we've tried to partner with the security team and kind of um you know harvest those relationships that we've been building to to really help promote the platform as a whole and so that i think that's been really um important too from in days past just continuing on building those bridges um with other teams and and kind of bring that into the world that we're at now because it's really important to to have those open dialogues and conversations not only with security teams and others but you know within the leadership organization as well and and i think that's you know the leadership team within the org has been really instrumental in getting where we're at with being able to embrace new technologies and accept you know not really failure but yeah accepting failure as like something that's part of the journey as we're learning and iterating on the platforms themselves tell me a little bit more about that in terms of that something that feels newer or is something that is more of an evolution of an existing way that that you related with these other teams and with leadership the notion of how we we think about and deal with failure yeah i think it's it's definitely um i think it's been an evolution within the company i think i've had a really a good privilege of working with some really good managers and on the infrastructure side and and currently on the platform side that that have been really good at identifying talent and and kind of really harvesting creative thinking um in both worlds so i think that's always kind of existed in some ways and i think it's just more talked about maybe more now and more of an idea that's like promoted as far as like you know getting that mvp out that that that minimal viable product that's that's out there getting that out and um i think it's just something that's always been
18:28talked about i mean like i said at previous my manager was always like you know let's just let's get version one out the door and then we'll go from that but that's really like tried to be an idea that's continued and just evolved as the organization itself has changed and kind of try to develop some more agile thought processes and teams without within the organization yeah so if i could venture a recap there it sounds like there's there's been a healthy foundation throughout for trying new things but it's going from the infrastructure side to the platform side has been an evolution in that you're you you talk about and implement those agile practices and lean practices if you will even more is that fair yeah for sure and you know we've i think a lot that's been helpful is having the the leadership from taking that on and really promoting that from the top down and that makes it easier for us to kind of do what we're wanting to do or you know build those platforms do those things but also too i think a lot of what's been really helpful for us as a platform team has been the product groups that we're serving or that are being hosted in the in the environment um you know we've we've gone to like other talks in different events where we're we're talking about this collaborative approach or whatever it is and a lot of times the companies are like well how do you deal with these developers and these product teams and we've been very fortunate to like not really have a lot of resistance but but have a lot of buy-in and the collaboration going on within the organization amongst uh these teams has been really really good for us to kind of get work done as a whole across multiple groups but also internally for them to kind of help each other and
20:28promote that um again that collaborative idea between you know all those teams so it has been you know something that is a culture change but very much driven from from the leadership team in order to to get to where we're at today okay so just to take the second part of this question is then what are the things that you've had to learn as you've transitioned from being more of a systems engineer to a platform engineer and what you know you alluded earlier to linux systems and a lot of new open source projects but you know what what kind of comes top of mind the things you've had to learn and then also how have you gone about learning those things what's been useful sure yeah so i mean you know working in the v-sphere world obviously there's linux experience there you're there's scripting and there's um you know command line stuff that's that's going on as you administer you know those kind of environments and that's very there's a lot of that going on where we're at today um where we're again like mentioned earlier we're trying to get to where we're deploying infrastructure as code so taking the the scripting models the those kind of things has been real helpful to bring into this world but um you know learning linux has been a big one and a lot of so one thing too that's been real helpful in this journey was when the platform the platform team was created there were we were kind of different people from different journeys within the it space um that that were kind of brought together just to form this team so a lot of my learning has been just talking to the you know guy who was doing more the linux admin stuff and you know hey how did i do this or can you walk me through that so you know when we are doing the work within our team we're trying to adopt a you know kind of a pairing model when it comes to the things that we're working on so that has always been helpful to learn new things from from people within the team you know as well as you know obviously going out and reading docs or you
22:31know whatever that's out there but i think like a lot of that just like on the job training that someone else has had from another space and bringing that into the team and kind of working with them has been more of an effort or more of a benefit rather to learn these new technologies like uh you know bash or you know whatever else that we're using it's just to learn from other people who have done it and be open to learning new things i love trying out new things and and learning new things a lot of times i'm probably wanting to use new ideas or technologies probably more sooner rather than i should but um i think that i've always enjoyed learning and trying something new um if it makes sense for the business and i think that um you know having a scripting or um you know in the scum world of writing management packs and kind of code some of the code stuff that's there those kind of things really helped make that transition because like in now as a cloud engineer there's you know more of that uh going on for sure and understanding um you know having those that that base for some of this um tech that we're using now has been really helpful in the new role what's been the the hardest thing to pick up that's a valid question i you know i again i think that just try just changing the the the scripting model into another another language has been a bit of a um a challenge i think another good thing is it's not really been um it's it's still a challenge but like working with different cloud providers um and kind of working through those nuances between each one and understanding that has been you know there's been some struggles there with with running the way we're running our cloud foundry environments in different spaces and then linux is always a challenge for me so i'm still a lot the more i'm in it the more i love it but um it's it's it's fun
24:31yeah i mean and um and i think that uh very practical learning of working and pairing with folks who have more experience yeah um if there's anything you want to add to that just you know i hope these uh these interviews can be a bit of a resource for other folks who are on this journey and trying to learn what and how they should go about trying to to pick up new skills so if there's anything anything else other than that kind of pairing model that that's helped then then please chime in yeah i mean pairing has been good but i also think just doing something or even if it's even if it fails like actually getting in and doing something is is really a good way that i've learned over uh the years when it comes to the platform stuff a lot of the like the really deep core things that i'm learning about um either cloud foundry or kubernetes or whatever has always been just absolutely failing at it and then but then getting into the weeds of why it failed in order to understand you know how that's working i mean taking a course on kubernetes or whatever is helpful but it's it's also really helpful to just fail at it or jump into it and kind of and try it out and then learn from that way as well too almost not really reverse engineering but really just kind of getting that experience i think has been really helpful for a lot of us on the team yeah is that something that you find um it's helpful to set aside time for yeah it is it's it's something we've i think we've struggled with it a little bit but we definitely acknowledge that it's very important um and we've we've tried to like either set aside days or hours um within a day to kind of continually feed that desire to learn and and try new things and be innovative and not just be a platform team that is keeping the lights on you know for the product teams but also be one that's that's being that's creating new things for the platform so that others
26:33can either consume or you know whatever whatever perspective you know just make it easier to to do something in the platform and learn something new while you're trying it too so we we that that kind of that idea of continuing to to learn you know that's something we're still that we try to drive a lot of things and i think it's very important not only in the platform side but any any space right i mean it's always good to uh continually learn new things and new skill sets now if you were to go back and do this whole uh transition journey uh again of course it's a journey that you're probably you know you're still on because when is it right exactly you know if you were to go back and and sort of you know take the the at least the the first part over again what would you would you do anything differently um and what advice would you have for someone who's a v-sphere pro today um or a hyper v pro um and you know they're looking to develop into a a platform engineer kind of devops pro what advice would you give yeah i mean i think that you know getting into being a v-sphere admin or you know working on that side of has always that's just been that was something that i kind of just got thrown into in some ways but also too it was a good opportunity to learn something new and then develop a skill so i think continuing that idea of always trying something new is really important i think a lot of times there were were times where i was kind of stuck in where i was at just because i'm familiar and comfortable with it and that that um that idea you know just made me want to learn things within that space or whatever without really looking outside of uh and trying something new so i would definitely encourage folks to get out and and and try something new continuing to learn different things because you know the things that we're doing in tech continually change and improve and now with like
28:36really cool things like kubernetes and stuff being brought into the v-sphere world like a lot of these worlds are kind of colliding together between what's happening there and what you know what platform engineering is doing and kind of bridging those gaps together i mean it's still really important um you know for us to have that that bridge between us and the current vm the v center admins and the infrastructure guys because they're doing really cool things building out um stuff on prem for developers to consume these resources and so you know i think that that's a continually evolving kind of process and in continuing to learn and iterate on new ideas and um and new tools is is always important and i would i would just continue to encourage folks to continue to try to you know look into that push yourself to learn new things um and not be you know complacent or just content with where you're at and you know try to try to really expand your horizon in that thinking and uh and and what's potentially something that folks could do would do differently uh that you would recommend they do differently than than how you approached it the first time or would it would it be no change from from how you went about it no i mean a lot of i mean i was very fortunate in in the journey to get where i'm at i think you know as mentioned earlier i always like to to say i'm like a founding member of the platform team at exporting goods but it's it's really i got coached almost from where i was at into this environment to some degree where you know we're building this collaborative platform team and and honestly i was a little bit you know not as open to that idea just because of the uncertainties of what was going what that was going to look like so i would definitely you know probably be more open-minded to potentially what that could open the door for and not just kind of discard it those kind of opportunities if something weren't like that were to come about um earlier on to before
30:38the platform team i i was helping one of the subsidiaries that we had kind of build out their e-com environment and and kind of run DevOps a little bit and not really having a whole lot of experience in that realm i still wanted to help them out for the benefit of the company for sure and but also to learn new things and so i took on some of those roles to really learn more about devops and what that looks like which was then helpful in making a transition into the platform team now because that devops world of of cscd and and helping folks deploy things and and build things is a lot more of what's going on now than we're in the old world before so and that i don't know that i would have really had that experience without just trying it and putting myself out there to to try something new well thank you so much john this has been a kind of a wonderful review of your your journey and and and i think there's a lot of great nuggets in here for for folks who are coming coming at things from the the v sphere pro side and i think there's a lot that folks can take a lot of confidence in and building on the skills that they've got so thank you so much for sharing yeah thanks for having me i really appreciate all that like all the vmware is doing to really harvest these kind of collaborative conversations and community i think it's really beneficial as folks are making those transitions i think it's very important and uh so thank you for for having these conversations hopefully it is meaningful to someone but yeah it's it's been a good journey and it's it's been exciting so thank you my pleasure all right well have a great rest of your day thank you Thank you.