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okay welcome back uh this is Dormain Draywitz and we're on for another episode uh episode

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episode of Tanzu Talk with me today is John Pace from Dick's Sporting Goods. John say hello please

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hello thanks Dormain for having me on long-time listener first-time caller

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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

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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

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series looking at folks who've made the journey from uh vSphere Pro uh focused on more of the

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infrastructure side uh to more of a DevOps Pro platform engineer cloud engineer whatever you

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want to call it um and so uh John here has has uh another uh background that fits into this profile

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so I'm going to run uh similar questions by you as as we had with uh Neville George on a couple episodes

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ago and um let's sort of let's sort of see what we can learn from your journey um so the first question

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is just kind of just a little bit of a backgrounder on how you got into uh the world of of technology

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um and found yourself as a as a vSphere Pro

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sure so um my name is John Pace I'm a senior platform engineer with Dick's Sporting Goods

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um our platform journey is um pretty young uh we've been doing this for a few years now so

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um it's been an exciting change and exciting culture change within the organization as well

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um and yeah Neville's it was a great podcast and he's Comcast has been a good um resource for us as

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well and a collaborator uh in that space so that's been fun to get to know him and those guys a little

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bit for me as a vSphere admin um I've always been on the infrastructure side of things um I've always

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um in in a couple jobs past uh ran the infrastructure we used um Hyper-V at the time for our hypervisor

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and a company came in and kind of changed things up and when they did that was one of the things that

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got changed so my experience with it was diving in and migrating those workloads and updating storage

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and doing all those things uh that you would normally do and then you know switching that to the vSphere

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platform and that was really good um experience that uh I was able to take with me to a consulting gig

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for a while and doing those kind of things with other customers and and looking at other vSphere

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implementations um and and that world and then um kind of getting into Dick's Sporting Goods um I was I

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came over as a systems engineer on the infrastructure side doing some stuff from the consulting gig that

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I was at before and kind of just really liked what was going on there and and kind of stuck there

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and bringing bringing that experience again to that that role uh within Dick's Sporting Goods so

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yeah it's been a journey of a probably longer than just a few years it's probably been

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10 years or something time flies I guess when you're having fun um but yeah it's been a good

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opportunity to to kind of use those skills it's uh across multiple jobs and platforms so yeah no

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that's um that's interesting to like like you know you had to be really intimate and familiar with

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two different um uh virtualization technologies and and ecosystems to to then go and and do that again

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and again um and so yeah that's uh that brings its own unique perspective um it does and it's very

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similar to like the the overall journey that we'll we'll get into I'm sure as we continue the conversation

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with going from vSphere to platform it's a lot of that same kind of mindset where you're taking

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similar ideas or uh that may be on different tech and then you're just kind of moving that and and

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making the pivot between uh different platforms or environments okay let's come back to that let's

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let's tuck that away because I think that's that's definitely going to come up again maybe just thinking

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to okay uh you mentioned uh joining the Dick's team as a as a systems engineer sort of transitioning out

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of consulting for a while what is the what is the day in the life for John what did it look like

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um in that role and because I imagine it would have been different from the consulting work you were

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doing but what did it what did it look like in that that systems engineering role and then maybe

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what does it look like now as a senior platform engineer yeah so consulting was always fun because

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you get that that the idea of of multiple um environments different customers and you know you

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get to experience a lot of really different tech whether it be mature uh very developed environments

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versus you know immature new things or legacy systems that you're wanting to you know update or

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move on with um working at um the exporting goods on the engineering side it was a lot in the um

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microsoft stack of stuff it was doing a lot of monitoring and everything in the scom world that's

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how kind of how i got brought into that and then kind of developed other i've always been one to

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kind of reach into other technologies and constantly try to change and learn new things and kind of

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experience that and so getting into you know on the infrastructure side as a whole and and still um taking

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those skill sets uh from the scom world integrating into like trying to do like custom monitoring different

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things and bridge that gap into the you know b center on that side and that infrastructure team and kind of

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you know keep learning and doing new things um that was kind of where it started and then you know again

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developed into more mindsets around public cloud um at the at dsg and kind of getting um my feet wet

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into that and and and looking at public cloud as an option for devops or other kind of environments that we

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would normally do on prem so what what kind of and also just to just to clarify scom um if i've if i

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dust off my oh yeah i'm so sorry yes uh acronym system center operations manager very good yes yeah so

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very very nice circle gets the square um yeah no um yeah so a lot of the monitoring and stuff has

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always been kind of a key focus whether it be on the systems engineer side or even now as

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a platform engineer um that space that that monitoring has always been really key to understanding

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you know what's going on the platform or what's going on within the infrastructure and and you know

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has always been kind of a route of things that i've wanted to make sure we take take you take with

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me as we we go to different roles yeah okay um anything in terms of just how you would describe

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that you know a typical day yeah so i mean a lot of the times even doing stuff on the infrastructure

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side i think a lot of it and this isn't like necessarily a negative connotation but a lot of it

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is uh can be siloed work where you're just kind of doing your own thing there are tickets out there

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projects that are out there and you're kind of working through that you're still collaborating with

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different teams um you know and working on tickets or projects or whatever it is um again just making

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sure the overall health of the environment is up and running and um you know just keeping the lights

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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

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necessarily a negative thing but it's just like you know it's it's more kind of doing your own thing

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working at your own pace and you're collaborating you're doing different things um but i don't think

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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

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things within the infrastructure it was kind of a daily task you know checking in making sure um you

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know things haven't changed and um and working on tickets and kind of going through um through that

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environment okay and so you know you mentioned the like the level of collaboration and collaborative

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work that you're doing sounds like that's something that now as a platform engineer that's much higher but

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you know if you just step back and look at you know now what makes up a typical day for you what does

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that involve yeah so now there's a lot more i think in the old in the the other side of just doing

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infrastructure there was a lot less work within the product teams that um that we have now and again a

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lot of our journey is very uh is new so having a lot of these product teams that are working on specific

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areas within the e-com environments or you know within corporate environments uh those kind of

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things are are fairly new but working with them and um is is a lot there's a lot more of that going on

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working with the developer um is more of a daily routine than than it was in in the past just because

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a lot of times we would spin up a vm or whatever and you know hand it over to the dev team to just

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say hey go at it and do your thing and you know we'll make sure that it's up and running all the

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time whereas now with within the the developer um the devops side it's a little bit more collaborative

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where we're working with the product teams to make sure that not only is their application up and

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running but um we're working on making sure that their environment that they're that they're working

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in is is functioning properly and i think a lot of what we've tried to enable these teams to do is to

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kind of build things the way that they want to build them and kind of give them the free reign to go out

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and do stuff um and then but but some of that means that they still come back to us to kind of help them

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through that project or that that application that they're dealing with and and you know it may not

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be something that they're used to doing since they're always coding but we want to be able to kind of work

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with them and collaborate and and work together to make sure that they're running and functioning and

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you know getting what they need out of the application or environment that they're building

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so just to kind of i don't know if you can bring that into a concrete example of something where

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what a development team might come back to you because there's something that they want to use like

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i don't know like a particular technology that's yeah so we had a um yeah we had one of our product

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teams um that was spinning up their own um elastic instance elastic cluster um in azure and they were

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everything was running fine and and doing well they they started to see some latency or performance

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issues that they really wanted to look at and kind of narrow down to find out you know is it in the

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platform that's running it in the cloud foundry platform is it in their elastic vms they're running

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you know where was that at and so it was a lot of looking through logs but just kind of working together

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and sharing data between that where we you know got together on a call or whatever and started

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sharing things within a channel and just kind of you know collaborating together to ultimately find

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some some things that we were able to say hey you should probably do this

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you know change the iops or change your disk or whatever and you know help get that some of that

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performance but it was a an area where we said hey here you can go and build this we're giving you

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the power to build this uh so they went and built that elastic cluster and then they came back to us and

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said hey we we could use some help on this and you know kind of work together to solve that problem

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yeah and it's something you know just to to pick on that example is troubleshooting performance for

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elastic clusters something that you'd ever worked on before um no not really i mean a lot of the stuff

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that we had done like especially in this world now even though it's a new journey a lot of the change

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that we're seeing in exporting goods is embracing in and some of the new open not new but some of the

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open source technologies and tool sets that are out there that really i had not had a lot of experience

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with in the past because i had always really dealt a lot with the microsoft stack of tools and and stuff

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there and that's work in that space so this is uh given us the opportunity to kind of work on those

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kind of uh environments a lot more obviously linux and those kind of things where you know i had not

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had that experience prior to um you know join the platform team and you know still get to to kind of

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of mess in that world with you know the prometheus the grafana's and the you know those kind of open

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source things that are now very much a daily you know something we're doing every day yeah that's

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that's cool that you know if the part of your you know if i can sort of summarize and um and recap

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here a little bit it sounds like a big part of or some part of your day now involves potentially

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having to dive into a completely new uh technology space that one of the development teams that you're

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supporting has has decided to use to solve something they're trying to build and you know on any given

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day you might have to go in and suddenly like learn about you know how to troubleshoot performance in

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an elastic cluster is that a fair recap yeah for sure i mean yeah absolutely like a lot of the a lot of

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times what we're looking at you know there's core concepts that we're always going to be you know

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familiar with on like for me on the infrastructure side or the you know cloud side whatever but yeah

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absolutely we're gonna we've we've gone into where we really try to help enable the product teams but

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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

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the team are going above and beyond to help in those endeavors but also i think we all are you know

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technology folks where we like to learn new things and get our feet wet with stuff too so uh that's

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always helpful um you know dealing with these new technologies or different technologies and then

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we're you know we're in there learning when they're helping and you know some of us are even i never

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really came back from like a coding background by any means but you know there's still a lot of that

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now a lot more of that now in the in the cloud platform side compared to you know where it was

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before for sure okay and that that sort of starts to tee up my next couple of questions um the first of

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which is thinking about coming from the the systems engineering side of things um you know dealing

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with v-sphere and whatnot what things there have like continue to serve you well whether it's knowledge

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or relationships or skills you're kind of you've kind of hinted at at this already but just you know

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what would you say has um you've carried with you and and just is continues to be part of how you're

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successful yeah um you know a lot of the the old world in the in the infrastructure side there's

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still a lot of there was a lot of command line stuff and a lot of um you know scripting and that

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kind of thing that's really amplified itself quite significantly on the in the world that we're in

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now um you know we're trying to do a lot of our infrastructure as code now and you know having um ansible or

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whatever else kind of scripting or building pipelines we've got out there you know we want to kind of

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kind of do that more programmatically now than than before not necessarily you know that there are areas

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that we're doing that still on the infrastructure side now and you're not to take away from that but

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that's still like a lot of a lot more of that going on now and the relationship side you know with the

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teams that we were working on is still really important and i think in some ways that's

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changed as well too i mean we've always worked with security or networking and those kind of partners

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within the um the infrastructure and how that's yeah um kind of set up in dsg but also too i think a lot

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of like what we're doing now is we're really trying to work with those parties uh more collaboratively a

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lot of the stuff recently with some things that we're doing in github we've tried to partner with

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the security team and kind of um you know harvest those relationships that we've been building to

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to really help promote the platform as a whole and so that i think that's been really um important too

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from in days past just continuing on building those bridges um with other teams and and kind of bring

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that into the world that we're at now because it's really important to to have those open dialogues

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and conversations not only with security teams and others but you know within the leadership organization

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as well and and i think that's you know the leadership team within the org has been really

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instrumental in getting where we're at with being able to embrace new technologies and accept you know

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not really failure but yeah accepting failure as like something that's part of the journey as we're

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learning and iterating on the platforms themselves tell me a little bit more about that in terms of that

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something that feels newer or is something that is more of an evolution of an existing

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way that that you related with these other teams and with leadership the notion of how we we think

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about and deal with failure yeah i think it's it's definitely um i think it's been an evolution within

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the company i think i've had a really a good privilege of working with some really good managers and

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on the infrastructure side and and currently on the platform side that that have been really good at

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identifying talent and and kind of really harvesting creative thinking um in both worlds so i think

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that's always kind of existed in some ways and i think it's just more talked about maybe more now and

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more of an idea that's like promoted as far as like you know getting that mvp out that that that minimal

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viable product that's that's out there getting that out and um i think it's just something that's always been

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talked about i mean like i said at previous my manager was always like you know let's just let's get version

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one out the door and then we'll go from that but that's really like tried to be an idea that's continued

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and just evolved as the organization itself has changed and kind of try to develop some more

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agile thought processes and teams without within the organization yeah so if i could venture a recap there it sounds like

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there's there's been a healthy foundation throughout for trying new things but it's going from the

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infrastructure side to the platform side has been an evolution in that you're you you talk about and

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implement those agile practices and lean practices if you will even more is that fair yeah for sure and you know

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we've i think a lot that's been helpful is having the the leadership from taking that on and really

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promoting that from the top down and that makes it easier for us to kind of do what we're wanting to

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do or you know build those platforms do those things but also too i think a lot of what's been really helpful

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for us as a platform team has been the product groups that we're serving or that are being hosted in the

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in the environment um you know we've we've gone to like other talks in different events where we're

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we're talking about this collaborative approach or whatever it is and a lot of times the companies

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are like well how do you deal with these developers and these product teams and we've been very fortunate

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to like not really have a lot of resistance but but have a lot of buy-in and the collaboration going on

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within the organization amongst uh these teams has been really really good for us to kind of get work

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done as a whole across multiple groups but also internally for them to kind of help each other and

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promote that um again that collaborative idea between you know all those teams so it has been you know

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something that is a culture change but very much driven from from the leadership team in order to to

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get to where we're at today okay so just to take the second part of this question is then what are the

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things that you've had to learn as you've transitioned from being more of a systems engineer to a platform

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engineer and what you know you alluded earlier to linux systems and a lot of new open source projects

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but you know what what kind of comes top of mind the things you've had to learn and then also

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how have you gone about learning those things what's been useful sure yeah so i mean you know working

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in the v-sphere world obviously there's linux experience there you're there's scripting and

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there's um you know command line stuff that's that's going on as you administer you know those kind of

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environments and that's very there's a lot of that going on where we're at today um where we're again like

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mentioned earlier we're trying to get to where we're deploying infrastructure as code so taking the

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the scripting models the those kind of things has been real helpful to bring into this world but um

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you know learning linux has been a big one and a lot of so one thing too that's been real helpful in

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this journey was when the platform the platform team was created there were we were kind of different

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people from different journeys within the it space um that that were kind of brought together just to

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form this team so a lot of my learning has been just talking to the you know guy who was doing more

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the linux admin stuff and you know hey how did i do this or can you walk me through that so you know

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when we are doing the work within our team we're trying to adopt a you know kind of a pairing model when

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it comes to the things that we're working on so that has always been helpful to learn new things from

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from people within the team you know as well as you know obviously going out and reading docs or you

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know whatever that's out there but i think like a lot of that just like on the job training that

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someone else has had from another space and bringing that into the team and kind of working with them

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has been more of an effort or more of a benefit rather to learn these new technologies like uh you

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know bash or you know whatever else that we're using it's just to learn from other people who have

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done it and be open to learning new things i love trying out new things and and learning new things a lot

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of times i'm probably wanting to use new ideas or technologies probably more sooner rather than i

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should but um i think that i've always enjoyed learning and trying something new um if it makes

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sense for the business and i think that um you know having a scripting or um you know in the

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scum world of writing management packs and kind of code some of the code stuff that's there

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those kind of things really helped make that transition because like in now as a cloud

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engineer there's you know more of that uh going on for sure and understanding um you know having

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those that that base for some of this um tech that we're using now has been really helpful in the new

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role what's been the the hardest thing to pick up that's a valid question i you know i again i think

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that just try just changing the the the scripting model into another another language has been a bit

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of a um a challenge i think another good thing is it's not really been um it's it's still a challenge

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but like working with different cloud providers um and kind of working through those nuances between

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each one and understanding that has been you know there's been some struggles there with with running the

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way we're running our cloud foundry environments in different spaces and then linux is always a

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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

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yeah i mean and um and i think that uh very practical learning of working and pairing with

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folks who have more experience yeah um if there's anything you want to add to that just you know i hope these uh

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these interviews can be a bit of a resource for other folks who are on this journey and trying to learn

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what and how they should go about trying to to pick up new skills so if there's anything anything else

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other than that kind of pairing model that that's helped then then please chime in yeah i mean pairing

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has been good but i also think just doing something or even if it's even if it fails like actually getting

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in and doing something is is really a good way that i've learned over uh the years when it comes to the

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platform stuff a lot of the like the really deep core things that i'm learning about um either cloud

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foundry or kubernetes or whatever has always been just absolutely failing at it and then but then getting

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into the weeds of why it failed in order to understand you know how that's working i mean

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taking a course on kubernetes or whatever is helpful but it's it's also really helpful to just

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fail at it or jump into it and kind of and try it out and then learn from that way as well

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too almost not really reverse engineering but really just kind of getting that experience i think has been

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really helpful for a lot of us on the team yeah is that something that you find um it's helpful to

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set aside time for yeah it is it's it's something we've i think we've struggled with it a little bit

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but we definitely acknowledge that it's very important um and we've we've tried to like either set aside

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days or hours um within a day to kind of continually feed that desire to learn and and try new things and be

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innovative and not just be a platform team that is keeping the lights on you know for the product

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teams but also be one that's that's being that's creating new things for the platform so that others

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can either consume or you know whatever whatever perspective you know just make it easier to to do

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something in the platform and learn something new while you're trying it too so we we that that kind of

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that idea of continuing to to learn you know that's something we're still that we try to drive a lot

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of things and i think it's very important not only in the platform side but any any space right i mean

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it's always good to uh continually learn new things and new skill sets now if you were to go back and

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do this whole uh transition journey uh again of course it's a journey that you're probably you know

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you're still on because when is it right exactly you know if you were to go back and and sort of

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you know take the the at least the the first part over again what would you would you do anything

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differently um and what advice would you have for someone who's a v-sphere pro today um or a hyper v pro um

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and you know they're looking to develop into a a platform engineer kind of devops pro what advice

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would you give yeah i mean i think that you know getting into being a v-sphere admin or you know

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working on that side of has always that's just been that was something that i kind of just got thrown

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into in some ways but also too it was a good opportunity to learn something new and then develop a skill so

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i think continuing that idea of always trying something new is really important i think a lot

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of times there were were times where i was kind of stuck in where i was at just because i'm familiar

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and comfortable with it and that that um that idea you know just made me want to learn things within

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that space or whatever without really looking outside of uh and trying something new so i would definitely

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encourage folks to get out and and and try something new continuing to learn different things because

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you know the things that we're doing in tech continually change and improve and now with like

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really cool things like kubernetes and stuff being brought into the v-sphere world like a lot of these

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worlds are kind of colliding together between what's happening there and what you know what platform

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engineering is doing and kind of bridging those gaps together i mean it's still really important um you

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know for us to have that that bridge between us and the current vm the v center admins and the

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infrastructure guys because they're doing really cool things building out um stuff on prem for

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developers to consume these resources and so you know i think that that's a continually evolving kind of

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process and in continuing to learn and iterate on new ideas and um and new tools is is always important

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and i would i would just continue to encourage folks to continue to try to you know look into that push

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yourself to learn new things um and not be you know complacent or just content with where you're at

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and you know try to try to really expand your horizon in that thinking and uh and and what's

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potentially something that folks could do would do differently uh that you would recommend they do

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differently than than how you approached it the first time or would it would it be no change from

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from how you went about it no i mean a lot of i mean i was very fortunate in in the journey to get

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where i'm at i think you know as mentioned earlier i always like to to say i'm like a founding member

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of the platform team at exporting goods but it's it's really i got coached almost from where i was at

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into this environment to some degree where you know we're building this collaborative platform team

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and and honestly i was a little bit you know not as open to that idea just because of the

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uncertainties of what was going what that was going to look like so i would definitely you know probably

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be more open-minded to potentially what that could open the door for and not just kind of discard it

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those kind of opportunities if something weren't like that were to come about um earlier on to before

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the platform team i i was helping one of the subsidiaries that we had kind of build out their

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e-com environment and and kind of run DevOps a little bit and not really having a whole lot of

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experience in that realm i still wanted to help them out for the benefit of the company for sure and but

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also to learn new things and so i took on some of those roles to really learn more about devops and

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what that looks like which was then helpful in making a transition into the platform team now because

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that devops world of of cscd and and helping folks deploy things and and build things is a lot more of

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what's going on now than we're in the old world before so and that i don't know that i would have

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really had that experience without just trying it and putting myself out there to to try something

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new well thank you so much john this has been a kind of a wonderful review of your your journey and

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and and i think there's a lot of great nuggets in here for for folks who are coming coming at things

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from the the v sphere pro side and i think there's a lot that folks can take a lot of confidence in

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and building on the skills that they've got so thank you so much for sharing yeah thanks for having

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me i really appreciate all that like all the vmware is doing to really harvest these kind of collaborative

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conversations and community i think it's really beneficial as folks are making those transitions i think

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it's very important and uh so thank you for for having these conversations hopefully it is meaningful

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to someone but yeah it's it's been a good journey and it's it's been exciting so thank you my pleasure

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all right well have a great rest of your day thank you

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Thank you.