Martez Reed

@discoposse The fundamentals aren't sexy to talk about at a conference or a vendor pitch. A hijacked Terraform binary or provider could be really fun for those that believe GIT is an audit log.

I just have to laugh every day as I see everyone talking about secure infrastructure and secure dev practices. Then, 3 minutes later they see someone tweet some Claude thing and proceed to do a "npm random-shit" and never even check the package.json it came with let alone validate any signatures.

Drop a reply if you've ever checked the signature against a download before installing it.

@CTOAdvisor The 50% is all hype particularly when you think about assembly lines for cars. All of those are still not fully automated despite them having a very finite number of operations in most cases and something that the car manufacturers have been working on for decades.

Almost a year after this interview we don’t seem any closer to AI taking 50% of the white collar jobs. Models have proved that they aren’t scaling in capabilities that matter in the way businesses need to replace workers. Is this idea of AI taking 50% of work all hype?

@CTOAdvisor This should be easily achieved in an entirely closed environment where the AI has full insight into everything in the estate. An experiment I'd start with is can the AI reliably find the current version of every piece of hardware and software then find at least the latest version

Walking the expo floors at Nutanix Next and Google Cloud Next looking for one thing: Agentic AI that actually operates infrastructure. We’ve been promised a self-healing network since the 90s. If it’s real, it won’t be in the keynotes. It’ll be in the booths.

Install Nutanix community edition nested on the homelab hypervisor for some migration testing. Having an extremely lightweight virtualization solution makes tinkering infinitely easier.

Starting a nested Azure Local install using the home lab hypervisor.

Finally got cloud-init working with the metadata service in the homelab hypervisor. Setting the hostname and running user data scripts.

Spent time getting the network visualizer in the homelab hypervisor working. Now I can quickly see what subnets a VPC has and what instances are connected to those subnets.

Working on adding network visualization to the homelab hypervisor to quickly see what subnets I've got workloads connected to while working on OpenFlow flows.

Added support for browsing the datastore files for the homelab hypervisor to simplify file management.

@rnelson0 Those use case specifics are ideal places to start the conversation. Are our apps generic enough to run on dissimilar hypervisors between dev and prod? Do we need to meet stringent security requirements? Usually I just see a feature by feature checklist comparison spreadsheet.

@GreenReedTech Yep, it’s expensive to have two separate environments, but so important especially when dealing with PHI/PII.

I would argue all VMware replacement conversations should start with what applications the business needs to run. The features and ecosystem support the workloads running on the virtualization platform. Do dev and test workloads need data protection or HA?

@rnelson0 That raises the question of whether to have a small footprint that mirrors production that you cycle apps through in a short lived fashion or you go with a more persistent larger dev environment. Thinking all things cost to value trade off if we're talking more licenses.

@GreenReedTech If production does, dev does. Found a number of apps that, surprise, behave differently with and without those features, so you have to have the same dev and prod setup to measure fairly. Test is fine without parity, tho.

Speed has been the focus of the homelab hypervisor that I've been working on and being able to go from not installed to ready to run virtual machines in a matter of seconds accomplishes the goal. The OS installation is stateless and I usually run it from a USB on real hardware.

@darthVikes @MichaelCade1 There's definitely a middle ground that melds concepts like immutable infrastructure and a very lightweight virtualization layer without all the bells and whistles. Microvms are interesting but have limited use cases for orgs with a lot of 3rd party apps.

@MichaelCade1 @GreenReedTech But I wonder if we take some of the network and storage complexity out and still can package vms to start with some sort of format/API to orchestrate it crud operations. Have traditional vm storage, traditional vm networking. Where that would take us from a hybrid approach.

More UI work on the homelab hypervisor. Just removed the need for a separate VNC client with a built-in VNC client in the UI.

@MichaelCade1 It has a built-in metadata server like AWS to simplify cloud-init and the goal with the networking is to support more advanced use cases for testing like integrated proxy servers and "air-gapped" environments. All features focused on lab or test environments.

@MichaelCade1 I do a lot of testing that doesn't need enterprise features in a hypervisor like DRS, HA, Live Migration, etc. The "hypervisor" is based on Alpine Linux with KVM and Open vSwitch. It boots in about 90 seconds. I'm using it to run Nutanix AHV and Hyper-V at the moment.

@MichaelCade1 This is what makes one think about whether it was significantly underpriced for years given the breadth of very polished features and broad ecosystem of integrated solutions. How does one determine fair market value without a relatively close competitor?

I just stuck up for VMware in the hypervisor hunger games. No doubt best hypervisor and virtualisation platform available today!

@TheNJDevOpsGuy By no means do I believe that AI will replace a majority of engineers but there will be a portion of engineers, who are real people, will lose their jobs to AI. I believe the conversation needs a middle ground. Everyone can't adapt to the same degree and AI won't take every job.

The same conversations happened when on-prem went to the cloud. The same conversations happened when Sysadmins started to use PowerShell more. The whole "engineers will lose their jobs" happened WAY more during the NoCode/LowCode phase compared to the AI phase. I'll believe it when there's some proof.

For everyone who ever said/thought "AI is going to take engineering jobs" Enjoy the read 😊 thenewstack.io/mcp-vulnerabil…