This autumn, on September 15-16, for the 7th time in a row we will meet again in Riga to participate in Zabbix Conference 2017.
As always you will witness inspiring presentations, gain fresh perspective on new trends and established monitoring concepts, while spending an amazing time before, during and after the conference.
To introduce the upcoming agenda that awaits you, we are creating a series of pre-conference interviews with the speakers, granting you a deeper insight on the themes and topics intertwined through the both days of our event.
In this post we would like to present founder of Mesoform, Gareth Brown, getting ready to share his experience of running containers, from the first steps to scaling and operating in cloud environments.
Pre-conference Interview with Gareth Brown
Tell us about you and your company, how did you get started, and what choices led you to where you are now?
I’ve been working in technical operations for nearly 20 years now and most of it has been working in environments that people now define as DevOps organizations. As I’ve moved around and worked with many large companies I’d come to realize that, even though it’s the latest buzz word, there are still many places not implementing these practices or worse, not implementing them correctly (this runs the risk of the transformation failing and causing people to back away).
I started Mesoform because, during talks about splitting my department into a separate business with the CEO of the last company I worked for, we were sold. So I took the opportunity to dedicate my time to doing it on my own.
What are your biggest challenges, and could you give us some interesting statistics regarding your work?
Toughest challenges right now is finding time between consultancy work, which brings in revenue and time to work on product development
How did you choose Zabbix to be your monitoring solution, and what about Zabbix impresses you the most?
A company I worked for previously already had Zabbix implementations. They were finding limitations but I could tell quite easily that it was because it wasn’t set up right.
Reading into the documentation to find out how best to correct the issues I found a number of things which I liked. How monitoring load is distributed, LLD, programmability and mostly it’s powerful event management engine.
What is your history with Zabbix Conference, and could you tell us your motivation for becoming one of the speakers for this year’s event?
I attended 3 of the first 4 years and I have an interesting new paradigm which involves Zabbix as key component used in the our primary example.
What would be the key message of your presentation, and what do you want attendees to learn from your talk?
How simple running in containers in production can be; and that they don’t need significant and opinionated additional systems.
In your opinion, what are the main advantages and reasons for joining the upcoming Zabbix Conference 2017?
To be completely honest, it’s a little selfish. I really believe in simplifying infrastructure and streamlining operations. So I really want to share any experiences and ideas I have with like-minded people.
What topics you look forward to discussing with Zabbix community, conference participants and Zabbix team?
I think I’d like to discuss future opportunities around utilising and extending the event management system within Zabbix.
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At the conference Gareth will talk about vision of the Concierge Paradigm, how they made their application monitoring more efficient and accurate, by radically simplifying the infrastructure needed for running containers and how they utilized Zabbix as an container scheduler.
We are definitely looking forward to meet Gareth in Riga, to learn the road to drastically simplifying containers at scale, gain new information and experience.
Only a few short weeks are left to register, so we encourage you to act now and join the biggest Zabbix event of the year, to discover new possibilities of Zabbix, find answers and get to know Zabbix experts and our community – people who share your passion little closer.
