Hi, my name is Gavin Stephens and I live in a small country called Wales, in the United Kingdom.
I have been working in the industry for around 11 years, starting out as a network engineer and then getting into virtualization/VMware very quickly, for the last 10 years.
I have focused on building cloud platforms, from your typical on-premise vSphere environments to working with many MSP’s using vCloud Director (ever since the 1.x days). I have since worked more closely with vRealize Automation and vRealize Orchestrator. It’s really hard to describe exactly what I do but I think a systems integration developer, most likely fits the bill. I spend most of my time gluing many API’s together to deliver solutions.
I have a 42u server rack in the garage where I host all my infrastructure running on VMware vSphere and vSAN, which hosts the entire VMware stack. I also work with a lot of open source software, such as Ansible, Terraform, Netbox, Jenkins… the list goes on.
Outside of work I am a big PC gamer at heart. I once enjoyed the fast-paced RTS genre but now stick to turn based strategies as I have a little bit more time to think. I am also a big board gamer, getting together with friends for at weekends and having a 12 hour gaming session.