Infrastructure learning with the live edges left in.
vBrownBag brings practitioner conversations to cloud, DevOps, AI, and infrastructure topics without sanding off the messiness of real work. Episodes move from conference chatter and tooling mishaps into concrete problems like OTEL vendor neutrality, hallucinations, AI governance, FinOps, Terraform, and MCP.
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vBrownBag is a community-flavored technical education show built around cloud, DevOps, AI, and infrastructure work. The recent episodes sound like live technical sessions rather than tightly edited interviews. Openings can wander through conference travel, streaming-platform experiments, soundboard jokes, time-zone mistakes, and friendly ribbing before the discussion locks onto the subject. That looseness is part of the show’s identity. It leaves the seams of real technical conversation visible. The useful material comes when guests start mapping current tooling to everyday operational problems. Vendor neutrality in OTEL becomes a discussion about collectors, telemetry signals, multicast patterns, and comparing backends with the same data. Hallucinations from vector-store databases turn into troubleshooting around embeddings, model access, OpenSearch Serverless, Postgres, syncing, cost, and black-box behavior. AI agents are framed through tools, MCP servers, Playwright, browser automation, local context, and the cost of loading too much capability into an agent. Governance gets attached to virtualized infrastructure through access controls, service accounts, ownership, change processes, and the language gap between technical teams and risk leaders. FinOps is handled as architecture, tooling, tagging, labeling, reporting, and trust with business partners. Observability stretches past logs, metrics, and traces into anomaly detection, incident prioritization, readable summaries, OpenTelemetry components, and AI-assisted response. Terraform appears through MCP servers, code assistants, demos, documentation, and early tooling tradeoffs. The show’s range is broad, but its center is narrow: infrastructure people trying to understand what today’s platforms actually do. It suits practical technical learning more than polished thought leadership. The banter can be blunt and irreverent, yet the best passages are specific, grounded, and implementation-minded.
Made for: Suits a listener who works near cloud, DevOps, AI, observability, or infrastructure and wants practical technical discussion with informal pacing. It also fits people tracking MCP, agents, OTEL, FinOps, and infrastructure governance from a practitioner angle.
What sets it apart: vBrownBag stands apart by keeping technical education close to live community sessions: demos, detours, jokes, tool failures, and concrete implementation details share the same room. Similar shows may smooth the conversation; this one often preserves the working texture.
vBrownBag.com is a community of people who believe in helping other people. Specifically we work in IT infrastructure and we help other people in the IT industry to better their careers through education. Most frequent activity is producing the vBrownBag podcast. vBrownBag also attends global conferences to produce TechTalks and theater sessions
A Minecraft server becomes your Terraform classroom, live tech hiccups included.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A practical look at using the OpenTelemetry collector to compare backends and plan a vendor transition.
Vendor neutrality gets a grounded workout as Adriana and Josh explain how the OpenTelemetry collector can send the same telemetry to multiple backends. That makes it easier to compare vendors on shared data, or to bring in a new system while phasing another one out.
A grounded AWS troubleshooting story about vector stores, black-box behavior, and hallucinations that keep showing up in production data.
AWS vector-store hallucinations turn into a practical troubleshooting story as Amelia Huff-Ross works from not knowing the data toward understanding why a knowledge base keeps giving bad answers.
A grounded tour of agent tools, MCP context, browser approvals, and the friction of live automation.
AI agents enter through a practical doorway: a real-estate professional with no technical background reads two free books and feels he understands most of what he needs to build.
A grounded governance primer for vSphere admins preparing to discuss access, ownership, logs, and retention.
AI governance for virtualized infrastructure gets a grounded, practical treatment here, with Marian Newsome steering the discussion away from the noise around agents and MCP and toward the controls administrators may be asked to justify.
A grounded look at cloud costs, tooling, architecture, and the trust that depends on getting the numbers right.
FinOps - What It Is & Why It Matters opens on the familiar sting of a high cloud bill, then traces the problem into architecture, performance, and business trust.
From economic pressures to investment consequences.
AI capability meets the work of building.
Daily AI news through the lens of trust, infrastructure, and real-world deployment.
vBrownBag's Chris, Adriana Villela, and Josh turn a LinkedIn argument into a talk about OpenTelemetry vendor neutrality.
On VBrownBag, Chris Williams and Damian Carlson talk with Amelia Huff-Ross about why a Bedrock knowledge base over JIRA tickets started returning Azure and Google results for AWS questions.
vBrownBag's AI Agents Made Simple: Everything You Need to Know puts Duan Lightfoot, an AWS AI engineer, in a practical discussion about building AI agents that can call tools, keep memory, and run code.
Marian Newsome frames vBrownBag's AI governance talk around four questions for vSphere admins: who owns it, can you prove it, can you recover it, and can you defend it.
vBrownBag's FinOps talk with Peter Crenshaw focuses on why cloud spend matters after bills arrive as one line item and then explode into hundreds of thousands of rows.
Neal Shah presents vBrownBag’s “Observability 2.0” as a shift from logs, metrics, and traces toward OpenTelemetry, predictive anomaly detection, and AI-assisted remediation.
vBrownBag host Chris and guest Sam McGowan of HashiCorp explain how Terraform MCP servers connect AI models to current provider registries, style guides, and private workspaces.
vBrownBag host Chris and guest Gautam Bagel examine how generative AI moved from conversational assistants and RAG to tool use, MCP, and autonomous agents.
Peter Sankauskas presents the fourth annual AWS Survey on vBrownBag after building it to measure AWS service usage, interest, and retention with year-over-year data.
Mark Tenderholt presents infrastructure-as-code through a Minecraft server, using Terraform and Packer to connect cloud, operating-system, and application configuration.
Duan Lightfoot presents Strands Agents, an open-source Python SDK created by AWS that supports Amazon Bedrock, OpenAI, and Gemini models.
Eric Shanks explains why vSphere administrators are evaluating KubeVirt as Broadcom pricing and contract-renewal problems affect VMware customers and service providers.
vBrownBag hosts Dominic Wyszynski, Eric Wright, and Damien examine Amazon Nova Sonic, a unified speech-to-speech model on AWS Bedrock.
Damian Karlson, a longtime VMware administrator and former VMware employee, explains how OpenStack maps to familiar virtualization concepts for administrators facing migration pressure from Broadcom.
Luis Valdivia Omedera demonstrates how AWS MediaLive, MediaTailor, and MediaConvert can assemble a small FAST channel from stored video and live inputs.
An interview with Irvin Szilagyi about building a BlueSky bot using AWS Lambda and Terraform, covering his background as an AWS community builder.
Peter Sankauskas launches the third AWS survey for 2025, discussing its release and briefly touching on a new job at Platform 9.
AWS hero Linda Mohamed discusses building Amazon Q apps to scale and drive community engagement on the vBrownBag technical podcast.
Jeremiah Dooley discusses his role at GitHub, the recent GitHub Universe conference, and the transition to managing an advocacy team for enterprise developers.
Aaron Miller discusses the human side of DevOps, focusing on human interaction and helping others level up.