Are you comfortable with the whole "Cloud Native" concept yet?

If your (tech-savvy) neighbor wandered over to chat you up in the front yard and asked you about it, could you explain what it is? How it works? Why it matters?

It's OK if you couldn't. Most people can't. Oh they're not admitting it, but they should. It's still a very new concept, and the sooner we all get up to speed on it, the sooner we can differentiate between the best cloud-native offerings for our particular environments and those that are less-than-ideal.

Cisco recently hosted a couple of webinars that attempt to do exactly that.

You see, we're partnering with Pivotal to deliver Cloud Foundry on top of Metapod (our fully-managed OpenStack-based private cloud solution), and Cloud Foundry just happens to be great at delivering all the cloud native goodness you've been hearing whispers about.

The first webinar (accessible here on-demand) is dedicated to making the value proposition crystal clear. It explains what Cloud Native really means, why you should care about it, and how other large companies are exploiting it to their advantage.

The second webinar (accessible here) is a more technical deep-dive. It explores what Cloud Foundry consists of, how it works, and why it makes your private cloud much more powerful.

Both sessions are very worthwhile on their own, and combined, they will position you to blow your silly neighbor's mind when he shows up on your lawn with the nerve to challenge your IT wisdom.

Oh, it might be useful in your day job as well. You know...for enabling a successful DevOps environment, making continuous integration possible, and fundamentally changing the way you build and deploy software...but first things first.

Enjoy!