Building Community with the (US)NUA
Phil Gervasi runs the upstate New York NUG, so he had Chris Kane and me on Telemetry Now to tell the origin story: why we started, how a NUG night runs, how we keep it vendor-neutral, and how to start one where you live.
21 February 2025 · 2 min read
Telemetry Now, Season 2 Episode 32. Published 21 February 2025. Host: Phil Gervasi of Kentik, with USNUA co-founder Chris Kane.
Phil leads the upstate New York NUG in Saratoga Springs, which he reminded us is the best chapter of the 32. He wanted the founders on the record, so Chris Kane and I told the story.
Why we started
Our first event was February 2017. VMware people had VMUGs, Linux people had LUGs, operators had NANOG and the regional NOGs, and there was nowhere for enterprise and service provider engineers in the same city to sit down with a beer and talk shop. Chris added the part I had forgotten: at the time everyone was telling us to become programmers, and what we noticed about the DevOps crowd was how openly they shared and collaborated. We were not seeing that in networking. So, think global, act local: get engineers in our own backyard talking to each other. Chris's line about meeting a fellow engineer from your own city at a conference on the other coast is the whole problem in one sentence. COVID shut the events down and gave us time to turn the Ohio format into a template, and that became the USNUA.
How a night runs
Show up around four or five, grab food and a drink, mingle. The local leader introduces the night and thanks the sponsors, because none of it happens without them, Kentik included. A 45 to 60 minute vendor-neutral presentation by someone local: an automation journey, an EVPN-VXLAN rollout, the Ohio grocery retailer who built open-source routers for every store. A break, then a panel of three or four practitioners with a question list we rotate quarterly and that the room usually hijacks, which is the point. Phil's memory of AJ Murray's Vermont NUG getting through two of eight questions is typical. Average attendance is 30 to 35; Indiana and Connecticut run 50 to 60, Nebraska 75 to 80, and the Cleveland Halloween event has had a wait list past 100. Chris's framing of the crowd: the people who would be in the foxhole with you during a maintenance window, not the C-suite, though security folks, budget talks and career advice are welcome creep.
Staying connected, and starting one
The Slack has close to a thousand people in it, with a channel per chapter plus beer and books. Membership is free and the member section holds slide decks and recordings, including the Pennsylvania panel that became a podcast. To start a chapter, fill in the form under Groups and Events; we ask for two organizers so momentum survives one of them getting busy, and our event coordinators handle venue, sponsors, catering and the seventeen phone calls that go with it. Chris's closing shout-out went to Kayla, Jess and Kate, who do that work while the two of us get to be the faces. We also talked through the move from state to city chapters, which started with Texas and with Phil pointing out that upstate New York is a different country from Manhattan, and the partnerships: the Great Debate with the Network Automation Forum at AutoCon, Packet Pushers, the Art of Network Engineering, NANOG and CHI-NOG, and mash-up events with the Western Michigan Cloud Security Alliance.
My favourite moment was Phil's aside about his 18-year-old daughter, who came along to the Philadelphia and Connecticut events and walked out with a paid internship and an interest in computer science. That is the thing working as intended.
