Fuel User Group 2024 Year in Review
Fuel has had its share of changes this year. There have been a number of increases in the events and members and we look forward to continuing this trend into 2025!
First off, Fuel’s membership this year increased by almost 3200 people, bringing our total active user membership up to 9,257! With an increase of 52.6%, we have a goal next year to meet at least this same value, if not surpass it! If you know someone who could benefit from Fuel’s offerings, please pass word along about the organization so they can join in and learn along with the rest of us!
The number of chapter events we had this year totaled a magnificent 82 held around the world! With a total of eight (8) Spark User Summits through the year, sixty-nine (69) individual chapter events, and the introduction of our new series called the “Fuel Workshops”, we had an additional five (5) events there as well. We hope to increase this even more for 2025 with a goal of hitting over 100 events across all types of chapters!.
For those who aren’t familiar with the new Fuel Workshop events, let us tell you about them briefly. The Fuel Workshops are joint events between Fuel and members of the support team within Palo Alto Networks. These events are intended to introduce new customers and support personnel to the offerings within the Palo Alto Networks ecosystem. To date, we’ve talked about numerous topics including
Best practices on the setup and configuration of the Next Generation Firewall (NGFW)
Setting up and configuring GlobalProtect VPN for small companies up to and including large scale implementations for global organizations
How to work with Palo Alto Networks customer portal for handling licensing, transfers, RMAs, and other parts of the support system
Advanced data plane troubleshooting of the NGFWs to allow for debugging and identification of issues with regards to poor firewall performance
These are just some of what the Fuel Workshops have done and in the future, we will be covering more topics like SD-WAN, Panorama, and many, many other tools!! And while these events to date have centered around the timing of the SAGE chapter based out of Singapore, we are currently in the process of adding more instances of these same sessions to NAM and EMEA to be able to increase the reach of these great events to more people live so they can interact with the speakers as well. Please be sure to check these out!
We have restarted the blogs section of the Fuel user group. Several years ago, these articles were big offerings and greatly enjoyed by hundreds of people. By restarting this section, we’re hoping to get more input from other presenters, writers, and professionals that want to share their knowledge with everyone else. Knowledge is a valued commodity, so the more that the wealth can be spread around, the more people can take advantage of it. We are always on the lookout for anyone who would like to contribute, so please feel free to reach out to us at Fuel at fuel@fuelusergroup.org to tell us how you can help with the blogs! We’d love to have you!
Last, but certainly not least, would be the improvements we’ve made to the virtual test lab (VTL) that Fuel maintains. During this year, we’ve gone ahead and done a major overhaul to the entire system including the following changes/updates:
The PAN-OS was upgraded to version 11.1 for easier access to newer technologies. In early 2025, we will be upgrading to 11.2 as a base standard so keep an eye out for that announcement!
The Windows Server OS was upgraded from Windows Server 2008R2 to Windows Server 2022
The Ubuntu Desktop OS (Debian-based Linux OS) was upgraded to 22.04 LTS. This is to get the system to a version that has the long term support (LTS) so users will know that it is a version that is around for quite some time and will be supported for at least a couple of years.
CentOS Server replaced with Rocky Linux 8 - We wanted to offer an EL-based Linux OS alongside the Debian-based one so that users who are more familiar with one distribution type versus the other had the chance to work with whichever platform they prefer. We also wanted to replace the CentOS distribution with Rocky Linux to keep the OS in an open source environment for anyone looking to do any kind of replication of these systems in their own home environments.
Coming in 2025, Fuel has more things that we are looking to implement and do beyond just the improvements to the VTL as mentioned above. Without giving away anything, we’re planning to do the following:
More webinars and summits to get training, demonstrations, and announcements to the Fuel membership
Looking into getting users involved in potential beta programs with Palo Alto Networks so everyone who wants to can keep up to date with the latest, greatest technology from this amazing Gartner Magic Quadrant leading company
Decommission chapters that are inactive to free up resource to reenergize chapters that are just starting, to start more chapters, and to continue to grow where Fuel members want the most involvement from the Fuel organization
Introduce open source tools that are advantageous to the smaller companies out there without the massive budgets so they can protect themselves while still maintaining a solid cybersecurity footprint of protection.
Thank you for taking the time to read what Fuel’s done in 2024 and here’s to getting even more done in 2025! We look forward to hearing from you!
The Fuel Team
fuel@fuelusergroup.org