Tag Archives: edge computing

Podcast with Krishnan Subramanian on Edge, the Kubernetes Ecosystem & the Composable Enterprise

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In this week’s L8ist Sh9y podcast Krishnan Subramanian, Founder and Chief Research Advisor of Rishidot Research talks about Edge Computing, the Kubernetes Ecosystem and the Composable Enterprise. Key highlights:

  • “Multi-Cloud is the foundation of Modern Enterprise” – Krishnan
  • Kubernetes ecosystem and the possibility that Serverless could replace it
  • IT innovation requires a composable and layered approach, without this approach IT will find themselves trapped in a hard-wired infrastructure unable to move forward

Topic                                 Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                  0.0 – 1.28
Edge Computing                         1.28 – 4.25
What is the Edge?                       4.25 – 6.06
Use Cases Not For Cloud           6.06 – 8.50 (Networking and 5G)
Distributed Scale of Edge          8.50 – 10.03
Multi-Cloud Progress                 10.03 – 12.07
Supporting Diff Infra Types?      12.07 – 16.40
Multi-Cloud & Kubernetes         16.40 – 20.54
Kubernetes Ecosystem              20.54 – 28.00 (Serverless can replace)
Ecosystem Gaps                          28.00 – 29.44
Best of Bread IT                           29.44 – 32.25 (Composable Enterprise)
IT Moves to Smaller Units         32.25 – 35.30
Back to Edge                                5.30 – 41.45
Conclusion                                   41.45 – 42.35

 

Podcast Guest: Krishnan Subramanian
Founder and Chief Research Advisor, Infrastructure, Application Platforms and DevOps

Krishnan Subramanian (a.k.a Krish) is a well-known expert in the field of cloud computing. He is the founder and Chief Research Advisor at Rishidot Research, a boutique analyst firm focused on Modern Enterprise. Their open data-based research helps enterprise decision makers on their enterprise modernization strategy. His Modern Enterprise model helps enterprises innovate rapidly by transforming their IT as the core part of the innovation team. He was a speaker and panelist at various cloud computing conferences and he was also an advisor for Glue conference in 2011 and Cloud Connect Santa Clara in 2012. He has also organized industry-leading conferences like Deploycon and Cloud2020. He is also an advisor to cloud computing startups. He can be reached on Twitter @krishnan.

 

Podcast with Yves Boudreau talks Heterogeneity in the Edge

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Joining this week’s L8ist Sh9y Podcast is Yves Boudreau, VP or Partnerships and Ecosystem Strategy at Ericsson. Rob Hirschfeld and Yves discuss the Ericsson Unified Delivery Network platform and the concept of a global content provider service built on heterogeneous infrastructure. Yves also provides insight into what webscale customers are looking for in the Edge as they give thought around balancing their applications from public cloud services to future edge clouds.  Finally, Rob and Yves talk about the coming fundamental change in how software is created and run “independent” of hardware.”  Yves can be contacted via LinkedIn.

Topic                                      Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                                   0.00 – 2.11
Ericsson Unified Delivery Network            2.11 – 3.01
Service Providers Space                              3.01 – 4.05
Operator Customers                                    4.05 – 5.22
Content Provider want global coverage  5.22 – 7.15
Example                                                         7.15 – 8.34
Edge Infrastructure w/ CDN                      8.34 – 9.42
Distributed Heterogeneous Infra               9.42 – 11.30
Baking Cloud Consumption into Edge    11.30 –  11.56
Multi-Tenant Infra at Edge                         11.56 – 14.05
Delivery of the Edge                                   14.05 – 16.16
Amazon Lambda is Expectation              16.06 – 20.36
Containers are Edge EC2?                         20.36 – 25.18
Is Edge Greenfield Work?                          25.18 – 29.12
Fundamental Software Change                29.12 – 31.29
Locked-In “Debt” always Re-appears      31.29 – 35.28
Conclusion                                                    35.28 – END

Podcast Guest: Yves Boudreau

Mr. Boudreau is a 20 year veteran of the Digital, Telecom and Cable TV industries. From modest beginnings of one of the first cable broadband ISPs in Canada to the fast paced technology hub of Silicon Valley, Yves joined ERICSSON in 2011 as Vice President of Technical Sales Support and most recently has accepted a position as the VP of Partnerships and Ecosystem Strategy for the ERICSSON Unified Delivery Network. Previously, Mr. Boudreau has worked in R&D, Systems Engineering & Business Development for companies such as Com21 Inc., ARRIS Group (Cable), Imagine Communication (Video Compression) and Verivue Inc. (CDN). Yves now resides in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife Josée and 3 children. Mr. Boudreau completed his undergraduate studies in Commerce @ Laurentian University and graduate studies in Information Technology Management @ Athabasca University. Yves currently also serves on the Board of Director of the Streaming Video Alliance (www.streamingvideoalliance.org)

Podcast with Zach Smith talking Bare Metal and AWS Training Wheels

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Joining this week’s L8ist Sh9y Podcast is Zach Smith, CEO of Packet and long-time champion of bare metal hardware. Rob Hirschfeld and Zach discuss the trends in bare metal, the impact of AWS changing the way developers view infrastructure, and issues between networking and server groups in IT organizations.

Topic                                                            Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                                       0.0 – 0.43
History of Packet                                               0.43 – 1:38
Why Public Cloud Bare Metal                         1.38 – 2.10
Price Points Metal vs VM                                 2.10 – 3.08
Intro Compute to Non-Data Center People 3.08 – 4:27
RackN early Customer                                      4.27 – 5.41
Managing non-Enterprise Hardware             5.41 – 7.45
Cloud has forever changed IT Ops                 7.45 – 10.20
Making Hardware Easier                                 10.20 – 12.35
Continuous Integration (CI)                            12.35 – 14.37
Customer Story w/ Terraform                        14.47 – 16.08
SRE, DevOps and Engineering Thinking     16.08 – 16:49
Most extreme Metal Pipelines                        16.49 – 18.02
Coolest New Hardware in Use                        18.02 – 19.28
How order metal and add to data center     19.28 – 22.47
RackN and the Switch                                       22.47 – 24.39
Edge Computing Break Enterprise IT           24.39 – 25.16
DevOps Highlights for Today                          25.16 – 27.01
Post Provision Control in Open Source          27.01 – 30.03
Data Centers in early 2000’s                            30.03 – 31.27
Nov 1 in NYC: Cloud Native in DataCenter   31.27 –  END

Podcast Guest: Zach Smith, CEO Packet

Zachary has spent his last 16 years building, running and fixing public cloud infrastructure platforms.  As the CEO of Packet, Zachary is responsible for the company’s strategic product roadmap and is most passionate about helping customers and partners take advantage of fundamental compute and avoid vendor lockin.  Prior to founding Packet, Zachary was an early member of the management team at Voxel, a NY-based cloud hosting company sold to Internap in 2011, that built software to automate all aspects of hosting datacenters.  He lives in New York City with his wife and 2 young children. Twitter @zsmithnyc

Nov 3 – Weekly Recap of All Things Digital Rebar and RackN

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Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things Digital Rebar, RackN, SRE, and DevOps. If you have any ideas for this recap or would like to include content please contact us at info@rackn.com or tweet Rob (@zehicle) or RackN (@rackngo)

Items of the Week

Digital Rebar

Join us Tuesday November 7th at 11am PST for our next Digital Rebar Online Community Meetup #4.

Long-time community member going back to the original Project Crowbar days Will Dennis talks with Rob Hirschfeld in in this week’s Podcast about the value of Digital Rebar technology as an operator for a complex lab environment.

Stay in Touch with the Community:

RackN

We released our 2nd White Paper this week: The New Economics for Data Center Infrastructure: RackN Automation Improves Speed and Agility by Reducing Cost and Risk.

Executive Summary

RackN’s mission is to fix the current lack of fast, simple and standard ways to manage fundamental data center infrastructure activities. These include updating server firmware, operating systems and integrating provisioning into application life-cycles. RackN on-premises software integrates easily with existing processes while providing a clear path from home-grown scripting to common best-practices. RackN customers achieve a 10x performance improvement by automating provisioning and orchestration. Like any building activity, a solid foundation makes the entire stack more robust and secure.

Podcast with Bernard Golden

We spoke to Bernard Golden about his recent blog post Edge Computing and the Death of Cloud: Nonsense.

For those of you who prefer to access Podcasts via YouTube, all L8ist Sh9y podcasts are now available at this Playlist.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus are preparing for a series of upcoming events where they are speaking or just attending. If you are interested in meeting with them at these events please email info@rackn.com

If you are attending any of these events please reach out to Rob Hirschfeld to setup time to learn more about our solutions or discuss the latest industry trends.

OTHER NEWSLETTERS

Podcast with Bernard Golden talking Edge Computing and the Container Hotel

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Joining this week’s L8ist Sh9y Podcast is Bernard Golden, a long-time tech innovator and visionary and one of the ten most influential people in cloud computing according to Wired.com. Bernard and Rob Hirschfeld discuss the latest blog from Bernard and the impact of Edge Computing and the reality of implementing this concept. We are also introduced to the Container Hotel.

Topic                                                                              Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                                                               0.0 – 0.39
Edge Computing Blog                                                             0.39 – 3:35    (Bernard Blog)
Other Non-Control Loop Use Cases                                     3.35 –  7:10
Environmental Computing / IOT                                           7:10 – 9:05
Fallacy of Vendor-based Solutions                                       9:05 – 13:25
How Manage Edge Hardware                                                13:25 – 16:00
Container Hotel                                                                         16:00 – 16:50
No One Cares about Hardware                                              16:50 – 23:40
Cloud Extensions – Not Mini Clouds                                     23:40 – 27:05
Like Cloud but Own Data-Center Can’t Do What I Want   27:05 – 29:55
Wrap-Up                                                                                     29:55 – END

Podcast Guest: Bernard Golden

Bernard Golden is a long-time tech innovator and visionary. Wired.com named him one of the ten most influential people in cloud computing, and his blog has been listed in over a dozen “best of” lists. He is the author/co-author of five books, including Amazon Web Services for Dummies, the best selling cloud computing book ever.

From 2012 to 2015 Bernard served as an executive at two cloud computing software startups: Enstratius (acquired by Dell, 2013) and ActiveState Software (cloud product line acquired by HPE, 2015).

After leaving ActiveState, Bernard began researching and consulting across a number of new technologies, including machine learning, drones, genomics, and 3D printing. One, however, stood out as the next innovation platform that will transform our society: blockchain.

Deep Thinking & Tech + Great Guests – L8ist Sh9y podcast relaunched

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I love great conversations about technology – especially ones where the answer is not very neatly settled into winners and losers (which is ALL of them in IT).  I’m excited that RackN has (re)launched the L8ist Sh9y (aka Latest Shiny) podcast around this exact theme.

Please check out the deep and thoughtful discussion I just had with Mark Thiele (notes) of Aperca where we covered Mark’s thought on why public cloud will be under 20% of IT and culture issues head on.

Spoiler: we have David Linthicum coming next, SO SUBSCRIBE.

I’ve been a guest on some great podcasts (Cloudcast, gcOnDemand, Datanauts, IBM Dojo, HPE, Foodfight) and have deep respect for critical work they do in industry.

We feel there’s still room for deep discussions specifically around automated IT Operations in cloud, data center and edge; consequently, we’re branching out to start including deep interviews in addition to our initial stable of IT Ops deep technical topics like Terraform, Edge Computing, GartnerSYM review, Kubernetes and, of course, our own Digital Rebar.

Soundcloud Subscription Information

 

Podcast: Mark Thiele Talks Cloud, IT, and Jevons Paradox

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Rob Hirschfeld, CEO/Co-Founder of RackN speaks with Mark Thiele, Chief Strategy and CIO of Apcera on a variety of cloud and DevOps related topics including Mark’s recent blog post, Why Adoption of Public Cloud Likely Won’t Exceed 17 Percent of Total IT Demand by 2022.

TOPIC                                                                    TIME
Intro to Mark / Latest on Culture                     0:00 – 3:50
Winners/Losers Mentality in IT                       3:50 – 8:35
Bottleneck in IT for Future                                8:35 – 11:00
Pay Down Debt in Interconnected Systems   11:00 – 13:15
IT More Consumable                                          13:15 – 15:10
Resiliency                                                              15:10 – 16:15
Jevons Paradox & Internal/External Cust      16:15 – 22:44
Public Cloud & Edge Computing                      22:44 – 26:55
Problem is People Not Tech                              26:55 – END

Don’t miss Mark talking about the Winchester Mystery House of IT at 12:07

Podcast Guest – Mark Thiele @mthiele10
Chief Strategy and Chief Information Officer – Apcera

Mark Thiele’s successful career in IT spans 25 years and has focused on both operating roles and on driving cloud adoption across enterprises of all sizes. Mark has deep industry experience and extensive knowledge of the requirements of policy-driven cloud computing and drives cross-functional strategic initiatives as Chief Strategy & Chief Information Officer for Apcera. Prior to joining Apcera, Mark was the executive vice president of ecosystem development at Switch SUPERNAP, builders of the world’s highest-rated data centers. He is also the president and founder of Data Center Pulse, an organization created to promote best practices in the data center industry. Mark has held executive roles at HP, Gilead, VMware and Brocade and is a member of nonprofit groups including The Green Grid and Infrastructure 2.0, where he advocates for data center and cloud industry evolution. A globally recognized speaker at leading industry events on a wide range of topics including cloud, IoT, data center, DevOps, and IT leadership. Mark is a regular content contributor to InformationWeek, GigaOm, Data Center Knowledge and other publications. Mark also serves on the technical advisory board of several startups.

Podcast: OpenStack OpenDev Highlights Edge vs Cloud Computing Confusion

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Rob Hirschfeld provides his thoughts from last week’s OpenStack OpenDev conference focused on Edge Computing. This podcast is part of a three blog series from Rob on the issues surrounding Edge and Cloud computing:

Post 1 – OpenStack on Edge? 4 Ways Edge is Distinct from Cloud
Post 2 – Edge Infrastructure is Not Just Thousands of Mini Clouds

Edge Infrastructure is Not Just Thousands of Mini Clouds

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I left the OpenStack OpenDev Edge Infrastructure conference with a lot of concerns relating to how to manage geographically distributed infrastructure at scale.  We’ve been asking similar questions at RackN as we work to build composable automation that can be shared and reused.  The critical need is to dramatically reduce site-specific customization in a way that still accommodates required variation – this is something we’ve made surprising advances on in Digital Rebar v3.1.

These are very serious issues for companies like AT&T with 1000s of local exchanges, Walmart with 10,000s of in-store server farms or Verizon with 10,000s of coffee shop Wifi zones.  These workloads are not moving into centralized data centers.  In fact, with machine learning and IoT, we are expecting to see more and more distributed computing needs.

Running each site as a mini-cloud is clearly not the right answer.

While we do need the infrastructure to be easily API addressable, adding cloud without fixing the underlying infrastructure management moves us in the wrong direction.  For example, AT&T‘s initial 100+ OpenStack deployments were not field up-gradable and lead to their efforts to deploy OpenStack on Kubernetes; however, that may have simply moved the upgrade problem to a different platform because Kubernetes does not address the physical layer either!

There are multiple challenges here.  First, any scale infrastructure problem must be solved at the physical layer first.  Second, we must have tooling that brings repeatable, automation processes to that layer.  It’s not sufficient to have deep control of a single site: we must be able to reliably distribute automation over thousands of sites with limited operational support and bandwidth.  These requirements are outside the scope of cloud focused tools.

Containers and platforms like Kubernetes have a significant part to play in this story.  I was surprised that they were present only in a minor way at the summit.  The portability and light footprint of these platforms make them a natural fit for edge infrastructure.  I believe that lack of focus comes from the audience believing (incorrectly) that edge applications are not ready for container management.

With hardware layer control (which is required for edge), there is no need for a virtualization layer to provide infrastructure management.  In fact, “cloud” only adds complexity and cost for edge infrastructure when the workloads are containerized.  Our current cloud platforms are not designed to run in small environments and not designed to be managed in a repeatable way at thousands of data centers.  This is a deep architectural gap and not easily patched.

OpenStack sponsoring the edge infrastructure event got the right people in the room but also got in the way of discussing how we should be solving these operational.  How should we be solving them?  In the next post, we’ll talk about management models that we should be borrowing for the edge…

Read 1st Post of 3 from OpenStack OpenDev: OpenStack on Edge? 4 Ways Edge is Distinct from Cloud

OpenStack on Edge? 4 Ways Edge Is Distinct From Cloud

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Last week, I attended a unique OpenDev Edge Infrastructure focused event hosted by the OpenStack Foundation to help RackN understand the challenges customers are facing at the infrastructure edges.  We are exploring how the new lightweight, remote API-driven Digital Rebar Provision can play a unique role in these resource and management constrained environments.

I had also hoped the event part of the Foundation’s pivot towards being an “open infrastructure” community that we’ve seen emerging as the semiannual conferences attract a broader set of open source operations technologies like Kubernetes, Ceph, Docker and SDN platforms.  As a past board member, I believe this is a healthy recognition of how the community uses a growing mix of open technologies in the data center and cloud.

It’s logical for the OpenStack community, especially the telcos, to be leaders in edge infrastructure; unfortunately, that too often seemed to mean trying to “square peg” OpenStack into the every round hole at the Edge.  For companies with a diverse solution portfolio, like RackN, being too myopic on using OpenStack to solve all problems keeps us from listening to the real use-cases.  OpenStack has real utility but there is no one-size-fits all solution (and that goes for Kubernetes too).

By far the largest issue of the Edge discussion was actually agreeing about what “edge” meant.  It seemed as if every session had a 50% mandatory overhead in definitioning.  I heard some very interesting attempts to define edge in terms of 1) resource constraints of the equipment or 2) proximity to data sources or 3) bandwidth limitations to the infrastructure.  All of these are helpful ways to describe edge infrastructure.

Putting my usual operations spin on the problem, I choose to define edge infrastructure in data center management terms.  Edge infrastructure has very distinct challenges compared to hyperscale data centers.  

Here is my definition:

1) Edge is inaccessible by operators so remote lights out operation is required

2) Edge requires distributed scale management because there are many thousands of instances to be managed

3) Edge is heterogeneous because breath of environments and scale imposes variations

4) Edge has a physical location awareness component because proximity matters by design

These four items are hard operational management related challenges.  They are also very distinctive challenges when compared to traditional hyperscale data center operations issues where we typically enjoy easy access, consolidated management, homogeneous infrastructure and equal network access.

In our next post, ….