Over The Edge

Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Fay Arjomandi, Founder, President, and CEO of mimik technology.

Fay is a serial entrepreneur, multiple-time CEO, and authoritative voice in the tech industry. She is an official member of the Forbes Technology Council, and recently received the State of the Edge and Edge Computing World 2020 Edge Woman of the Year Award.

In this interview, Fay discusses the origins of mimik’s hybrid edge cloud computing application development platform, and how it is enabling digital transformation and helping build a socially and economically sustainable applications ecosystem. 

Key Quotes

“We are a big supporter of ecosystem. That's number one. We're basically saying that the opportunity is way bigger than one single company winning everything…We think this is an ecosystem play, and the opportunity is quite lucrative for everybody.”

“We believe in the ecosystem that is like a Bazaar. Everybody defines their own set of things that they sell, and the consumer can pick and choose different parts of the product that they want from different entities and different companies. But the Bazaar itself goes by a set of regulations.”

“The fast pace of the world is why restful APIs are so important, because there is so much we don't know. We don't know what we don't know. And I think that's one of the challenges of enterprises right now, it's almost like ‘Okay, I need to do my digital transformation. Where do I start?’"

“Restful API has become so important and defining an architectural pattern of microservices has become so important, because that allows people to iterate on design, development, and delivery and integration with the rest of the world.”

“When people say ‘What does mimik do?’ We say simply, we enable microservice development on any device. Because that is the key in terms of market adoption of digital solutions in a sustainable and systematic approach.”

Sponsors

Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Seagate Technology. Seagate’s new CORTX Intelligent Object Storage Software is 100% open source. It enables efficient capture and consolidation of massive, unstructured data sets for the lowest cost per petabyte. Learn more and join the community at seagate.com

Links

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Edge Woman of the Year Award 2021 

Today’s episode features an interview that took place earlier this month at Kubecon’s Kubernetes on Edge virtual conference between Matt Trifiro and Craig McLuckie.

As a co-founder of the Kubernetes project and co-creator of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Craig is a modern-day legend in the space. He left Google in 2016 to found Heptio, and currently serves as VP of Product Management at VMware.

In this interview, Craig discusses the Kubernetes origin story, his current work in the Modern Application Platform business unit at VMware, and why he says Edge will be a highly disruptive area of innovation.

Key Quotes: 

“From a futures perspective, it's all about the edge. This is where I see the most excitement…I think it's going to be a huge growth area and a highly disruptive area of innovation over the coming years.”

“To succeed in a startup, you really need to look for a moment of disruption where the set of incumbents are not able to move as quickly as they might like; where there's a high total addressable market…that's what you can create a successful business out of.”

“There's no substitute for culture. I think if you can establish a very effective cultural bar, if you can design your culture to the problem at hand, and if you hold yourselves to a very high standard, it becomes self-perpetuating…[It starts] with being very, very deliberate about the cultural roots.”

“We are an organization that is in service of the community and in service of our customers, and what we build is honest technology. So we stand behind the way that we build, and we stand behind what we build. We take a great degree of pride and delight in creating honest technology.”

Sponsors

Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is NetFoundry. What do IoT apps, edge compute and edge data centers have in common?  They need simple, secure networking.  Unfortunately, SD-WAN and VPN are square pegs in round holes.  NetFoundry solves the headache, providing software-only, zero trust networking, embeddable in any device or app. Go to NetFoundry.io to learn more.

Links

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Follow Craig on Twitter

Today’s episode features an interview between your host Matt Trifiro, and David Xie and Dalerie Wu of Zenlayer.

David is the Chief Product Officer at Zenlayer. Before joining Zenlayer, he spent eight years at Gartner, most recently as Group Vice President of Digital Products. 

Dalerie is the Head of Corporate Strategy at Zenlayer. She has been with Zenlayer since 2015 and previously led its global marketing team. 

In this interview, David and Dalerie discuss the unique challenges of bringing edge solutions to emerging markets, and how the edge represents a huge opportunity to introduce a quality digital experience to countries with underdeveloped telecoms infrastructure. 

Key Quotes: 

“I'm sure a lot of technologists think about the edge from the technology angle. We tend to think about edge purely from our customer's perspective. Because we are serving global companies, they are usually doing well in their home country, which is usually in the developed world. For example, if the United States is the core market, then the emerging markets will become the edge for them.” -David

“All of those emerging markets are growing at a much faster speed and they have tons of people, so if you add those two things together and then couple that with the poor infrastructure, that means there's a huge opportunity for infrastructure providers to bring a good or decent digital experience to those users.”  -David

“In emerging markets, it's really people using mobile internet more than wired connections because of the infrastructure issue. It's hard for them to build fiber, so you have wireless internet being so much more dominant. Over 90% of people who are on the internet use a mobile device to access it.” -Dalerie

“I think once [5G] does roll out to emerging markets, it will have a much bigger impact than it would probably have here in the US…[but] really building and ramping that up is going to be a challenge.” -Dalerie

“Cloud and edge [are] complementary. Cloud is always going to be here as the core, but as more and more applications are being consumed by users all over the world at the edge, you need the edge computing component to complement that.” -Dalerie

Sponsors

Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Zenlayer. Improving user experience doesn't have to be complicated or expensive. Zenlayer helps you lower latency with on-demand edge services in over 180 PoPs around the world. Find out how you can improve your users' experience today at zenlayer.com/edge

Links

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Find David on LinkedIn

Find Dalerie on LinkedIn

Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Nick Barcet, Senior Director of Technology Strategy at Red Hat. 

Nick joined Red Hat in June 2014 and now leads the team that helps decide the future of technologies, currently focusing on Telco, Edge, and AI/ML. 

In this interview, Nick discusses what it means to set edge strategy for Red Hat, where he’s seeing the most edge-related demand right now, why the future of edge must be open, and the floating IP solution he’s constructed in order to get reliable internet while he sails around the world on his boat.

Key Quotes: 

“When we’re talking about a new field of interest, what people are saying is still not yet normalized. We still have problems with definitions and there is a lot of confusion. If I take the average person in the IT field and ask them, ‘What is the edge?’ The answer is generally linked to mobile phones and 5G. And while these are important components, they are not the beginning nor the end of it. So I think it's super interesting to be in this early phase and trying to bring more clarity to the fog in which we are moving.”

“[Three areas] where we see a lot of edge-related demand right now are: In telco–they are busy deploying 5G, which requires an edge infrastructure for it to be performant. Then automotive–lots of evolution is happening in the auto industry…And then the general industrial environment–whether it's oil and gas or standard factories–is really, really keen on improving their processes by deploying edge infrastructure. But it doesn't stop there. We see opportunities happening in retail, in healthcare, in the public sector, it’s really, really varied.”

“When you're dealing with open-source software, there is never a case where a single company offers that piece of software, there are generally multiple options, and that's another way of protecting you from having to redo everything from scratch. So that's why I think that the edge cannot be fruitful--cannot bring maximum benefit--without being open, because if you are not protected against those risks, you're going to have a very, very costly edge.”

“The evolution of networking…is going to change a lot of things on how we approach the networking problem…The availability of network is going to become a problem of the past. If we look at 20 years from now, we have hope to have instantaneous communication--as in quantum--we could have instantaneous communication from any point to any point.”

“The other evolution that is really interesting is how we are using processing power in more specialized units. The fact that you have DPUs available in SmartNICs and we can use those to do things in parallel to what the main CPU is doing. I believe that this specialization of resources is going to enable a new generation of software that provides for problem-solving quicker and much cheaper than ever before. We've seen that revolution happen through GPU's, but we are only at the beginning of this revolution, and it's going to go through all kinds of discoveries.”

Sponsors

Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Vapor IO, the leader in edge computing. We want to be your solution partner for the New Internet. Learn more at Vapor.io

Links

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Follow Nick on Twitter

Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Lee Hetherington, VP of Technology at Ori Industries.

Lee has been in the infrastructure and networking space for over twenty years, and prior to joining Ori, spent the last five years setting strategy and focusing on edge and content delivery for two of the world’s largest hyper-scalers.

In this interview, Lee dives deep into the technological challenges of building the next generation of cloud, illustrating his and Ori’s approach to solving the infrastructure, software, networking, and business problems of constructing the globally-distributed edge cloud of the future.

Key Quotes

• “I don't want to go and build a hundred megawatt deployment in any city in the world. That just seems crazy to me. That’s not what the edge is all about. Amazon does a really good job of that. So does Microsoft, so does Google. Why would we try and compete in that business?
• What we're looking to try and do here is: you're a developer, you're running your application inside one of these hyper-scalers. Now you want closeness to the user and that's the thing that's important with edge. That's where we can come in…that's where edge and cloud kind of complement each other more than they compete with each other.”
• “People asked me before I joined Ori, “What are you doing? This is crazy, this edge computing thing. Are there really legit use cases that are actually going to drive this thing?” But I think we're in this really interesting position where…if you're a software developer, the envelope can really be pushed. We're no longer building monolithic applications. Things need to be more distributed…That's really where it's at.”
• “I think we all go through our careers and it's very rare to find an opportunity that's a legit greenfield. Ori represented a huge greenfield for me personally…Working on edge at Facebook really got me bitten by the bug of ‘How do we get the best user performance? How do you really distribute this thing? How do we serve billions and billions of users?’ It's a super interesting challenge. And a greenfield I just didn't feel like I could pass up.”
• “Building big things that live in clouds and use database-as-a-service and all these other things, that's great. But to actually create a great user experience and do all of the AR and VR things that people have been talking about for a while now, we really need to be embracing things like edge…I think that developers pushing the boundaries of what we can do with this kind of infrastructure is going to be really, really interesting.”
• “What it's about is driving an ecosystem. It's not about ‘How does Ori build this great closed-source thing and demand people come and spend lots of money with us.’ It's about how do we help these developers build applications which work on edge.”

Sponsors

Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Catchpoint. Catchpoint gives critical knowledge to help optimize the digital experience of your customers and employees. Learn more at catchpoint.com and sign up for a free trial.

Links

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Follow Lee on Twitter

Today’s episode features an interview that took place live at the 2020 Edge Computing World Conference between Matt Trifiro and special guest Jonathan Seelig, Co-founder and CEO of Ridge and Co-Founder of Akamai Technologies.

As a co-founder of Akamai, Jonathan is one of the true godfathers of edge computing, having enjoyed an extremely impressive two-plus decade career in technology as a founder, investor, and board member. 

In this interview, Jonathan and Matt discuss the past, present, and future of edge technology, starting with the origins of Akamai at MIT in 1997, through to Jonathan’s latest venture at Ridge, where he is building the distributed cloud platform that will power the next generation of cloud native applications.

Key Quotes

• “One of the things that happened at Akamai is that, because this distributed infrastructure existed for content because the CDN was created, and because you could get scalability, reliability, and performance in ways that you never were going to be able to out of centralized infrastructure…Netflix happened and Hulu happened and online gaming happened.  And even if some of those companies were never my customers, the reason that those capabilities exist in the marketplace is because the CDN was created. It completely changed what entrepreneurs and what content owners believed to be possible.”
• “One of the things that we were observing in 2018 is that there just didn't seem to be a lot of really good thinking about how to create very highly distributed infrastructure for compute…The argument that we're making at Ridge is that applications that are going to really change the world going forward…are going to care a lot about geography and care a lot about being highly distributed.”
• “I can't imagine that if we sit down and have a conversation five years from now about the cloud, that three companies will have 100% market share of the industry. We've never seen an infrastructure company become a full monopoly…The idea that we're going to have one infrastructure provider that will be able to do everything that a company needs them to do all over the world in every single location just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.”
• “Five years from now, I would imagine that ten milliseconds of latency for the vast majority of users in the world is sort of de rigueur…And then we'll talk about how hard it is to get single digit milliseconds of latency and how that's going to be 2025’s edge cloud.”
• “None of us are going to solve this on our own…for these ideas to work, this is an ecosystem play. One of the things that makes the hyperscale clouds so powerful is the ecosystems that they have developed around their platform…You have to pull together as an ecosystem as opposed to a single vendor. That, to me, is the thing that's going to require the most advancement for this to become more mainstream and more accessible over time.”

Sponsors

Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Zenlayer. Improving user experience doesn't have to be complicated or expensive. Zenlayer helps you lower latency with on-demand edge services in over 150 PoPs around the world. Find out how you can improve your users' experience today at zenlayer.com/edge

Links

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Follow Jonathan on Twitter

Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Rodney Richter, Enterprise Architect at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and member of the LF Edge Technical Advisory Council

Rodney has been with HPE since 2015, and previously held numerous positions over 19 years with AT&T, including Principal Network Planning Engineer responsible for AT&T Wireless and Wireline access network virtualization.

In this interview, Rodney takes us through the technological and logistical challenges of implementing edge solutions at the enterprise level, the thinking that led HPE to develop an entire product line of edge servers, the types of use cases that are getting traction today, and more.

Key Quotes

• "Everybody's looking for ways to optimize their business. As they invest in edge, it’s about what can they do differently and how do they make it more efficient…looking at ways to automate at the edge to be able to do things that they've done before, but haven't done as quickly or as efficiently."
• "Over the next 18 months, I think we're going to see the evolution of the network edge a lot more. At least in the open source community, a lot of applications and platforms are being developed that are going to help move things forward, especially evolving from some legacy platforms and seeing the data move from the data center out to the edge."
• "We've been in the edge business for quite a few years now and I see the next 18 months just starting to explode. Customers that are going to either implement [edge solutions] at their customer sites or they're going to be using network edge."
• "A lot of devices that are generating data typically were analog, now have moved into the digital age. So you now have the need to be able to collect and process that data at the edge…And you do that by developing a whole new product set….so you can run the applications that you typically run in the data center, but now you can run them at the edge."
• "The edge and the cloud and the data center and the mini clouds, it’s all going to be part of an overall solution. You need to look at the application that's going to be running or set of applications or platforms and what are the requirements for each. Some things will operate in the data center, some will operate in the cloud, and some will be at the edge. You're going to use all of those as a tool set to be able to develop an overall solution."

Sponsors

Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Packet, an Equinix company. Packet is the leader in bare metal automation. They are on a mission to protect, connect, and power the digital world with developer-friendly physical infrastructure and a neutral, interconnected ecosystem that spans over 55 global markets.  Learn more at packet.com.

Links

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Iain Gillott, founder and president of iGR market strategy consultancy.

Iain is a leading wireless and mobile industry analyst, and since 2000, has run iGR, a market strategy consultancy focused on the wireless and mobile communications industry.

In this interview, Iain discusses the many challenges and intersections between wireless, mobile, and edge computing, his views on where the telco operators will fit into edge, the role CBRS will play, and much more.

Key Quotes

"Problem number one is people don't realize how much edge is actually out there. A lot of people think, ‘to do edge computing, I’ve got to wait for 5G. There'll be no edge until there's 5G.’ But some of the very first edge compute was put in with ethernet wired connections…The second problem is that everybody has a different definition of the edge. My definition of the edge is if you take one more step, you fall off a cliff. That’s the easy one."

"The perceived value of edge compute in the mobile network is with the cloud vendor, not with the mobile operator, and I think that's a problem. It doesn't mean they're not needed. The mobile operators are needed, but from a mobile operator perspective, their customer is the cloud vendor. It is not the enterprise or the end-user…In this respect, I hate to say it, but they are being pushed into an edge bit-pipe relationship where they're going to rely on the cloud guys to deliver that business to them."

"When we've seen things take off in technology, they're one of two things: They're either huge volume, mass market, low cost. Or they're very specific, super high requirements, and expensive. It takes a while to build the middle ground."

"The operator will tell you it's the connection that's the value. The application developer says it's the application. The edge compute guy says it’s the servers. But the whole solution is the application, some compute, and connectivity. But the CIO looks at the entire solution. The answer is we need all three."

"I think the problem with edge compute is, it's very difficult to pick winners and losers right now. Some operators are going to be successful with their strategy and others will not even be involved. So picking winners and losers is difficult."

"I think people who've got a very rigid view of ‘the edge is here, and I'm going to do this and sell it to these people,’ that's a problem. You've got to be much more fluid and say, ‘to this customer, the edge is over there, for this customer, the edge is over here, and for this customer, it's actually completely different.’ You’ve got to be really fluid and flexible, probably like we haven't been before as an industry. And I think this is why the operators will have a problem because they're not flexible."

Sponsors

Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Ori Industries. Ori Industries is building the world’s largest edge cloud. Their products power the next generation of intelligent applications through unparalleled access to major communication networks worldwide. Ori is laying the foundations for application developers to seamlessly deploy to uncharted edge computing infrastructure across the globe. Learn more at ori.co

Links

igr-inc.com

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Follow iGR on Twitter

Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Iyad Tarazi, President, CEO, and Co-Founder of Federated Wireless

Iyad is a technology industry trailblazer with experience in successful commercialization of disruptive cloud native SaaS technologies. Prior to Federated Wireless, he served as Vice President of Network Development and led the Network Vision modernization project at Sprint Corp.

In this interview, Iyad discusses CBRS, shared spectrum, and the massive potential for disruption and innovation they represent, as well as the interesting intersections between CBRS and edge computing.

Key Quotes

“The most thrilling part of CBRS is that it truly is free. It's really democratizing wireless access.”

“This is like Airbnb. Don't sell the house, I'll rent the room for you tomorrow. That's basically what we're doing. We make the spectrum available immediately, which is great for economics and great for innovation.”

“When we go from a few people building technology on spectrum to thousands and thousands if not millions of deployments, the amount of innovation we’re going to get in the software technology ecosystem is going to go through the roof…Innovation is going to take off. That's democratization in the best way possible."

“The U.S. will become the most innovative, by far, in creating solutions and applications and technology for wireless, because they’ll be able to get a thousand enterprises or a thousand companies all innovating at the same time.”

“At the end of the day, we're a software company that sits on top of an open ecosystem with a bunch of partners built around a very, very innovative spectrum model that's enabled by a really innovative government. The FCC and the DOD and NTIA and the White House--what they've done here over the last 10+ years in terms of creating this innovation model has really been first in the world.”

“All we really do right now is facilitate the management and enable the system. We pass more than 90% of the value of what's happening and what the spectrum offers over to our customers. We're more focused on enabling the ecosystem and enabling our customers than anything else. We're an enablement platform at the end of the day.”

Sponsors

Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Seagate Technology. Seagate’s new CORTX Intelligent Object Storage Software is 100% open source. It enables efficient capture and consolidation of massive, unstructured data sets for the lowest cost per petabyte. Learn more and join the community at seagate.com

Links

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Follow Iyad on Twitter

Today’s episode features an interview between guest host Ian Faison, the CEO of Caspian Studios, and David Hart, CTO and Co-Founder of NetFoundry.

David has over 20 years of experience in the software industry and is an expert in the IoT space, having led successive generations of remote connectivity platforms and played a key role in realizing innovative connected product solutions. 

In this interview, David discusses how NetFoundry is redefining networking in order to enable innovation, the key role networking plays in digital transformation, the critical moment IoT is undergoing, and why edge solutions need to be an ecosystem play in order to succeed.

Key Quotes

• “When we talk internally as a company, we say we are redefining networking in order to enable edge innovation. And when we say edge innovation, we don't mean edge like edge computing, we mean like innovation around the edges, so innovation where you don't need to ask permission.”
• “We have a very strong belief at NetFoundry that for us to be successful and for these ideas to be successful, it's an ecosystem play. We need to be out talking to people and working with people in the edge space.”
• “To me, it's better when you don't talk about IoT…In other words, as it gets to the point where you're not talking about IoT itself, but you're just talking about things that are good ideas and should be done, that’s when we're really getting somewhere.”
• “Networking is a huge part of any digital transformation or any kind of distributed application. It's a central part of the issue, so we want the network to be application-centric. We want the application developer to control the network and embed the network directly in the app.”
• “I hope we continue down this democratization path, redefining networking in order to enable edge innovation and getting the world to the point where people who don't necessarily have access to tons of money or the ability to roll out massive, distributed systems, can start getting that in their hands.”

Sponsors

Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is NetFoundry. What do IoT apps, edge compute and edge data centers have in common?  They need simple, secure networking.  Unfortunately, SD-WAN and VPN are square pegs in round holes.  NetFoundry solves the headache, providing software-only, zero trust networking, embeddable in any device or app. Go to NetFoundry.io to learn more.

Links

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Ziti Developer Blog

Open Ziti on Github