We seem to be very worried about complexity in technology, but how bad is it really? Do we have a way of measuring complexity? Figuring out how to actually quantify it could help eliminate and manage it.
We started by discussing mathematical concepts to capture the systemic nature of complexity. That turns out to be really hard, so we got into some really interesting thoughts about what it takes to manage and understand complexity. Is it even possible to measure complexity? The group is mixed.
We know that humans have trouble keeping systems updated, but… how can we address the challenge of knowing which updates are required and, critically, if the updates with break other systems? Even knowing if they worked is a really thorny problem!
In this episode, we focus on actions about what’s going on and why this problem has persisted in industry for so long. Starting from the news of the day about CentOS 8 mirrors being taken down. That’s exactly the type of challenge we are facing when we think about where updates and repos are coming from.
Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co-founder of RackN, discusses the challenges of system maintenance and lifecycle in the Cloud 2030 podcast. He emphasizes the difficulty of keeping systems up to date and understanding dependencies, leading to a lack of confidence in system updates due to the fear of breaking or degrading them. Hirschfeld advocates for a change in the industry to prioritize test and verification practices, enabling more effective and confident system updates.
This discussion sifts into tactical concerns for containers in the near term. We’ve gotten far with containers and Kubernetes. But what about process controls that we need to wrap around containers?
We talked through how we need to be thinking about containers now that we have good control surfaces around them to make things work. If you were using containers and Kubernetes, this podcast will certainly inform your thinking.
We talk about software licensing in open source, and what it means to the broader market. In fact, we cover how it’s changing what the market actually is!
This is not not just open source licensing in general because at the end we didn’t care about the license. We are more concerned about utility, serviceability and operability of the products we use. We need to understand whether or not we can rely on them!
In short, the supply chain of the software was much more important than the licenses of the software
Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co-founder of RackN and host of the Cloud 2030 Podcast, reflects on the October 28th discussion about software licensing. He highlights the industry’s indifference towards software licensing as a critical battleground and questions the necessity of open source for good software, asserting that system support, maintenance, and trusted partners are more crucial. While acknowledging the importance of community goods like Kubernetes for creating abstraction layers, Hirschfeld emphasizes that the ultimate focus should be on the supply chain and invites listeners to explore the extended conversation at the2030.cloud.
We discussed the intersection of serverless and digital twinning. These two concepts are really tightly intermingled!
We discarded the idea of a central single serverless hub managing everything; instead, we think sites would actually have a mesh of serverless, interconnected event processing and stream processing systems. This approach is much more function dependent, but really opens up a lot of interesting discussions and possibilities.
We also discussed how to manage all of this meshed, serverless subscription modeling eventing, and digital twinning.
Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co-founder of RackN and host of the Cloud 2030 roundtable discussions, shares insights from the January 13th discussion on serverless and digital twinning. He emphasizes the significant overlap between modeling data through digital twinning and building serverless systems that subscribe to events for action, transformation, and control. Hirschfeld underscores the need for a joint discussion on these topics, highlighting that a sustainable serverless system requires a reliable model, and a useful digital twin system must connect inputs and outputs to the real world. Interested listeners are invited to explore the full episode at the2030.cloud for a comprehensive discussion on these critical industry aspects.
We have a lot of questions about improving collaboration in organizations: How do we deal with change in organizations How can we get organizations to work together better? How do we encourage collaboration around the automation spaces that we’re trying to build in DevOps.
In our discussion, a lot came back to something as simple as version control!
We also discuss how we handle coupling between systems. In order to collaborate, we have to couple systems. But if we couple them, we create complexity.
This podcast includes our warm up conversation about Microsoft acquiring Activision because that is ALSO about how you integrate to organizations and business plans! This was news of the day and I think you’ll be very interested in our take on it.
We started talking about blockchain and the edge, but that is not where it ended up at all! Our fascinating journey started with web3, and surprisingly, it’s potential for distributed infrastructure and distributed web.
That led us to edge: managing and trusting devices on the edge through distributed ledger (DLT). That led us to the distributed ledger landscape. The journey is important because some of these technologies will be essential for establishing trust in systems.
In this conversation, we walk through the progression of these very important topics.
Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co-founder of RackN and host of the Cloud 2030 podcast, provides a hot take on the January 20th discussion about Blockchain on the Edge. The conversation delves into trust, identity, and the need for reliable communication among systems, leading to a focus on distributed ledger technology (DLT) to address these challenges. Hirschfeld acknowledges the complexity of implementing DLT but invites listeners to explore the longer podcast for a comprehensive discussion on potential solutions and a roadmap for the future at the2030.cloud.
What is a “green datacenter?” Can we make the IT infrastructure we use more environmentally sound?
Maybe, but… it’s a challenging problem because fundamentally running servers uses power.
We went into how data centers use power with an eye to making them more efficient. But that’s only part of the story. We discussed ways to incent people to give up resources, CPU cycles, and idle servers. Those are the items that really help with savings.
Ultimately, building a next generation infrastructure is more about the behaviors of the users as the efficiency of the equipment. In that case, what’s holding us back?
Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co-founder of RackN and host of the Cloud 2030 Podcast, shares insights from the January 27th discussion on data center efficiency and greening. While addressing the challenge of using power more efficiently and exploring cleaner locations for data centers, Hirschfeld emphasizes that the primary obstacle is a human behavior problem. He advocates for immediate improvements in resource utilization, portability, and supply chain performance, asserting that the benefits are pervasive and can positively impact both businesses and the environment. Hirschfeld encourages listeners to check out the full episode at the2030.cloud for a comprehensive exploration of creating greener data centers.
Today’s episode is about how to trust machine learning in operations. This is a really serious issue because the attraction of machine learning is strong, but does not translate into operations.
Why doesn’t it translate? Because operations is a closed loop process where we constantly get feedback and have to adapt and adjust. That makes it difficult to train models and hope that they work. This discussion gets into why that’s the case and what we can do about it.
Then we explore scenarios for machine learning and AI in operations.
This episode explores applications for the edge. We really try to dig in on what will work in the edge from an application perspective. We also explore what’s holding us back.
Every time we have a conversation about Edge, we help undangle the components of Edge. In this discussion, we get more concise about what type of infrastructure is needed to build real edge applications. We also define where edge applications are expected to work and where they don’t.
Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co-founder of RackN and host of the Cloud 2030 Podcast, offers insights from the December 2nd Edge Applications discussion. The conversation focuses on the challenges of building integrated edge applications composed of various components like platforms, compute, networking, and sensors. Hirschfeld highlights the need for collaborative data planes, digital twins, and an ecosystem that allows applications to utilize existing resources, emphasizing that these challenges in the edge space have yet to be fully addressed. He encourages listeners to explore the comprehensive discussion at the2030.cloud.
