Talking the Future of Tech
Rich Miller and I debrief our experiences at the AI Infrastructure and Edge Summit in Santa Clara. This show was interesting in the way it combined a lot of different pieces together related to AI. We share our thoughts and critiques on the event’s sales-oriented focus, which overshadowed meaningful discussions on AI applications and data governance.
Transcript: otter.ai/u/5zn42OkdumP-HXIdi5…?utm_source=copy_url
Cloud versus Edge? This panel dove into what makes edge different than cloud.
There are a lot of different technical and commercial drivers. And fundamentally, it matters who owns the sources of data and how data sources are different. This underscores how it is critical to understand data sources, infrastructure ownership, and how everything fits together.
This discussion will change to you rethink what makes Edge different than Cloud.
Transcript: otter.ai/u/y2ubHGGIhY31hRyiV6mW_B8e-os
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Building an edge control plane is challenging! It’s not clear even what is currently available. As always, data, data pipelines, data orchestration, and data choreography are all influential for edge infrastructure.
Transcript and Photo by Taryn Elliott from Pexels [ID 3889936]
Good APIs are hard to design! Making them long lasting and scalable is even harder.
We discussed two aspects of API design. First, making about Event Bus for system integration and then RackN CTO, Greg Althaus, discusses what his team considers a good API design from Digital Rebar.
Transcript: otter.ai/u/2Pz3LwG4qPl58s3ewwGFCCFmg8w
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Is open source driving innovation? And Is it a necessary component of Right to Repair and ownership? Are there commercial drivers where people want those open capabilities?
We transition into a deeper conversation about what’s going on with open source. Is it being innovative? Who is leading? How is it working?
Transcript: otter.ai/u/vto0yPpBuZtqngkc_zqMDp9J39M
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Cloud provisioning is very difficult when you go beyond simple provisioning and start thinking about how to to stitch together infrastructure in a repeatable way!
Specifically, today’s episode is a deep dive into Terraform usage patterns.
We get very hands on as we talk about how you manage state files and how you connect things together with Terraform.
We will spend a significant amount of time discussing in the fall because building infrastructure in a scalable automatable way, is a critical topic for the group.
This is an ongoing topic for us – stay tuned for more episodes!
Transcript: otter.ai/u/A-NgZOfa1xeIPA1uQOh8_bSStck
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In this episode, we question the IT talent pipeline. We really work through boot camps and how we are building talent and skills for the generation of IT workers.
We ask some key questions like:
Are degrees necessary?
Can you teach these things quickly?
How do we actually learn the skills that are necessary to build resilient systems?
And what would it look like if we were creating certification programs, real certification programs, like we have in other trades?
Transcript: otter.ai/u/FTOvatXEYSxNze00HKXVz8OZHxU
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We talked about 5G, factories and edge infrastructure.
They are very interconnected because they live at the network edge and are sensitive to how we need to route traffic.
This is important as the basis for using digital twinning as a new user experience (UI/UX) around interacting with systems. This new approach is starting to emerge and it will be very network intensive, visually oriented, and involve overlaying the physical world with the virtual world.
How the heck are we going to connect all these things together?
Transcript: otter.ai/u/7lSSCwLdGiF9JqyunUHo19m6yPk
Photo: www.pexels.com/photo/two-boys-si…ent-moon-1651483/
Right to Repair is the idea that when you buy a product, you’re able to fix it. We’ve been building products lately that don’t have that inherent part of the contract.
In this episode, we really took Right to Repair to another level talking about Intellectual Property (IP) and ownership of that IP in the software components.
This topic impacts every single business and every single consumer!
Transcript: otter.ai/u/7EVT0C9T0KDCcUIWBsGYKHdiT6Y
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This episode is about Terraform orchestration, what some people might call a TACO, in which we actually tried to do cloud provisioning in a orchestrated way. But this is a really challenging thing to do!
Orchestration is really hard so our discussion kept coming back to saying that this isn’t orchestration at all: it’s Infrastructure as Code and management.
We need to find a consistent way to to run a workflow or a control plane. We’re not even getting to the point where we’re coordinating or orchestrating aspects of different systems and using remote or API driven infrastructure.
Even if you use Terraform, you will get a lot out of this discussion!
Transcript: otter.ai/u/Ohbfr0Uprm95WYYI4357IdUodOU
Photo by Gabriel Santos Fotografia from Pexels [ID 2102568]