S1E09: Solving the Fundamental Problems of the Cloud

Episode Summary:

Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Chetan Venkatesh, CEO & Co-founder of Macrometa.

Macrometa is "Geo Distributed Fast Data As A Service"​ for cross-region, multi-cloud, and edge computing apps.

In this interview, Chetan discusses his approach to solving the fundamental problems developers face with cloud-native apps, and how the edge represents a new paradigm for how applications and services are going to be built going forward.

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Key Quotes:

“While the cloud is great, there's just a whole class of new things that people want to be able to do that the cloud is fundamentally not a sound platform for, [especially] If you really want to deal with things that are time-sensitive.”

“The biggest limitation of our current computing model is that we can only do computing in two places. We can either do it on the device or we can do it in the data center. And there's a vast middle mile between these two places that really doesn't do strategic stuff. It doesn't do anything useful or interesting other than shuffling bits from one place to another. We think that's a really interesting place to bring not just computing, but stateful computing, because the state part of this computing problem is very, very important.”

“One of the hidden parts of the edge that nobody really talks about is if you want multicloud, the edge is the place to do it because none of the cloud providers actually have any interest in multicloud. But the edge provides a really interesting place for us to abstract and arbitrate workloads across any cloud provider based on location, latency and regulatory requirements that the customer has for their applications.”

“There are three different parts (of this industry) that are rapidly maturing in parallel, and it's all converging towards some sort of a singularity that's going to create an explosion of value. The first part is capital–capital is getting much smarter about this problem and why it matters...The second part is customers are getting smarter...The third part is the ugly secret about the cloud: it's easy to get in, but it's really hard to get out, and if you haven't built an application with scalability in mind (things like) sloppy coding really cost you a lot of money in the cloud.”

“The telecom operators really need to supersize their thinking. A lot of them are very much still in a deer-in-the-headlights phase…The place where they're trying to intercept the market has already passed by four years back. If you're not thinking serverless, if you're not thinking developer experience as a telecom operator, I think your big-time screwed.”

“Deploying code is deploying capital. It really is in the cloud world. I think that's actually an emerging area for VCs to look at: analyzing code to figure out what does it cost to run at scale.”
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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

Follow Chetan on Twitter