S1E26: Distributed Edge Cloud: A True Greenfield Opportunity

Episode Summary:

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:

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