S1E27: The Creativity of Designing Edge Solutions for the Enterprise

Episode Summary:
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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.

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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.”

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Sponsors:

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

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Links:

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Follow Nick on Twitter