The Holy Grail of Truly Automated Multi-Cloud
Transcript
T needs of a very specific Enterprise in a specific location isn't isn't there a part of that that people who are the hands and feet to make the insurance boy how much do they actually have a role on this historical it's a really good question Matt any thoughts on that one uh there's so many things there's so many ideas floating around here and and I really want to kind of pick up on something that then started on our first question that reminded me of a book I read many years ago called I think it was in pursuit of Elegance that you know we're we're the point at which we started this morning you know this discussion is saying look we complexity has gotten out of control and we start to frame the solution of complexity to be Simplicity and the kind of cool thing about this book and I think Rich hickey who's a wrote the closure programming language picked up on something similar to this there's a difference between Simplicity and elegance right where Elegance is uh you know the the Steve Jobs fanaticism about the iPhone having just the things the user needs right in front of them and easy to access that's probably where we really need to go is back toward elegance and to kind of weave this then you know through uh through what Rebecca was saying back to your original question Allison I think then you know the the challenge for us now is can we as an industry now Embrace together this concept that look we're we're at complexity a simple solution is not what we need a really elegant solution is where we need and I think uh when Rebecca started talking about the policy part of it I think that's definitely a huge one I mean we cannot understate uh the importance of of all of that on the technology side I guess where I'm kind of hoping to see things shift too is is along the same lines of what Rebecca described that uh you know Technologies like kubernetes were supposed to offer a solution to some of this complexity That was supposed to be elegant by saying look any cloud provider that has a kubernetes offering that the developer can take their workload the devops and platform Engineers can take those workloads and move them around right it's a but it's only a very small slice of the big pie of cloud services that that has been working for right so my hoping kind of you know technologists at heart is that we will begin to build Technologies again the way we did 20 years ago uh and say okay standards you know tcpip was a great Innovation dude do we build do we build a couple of new layers standards that will help us Implement that kind of Technology policy uh such that we will be able to manage things regardless which Cloud they're on and we'll be able to move uh workloads to the places where it's most cost effective or most performant or whatever our particular goal at that moment is uh that that's kind of the that's kind of the direction I'm going and now I completely lost the track of Lynn's follow-up question so I'm just gonna stop right here and let somebody else jump in so yeah I will say what Rebecca is entirely wrote though commercial interest we tend to forget about we love technology we want to create this elegant technology because we're all nerds um and at the same time when there's commercial interest at play to not play nice you could end up with a situation like what you had I don't remember how many years ago it was where basically the US government told ATT no really you have to make the interfaces something that other people can have access to you cannot treat it like it's an entire Silo and so the question is really will it be commercial interest like what Rebecca said or will it be something else because because this is truly a utility of capabilities and services that everyone depends on so I don't know which of those two forcing functions is more likely but I have to believe I will I will pick an open Mark at born capitalist I will believe a business model that is logical and you know Capital constraints pushing us towards the right things versus government policies towards technology as a security company that operates in many different countries we have a lot of eyes on compliance and how we do this correctly and it is a lot of work not necessarily for better end States for users and that is a trouble if we do not have technologists and there's wonderful programs out there to try and bring more technologists into our government programs and they are getting better but if we don't have people who deeply understand what we're dealing with and can come up with an elegant solution we end up with simplified standards that are really quite difficult to work with and you know the inner technologist in me wants to say no no no give us guidelines give us rules give us principles help us understand what is what is the uh Antoine de exubery if you want someone to to sale you know make them yearn for the vast and endless C something like this right um don't give them you know wood and tell them what to do we don't do well I think when policies are so prescriptive they need to be descriptive of what we're trying to do and then let technologists solve these problems but if commercial interests get in the way where there's you know so much boundary and so much disincentive to solve problems that's where I think government does have to start to say Hey you know play nicely ATT example great example so Rebecca I'm going to throw a question back out to you as um you know we've talked about how the complexity of our stacks and maybe underlying Hardware are some of the key determinants of the complexity of cloud do you think that government regulations should be looked at as a third pillar of complexity as we try to solve towards that more elegant future that Matt describes absolutely not uh but yes sort of uh I I will put on my other hat so in my intro I talked about cloudflare which I love uh but my other hat is open compute project and obviously I'm the chairperson of open computer project which is really about the community coming together and establishing the Norms the policies and obviously the specifications we need to follow to have systems work right whether Nvidia is making the Asic or broadcoms making the Asic or Intel's making the Asic or AMD is making the Asic how do we make sure these things play nicely together and there are plenty of Standards bodies whether we're looking at pcie USB genetic like the world lives on standards and hardware and we like those and letting those technologists work together to come up with the defined plans so that thermals electrical work much better place than letting the government trying to find these things it's just it's not logical that's not what they've specified and worked towards so I'm a huge fan of Open Source open projects for collaboration to drive closure on what we need to accomplish it often leads to not Perfection right VHS betamax like what wins in the community is not necessarily the best and most elegant thing to go back to Matt but it is the one that has Market pressure behind it and the one that works that makes us have less complexity is the one that will win and so there's this kind of Simplicity complexity Elegance spectrum and Community winning with their feet is probably the only thing we can really rely on to move forward that's why I think it's so important that we get involved in open and Community environments we cannot solve these problems in our silos no one company is going to be able to solve the complexity that is the cloud it's just not possible uh one of the one of the more uh memorable meetings I had I was at Microsoft for for many years and one of the most memorable meetings I think I had there was when uh the topic of hybrid Cloud came up and uh and and people started in the room and started saying you know we really need to make sure that we that we deal with this by making it easy for people to move off of azure and onto other systems my eyebrows sort of shot up I'm going wait a minute you know we want them to run on Azure right this is a and somebody you know at some point somebody said why are we talking this way instead of talking about wanting everybody to stay on Azure for all time and uh the the answer that came back was well you know what we're seeing from our customer base is that when we're signing big contracts there's a check box on there that says I can migrate off to another cloud and that moment was uh was a moment where I realized okay you know when and and to kind of Rebecca's notion of community I I like to think of it primarily in terms of Open Source again again my background I think the same way but but that was one of those moments where I had to realize that my view needed to be a little more expansive right that this was essentially an ad hoc community of ctOS in large companies had sort of formed merely by saying vendor lock-in is something we did before back then and we don't want to repeat it in the cloud world and that that to me is you know going to uh Rebecca's point of like the government should really be the standards body of Last Resort right but one of the things we can do to get uh you know us as vendors and one of the things you can do to get answers vendors to not try and go to the lock-in route is to say we really that's not what we desire as users and that's an anti-feature and something that is going to prevent us from wanting to use your product uh so that one moment was for me kind of one of those profound experiences of going oh right okay so uh so Community is a bigger thing than I thought and there can definitely be some sort of upward pressure from the community back to the people who are you know earnestly trying to figure out how to pay the paychecks of all of their employees and rightly so but you can put pressure on them to say these are the features we want and one of those features has to be the interoperability story among you know along multiple dimensions and I think it's still for us to kind of figure out which ones we need to push on and say we need more interoperability over here a little over here yes you're going to build your awesome thing over here and that you know go ahead and do and do that because I really want to use it but we need a story here for migration or interoperability or hybrid a great example of Industry Giants being able to come together and come up with a standard where things are interoperable and it's the itu and cellular standards so you know if you think about it those have to interoperate there's a huge Global implication and it's in their commercial best interest to make sure that things can interoperate because you know trying to get spectrum and frequency if you've ever looked at cellular Spectrum Maps within each country it's nuts in terms of what you're trying to work around um and you know the other thing that is true is when they figure out how do we actually come up with a standard we can agree on of how these complicated systems and cellular networks are probably as complicated as Cloud architecture itself um they can make things work and you know there's another time that we've seen a commercial alignment between large vendors kind of osbourning the most elegant technology and everyone remembers iridium which was before SpaceX there was iridium and what ended up changing the trajectory of that particular project was the fact that the European operators realized you know people just want to be able to use the same number in Britain that they actually have in Germany let's just sign commercial agreements and with a stroke of a pen things were interoperable because of the itu and you know iridium had a very long wait until we had SpaceX so there's a couple good examples and reference points from other similarly structured similarly complex industries that I think could be used and it really comes down to I think this particular Cloud industry as a whole saying you know let's be pragmatic about how things are really going to work and I agree completely Rebecca the technologists really need to be able to come up with the elegant and appropriate solution because if it comes down to policy I mean you're talking about people who have no idea what they're legislating so I agree Lynn I would be remiss in not sending you a question about Hardware's role uh within this um your company just released an announcement that you were doing a very cool collaboration for multi-cloud across AMD instantiations in multiple clouds but it gave a reminder that there's a limitation here right there's a limitation to how customers can use that do you see a day where we get past that what what do you think about that and what should the Silicon Arena be thinking about to contribute here so wow lots of questions in there um in terms of multi-cloud and limitations uh you could probably guess I do have a deep Network background and so I feel like there's an a point at which going too far was distributed anything is going to run right up against the reality that bandwidth is not free the network is never 100 reliable and so I think that there's going to be a limit on how far we can go with that um and you know the other reality was you know most of what AMD has done with Eda tools that we use were basically constructing our silica a lot of that is hosted in the cloud but very often you will find and I'm sure we're back and it's going to nod her head out you will find that you might need to have those resources in Japan but the closest thing is in Korea and by definition the type of workload that thou felt not press those boundaries so I think that there's just some pragmatic limitations of policy placement and where you actually have availability zones of what you could do because it makes no economic sense for every cloud provider to have exactly the same resources everywhere that they're operating and then as far as silicon goes you know I think that it is contingent on the Silicon vendors to come up with innovations that give the maximum flexibility so one example that I've learned recently is cxl is is something that I looked at I thought is a motherboard systems engineer oh that would be really cool to help increase your memory for more what I actually learned is that kind of capability you can support memory tiering in a cloud instantiation so you know how we would think oh this would be useful we actually have to talk with our customers and say how are you going to use that to make sure that we actually got it right 17.
Matt and Rebecca any comments well I could talk for days about cxl but I'll restrain myself because of course as soon as you cool and disaggregate memory now you have to think about reliability on a totally different level uh and that's a really fun problem to solve and how do you expose that new tier of memory in a transparent and interesting fashion when you've got you know webassembly running in some applications rust for other you know like uh the world is still quite complex to deal with changing the compact between computes and its memory devices but we're going to do it and that's really exciting I think we're in a very interesting place you know I've said this multiple times that it's so true that we are like at the Golden Age of silicon and I say that with all due respect for the you know era that was the 1960s where everything was invented but we really are just scratching the surface of what we can do with Material Science with the physics with the oh it is so cool and I think what I really get to see is that we're seeing some of these most large and influential clouds right gcp Azure are coming together in communities like ocp and driving those standards in communities like cxl and driving those standards so they really are working together and seeding the future in ways that you know I hope we'll never get to the ATT moment not to pick on ATT they've obviously changed a lot of things about their their life and business model um so I am super excited about it I think silicon vendors have a role I think the standards bodies have a huge role and I think we have to keep seeing the leadership of these largest clouds I love your example Matt that in Azure they're like we're not going to win the biggest customers if we don't check that box that is where voting with our dollars as consumers is going to help us and then the last thing I would say is as consumers think about sustainability and we've talked about this Allison like as they think about the value of doing the work and not backhaul bandwidth the point that Lynn was making in a different country or as they think about their privacy concerns and become more informed about whether or not their data is leaving their country or their you know EU region that creates new constraints that we as vendors have to support and supply and it's also another aspect so you can vote by having the big checkbox if you're a big company but even as a consumer if you are willing to think about am I doing this in a Greener fashion am I doing this in a way that I am protecting the privacy and the rights of not just me but my children and if you bring that knowledge as a consumer into your experience you will demand those companies to be better and they will only be better back to the it's hard to be Sweden we will only be better if you demand it of us right sustainability and physics which I love too um so I think one of the things as a uh you know that I would say to anybody that is you know pretty much everybody in the visible Mage um Isa is not implementation so I have built I have done silicon for base stations I have done silicon for smartphones I have done silicon for Server infrastructure I've done things for nfv infrastructure and um you know instruction set architecture in AMD in neutral about instructions that are architecture but an Isa is not an implementation and physics is still physics you still have to run the same freaking program whether it's reduced instruction sets or complex instruction sets and so in terms of thinking about sustainability perspective you know like just one example um when I was marketing a product that was this will tell you how old it is by the way 200 megahertz and it was 30 more TDP than the next nearest competitor which was running at 40 megahertz now this is a cell phone and what was really fascinating is the lower TDP device at 40 megahertz actually had worse battery life than the 200 megahertz processor that had a little bit more TDP but it's called the race to idle and basically you see a lot of that even in the infrastructure place so it's one of those things where it's like Isa is just an Isa and you have the same work to do and I think it is really exciting because we're seeing a lot more Innovation happen in a lot more architectures than what we saw 10 or 15 years ago Matt 30 seconds on to close down this topic if you want it I just there's something that just emerged in from Liv's last two answers that I think really encapsulates why conversations like this are so cool uh we just saw sort of un unwrap here uh you know this idea that we really as technologists are pushing forward experiments and Innovations then we observe how people use them and then we end up in this decision-making process where we're going oh now we need processes policies and standards on top of it and that that fact that that last part is reactive is really facilitated by the fact that we it this whole process is an experimentation and improving all of this it was so fun to watch that story sort of aerate itself in the course of this conversation I I loved it too and hot diggity this was a good panel I knew that the three of you would come together and really knock it out of the park and you did I have one final thing for each of you and I want to have you give your final thoughts but do it from a standpoint of I'm a customer listening to this panel and I just want to know how to take action so how do we've discussed a lot of things what should they go do now um to engage with the industry and what are the most important things that they do to ensure that their voice is heard in this key challenge Rebecca go first I think I've said it I think be a conscientious consumer think about not just right now who's giving you the cheapest Bill think about what you're going to be facing in four years when renewal is up click the box for multi-cloud yes it is more complicated but whatever bargain deal you're getting at that exact moment it's going to be more expensive in four years if you put yourself in that corner but recognize it's complex there's going to be many different elements that come into a multi-cloud strategy focus on your core business that's fine to keep on Prem look at hybrid really understand you have to look at the long term and you're going to have to stitch this problem back to Lynn's original snowflake portion you're gonna have to stitch this problem through your Cloud through their clouds losing the expertise in that domain is probably not your best corporate decision all right that you're up next I'm just gonna rip on what Rebecca said now and a little bit earlier and you know we got this this is experimenting part of the journey where we we build a new technology we put it out there to for technology to evolve well technologists need that feedback from it and and and Rebecca articulated that by talking about Community right that's that those voices are profoundly uh impactful on uh on the next phase right I was just trying to paint the sandwich picture right the the bread the bottom layer is the Innovation then there's this period where we see how the Innovation takes hold in actual practice and the feedback out of that informs how we do the policy layer and the and the standardization layer the higher level standardization layer and that middle part is the part where you have this profound ability to impact the shape of the technology as it evolves and Lynn why don't you bring us home all right so I think one of the biggest nuances that I've seen gets lost over the last X number of years that I've watched Cloud evolve um a lot of people focus on where the workloads run and there's this whole uh repatriation uh initiative that seems to be on the way right now what many of these customers and consumers forget is data data movement David redundancy data management and a lot of people think about how do I have workload flexibility in multi-cloud but they kind of forget that if you're not Artful in how you approach the question of data you could end up with an absolute Hotel California effect where sure you can check the workload out but your data is never going anywhere and I think that is the main thing that I would say pay attention to that because workloads matter but your data is your mission critical Enterprise business value way to sneak that small Topic in right at the end Lynn that was fantastic thank you all three of you for being with us today and that was a fantastic discussion um we will now take questions promise wasn't that a great session if this is your first session of the day and you're wondering what's next well you have options you can hang out in the chat room now and you can see there's a conversation going on in the chat room in the session that you're in this will be open until the end of this hour and the top of the next hour the next session will start if you want to go into the breakout room there's a general chat session you leave here go into the lobby and then enter General's chat you can chat with your regular attendees I'll be floating between the two chat environments love your feedback if you have any questions please you can DM me within the platform or on Twitter at CTO advisor enjoy the rest of the conference
