Efficiency, Innovation Cycles, and Lessons from Cloud Field Day – Tech Field Day Takeaways

Hey, I'm Alistair Cook. I'm an event lead here at Tech Field Day, and here are my takeaways from Cloud Field Day 25. Cloud Field Day 25 brought us back to some of the basics, some thoughts around the fact that the internet and the cloud has been around for a while, and that we really are still trying to do the same things we've been trying to do for a while, to focus on the cyclic nature of innovation in the business.

But also thinking about the ability to make choices about where your applications run, and that these choices about moving applications in that hybrid multi-cloud world really comes down to, can we get the data in the right place? Can we get the services that our applications need? And those were a couple of the things that I think were fundamental to what we saw at Cloud Field Day 25.

My first takeaway was that we need to recognize and efficiently use whatever limited resources there might be. The current high prices for RAM and SSD have changed some of the economics for building new infrastructure. Now, these costs translate into, essentially, some limitations on maybe application design as well as infrastructure design.

Solving performance problems using more memory, more SSDs, more CPUs, more GPUs may not be a viable solution for a while. We might need to spend some time considering optimization of our software, optimization of our AI models, rather than just using more and bigger hardware. Now, this is absolutely a cyclic thing.

We see shortages of resources leading to changes in our system design. And then when those shortages go away, we find ourselves having some other limitation in system design. System design is always about finding where there's a limitation and finding how we can optimize the use of whatever's limited.

Currently, the price demands on RAM and SSDs are driving those as being important things as we look at our system design and consider the total cost to deliver some business benefit. At the moment, plan to use products that offer you some memory or storage optimization, and minimize the current high costs of both RAM and SSDs. My second takeaway was to look back a little bit and recognize how far we have come.

We often consider whether to adopt a new technology or build a new capability. It's sometimes kind of cynical as we get a little older, and we've seen these cycles a few times, and to get a little cynical about constant change. But it's worth taking a moment to consider where this constant change has taken us, the monumental progress on the internet and the cloud computing that we've had over the last 20 years, possibly longer.

We no longer spend all of our lunch breaks queuing at the bank to find out how much money we have, nor do we blindly trust whatever the salesman tells us as they try and sell us clear coat, because you've got to have clear coat on your car, otherwise it's going to rust up. Blindly trusting this, not making our own informed decisions about whether we should be buying a new washing machine or replacing the motor, or when I last did it, just replacing the starter capacitor in the washing machine rather than just buying a whole new one. The internet has brought a whole lot of access to information and a whole lot of convenience to our lives.

And so those innovations that maybe I'm getting a bit cynical about, they are still leading to improvements in our lives. Speaking of experience, one of the things that our experience tells us, that everything is cyclic. The old saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same, is also true in our history and in our industry.

The current shortage of RAM and SSDs, even hard drives, apparently you can't order new hard drives in bulk at the moment either. These things aren't going to be a constraint forever. 0.

That unforeseen outcome may or may not involve generative AI, but we will see that something will change. One of the other places that I've seen this cyclic nature is the shift in focus between infrastructure and application development, as each becomes more or less fashionable as an area of innovation. Constraints around hardware that we're seeing at the moment are naturally going to lead to requirements to do optimization, to do innovation in software rather than just throwing more hardware at it.

Of course, when those constraints go away again, we'll have the option to use more hardware to solve our problems. We'll get more of a focus back on infrastructure again, and when we can build new infrastructure. We often focus on the new and different parts of the cloud.

Some of our presenters at Cloud Field Day 25 were reminding us that the internet and the cloud has been around for some time, and we can learn from that past. Of course, the recurring themes of data mobility and consumable infrastructure, these are important things, particularly as we want to enable choice of where we place our applications in our hybrid and multi-cloud world. I'd like to thank all of my delegates, and my delegates know I like to thank their families as well, because it's their families who give up the delegates for the time that they come with us to a Tech Field Day event.

Particularly like to thank Brett Wollamans, who was a brand new delegate at his first event at Cloud Field Day, and it was a delight to have Sean Massey. Sean has been over in the vendor land for a long time. It's great to have him back in the delegate community.

I'm looking forward to having a few new faces at future events as well. Thanks for watching this episode of the Tech Field Day Takeaway series on the Tech Field Day Plus YouTube channel. If you enjoyed it, be sure to like, subscribe, and share your thoughts in the comments.

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Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time.