14. Everything is the Cloud and the Cloud is Everything – Tech Field Day Podcast

It seems like everything is the cloud these days. We talk about it all the time. We talk to companies, they're making cloud this, cloud that, all the way from literally your personal devices to the home, to the edge, to industrial iot, to the data center, to, yeah, the cloud.

It's all cloud. Or is it, is there some nuance to this discussion? That's the topic of this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast.

Welcome to the Tech Field Day podcast, where we bring together a group of IT technical experts to discuss a single idea about key concepts in the industry. This podcast features a variety of perspectives from members of the Tech Field Day delegate community, and is often recorded in association with one of our events. Tech Field Day is part of the Futurum Group, and the podcast is also published by our sister company, Techron.

On this episode, recorded at Cloud Field Day 20 in Silicon Valley on premises, we are focusing on the core question of the cloud. Is the cloud really anything or is everything the cloud? Now, before we get to that premise, let's meet who's on the podcast today.

Hi, my name is Jeffrey Powers. com. I'm Alistair Cook.

I'm a CTO advisor at the RUM Group. So you can, uh, yeah, find me at the Rum Group. And I'm Steve Plucka, uh, IP Architect at, uh, DQE Communications, recently retired.

And I'm Steven FoST, organizer of the Tech Field Day events and host of this here podcast for, uh, the geal It and Tech Field Day. So, uh, we, as I mentioned, are here on premises at, uh, I keep making that joke, even though that's not the name of the podcast anymore. Uh, we're here on premises at, uh, cloud Field a at Talking Cloud, and yet I'm not sure we've actually talked Cloud, cloud Cloud yet, but yet we've talked cloud all day long.

And that's the funny thing, isn't it? It's like it, everything is cloud now, all the way from literally from your phone to the data center to, well, the cloud. Does that word mean anything?

Uh, who wants to kick us off here? Kick off the cloud? I, I kicked off a lot of things.

Yeah, I, I find it interesting because the, the official definition of cloud came out with, with NIST in, in 2012, and they identified all the terms we associate with cloud at that time. And at that time, they were only available in a, in a handful of big companies that operated their own data centers and we're selling you those services. And I think what we've seen over the last, uh, decade or more is that those concepts make so much sense that they're being adopted first by smaller companies that were running their own data centers and are kind of mirroring mini versions of the big cloud and, uh, finally to the, uh, VMware community on premises at their, at their sites.

And VMware itself embraced that term and, and in, and rolled out their own cloud platform. So basically, the cloud has taken over from the bottom to the top and everything in between, and that's the place people want to be. Uh, and now the, the cloud term has become almost universal.

I think what we've seen is the reality of cloud being an operating model rather than the location. So originally that operating model was only available at these massive data centers, you know, AWS Azure, uh, Alibaba. And what we've seen is that customers businesses love not having to care about what's underneath all of these services that they consume.

And over my somewhat long career now, I've seen the, the need to know all of the fine detail, all of the, the intricacies of what case you put next to which CPU inside the, the enclosure. This becomes less important because it's not business differentiating. Yeah.

Uh, the whole point about cloud is to allow you to focus on the things that differentiate your business, to build applications, to operate your environment, and focus on what differentiates your business from its competitors. And to spend your money, spend your money on actually what makes your business unique. And cloud operating model allows that.

And so we've seen a huge growth. Yeah. One of the things I sort of echoes back to something I, I heard on a podcast a long time ago, and I think it was one of the gray beds on storage podcasts, was that the future of storage was cloud and your mobile device.

That's it. That's all there's ever going to be. And increasingly that's what we're seeing.

And particularly my children's generation are staying away from using a laptop. They're using their phone for things that I demand a laptop for. 'cause I can't stand using a tiny screen.

Um, everything is becoming cloud and mobile is, or at least the mobile, is that a consumption device for all of the cloud. I still think that they're gonna use a laptop. It's just not going to have anything on it.

It's gonna be like a Chromebook or a, uh, uh, just a machine that you just open up, uh, you log into and there, there's all your, your stuff. And of course the cloud can, you know, it's, it's like with, with, uh, with actual clouds, they now know how to make a cloud in a glass of water. So why not do that with our cloud and be able to, you can set up your own cloud inside your house with, because now we have internet ability, uh, data rates, uh, data gets pushed more and more nowadays we can do, uh, one gig.

So, uh, I've got items back at home where I, I could literally just connect up to, and I am connecting up to, whether it be, uh, security cameras, whether it be, uh, other machines or anything like that. If I wanted to upload, uh, information from here to there, I can do that. I don't need to have big data holding my data.

I can have my house holding my data if I know how to do it. And that's sitting with one of the NIST definitions of the universally accessible. Yeah.

And, uh, the sort of the other parts of the, the NIST definition, but multi-tenancy aren't really relevant directly except for that, that service that you are using is, is also that hardware is in somebody else's house, and they're using the same mechanism to access it. And so there is usually a little broker in the middle of those services that's multi-tenant, and that's build per use and all of the, the rest of the NIST definitions for cloud. Well, it's interesting.

You know, I think that's really insightful that you, that you bring up Jeff, because Wow, I think that Chromebook, I, I don't think you meant literally Chromebook. I think you meant sort of that Chromebook concept, right? Yeah, yeah.

Which is that, that nothing about this device in my hand matters because although I have storage and I have data and I have compute, um, it's genericized and it's an extension of an actual cloud service to the extent that I could literally chuck my laptop in the trash and go get a new one, and before dinner, I am back up and running exactly in the same fireman I was. And, and, and amazingly, I think we are actually there. Yep, we are.

Mm-hmm. So, like my wife, we went, uh, recently to my daughter's graduation across the country. We flew 3000 miles away and she realized that she left her phone on the nightstand.

Um, and, uh, she had an older phone anyway, and she was gonna upgrade anyway. And so I said, well, let's just go to the Apple store and we'll just get you a new phone. And literally before we were done eating ice cream at the mall, she had her phone back in a new case, basically.

I mean, it was essentially the old phone with the old apps and all the old data on a new phone. And I've experienced the same thing. You know, I just got a new iPad.

I've still got the same screensaver, the same apps, everything. It's new. Even the same with my laptop.

You know, when I bought a new, uh, a new MacBook, I, I literally just sat there and for 10 minutes and, and everything's on it. I'm testing. We do live in the cloud.

I'm, I'm testing a brand new laptop, and all I had to do was log in with my username and password on a Windows system, and it brought over everything from OneDrive, it brought over it, uh, I loaded up Chrome and I logged into Chrome. It brought over all my bookmarks, which now they have, uh, group bookmarks, which is great because I have groups for ai. I have groups for, uh, my socials that, uh, that pull pull up.

So I just hit one tab and poof, it's right there. So yeah. A little bit of configuration, but, uh, it's, you can get back to where you're going within, I'd say about 30 minutes or to an hour.

And, and it doesn't mean that you don't have data stored locally. Yeah. But every bit of data you have locally is also in the cloud.

Yeah. So, in effect, it, it really is kind of that Chromebook model. It, it's a cache.

You, you have a physical device that is caching your, your cloud personality or Caching It, You know, I, I hand over cash in order to buy the cache. Okay? So that's personal devices.

Let's talk enterprise, let's talk data center. Uh, are we there yet in the same way in the modern enterprise that we're talking about with personal devices or with the cloud, are we to the point where, yes, you can deploy CPUs, GPUs, storage, networking in your data center, or you could just use it in the cloud? But either way, it really doesn't make much difference.

I think it still makes, makes difference because data has, has gravity and access to your data. And the, the distance between that cloud location and your on-premises location makes a difference to application. Your application not designed to accommodate that latency.

It makes a big difference where it is. And on premises, we're not seeing yet the degree of automated deployment, the, as a service deployment as much as we see in public cloud. Well, that gets back to the, the same thing That's true in everything.

In it, it depends. If, if a application is, is quote unquote a modern app, then yes, it doesn't matter. It's been written in a way that that latency is not gonna make a difference.

That the caching is gonna work as is expected to work, that the sync is going to happen, that the security systems are in place, so that the provenance and the location of the data all all takes place. And the location that the, that the cloud exists is gonna be based on the regulations and the security and the certifications that are required for the company involved. But whether it's on premises or in one of the major cloud providers, the architecture of the access is gonna be the the same.

And, and I think what we're seeing happen is more and more these legacy applications are slowly as falling off, and the replacements are following these architectures, whether they're deployed on premises at a rented colo or in a cloud location, it doesn't matter. But the, the architecture of the, of the cloud is what matters. And that's, that's where things are going.

I mean, naturally there'll be things that are around quote, basically forever, because nobody wants to rewrite them until they're no longer valid at all. Um, but even those we see mainframes being, uh, emulated and, and, and deployed at, yeah. At AWS or in, in other, other things.

So, but You'll still have things like HVAC systems and their, and their systems that's probably going to be very centric to the building. Uh, so therefore, that type of software's gonna still be on there. I think the, uh, biggest bottleneck at this point is simply the infrastructure.

Uh, 'cause we can go to an area and still get no bars on our phones once, uh, in about 10 years when one gig is not the, is not the high end of the standard for homes, then we're going to be able to do a lot more When we go out in the middle of the country and have, uh, full bars in seven or eight or nine G or whatever the number is at that point in time, then we'll be able to really embrace this whole idea. But until then, we have to think about what happens when we only have one bar or less, and we don't have wifi in a, uh, structured area. But I, I would argue the Edge locations where those are, are gonna still be a cloud operating model because they're gonna deploy local servers there that, you know, when they can communicate up.

But they're supporting the, the local infrastructure and the industrial control community is already separating out, you know, the control and, and monitoring from the absolutely necessary onsite things that are happening. That's been well underway for a long time. And the, and the io, uh, and the industrial community is being dragged kicking and screaming into talking to their IT people and working With them.

I was gonna say that's, that feature is unevenly distributed with knives, You know. Well, it's interesting you point that out because, yeah, so we do Edge Field Day and we've talked to a lot of these edge companies. And boy, the edge has changed.

Uh, just like your home has changed, the edge has changed. You know, it used to be that you would go into an edge location, whether it was a network edge or retail space or industrial, uh, manufacturing or hospital, and there would be racks and racks of proprietary hardware. Today, you go in there and it's the same Dell server, or the same, you know, HPE or whatever server in there, and it's running virtual machines and increasingly at the edge, uh, they're using Kubernetes to orchestrate containerized applications because they figure that that's a great way to, uh, to, to manage and abstract these things.

And just like your phone, just like your laptop, they make them so that they can be blown away and replaced from the cloud at whim. It really is a ca a k. And, um, it's incredible.

The edge has become more cloudy than the data center already. I'll, I'll get you all speaking the king's English eventually. And, and not just phones, but watches glasses.

Yep. Uh, othering voices. Yeah.

Yeah. And not, yeah, as you said as well, like home IOT devices. I mean, everybody wants their, their thermostat and their home smart home devices and so on.

Like, those things aren't really bound to you. They're bound to the cloud too, right? Yeah.

You could, you could take your thermostat off of your old home, move it to your new home, plug it in, and not even think about, you know, the fact that I have it in the summer set to 70 degrees, it just does it. Mm-hmm. So I guess one of the kind of questions that comes to my mind then in, in terms back to the data center is virtualization.

Um, we've been using virtualization to do the same thing in the data center that they've done at the Edge, which is no more proprietary hardware. Everything is a virtual machine running on generic, on a generic hardware, an infrastructure platform called VMware. Um, everything should be a virtual machine so that we have flexibility and we can move workloads around and do those kind of cloud things.

We've long had the discussion of whether VMware is a cloud or whether it's not. Uh, I don't know if we wanna rehash that really, but, um, increasingly I would say that people are gonna be deploying things on virtual machines, right? At least.

Yeah. Yeah. I think the, the, the hardware that we're stuck with from the legacy side of the world, you know, if it's still around after 25, 30 years, there's a strong effort made and, and has been made to virtualize it.

I mean, we see that with the mainframes has already happened. I expect it to, to happen with, with other servers that hang around. I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if the Solaris stuff ends up being, uh, virtualized because it's another one of those platforms that seems to not want to die, uh, because the applications they're running in particular instances are, are there, and there's a hefty market on eBay for those replacement parts, you know, as we fight for them to, to keep our things living.

And it's that eBay market for old term was also what, what drove, um, process automation engineer. So a few years ago I was teaching VMware training courses, and I had some process automation engineers from New Zealand's largest company makes dairy products. Um, they were very excited to get virtualization so that they didn't have to keep hold of parts from their 10-year-old computers that were running the process automation products right now.

Um, you know, that same idea of, of, we don't need to hold onto this old staff is core virtualization though, doesn't get us the spark instruction set on top of current hardware. That's gonna be an emulation, but you'll still want to wrap it up inside a virtual machine. Or will you, will you end up running that in a container?

Will you end up running that on a serverless platform that's gonna handle that translation? Is are virtual machines actually the ingo, Will you run a VM that's actually in a vm? That's actually in a vm?

Yes, yes, yes. And I have, yeah, You can do that now, but there's, there's certain things that you can't Mostly for education Like that, but I'm, I'm talking in production, there's gonna be a point where a VM will be running VMs mm-hmm. In high capacity.

Yeah. Uh, and not in test environments that, uh, that will, and of course, the machine's gonna stay cooler and, and run better than anything that we can put out today. So is that a cloud?

Are so, so, yeah. Are we ready to declare that the data center is just another cloud? If it operates as a cloud, if it smells like a cloud, if it looks like a cloud, it's a cloud, but you can't just call it a cloud.

And, and it becomes, you know, suddenly the, the virtualization platform that we started with becomes a cloud. And that's, that's where VMware went very sideways with cloud several times, was to just say, here are a bunch of virtual machines. It's a cloud now.

Uh, there's, there's a whole lot of maturity around operating it and simplicity of being able to deliver this actually to end users with all of the governance and control that enterprises want. That was missing that you take for granted in a, a real cloud platform. Right.

But what I think I would argue is, is that in, um, in 2012, the cloud WA existed only in these big places where you bought services. And I argue today, the cl everything is not the cloud, but the cloud is everywhere. It's at the edge.

It's at small providers, single data centers, multiple data centers. It's at on premises for enterprises. It's at on premises for small companies even now.

But only because they're running their infrastructure in the cloud model. The cloud is in everything, but the cloud is everywhere. And I'm, and I'm saying that at home, you know, even 10 years ago people were building clouds in their home, but they needed to pay for it.

They needed to mm-hmm. Get the, uh, internet to do it. They needed to get the, uh, hardware to do it.

It was not cheap. Today it's a lot cheaper. Agreed.

It's a agreed lot easier to do. And we'll have clouds. We'll just, we'll have clouds in the sky everywhere.

Mm-hmm. Right? Yeah.

Cloud is everywhere, but everything is not the cloud. So every, okay. Okay.

Well, let's, let's finish up with that question. So if, if our premise here was basically everything is the cloud now, uh, what I'm hearing from Steve is that no, no, cloud is everywhere and cloud can be everything, but everything is not the cloud is, is, how do you complete that sentence? Is, is everything the cloud or is everything not the cloud yet?

Or is everything never gonna be the cloud? What do you think? Well, you know, never say never, but, uh, probably never because some, some people will hang on to whatever it is until their cold dead finger circled from the, which isn't what it is.

So, uh, you know, my statement I think remains that, um, the cloud is everywhere, but everything is not the cloud. What do you think, Al, I I keep getting bitten by the semantics of everything is not the cloud. Um, no, not everything is the cloud.

Not everything is the cloud. Yeah. I, I'm sorry, I'm, I'm obsessive with the semantics at times.

Uh, you know, I, I think the, the, the cloud is just computers on the internet and, uh, lots of pu does it matter? Does this definition actually matter? It matters for this podcast.

And my answer, my answer is simply this, you need point A, point B, you need something to connect in point A. You need something to connect in point B, the cloud point A, cloud point B, we don't know yet. Maybe the cloud will be in point A and point B, but there still needs to be a point A and point B for cloud to happen.

Yep. And, and I will say, um, I, I like this sort of nuanced answer to our premise. Yes, the cloud is everywhere and know the term doesn't really have as much value as it once did because most things are flexible and break the link between hardware and software and have, uh, independent controls and extend, uh, multiple locations and have maybe even multi-tenant or at least multi-user capabilities.

But that being said, certainly there's going to be a need for some level of on premises something. There's gonna be some things that are detached from it. Uh, people are gonna be concerned about privacy, or they're gonna be concerned about cost.

Maybe they don't want everything to be as a service. I mean, I, I could see an analogy to the, uh, the current, um, frustration with, uh, every, like TV unbundling and every, every fricking provider having another package and all that kind of stuff. We don't really want everything to be a service.

We kind of like feeling like we're getting a deal by buying a thing instead of buying a monthly service. Sometimes people still buy cars, people still buy houses, people will still buy servers, but only where it makes sense. If there's a compelling reason not to buy the server or the car or the, or the television or whatever, then, then maybe they'll just rent, rent it by by the month.

So increasingly, I think, think that it's not gonna be as sensible. And I think that we've gotten to the point now where the cloud is effectively just the word we use to describe modern IT services, because that's just how it is. So thank you so much for this conversation.

It's been a lot of fun here at Cloud Field Day to talk about how nothing is cloud and everything is cloud. Uh, before we go, uh, where could we continue this conversation if we wanted to? Uh, go ahead.

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But until then, uh, I guess everything's the cloud.