Cloud Field Day 20 Wrap-Up

My trip to attend Cloud Field Day 20 (#CFD20) last week was quite an intellectual adventure for me and the other delegates. Many great presentations from Juniper Networks, Google Cloud, Morpheus Data, and 0xide Computer Company! An amazing amount of information was rapidly covered, challenging the delegates to keep up!

I plan to be posting more detailed blogs about the key per-company takeaways here on LinkedIn as time permits. My intent will be to identify key takeaways among all the great information provided.

Can’t Wait?

For those who can’t wait, watch the session recordings, and/or check out the blogs posted by the other delegates. Links to the delegates’ blogs can be found at the bottom of the page https://techfieldday.com/event/cfd20/

You can get to the recordings from there as well. But to save you time, here are the event’s page links to the video streams:

·?????? https://techfieldday.com/appearance/juniper-networks-presents-at-cloud-field-day-20/

·?????? https://techfieldday.com/appearance/morpheus-data-presents-at-cloud-field-day-20/

·?????? https://techfieldday.com/appearance/google-cloud-presents-at-cloud-field-day-20/

·?????? https://techfieldday.com/appearance/oxide-computer-company-presents-at-cloud-field-day-20/

(As of this writing, morning of Monday 6/17/24, only the first two sets of videos have been processed and posted. The remainder should appear soon!)

Summary of the Event

Overall, we heard two themes from the vendors:

·?????? We help you do AI (in various forms)

·?????? We help you automate at a large scale (across clouds and datacenters, etc.)

Here are some key take-aways:

·?????? Juniper Network’s Apstra tool can help you build datacenter fabrics, including those for AI. 800 Gbps! Ethernet vs. Infiniband, and is lossless networking required.

·?????? Morpheus Data provides a cross-Cloud Provider automation GUI for self-service deployment of services to supported cloud vendors, hybrid cloud, or edge. Deployment includes VMs, containers, application services, Kubernetes, Docker, and KVM clusters.

·?????? For Google Cloud, one overall message was that they now support a wide range of forms of cloud-based AI computation. They also provided updated workload information (more capabilities).

·?????? Google’s last two presentations really grabbed our attention! They addressed what I’ll call “AI as a Service” – upload your data, train a Google LLM, and then use it. Example: L’Oreal, e.g. for sales forecasts or faster “beauty services” or hiring. The point is easy-to-consume AI without doing the hard stuff yourself.

·?????? Oxide Computer Company is selling highly evolved on-prem cloud-like computing and storage, optimized for high performance. Their basic sales item is a pre-built rack of dense compute and storage in trays, with NO internal cabling (except power), and the automation software to manage it. No need for staff to spend time racking, cabling, and imaging servers and storage manually. API based GUI providing a high degree of automation similar to what a Cloud Provider's GUI does, but open for integration with a site’s tools.

Note that one common theme is supporting automation and reducing the need for hard-to-find highly-skilled staff, by packaging up complex technology for faster, easier, correct deployments. Including AI, at various levels of granularity.

Comments

Comments are welcome, both in agreement or constructive disagreement about the above. I enjoy hearing from readers and carrying on deeper discussion via comments. Thanks in advance!

Hashtags: #CloudFieldDay20 #CFD20 #BlueAlly #CCIE1773 #PeterWelcher #CiscoChampion

FTC disclosure statement: https://www.blueally.com/disclosure-statement/

Twitter: @pjwelcher

LinkedIn: Peter Welcher

Mastodon: @[email protected]

?