Field Notes: March 2024

Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount happening in technology across the whole industry? Me too!

There's enough going on in our day-to-day not to mention keeping up with the latest innovation.. and regulation.. and keeping our skills sharp.

So to help myself, I've curated the recent news I found interesting, as well as some resources if you'd like to dive a little deeper. If I missed something big, I'm sure you'll let me know in the comments below!

Phoebe

NVIDIA GTC (March 18-21)

This week NVIDIA held the first in-person GTC conference in 5 years, expecting to draw about 16 000 attendees. During the keynote by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, he announced the new Blackwell architecture for AI chips, named after Dr. David Blackwell, an American statistician and mathematician. Blackwell is the successor to the Hopper chips, with significant boosts in performance and reduction in energy consumption. Blackwell will no doubt be in high demand when it ships later this year.

NetApp announced a collaboration with NVIDIA on a solution to enable customers to "talk to their data", querying enterprise data sets without compromising privacy or security. This uses the NVIDIA NeMo Retriever, an end-to-end platform of AI microservices designed for enterprise data use cases (such as search).

• Watch: NVIDIA GTC Keynote introduction: I Am AI
• Watch: NVIDIA GTC Keynote - Jensen Huang
• Read: The Verge blog on the new B200 Blackwell AI GPU
• Read: NVIDIA Blog on the NVIDIA NeMo Retriever
• Read: NetApp Press Release on collaboration with NVIDIA

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU (March 19-22)

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation hosts a number of events, but the flagship co-located KubeCon and CloudNativeCon conference runs several times a year. These are usually hosted in Europe and North America, with a joint KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit held in APAC (this year it's in Hong Kong in August!).

KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2024 was held in Paris this week (North America will host the event in November) with 12 000 attendees, including many of my colleagues from NetApp! No surprises but a focal topic was... drumroll and totally unsurprised gasp from the audience... AI.

The opening keynote from Priyanka Sharma focused on a few things that are close to my heart, relating them to AI inferencing in particular.

• The 10 year birthday of Kubernetes in June (later, the celebration was dubbed "KuberTENes" - I see what you did there
• "Prototype to production": The promise of AI is going to be realised when organisations learn how to run it in production. The keynote demo of rapidly prototyping AI and the later panel discussion with leaders in the AI/ML space emphasised that dev/test can share the same pipeline as production - a capability sped up and enabled by containers.
• The value of open sourcing AI models to make it extensible and to allow people to test boundaries quickly.
• The challenges of productionising AI: cost management and interoperability - will be addressed by platform teams using open source technologies to bring "seamless flow of work between developers and users".

I was excited to see the posts from colleagues at the event, and analyst Camberley Bates even recorded an interview with NetApp's Eric Han and Shiva Subramanyam in the NetApp booth - I have no doubt they were talking about one of my favourite services that makes Kubernetes data management in the enterprise so much easier (NetApp Astra).

Will you be at KubeCon NA? I'm starting to make plans now.

• Watch: Keynote - Priyanka Sharma, Executive Director, Cloud Native Computing Foundation
• Watch: Recorded sessions at CNCF
• Do: The keynote demo is available on Github!
• Attend: KubeCon 2024 NA in Salt Lake City, Utah

Also In The News.. Exploring VMware Alternatives

Major VMware changes after the recent acquisition of the virtualisation vendor by Broadcom have led many to explore alternatives. I'll be posting my view on this situation soon (stay tuned!) which includes (a) what you can do about it now and (b) what you should look forward to in the future. It's taking a while because my crystal ball is a little dusty and keeps responding with "AI Will Take Our Jobs".

If you want something to consume over the weekend, I really liked @msandbu's blog on alternatives and links to lots of resources you can learn from.

• Read: https://msandbu.org/alternatives-to-vmware-virtualization/

How To Sound Smart At Dinner

A good dinner conversation starts with a good question, so perhaps you might want to throw one or two of these into your next conversation (food and beverages optional):

• At GTC, NVIDIA also announced Project GR00T and Jetson Thor - models and computers designed to build more humanoid robots. Is it creepy if robots emulate humans, or is this important for us to get comfortable with them in society?
• Also, what's with all the AI talk everywhere? I heard the term "AI-washing" recently to indicate companies who add the term to all their marketing to ride the wave. What really defines an AI product - is it one that builds AI, uses AI, or something else?
• KubeCon is naturally all about kubernetes.. but what happens to virtual machines? Are they gone for good, or will they be around for a long time (like mainframes)?

Last Word

I am SO proud of Victoria Lam and Chris Gondek discussing the value of data for Formula 1 teams like Aston Martin. My favourite quote was Victoria speaking about the value of speed of access to data: "if it takes too long, you'll lose time and you'll lose your position".

• Watch: Victoria Lam on LinkedIn