Techstrong Gang – April 10, 2025

Hey, everybody. We're talking about Trump and tech, and then we're gonna jump into some good old fashioned continuous delivery in the land of DevOps. Before we take a look at these latest servers from Dell, you're watching Textron.

Hello everybody. We're back. And we're joined today by Kimberly Bates, who is still, I hope, in Colorado.

Correct. All right. Kimberly is a chief technology advisor still for the Futurum Group, and specializes in cloud infrastructure and all kinds of good stuff, and, you know, is enjoying that status where you're kind of somewhere in between.

Yes. And it's, you know, kind of official I'm, you know, exiting out at the end of this month, more or less. But I, I, I've told Alan and team, I would love to continue playing with, uh, the tech strong gang because I find I, I learn so much when I get on this thing.

All right. Uh, we would love to have you, but is this like exiting, like, you know, the Rolling Stones have a concert every three years and say, this is the last one, and then they keep coming back. I don't know.

We'll see how the body, you know, you look at those guys and they're still kicking on the stages, so I'm gonna see how long my legs last on the, on the ski slopes and the bike and the hiking and the backpacking and all that kind of stuff. And then you'll say, I miss those idiots and I should call them. Exactly.

All right. Also, joining us today is Robert Reeves, who I believe is still in Texas. Is that correct?

That's right. Austin, Texas. We are all here because we're not all there.

All right, I like that. And I am once again in the west of Ireland. So the thanks to the wonders of modern technology, we can do this almost anywhere in the world, and we're trying to prove it.

Now. Let's jump in here. Um, we only have the three of us, so I'm gonna kick off the A block myself directly, and we're talking about what's going on with Trump and his relationship with the tech community.

'cause initially they came down to Mar-a-Lago. They all bent the knee, they all left little gifts. And people are wondering, well, was that worth the time and effort?

Uh, earlier this week, it was reported that Elon Musk is screaming or yelling at our trade representatives for being quote unquote idiots because they are imposing these tariffs. He's apparently, the other president isn't listening to Elon on this one. So perhaps Elon doesn't have the clout, or maybe he served his purpose and they're moving on.

Who knows? Um, but as I kind of look at this whole situation, uh, you gotta wonder, like, is everybody starting to figure out, well, who's taking the biggest hits? It seems like Apple is getting trounced because they have more to lose from a manufacturing standpoint involving goods from China.

Maybe Amazon is not as sensitive to some of this stuff, even though they sell everything under the planet here, but perhaps they, uh, will just get different suppliers for different things and they might have a little more leeway. Um, but as I look at this whole thing, um, it just seems like there's no amount of money that's gonna make a difference one way or the other. So maybe everybody will just go back to their own knitting and stop paying attention.

Um, Robert, I know you're down in Texas, but what's your take on what's happening here with the relationship between Trump and the tech community at large? Well, I am just so pleased to be a part of, is it for now, once in a lifetime, economic seismic shifts. com, uh, great Recession.

Now this, um, look, it, it is, at the end of the day, business, uh, thrives on certainty. Um, business leaders, uh, need to know what to expect as they plan and lacking that certainty they're gonna pull back. Um, and bottom line is, is that we're already starting to see that with, uh, companies freezing hiring, uh, freezing investments, um, and people are going to start making decisions, um, you know, based on their best interests.

Uh, right now, because they don't have the information they need to make investments, they're not gonna make investments. Uh, they can't predict the future, and they don't have a reasonable expectation of what's to come. So they're gonna act like it.

And so, uh, expect more bloodletting, uh, and gnashing of teeth and hand wringing, uh, until we get to, uh, something more stable. Mm-hmm. It also seems like it may get worse for the big tech companies in this sense.

Um, as I look through the tariffs, right? It's, they're measuring goods and not including services. And in Europe where I happen to be at the moment, they do have some, you know, modest taxes on services and digital services from US companies.

But, you know, there's a debate happening here about how to ratchet that up or whether we should ratchet it up on their side. But they, um, are trying to figure out, you know, should they just be, you know, wait 'em out a little bit and have a conversation and hope that everything kind of evens out soon. Or, you know, is big tech gonna get hit harder because suddenly a lot of Europeans are gonna turn off services that they currently get as part of this whole trade war.

And maybe they already are because they're just generally p****d. But Kimberly, um, is there a moment for deescalation here? Have no clue.

I'm just going to give you my straight out going, like saying, okay, so we can see the guys in Vietnam and that kind of stuff, starting to kind of go, go to zero or whatever the numbers they're negotiating right now. So that sort, getting through that, you know, we see maybe we weren't as bad yesterday. I mean, it's, it's like every day is a new day, um, is kind of like where this is going and what's occurring.

So, I mean, you're right, absolutely right, Robert, you can't make a decision on investments right now. And I, if I was running a CEO with a very large CapEx kind of thing, and I'm not, you know, Arvind and I'm not, you know, San Antonio and those kind of guys, I'd be kind of like waiting to see how things were gonna weigh out. And the other thing we talked about, and I mentioned last time I was on, is that some of these guys had already anticipated this happening.

So there was some pre-buy that was going on, um, on, on some of the technology to saying, okay, so do we pre-buy? Do we not pre-buy? How do we do an anticipate going into this?

So we don't have that long term piece. Then there's, the big, big question on this is this actually CAU will cause people to create new manufacturing facilities in the United States, and that is the biggest difficult one because on long-term decisions, big CapEx decisions, heck, Trump will be out in four years. Maybe JD Vance will be back, and I have no clue, but in two years we're doing reelections and does that stop everything?

So, so what happens, and, and you're absolutely right, we're we're in this unpredictable space to say, so I think there's a, a couple things here is, one is that the administration is gonna go through some of these, these negotiations, and a few weeks we'll be kind of, know where we're at to a certain extent, um, on most of these, you know, big countries on those levels, and what's gonna be taxed or tariffed, what's not gonna be tariff taxed, um, and then kind of start making some decisions. Um, I, I think we are gonna see a pullback though. I mean, I know myself personally going, okay, so do I go spend this money on this or not?

I don't know. I think it's only a matter of time, unless cooler heads prevail before somebody rings up Amazon and says, all the services that you're providing in the United States need to be certain they're, they're all hosted somewhere in the day in the United States. And you might see the Europeans do the same thing.

They're already kind of moving down that path, but they may say that, you know, none of these services can be delivered from the US or anywhere else besides our own local data center. And China might do the same thing, which, um, Robert, walk me through this a little bit, but, you know, we invented this thing called the cloud to get away from having to put things in specific places. And it looks like we're gonna legislate our way back to that.

Well re remember, the cloud is just somebody else's server. So it's, it's just, you know, uh, it, it, it's, uh, fractional purchasing, uh, that that's what you're doing. Um, I, I will will say this, what I have seen with my experiences with the Linux Foundation and CNCF is that there is a huge appetite for two things in Europe when it comes to technology.

One is open source tech, uh, uh, companies and governments there want to make certain that they're building their solutions on open source, because that is effectively an open standard. Um, and they don't wanna get locked in just like any other company, uh, across the world. Vendor lockin is a real problem, is a, is a risk.

But the other thing is, is that they want to have, um, that that data is stored locally so that they can manage it, uh, that personal data, um, and, and also have control of it. Luckily, this is an opportunity for European Cloud providers to grow and scale. If you are offering services based on open standards on open source, that's far easier time to, a far quicker time to market.

And it's easier to, not easy, but, but, uh, uh, easier, uh, to deliver these services based on, on Kubernetes or, or, um, you know, some kind of observability solution around open telemetry. And so you're gonna start saying, I believe, uh, the growth of EU based, uh, cloud providers, we're already seeing that in China with our friends at Alibaba and Tencent and Huawei, uh, and many, many others. Um, and so you're going to see these same services, um, you know, it's not gonna be proprietary things like what Amazon has offered with Lambda and Fargate and those sorts of things.

You're gonna start saying, well, we just have a Kubernetes service, um, and it's good enough. Do you think we might see a moment, and it would be historic where, uh, folks from Wall Street and the big tech companies all get together and pay a visit to the president and say, Well, didn't they already? I know, but now post tariff, post tariffs, they need to come around and say, this isn't working out the way you think it is, and we're wiping out trillions of dollars worth of valuation, At least.

Well, he, I I'm sure that's a very reasonable approach, and I'm sure they're all working on that. And, uh, uh, but like I said, they've already done this. Um, there is, you know, if anybody is surprised by this, uh, they weren't paying attention in November, um, and, and these things were telegraphed, um, hey, for Christmas, we had an electronics Christmas, uh, immediately after the election, uh, you know, made sure to get the, uh, you know, uh, um, PS five pro, uh, you know, 4K TV, uh, all the goodies, uh, because those are things, those things are going up and, and, um, I, it's just, you know, I if it, there is nothing that big tech can do to change this administration's mind.

Um, they have done everything showing up at the inauguration doing what they were doing. It did not work for them. Uh, they have learned a valuable lesson and they're going to react accordingly.

Um, the next step for them is hunker down and wait and see. I also Can't help but wonder if big tech doesn't have the revenue streams that it might have had in the past, well, little tech benefit. And will we see smaller companies able to compete more aggressively with those people providing those types of digital services?

Or is, is that war already over? Oh, always room for startups? Always, yes.

Always. Because there's always room for Innova innovation. I mean, they're, they're gonna create a mode on their strategy.

Um, the, the innovation are the guys that they end up buying to add into their overall technology capabilities. So I think there's always root in that. And, you know, I kind of talked about, we, we had this kind of anxious discussion around energy consumption and ai, and it was gonna take over everything in the world.

And we, and you know, like two months ago, or a month and a half ago, Mike, and I remember on here talking about that and saying, you know what? We're just gonna see innovation around energy consumption. We're gonna see innovation about round air cooling.

We're gonna see innovation on all those areas. Because when there is a need, somebody shows up and says, let's go take a look and see how we can do this better. And it's one of the beautiful things about, you know, our, our country is that that is what we do.

Um, and, and, and enabling that to happen and not putting on rules and regs that, that stop that kind of innovation from happening. So I, I'm, you know, you, you kinda look at saying, okay, so, you know, let's see where this goes. You know, we've been through really bad times before, and I don't, I don't see this one as bad as others that we've been through.

2008 was crazy. com bust was nuts. Um, this one feels different for some reason.

Maybe that's, I'm just, you know, Pollyanna on, I'm, I'm, I'm being, I'm not looking at the sky falling May, maybe that's just my attitude right now. Well, Kimberly, I agree with you completely. Uh, thi this, this can be handled, this can be, this problem can be solved with a single tweet.

And this is not structural. com bust, it wasn't really, um, outside of the impact of nine 11 had on the, uh, stock market shutting down, um, that was, um, you know, just limited to technology. Um, you know, certainly felt like the end of the world to me 'cause I was in the middle of it.

But, um, it, it, it's, uh, I agree with you. Uh, these things can be solved. Uh, it's, it's, from my perspective, uh, it just seems like a, a, um, uh, very much a negotiation tactic.

Uh, and it will get resolved at some point soon. Uh, and then we'll all breathe a si of sigh of relief, and it'll be okay. But, um, companies until that happen are not going to invest.

So if you are looking for a new opportunity, uh, if you are seeking to invest somewhere, it's gonna be pretty rough. I'll tell you what feels different. And, and I've been on the other side of the pond since this thing started, but at least from here, I'm not seeing a lot of people expressing a whole lot of sympathy for Amazon, Netflix, apple.

There's not this sense of, uh, outrage that these poor companies are being treated roughly by the president. So maybe Kimberly, that's what feels different. You know, I, I laugh because I received the headlines, you know, with the picture of the guy standing beside Trump at the inauguration and that kind of stuff.

You know, they'd all flown, kiss the ring, drop the multimillion dollars into his inauguration, and now they're like getting jilted at the altar, jilted at the, the prom or something like that. Um, one of the things that was stated by, I can't remember who it was, it was, um, Scott Bessner, or if it was, uh, Howard Lutnick talking about the market right now. And the biggest people, the people that had hit the hardest is the magnificent seven.

And I was trying to pull up those numbers after I saw the topic for your day. And I, it is, it's bigger than your 22% that you're quoting. The, the magnificent seven have gone down much more than they have.

And that may be just a pure reflection of guys, they were overvalued. I mean, the last year we have had this AI craze, we couldn't have a meeting without talking about ai. It was disgusting, frankly.

com all over again. And, um, and so then there's a piece of me that's saying is, I look at some of these things happen. It's like, well, maybe what we're really, yes, if you really look at the portfolios and that kind of thing, maybe it's really like back where we were a year ago, right?

And the numbers were really, really good a year ago, even as we, as we looked at the, the market. So it's not, it's not like that we're back in the, you know, 10 years ago where the numbers were, um, in terms of the, the investments and that sort of thing. So that's kind of how I look at that.

Um, and, and how I, you know, that's why I think we don't have that much sympathy for Zuck and Bezos and, you know, so you lost a few billion. Sorry, Will someone think of the billionaires? Will someone please think of those poor, poor billionaires?

All right, folks, we're gonna move on to our next subject, but I wouldn't say those poor 10 billionaires, they're probably looking for a refund right now, and we'll have as much success as you did trying to get a refund from them. We'll be Discover Textron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation. We are your go-to for reaching IT, leaders and practitioners worldwide.

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Let's revolutionize your tech journey. Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Hey folks, we're back and we're gonna be talking about a thing called Argo, which is an open source continuous delivery platform, originally built by Intuit and given it a cloud native computing foundation.

And we talk a lot about how AI is transforming software development, but I would posit the following theory that Argo may have a more profound impact on the way we build and deploy software because it's changing the construct between what we call a continuous integration and continuous delivery. Uh, today, if you look at a CI ICD environment, the CD part is a lot of extensions of CI scripts, and they don't always work so well, then they don't scale, and they're pretty brittle. But other than that, it's always great.

Um, Argo is arguing it's time to loosely couple CI and CD with a more graphical tool that maybe appeals more to platform engineering types, or maybe even happens to Betsy IT operations folks. Robert, I know you're close to this topic, and Argo's like the number five most used thing after Kubernetes these days in the CNCF landscape. From your perspective, what's going on here?

Well, it is, um, I, I do, isn't it wonderful that you have a company like Intuit that has donated an open source project and it has taken off like this? Like typically, you know, let, let's look back at where Kubernetes came from. That was from Google.

They donated that, that started Cloud Native Computing Foundation, those sorts of things. You know, we, we typically think about these large, um, open source projects coming from, uh, uh, technology companies. And Intuit very much is a technology company, but their business model is, has nothing to do with selling, um, CD tools or, or cloud or something like that.

They viewed that as non-differentiating technology and donated that to the CNCF because they Wanted a superior continuous delivery solution. They built Argo for themselves, thought others might find interest in it, donated that to the CNCF and it took off. And now it's not Intuit that's just driving innovation with Argo.

It is that entire community and other companies that are part of it. Um, people proudly wear Argo CD t-shirts, which tells me that there it is one, uh, the, the hearts and minds, uh, whether it's DevOps, developers, SREs, um, and so whether there's a push pull between CI and cd, yes, of course there is of course, like where is that line? But what it's telling me is that one, people are very happy with Argo and they're using more and more of it.

And two, they're building more apps on Kubernetes. So it's telling me that, that Kubernetes is one. Um, and, and not only has this model of donating an open sourcing, non-differentiated technology wins, but also that as a platform for better or worse, Kubernetes is where it's at.

Let me go back to, there's another end user company that donated a project that seems to be getting traction and it's backstage from Spotify. Yes, Yes. That's another great example.

Right? Um, and interestingly enough, do you think that IT organizations may prefer something built by another IT organization rather than a vendor? 'cause the IT organization understands their pain.

When I was talking to the folks working on the Argo project, they were saying, you know, it's taken them a while to understand the needs of other companies, and they've completely rewritten the, the underlying platform to kind of make that adjustment. But, um, is there something to be said for getting something from somebody who's lived your pain? Well, I, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Uh, we buy products from companies and remember, using open source is a, is a purchase decision. You might not be paying with money, but you're certainly paying with time and energy. And, um, so you want to purchase a product.

You want to use a product where it's gonna solve your problems. And not just the problems you have today, but the problems you're gonna have tomorrow. And, uh, companies are looking at others like Spotify and Intuit, you know, these are highly respected companies and for them to release open source, this is how we did it.

Other companies, maybe banking companies are paying atten banking. Uh, uh, banks are paying attention to this and saying, well, we wanna be technology, a tech company like Spotify, like Intuit, we don't want to be seen as a bank and we need to start acting like it. But I'm reminded of what Kelsey Hightower said, um, at a executive summit in, at CubeCon in Chicago, and he was pointing out to executives that were just learning about open source and cloud native technology there.

That if you want to win at open source, you hire a maintainer, have a person that if you're gonna bet on Kubernetes or Backstage or Argo that bring in a maintainer, bring them into your company. Do not put them into a scrum. Don't assign tickets to them.

Their job is to take care of that open source project that you bet your business on. Um, and also they are top tier, uh, support in case things go wrong, but also they keep the vendor honest. A lot of these companies are choosing open source, but they're having it provided by other companies or are hosted somewhere else at AWS or Azure or GCP, wherever.

And so what that does is that allows you to be the master of your own destiny. I believe that companies are realizing that they do not need to rely on the ISV, the CSB, the, the software provider, the cloud service provider, that they themselves can pick Kubernetes backstage, Argo. And if they don't like the pricing or the services they're getting from that service provider, they can just move.

'cause it's an open standard. So I do believe that there is somewhat like aspirational adoption of Argo to be more like Intuit, but I do think that it just works. And they've proven that they're listening.

Kimberly, are people Looking closer at the licensing terms for these open source projects? I mean, one of the things that I like about what Robert just said was that ar there's no set of investors sitting behind Argo or Spotify going, when are we gonna get our money back? It is basically, so they're not gonna wake up one morning and change the licensing terms out from underneath everybody.

They kinda, and then, you know, we'll have other groups create forks and we'll fight and it'll just be a mess. Um, are, are organizations savvyer about looking at those licensing terms and understanding what they're getting involved in and when they pick something that is an open source project? Well, if you look at what's going on, because most, a lot of the open source projects that are big open source projects will have a supporting company like a Red Hat, if you will, that they are hiring to provide support services.

And they may not be doing what you're talking about, Robert, which I, I applaud, is that if you're gonna use, if you're gonna use open source, you need to have a maintainers on your staff and can dream you back. You can't just use, um, so I think that's a, a, a well stated kind of conversation given what we have struggled with maintaining, uh, of systems. So most of them have some sort of, I mean, licensing or they, they may want to look at some enterprise support.

So that's where the licensing comes into play and how that works. You know, some of those companies are doing very well. The problem with them is, from an investor standpoint, they're not seeing as much as having ip, you know, red Hat successfully went that way, so that there is more openness, if you will, to somebody that is, is taking an open source kind of technology, bringing it to market, adding on top of it.

But I still see those companies struggling with what they're adding. And a case in point to me is a company called Min io, which is in the object storage space. And they've been, you know, well on their way, lots of downloads, huge numbers along this crisis.

And as they've tried to move into an enterprise scale licensing model that's actually gonna produce revenue, they've struggled. But that's normal. I think that that's a normal process.

So, um, are companies looking at the licensing? Absolutely. Are they looking at the licensing more critically than they do when you look at a VMware kind of thing?

I don't think so, because there's more money there in terms of being out there. I think when you're looking at what you're doing with open source, you're looking at how do you staff your organization to support that environment? 'cause the, a lot of the requirements and the support structure has to come from your, your team a mess, something like a red hat behind you.

I think that's, you hit on one of the flaws in the whole open source thing. It has nothing to do with the maintainers. It has everything to do with the people who are using it.

I think somehow, or rather, they figure out that they're gonna be able to download this thing and then they run it, but it doesn't occur to them that somebody actually has to support this thing and integrate it and update it, and there's cost involved in that. And then they wind up with this kinda stack of open source software that they don't know how to support, and then they get frustrated and then they go blame the open source people. And I'm like, you know what, I, Robert, I think that the issue may be looking at those people in the mirror, so, well, I, well, exactly.

You know, it, it's, it's like, um, well, yeah, we, we see this in open source all the time where somebody uses it, builds their whole business on it, there's an issue, and they get very upset. They get very upset at the community, the maintainers for, for not think, how dare you. And, and it's like, you know what, if you don't like it, go use something else.

Um, and, and remember, all open source projects start with a developer scratching an itch. That's Eric Raymond Cathedral and the Bazaar, uh, uh, and whether that's Es uh, saying, Hey, I want a operating system that's free for X 86, you know, gang, check it out. Or, you know, it is, um, like Nathan Voxin at Liquibase saying, I'm tired of dealing with updating databases.

Um, you know, it always starts there and other people take it, you know, see it, they start using it and, uh, but they're taking a free ride. Um, and if you're really building your business on this, how dare you, how dare you as a manager, as a leader, not look at the risk of that and, and, and seek to, to alleviate that risk by hiring a maintainer, getting a service provider, something like that. Um, it, it, it's really, you know, uh, um, you know, why did you let me do something so stupid?

You know, it's like, like, well, you did the dumb thing. Uh, and, and if you're going to bet your business on this, uh, you need to have either maintainer or you need to have, uh, a company backing you up. But you still need to be using open source because that gives you freedom to avoid vendor lock-in.

And, and there is the right way of doing open source. And there is very, very, there's tons of wrong ways of doing it. Uh, but I do believe that, um, it is, it is shown to be a superior development model.

Uh, it creates tons of value, uh, and everybody gets a taste. Uh, everybody benefits from this. Uh, when we do open source, uh, there's no winner take all.

Uh, when we're talking about open source, everybody's making plenty of money off of Kubernetes. All the cloud providers, everybody's fine, but nobody was just clearly the winner at that. And that's okay.

We can all get paid a lot. Um, you know, we can all make money off of Kubernetes. Whether you're an application developer or an administrator or a cloud service provider or somebody building tools around Kubernetes, there's plenty of money out there.

Um, but if you're trying to get a free ride off of open source, you're doing it wrong. It reminds me, go ahead, sorry. So we're talking about maintainers and, and one, one of the things that would strike me is we, we hear a lot of people say, we're contributing, you know, IBM how much we contributed, how we contributed hyper contributed for me, personal looking from the outside in trying to understand, okay, so what one of, how much of that contr contribution from these companies are maintainers?

How much of that is actual new code that you're doing in writing the next, because it's always funner fun to write the next stuff, not to fix the things. And I'm, and then I'm struck by, you know, we've heard an awful lot from 37 signals moving their new systems off of AWS and on-prem, and they're pure open source. And you know, they talk, we do this without, with very, very few people.

We operate as I, and my next question is, is like, I'm gonna shoot them an email and say, how many maintainers do you have for code? Are you, you're using all of this? What's your contribution back to?

And maybe, and maybe they, they're doing a huge amount and you know, you don't see it, but I think that they're, could be within C-N-C-F-A, you know, highlight the good guys and highlight the bad guys. The wall of shame. You use all of us, but you don't maintain.

So I think they ought do a wall of shame, personally. Well, I ab absolutely, and, and they, um, you know, I, I'm former Linux Foundation, CNCF, and, and they prefer the carrot over the stick. Understood.

Yeah. And, and, and that's, that's their preference. Uh, rest assured, the community knows, the community knows who the free writers are and are well aware of it.

Um, and they don't get help. Um, and they, uh, you know, they're, they're, they're, you know, they're, they're choosing to play. The people that do not contribute back to open source are not building goodwill.

And that's bad business. And, um, you know, it, it is, uh, you know, this is not a hippie commune. We we're all providing to this because we wanna have an expectation of a return on it.

Um, you know, JPMC is not investing all of these, you know, time, money, and resources into open source because it makes Jamie Diamond feel good. It is not that it is because it makes money, it makes economic sense, good business, uh, uh, planning, uh, um, eliminating risk. Remember, banks, they buy risk.

They sell risk, they manage risk. And if they are investing in open source, if they are contributing upstream, and you are not well, you need to look in that mirror and really question your life choices. Uh, uh, not just from a moral and ethical perspective, but also from just a financial perspective.

I am reminded of a golf tournament I got invited to, and it was gro, so it didn't cost me anything to go. And I wound up getting paired up with this other fellow who I didn't really know. And after the second hole through about the sixth hole, this guy just complained the whole time.

The course sucked. The place was a rotten. And after a while, I just looked at him and I said, you know, you should get your money back.

I feel the same way. I feel the same way about the open source complainers. You know, if you're complaining about this thing and maybe you should go ask for your money back.

Oh, that's right. You didn't pay any money for it. So, you know, be grateful is, is what I would think.

But what do I know, folks? We will be back in a minute. And, um, I'm not sure we're building that open source wall of shame, but it is something I'm thinking about.

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Hello everybody. We're back and we're gonna be talking about some good old fashioned hardware and servers. Dell this week, uh, rolled out their next generation servers.

They're based on the Intel six. And one of the things this they started talking about during the press conference that frankly gave me whiplash was their embrace for this servers. Now, I've been following Dell for a while, and they were kind of at the forefront of this whole hyperconvergence push, and it was all about combine the compute and the storage, but something seemed to happen along the way here.

And they were pointing out now that, well, compute and storage now need to scale independently of each other. There's all these different types of applications out there, and some are monoliths and some are microservices, and some people wanna run Kubernetes on bare metal alongside virtual machines. And it's just getting, the world was getting a little more complicated is what they were saying.

Um, so Kimberly, are we kinda walking away from hyper-convergence here? And is that what's happening? Or is this kinda like we're testing something and we'll see how people respond?

I'm not sure if we're walking away from hyper-convergence, but I think we're going back to the three tier architecture. You know, I was on the same briefing with you, and I looked at it, you know, they had this, the old three tier architecture, hyperconvergence, disaggregated infrastructure, and I'm looking at this thing, I'm like going, okay, so how is three tier different than the disaggregated one? And I didn't bother to spend time with it.

I just kind of went on to the announcements because they had so many announcements on the servers and the storage and that kind of thing is, I didn't dive into that, but I'm saying, okay, so maybe they're looking at the future of different kinds of software, they're gonna manage it. And I think part of that is looking at how do you manage from a, a disaggregated or, or, or, or, you know, environment where I can still upgrade my storage and compute and my networking in a different way, um, separately, but also have some sort of level of management that goes over it. So that might be the direction that they're going, because that's what the direction of HCI was.

It was, it was that simplicity of sticking all the pieces together. Um, but as we know, that didn't scale as well as we wanted to do. So, uh, customers, especially on the larger side, did not go that direction unless it was a single application like DDI or something like that, that they could install it, manage that way.

So that's my thought process on it. Robert, it almost sounded like Kimberly said, you know, this is like, my dance moves are so old, they're new again, long as I call it something different. Yes.

Yes. It, it, it's shocking. It's shocking that, uh, you know, a, a large, uh, tech provider would recycle ideas.

Um, I, I, I don't know what to expect, you know, it, it's, no, but look, it, it's, it's, the market is telling them, um, you know, I've got a number of friends that work at Dell, um, and, and, um, you know, one thing I do know about them is that they have a internal, um, move to, um, you know, standardize, simplify, automate. Mm-hmm. Uh, they are really driving their company forward to kind of get away from the old Dell.

Um, and, uh, they're really working hard, uh, to improve their internal processes and how they're fixing things. I think this is honestly a reflection on what they're experiencing internally. And they've gotten very good recently, uh, about looking at, well, we're having this challenge.

Uh, perhaps other people are having this as well. Maybe hyperconvergence wasn't the right way to go. Uh, maybe we need to have different, um, approaches for different problems and, and let's not try to box it in.

Um, I think a lot of that though, I, I mean Kimberly, like, it was a function of the EMC acquisition, right? A lot of that push for storage. 'cause they had to monetize it.

I mean, that's my view. Yeah. But it was also, I mean, the big, there's two pieces.

There were big successes, their vblock, um, that they did, which was an integrated system that they rolled out with. And then when they brought in VMware, you had their vsan environment, um, which essentially became the VxRail, which was highly successful at that time. Um, and then of course we saw Nutanix, and then there used to be like 10 others that were in that space of HCI.

What we found when we were looking at our clients going in, I mean, I can see I, I come from the mid-range way. You came, you remember the ass 400 and, and the h HP 3000, all that kind of stuff. It was like, okay, whiplash, let's go back to those.

Uh, that's another whiplash back to. So, so that's essentially what they were doing was this integrated system that made it really easy for, you know, the smaller firms to bring systems in, drop it in, having not to manage all three pieces of it, et cetera. Okay, thank you very much.

But when it came to the big enterprises, you know, they had their environments and they had their bare metal. You had your, your, um, you three tier VMware environment, Kubernetes hadn't shown up yet. And then you had, um, maybe some unique areas where it would really do a good job because like VDI that came, we saw a whole lot of that getting deployed that time.

VDI did really bad if you put it on anything else, so needed to be this standalone run itself. So I brought in h and if you saw Nutanix, that is where they really got their play. And that was same with VxRail.

Their first big plays were in, were there, and later on they added a few others when it came to the enterprise. But honestly, you had to look at what was really going on in the enterprise and parse out to say, no, it's not gonna take over the world. And, and that's where we're at now.

And the other thing I'll add to that is that we've gone into this AI space. What we have seen all of the vendors come out with, and if you've got a server, is an integrated system. And that integrated system, which is not an HCI, but it's still an integrated referenced architecture or system, we're rolling that in because putting all those pieces together is difficult.

And if the enterprise wants to move fast, this is a way to roll it in and move quickly, get the deployment, get up and going. So maybe what we're gonna see is saying, okay, so now that you've got the deploying, what's, how do you scale that out? What's your next step?

And maybe it is going into this disaggregated kind of environment that they're talking about. Well, that's what, um, Intel is really pushing OPA, um, their, their enterprise blueprint for running ai. Um, you know, I, I, I certainly appreciate what Intel is doing around that.

Um, and I'm hoping that the vendors start pushing that and start pushing a standard instead of pushing, oh, well, this is how you would do, uh, AI infrastructure with Dell or, or whatever large company that is providing servers. Um, I hope they pick a standard, I hope they pick something where they can plug in, you know, a little bit from Dell, a little bit from this other company based on pricing. I hope that's the way it goes because, you know, I, I still have traumatic, uh, you know, post-traumatic stress, uh, from vendor lockin, uh, and, and I just never want to go back, See, I read this whole thing almost like a, a victory dance or Kubernetes.

And the way I come to that conclusion is that Dell, rather than telling you that you need to get some obscure little random server that they built specifically for that purpose, is saying Kubernetes now runs on their mainstream platform and it is one of their main target workloads. And that this is something that is, um, core to their, uh, strategy going forward. And I don't think I've heard that kind of talk outta any of the big server companies before today where they were basically, Robert Kubernetes is, this is a sign and it's one, Well, if I can go, go ahead.

So we saw this moving a couple years ago. Again, this was the situation of saying, you're going to be standing up. You're, you're looking at saying, how are you gonna stand up this next generation application environment you're building on?

And that was going to be all this new modern applications that we're doing was a Kubernete Kubernetes base. So the question is whether or not you are gonna build it on top of your VM environment, because then you have a single management skill, or if you're gonna build it up separately. And most new applications were moving over there.

So I think what you're seeing here is that we've gotten to a, not necessarily a tipping point. We still have, most of our applications are either on VM or bare metal, but all the new development is going over there on not all, most of the new developments going over there on Kubernetes. And definitely that is where all the AI applications are coming out.

So yes, the, the organizations are looking at this environment where unfortunately, I have a bare metal, I have a VM environment, and now I have a Kubernetes environment. And I say unfortunately, because they have to maintain those areas that they're maintenance max maintainers. Anyway, go ahead, Robert.

Well, no, you're, I, I completely agree with you. Um, you know, it, it's, you know, but if I was, you know, look, putting on my, if I was in their position, what would I do? Probably the same thing.

Um, we look, predicting the future I is, is, it doesn't happen, okay. It, it never works out. There's always one winner, uh, who gets it, right?

But it's, it's random happenstance. So it feels like they are saying, well, we don't know what's coming next. We do know that, uh, really broadly distributed apps are the way to go, whether it's, you know, GPU workloads or servicing a customer or whatever it is, we're gonna build this way, uh, going into the future.

Um, and so they don't know exactly where it is. So they're, they're in a sense skating to where the puck is going, or at least spreading their bets around so that they can take advantage of any new technology that comes out, a new choice of, of how to build and run applications. But I do believe that Kubernetes is one, you know, uh, and, and I'm trying to be careful of not, you know, drinking the Kool-Aid, the internal Kool-Aid of, of, you know, with all my friends at CNCF, but, um, you know, companies that build apps on Kubernetes, faster, time to market, easier to maintain.

Uh, yes, Kubernetes is a pain. It is, but the alternative is a lot more painful. So you're telling me I have a choice between the 12 inch stick in my eye and the six inch stick in my eye.

Where are You going with that? Pretty, pretty, pretty much a, it's gonna suck all around. So, so, you know, the choice is minimizing suck and hopefully benefiting the people that are actually, you know, look, companies don't make money off of how they run their applications.

They make money off the applications, how quickly they're built, um, and, and how quickly they're updated to service their customers. Um, Kubernetes is great at that container development has the, oh my God, it's just like when, when I first saw containers, like where have you been all my life? Uh, uh, just dealing with having to do all these updates across servers.

Uh, just so you know, there, there's an application that depended on this one library and now I don't have to worry about it. It's all encapsulated in the container. Um, but we needed a way to, uh, orchestrate all these containers and here comes Kubernetes.

Um, much like democracy, which sucks, but it's the, the best thing we got. Not everybody might agree with that today, but we'll see. Um, Kimberly, last question on this whole subject is on premises servers making a comeback.

Is there something going on here? I mean, you know, a year or two ago it was cloud or bust, but are we kind of coming full circle on that as well? Well, we've talked about this a couple times.

There's two factors in that. One is if you've had a stable application that's not changing that much, et cetera, it's more cost effecti to have it on-prem. And we get back to call talking about sweat and your assets and, um, it's all about that.

So yes, the CIOs have, are going through and examining what makes sense on-prem, what makes sense off-prem, but they're still staying in the cloud. That's not disappearing. The second piece of that is ai.

And I'm not gonna let my data escape from my four walls, and so therefore that has to stand up. And those are the new applications that are coming on board. So I'm gonna train on, on-prem, yes, we're seeing some of that training going up in the cloud, but there's a lot of concerns about doing that.

So on, you know, those, those acquisitions are going on-prem. Um, something else that I saw recently as well is the data protection being on-prem, um, which is, you know, another set of servers that you have there. That to me is kind of curious.

I think that more has to do with the companies per se as well as recover recoverability time. And if I'm doing my processing with more power, you know, with ser more servers, OnPrem, then of course I'm gonna have to have the data protection on prem in order to do fast recovery. So, you know, that has a tiering, you know, effect in terms of all the technology that you're purchasing.

It's not just servers, it's all of the technology. All right, well folks, you heard it here. Hey, servers, IT, infrastructure, it's kind of like fashion.

Eventually those bell bottoms do come back and people start wearing them again. So there you go. Robert Amberly, thanks for sharing your insights today.

As always, they were great. And, And thank you all for watching the latest episode of Textron Gang. Please stay tuned for the rest of the lineup for Textron tv 'cause it too will be equally awesome.

We'll see you tomorrow.