Techstrong Gang – October 16, 2024

Hello everyone, and happy Wednesday to you. You know, we've got the three largest ISPs in the US being called to the Carpet by Congress. What is the state of cloud native?

We're heading into CubeCon. And do we have digital twin schizophrenia? You're watching Textron Gang.

Hey everyone, good morning. It's a Shival. Happy Wednesday to you.

You're watching Textron Gang. As I mentioned, we've got, uh, three interesting topics to go over today. A little of this and that.

Uh, speaking of a little of this and that, I'm joined by some of this and that, um, first of all, I joining us from out in Las Vegas where he was up, well, it wasn't too late on your, on the, on the west coast there to watch the Yankees play. So you, you got a chance to see that you had to be happy with that game, Mike. I, I was happy with it.

It's, it's all good. And, you know, but I don't take those guardians formerly known as Indians for granted. 'cause this is the seventh time we've played them in the playoffs, so, Yeah.

And they, they've got a lot of pitching. But anyway, Mike Ard, our chief technology officer joins us. He's out in Las Vegas at a, uh, I think it's a BMC conference.

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't, I wouldn't call it this and that as much as I would since Paul is here. It's, you know, riff and ref. Riff and ref.

Okay. And I'm not gonna ask who the ref is, but, um, anyway, thanks for joining us. I know it's early up on, on your end of the world there, Mike.

Um, as Mike intimated, Paul Nati, Futurum group DevOps analyst, and Cloud native as well, I believe, covers the cloud native space. Paul, it's great to see you. Where are you joining us from today?

Yeah, great to be there, Alan. I get to get, just be on the set. I'm in North Carolina.

I'm in my home office. I'm Back called Okay. Yeah, Right now.

And, uh, you know, soon to be back on the road, just like I Was gonna say, not for long. Not for long Nature. The nature of the business.

Yep. You weren't impacted by the storms up there, were you? Little bit, yeah, a little bit.

But we can speak an hour on that phone, but we won't. Yeah, no, that was, I think that was last week's show we spoke about it. Right.

A little bit about that. But anyway, it's great to have you on Paul, and thanks for joining us. So guys, let's just jump right in, if you don't mind.

Uh, our first block today is, is regarding the state of cloud native. A new survey out over in cloud native now is an article around it. Mike, you wanna kick it?

Yeah. This is part of an ongoing series of articles that we've put together off of this report on, uh, DevOps next, which you guys can find on the websites and download. And there's a link in this particular article and in this segment we're looking at, well, what is the level of interest in container technologies, orchestration, and all things cloud native?

And similar to the other reports, 20% of folks are actively engaged in investments. And the other, uh, another 40% are kind of somewhere in the modest part of that investment. And Paul, I'd love to get your opinion, 'cause I know you track a lot of data reports in this space, but, you know, one of the things that struck me, it's like this whole ship to cloud native hasn't occurred with the big bang effect that I think we initially expected.

It's been a, a slow roll evolution, but I kind of feel like we're there now. Yeah. Like, it's, it's a good point.

Um, you know, you're right. I would really go out this study that you have on, on the, on the, uh, Textron site, um, you know, the, the, the, the, the study covering the, the, uh, growth and awareness around tenderization and such. It's always interesting.

You know what I wanna start with what you just kind of hit on, which is the adoption of cloud native. You know, there was this initial big bang like, Hey, we're I want to move to cloud, everything's gonna move to cloud, everything is gonna move in that direction. Um, and unfortunately that, not unfortunately, but for kind of, uh, the movement hasn't been as rapid as we, we like to see.

And what I, what I think really happened was, you know, organizations got smart and didn't chase the shiny object. And unfortunately, as, as organizations go, typically there's a new shiny object and everybody's chasing it nowadays. It's ai, we're chasing the shiny object, right?

But when we talk about c containerization, um, there's advantages to move to containerization, especially when you look at cloud native. And when we look at the research mentioned, uh, you know, the, the 20% making significant investments and 40% making modest investments. You know, I I I look at, um, my recent research and I show that 30 to 60% of production applications are running, uh, uh, containerization for their production applications.

Now, with that set, a lot of information that that's happening in that space is under understanding what needs to be refactored and what doesn't need to be refactored is equally important. The fact is, is, um, heritage applications, I, I like to call them, is, is, you know, those maybe monolithic applications may not need to be refactored. There may be a reason to move it off their existing infrastructure and make 'em cloud ready.

So maybe those heritage applications get, um, uh, encapsulated into a vm and that becomes a cloud ready state. Um, and that's okay, right? Because now you can move the underlying architecture and, and, and infrastructure move that way and replace it with new modernized infrastructure.

All good. But the application business object may stay as an existing system of record and new monetization approaches all built on containerization are going to be new systems of engagement attached into those existing systems of record. And that is really what pivot happened several years ago.

And it'll be like, oh, full force, we're going towards cloud data. We're gonna be containerizing microservices and using Kubernetes for orchestration. It's all gonna be great.

Yes, true. But that's not what's necessary for all heritage applications as well. So I think that organizations got smart understand what their, what their impact is.

And and why containerization is, is, is being adoptively is, You know, I, building on that, Paul, I I, you look, I always look at it this way when we talk about moving to the cloud, that sort of sort of started around 2005, 2006 to public cloud infrastructure as a service and, and let, let's call, call it what it was and what it is, it was moving to virtualized services, moving to virtualized infrastructure, whether it was VM or some other hypervisor you were building on top of the hypervisor. Yep. And I no sooner had that sort of catching, all right.

We started talking about moving from infrastructure as a service to platform as a service. Yes. And the platform as a service you built from, from the on top of the OS where from the hypervisor you built from the OSF and platform as a service for all intents and purposes became cloud native.

Right. Your containers, your Kubernetes, and so forth. What was interesting to me was that while building on a hypervisor, right, building in VMs, you know, achieved critical mass, not all of that was moved into public cloud per se.

A lot of it was at a private data center. And we call it private cloud, though, that became passe. We don't talk about private cloud as much anymore, but you know, even stuff running in third party data centers today run on hypervisors, the move to, to, uh, cloud native pass platform as a service really is what it is.

Look, it's a 20%. You look at your classic crossing the chasm model, 15% or early adopters, the next 30, 35% is that early mainstream. And I think that's clearly where we are now, that 40% number lines up real well with the early mainstream that are in some sort of, you know, uh, acquisition development mode with it.

But I think it's important to remember what you said, and this was a lesson I learned early on, on in DevOps, just because you can't, doesn't mean you should, right? And there are some applications that work just fine in waterfall. You don't need to DevOps, you don't necessarily need them in a public cloud.

And if you wanna just wrap 'em in one container and do a lift and shift and pat yourself on the back and say you're a cloud native adopter, God bless you. It's not really what we're talking about though. Yeah.

I I, I, I think I'd like, well, I like when you were going in the Jeffrey Moore reference of, and I'm gonna add another one in there, bridging the gap between your old and new, that's, that's where the bridging the gap of the heritage architecture with the next, the next generation comes into play. But you're absolutely right. Moving to the cloud was about encapsulation that a virtualization vibe moving up into a cloud ready state, right?

And so it's into the cloud now. You know, I, 25 years before I was, I, I, I was in the, in the vendor world and working in the big companies and, and I was in the space of build it, you know, providing I is and, and PAs and AP a solutions for, for companies. So that always, that's how we moved companies over.

But there was a big push, the reason why a lot of people moved to the cloud was, uh, and the, the promised land of cost optimization and, and birth pass and all this good stuff. But also every 18 months there was a refresh of the infrastructure, the underlying infrastructure and that hardware, the underlying infrastructure needed to change. And it was really difficult to pick, lift, and shift over to an old, you know, an old environment to a new environment.

So encapsulating moving to the cloud and, and having that portability back and forth became a real, a real value. And actually, what we see in our research is 20% of respondents view application portability to be critical. And 67% say it's very important to their organizations.

And that's partially to the reason like you've dropped private cloud or on cloud to, to edge locations, to, uh, you know, different public clouds. I mean, moving applications and data around, uh, will is, is uh, basically operational efficiencies for developers, right? You can, you can develop wherever and environment you want, develop and then move those applications where you want 'em to be.

So I agree with that. The next generation, that bridge in the gap piece is let those applications, those heritage applications live out their life, their lifecycle in an encapsulated state, but then tr build a new applications in the front end. And we're seeing this with ai, right?

New LLMs, uh, that kind of using those data. We used to call 'em data lakes and now they're LLMs, you know, like that kind of thing. But basically those systems of record eventually will migrate out, but let 'em sit with AR for now and then build new systems of engagement for monetization.

And that's really where the containerization is really taking off. I, I, I think what's happened here is that a debate between microservices and monoliths has been rendered moot. All I gotta do now is, you know, take a monolith, encapsulate it in a container, and then treat it like it's a big ass microservice, right?

It's got an API, but it's still a monolith. And then I've got a bunch of little microservices wrapped around it, and I'm not, um, debating with myself over computer science architecture. I'm just trying to get the job done.

You mean I, I, Sorry, sorry. Now functionally, that's right, Ivan, but I will tell you the one exception is secured. You do wanna modernize your heritage application to make sure it's secure.

And I agree with you, mono, I, I, I think that's what we used to call cloud washing. It's a lift and shift. And it, why are you doing that?

Just to give yourself a metal that you're cloud native or you need a chance to pin the metal up. I mean, What I need, I need, I need the flexibility of the resil and the resiliency of that microservices type architecture. So I can reroute calls when there's an issue and the app won't go down.

And I also need To, so what you're saying is you, so by putting it in a container, I could have multiple containers and sort of spread 'em around, if you will, with hot swaps, Right? Or I can rer. And so Lemme ask you why do you need a container for that?

Why can't you just put it on different hypervisors all over and and literally have like snap too and Swappable? 'cause because I can move the container much more easily than I can the virtual machine, the VMware virtual machine isn't really that. Well, You do it as a chef recipe or a puppet script Too.

Too hard pain in the ass. And then I gotta get people other than developers to do it. Yeah.

The promise, the promise of microservices allows you to do incremental updates without having to bring down the entire application. That's the promise. And, and then if you have to, that's the Femoral, the ephemeral nature of it.

Correct. Correct. And then the impact, like I mentioned, security is a huge factor here.

That's probably one of the main factors to think about when you're looking at modernizing your application, kinda make sure you have the latest and greatest protection, and having the ability to react quickly. You can have a microservice to shut down individual components and services version have to shut out the whole, um, virtual machine And then over. And then over time, I keep shaving functionality off the monolith, right?

Because I can then turn subsets of that. So You're talking about a slow burn to true microservices architecture, right? Right.

I mean, if that's what floats your boat, in my mind, you know, if you don't have a good reason, a really good reason to do that, don't bother. Right? Either you're gonna transform or you know, you're gonna evolutionary you.

Yeah. Transformation versus evolution. Evolution takes a long damn time.

Transformation a little bit faster. Um, but I think we also see this in numbers, Paul, I'm sure you've seen these numbers that, you know, for new applications, greenfield kind of stuff, man, Kubernetes and, and containerized infrastructure is dominant, like 80% or better of greenfield apps are built on that cloud native stack migration of existing applications. Brownfield stuff much, much less because they tend to do the lift and shift unless they're gonna re-architect the whole thing into true microservices.

Well, Alan, I think that you're, you're spot on. This is kind of where I was going with it. We're seeing the, uh, there's two parts here, two parts that response to what you're talking about.

One is, if you look at the refactoring effort and after you, one, use your limited skill bench that you have in your organization, your limited resources and your limited funds to refactor only to get the same or even less performance by going to a microservice with a refactoring application, that was a bad use of money and tie. So I agree with that approach. You'd have to look at the application to see what the right approach is there.

However, net new applications that are being developed are not being developed as monolithics. They're being developed in containerization. Right?

And that, and what we're seeing is there's two to three times more applications being developed now, and just with, with the same or fewer resources than just two years ago. And so that's where we're seeing the, the incredible increase in application development. We're seeing that with the adoption of AI in production.

We're seeing that with the just applications that, that are addressing. You know, we are an instant gratification society, so we have to have those applications that are quickly responding to your needs. Otherwise, you're gonna biopsy those someplace else as, as we all know, how long, how much time do you spend on an internet site before it, it's not responding to you, you move on, right?

Right. Yeah. It's the same thing with the applications.

So all these applications that are being developed, all these net new applications are being developed as containerized applications. And, and you know, frankly, when you look at it in the context of the CSD pipeline and the SCLC, incorporating automation in AI allows for those work, those recipes, like you mentioned chef recipes and such, you can, you can add those recipes in and make rapid development of these applications very quickly be with using the, uh, the tool sets and, and allowing. So that's where I think that, uh, containerization has an advantage for the, the development side.

Um, but again, I'd agree with you, everything you're saying on the refactor side, don't do it unless you have or need to do it. Right. I would Just point out, I would just point out one thing, and I think we all make this mistake time and time again, is we all get like caught up in this, well, this is gonna happen overnight and this is gonna be super fast.

And we're seeing the same thing with ai. You know, the definition of wicked fast in the enterprise is three to five years, and That's where we are. It depends, if you're in Boston Center lot records, then you'd say it different, but, um, but let, let me, let me say one other thing though about the whole cloud native space and what, you know, when we talk about investment in cloud native and stuff like that, we really kind of laser focus in our Kubernetes and containers cube codes coming up next month.

I'm inundated with, uh, pitches already and projects graduating and all of this stuff. Let's not forget that the CNCF has, I think it's over 180 projects now. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has over 180 projects that they are managing that go way beyond Kubernetes and, and, and containers.

And they, the security and mesh and edge and, and, and a million other, not a million 180 other places here. And, uh, this cloud native ecosystem is becoming very thick, right? And, uh, in, in terms of all of these projects, I think, I think part of what's happened is that there's been too much consortium shopping, and now all these consortiums have different projects that overlay into each other, and it's getting a little outta control, to be honest.

Well, and it's one way to, one way to view it. I think that there's in, you know, the innovation, right? Is, is what I, what I'd see.

I mean, there's 170 as of as of 2023. There was 173 projects in the C NCF with over 220,000 contributors, over 190 countries, right? And there's 24 graduated projects and 36 intubated projects and 109 projects in the sandbox.

All right? So that's what the co the, the C**n event is, is really kind of driving towards. When you look at that nu those numbers, there's reasons why those projects are being built, because they're, they're trying to put new ways of doing something that is deemed as inefficient and not effective in the current state today.

I mean, will all those projects be individual companies? No, not at, not even close. I think there's gonna be a lot of consolidation as that's a, the, the co kugar is a great, uh, shopping ground for m and a, right?

What's the next acquisition that's going to occur? I mean, look at Cisco going on these buying screens, right? Look at, you know, uh, you know, the merging of these different tech stacks Nutanix by D two iq.

Uh, you know, there's a whole bunch of things. And, and, and these are the, these are the areas that are being scooped up by the larger, larger vendors in space. But I agree that this is a, this is a, uh, an area for innovation and growth.

Um, I don't think we should be stifling that at all. I think that that's a, how these bigger companies are going to increase their roadmaps and grow their product sets. Look, let the market have attic, right?

These, these are market forces that work. But guys, we need to take a break. I think we, we've, you know, we'll be discussing more cloud native as we get closer to Q con in less than a month now, just a few weeks.

By the way, if you're going to Q Con, we're, we're sponsoring a great breakfast there Tuesday morning. So check out our, uh, cloud native Now. We'll probably put up an article and have information on that.

Um, but let's take a break here on Techstrong Gang and come back and talk about ISPs under Siege. You are watching Techstrong Gang. In a world where every line of code powers the future, every keystroke can introduce new threats.

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Register now and secure your place in tomorrow's world. All right, folks, we're back. And as Alan said, yes, our ISPs are under siege.

They've been discovering some malware that they think came from China. And frankly, when I looked at this whole thing when I first came out, I was like, well, yeah, water is wet and sky is blue, and our adversaries are in our networks. And it didn't really surprise me all that much, but now we are actually putting a task force together to respond led by the White House, and this is gonna be maybe taken more seriously.

But, um, Alan, you've been around this space a long time. Am I, uh, you know, maybe seeing the glasses being half full, or is it half empty? Or is there no glass at all?

You know what? I have been in this space a long time and long enough where I could actually talk about some of the things that I saw way back when. Um, so there's two aspects to this.

And if you read the article in Security Boulevard, you'll see them in there. Number one is there's a, congress is pulling together a, uh, a committee hearing. You probably spell the Woodburn from all the thinking going on from where you are.

Um, and they're calling in basically at t Verizon, and I think little bit three of the biggest ISPs in the US who have all been victims of a, of a hack by a, uh, I forgot the name of the group, but it's, it's a Chinese nation state for hacking group. That's, we, we've seen their work before. And the question is, why did they hack these ISPs?

Well, probably to get to critical infrastructure type of access and to wreak havoc potentially on US internet access, right? Think of what happens when the internet goes down by you. Um, my question, of course, is what the heck are the people in Congress going to do about this?

Are they even, are they even qualified to have this discussion? On the other hand, I love what the Biden administration has done around see empowering CSA and empowering cybersecurity and making it a priority in this country. I'm not talking about inflation, I'm not talking about responses to hurricanes.

I'm not talking about wars. Leave all that crap for the mainstream news. But in terms of technology and cybersecurity, this administration has done more than any administration I've seen in a really long time, right?

Between executive orders and what we've seen in csa, I applaud them putting this together because this crap has been going on for a long time. When, when I, when I was at still secure, we were, we were defending of one of the largest continental based private networks in the world for, for some, uh, certain, you know, for some, uh, military agencies. We were getting 400 to 600,000 potential intrusion, you know, tests, attack attacks a day.

And that was 15, 20 years ago. I still remember when we had our n product approved, you know, for information insurance. And we were selling it to many people within the DOD, many agencies.

And we got a call if we could write a test that would determine whether or not a USB port was open on a laptop. And I said, yeah, we could probably write that test pretty easily. What do you, you know, do you are USB ports open?

They said, well, not anymore. We're gonna be closing all USB ports. And it wasn't until much later we all found out, right?

Someone scattered a bunch of USB thumb drives in the Pentagon parking lot, and people were bringing them in and bringing them into their, plugging 'em into their laptop. And, you know, rumor has it, that's how the, the stealth fighter plans got made their way to China. China has had a concentrated effort to breach the US systems, both government and industrial for years.

They did it with the Google, remember back when they hack Google and a bunch of the other major tech ventures. This is their mo, they have multiple nation state backed hacking groups that do this, where North Korea does it for cash. 'cause they don't have money to feed their people.

China does it for strategic advantages. And if we don't get smart about it and get wise to it and get tough about it, it's not gonna stop. And, and it could be a potential catastrophe for us.

So I applaud the, the government taking action. I, I don't think the committees, maybe the committee shines a light on it, so it helps us. Yeah.

But that's, that's where I am. Yeah. Alan, I think good points.

I mean, I was at an event last week at one of the major hyperscalers, and we were talking about policies and such. And, uh, I agree with you. I think that it's a good first step for the administration to, uh, put some rules and regulations and compliance in place.

The problem that we all run into, when you look at something like Typhoon, right? And you look at what, what they're doing, uh, they don't play by the same rules, right? And when you put in compliance and regulations for, you know, the, the, we're all kind of rowing the boat the same direction.

When you get a rogue nation that decides they're going to do whatever they wanna do, where is the accountability? Where's the sanctions? Where's the things that kind of stop this from happening in the future?

I know we can, you know, we can like, kind of like play Monday morning quarterback and go, yeah, we saw this happen so we can kind of make all these statements said, but it's not as easy as that, right? And, and I think that it's, uh, it's definitely about, uh, something we were talking about earlier in the earlier segment. Um, in order to protect, we have to look at things differently, right?

And, you know, we were talking about containerization in the last episode, and I know it's super tactical, but when we were talking about containerization in the last episode, we were talking about one of the reasons to move towards containers. And part of the reason to move to containers is security, is to reduce the attack surface, right? To reduce the number of ways in to guy get into these things.

If you can do, I'm not saying that's the end all be all, but I'm just saying that there's ways to kind of do it. My concern about the administration, the government administrations doing pol putting policies in place, they're not technologists, right? And they may have influence from certain individuals, but one of the things that we have to also understand from this consortium of people that are working in the space is who, who regulates the regulators, right?

Or who, who understands what is it that we're doing and why that should be, that should be going in that direction. One interesting thought that came out of last week is to almost provide a, uh, an open source type of way to influence policymaking. So if you have this con, this tech stack that is, that is a way to address the policies that are being, being put in place to provide more of an open source, community driven, Hey, this, these are the things that are vetted out versus having three or four strategic, say influencers or companies saying this is the way they should be going.

There's, there's less of a vested interest based on commercialization and more of a vest interest in protection. Just a thought. Well, I I don't think there's about policy.

Hold on a second. There's plenty of examples out there where there is made in the USA malware being used to insert it into networks in other countries. And arguably we give as good as we get.

So how can you see that? There's no doubt about that. We're far from angels.

I'm not, I'm not saying that we're the NSA and, and I can't talk about it, but they're as good as, they're as good as they're as good as 8,600 unit, right? Which we all hear about, you know, over, over in the Middle East. But that being said to this, ain't your grandpa's csa, I'm telling you, when you go talk to the people in CSA today, they are not government bureaucrats.

Go talk to Alan Friedman about SBOs Mm-Hmm. Right? Go talk to some of the folks that are in the, in the trenches there, Josh Corman and, and some of these people.

They are us, they are industry experts. And I don't think they're talking about policy. I think they're talking about how to respond here, right?

And I think, I think there's a multi-pronged approach. One is make it expensive for the Chinese to do it. Right?

Okay, you're gonna start doing that. Fine. We really can't have Huawei equipment in this country anymore.

Right? Hit 'em where it hurts. Number two, we, if we're all gonna play by those rules, so be it, right?

And turn, turn the turn the dragons loose. Number three, these ISPs can't do it alone. We need to support them with, with our top lines, whether they be at the NSA or somewhere else.

We need to support them with money. We need to support them with friendly legislate s**t legislation. They need help.

We need a public private, you know, this is back when World War ii, right? I, I mean, I wasn't alive barely. Um, but you know, from what my grandma used to tell me, you'd get in the elevator and there'd be a sign that says you don't know who's listening, right?

And all of these kinds of things where you had this public private partnership in corporations, we built an atomic bomb and no one knew we were building it because you had Well, almost, but don't stop me now. Don't stop me now, Mike. But, you know, public private partnerships, we, we can't, no company can do this alone.

The Chinese represent a very, very big threat here, guys. And we need all hands on deck. And that's what I think this is really about, right?

Pulling together a national consensus of how do we confront these people who are, you know, this is, this is Espionage, plain and simple. Yeah. I think the, the moving Congress is part of that effort, right?

And kind of rallying the troops and it Yeah, no, it, it's, it's show and tell, right? But again, anyway, I'll get off my so box now and remind everyone to vote, but we'll, we'll go from there. But, um, that's how I feel about it.

And I, you know, as I said, I've been involved in security at the federal level, going back to the early two thousands through maybe 2009 or 10. And it, it really, it's only gotten worse. The one thing I don't wanna hear is a bunch of ISPs going around.

Oh, well, we just supplied dumb pipes and we're not responsible for any of this stuff. So yeah, I don't think that's gonna cut it anymore. Yeah, I don't think so.

All right, let's take a break then. I think we talked this, or not even Paul has nothing more to say. Um, we're gonna take a break.

You're watching Text Gang. Let's come back and talk about, uh, digital twin schizophrenia. Okay?

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Alright, we're back. And we're talking about Digital twins.

And for those of you who did not know, there is such a thing as the Digital Twin Consortium, and they're out promoting usage of digital twins in a, in a lot of different, uh, applications. And part of the problem that they're running into is everybody has it in their head that these digital twin applications are these major endeavors, such as, I'm gonna build a digital twin of an aircraft engine so I can train people, and then I'm gonna give 'em all these high-end goggles and they can go off and do something interesting. And the consortium is kind of saying, well, there's actually a lot of different use cases that kind of fall into four general categories and kind.

It's suggesting that we're limiting our imaginations too much because we're thinking of it as these big applications when there are plenty of use cases for digital twins that, um, are much smaller, less costly, and could be done in an interesting ways. One of them is, you know, in the DevOps space, we talked to these folks over at, uh, system Initiative and essentially they are creating models of application environments, and that's is a form of a digital twin when you look at it. So, um, Alan, I don't know, I think we've been talking about digital twins for a while, and I'm like, frankly, I thought there'd be a lot more of them around by that.

I don't think the Lack of digital twins has anything to do because we, we don't have yet another consortium to remind us of something. I, I, I read this article, and I gotta be honest with you, I said the Digital Twin Consortium, DTCI mean, did they have to register as a lobbyist? I mean, you know, what do we need the Digital twin consortium to tell us to use digital twins?

If digital twin technology is so good, people will find a use for it. If I gotta beg people or show people how to use it, it's not good enough That that's a reasonable argument. So Paul, your thoughts on that?

Why is it too hard to build these things from a developer perspective? Well, no, I think, I think you need to take a step back and understand like what the point and purpose is. Like when you look at digital twins, it's used across many industries, whether it's manufacturing, healthcare, automotive, construction, I mean, it's, it's, it's across all, but most kind of to touch on your point system initiative, Adam, Jacob and I had a conversation about, you know, the, the, the digital twin and the production product development and the virtual machine inspections, right?

That, that, there's a lot there that happens. And, you know, one of the reasons that digital twins is, is, uh, is is basically a, a, a strong use case, especially in the DevOps basis. You can do like predictive maintenance and, and advanced diagnostics of what's happening within the CST pipeline, right?

You can decrease the time a, you can streamline pro product development and there's a whole slew of use where you can do it, right? Well, you don't have to actually stand up another instantiation and resources and hardware and people to do the work. Like you said, you put on that virtual environment, you kind of figure out what's going on, you test something, see if it works, and then you put it into motion.

I view digital twin the same way I view ai, which is an enabler towards an end result. Um, it's not, I don't necessarily think that there needs to be a consortium or groups telling you to use it as all. I mean, it is same thing with ai.

I mean, maybe there's use cases that I don't, that I'm not thinking about that maybe you need some type of compliance regulation and, and protection around. But I, I, I think at the end of the day, it is a tool in the toolbox in order to make your organization, your development environment and your business, uh, effective in a way to do it, um, that's more in that virtual world versus doing it with physical resources. So in my mind, I think it's a good thing.

I think that people should be adopting it where appropriate. Um, and but, but use it for the tool that it is versus try to shoe one into something than stop. You know what, Mike didn't, we already have digital twins in development and we called them test environments And could argue that maybe a form of that maybe they didn't actually they were in full boat twins because they never actually looked like the production environment.

Well, that was the idea behind was to make them this look as much like as your production environment as you reasonably can it. Yeah. The main difference, Allen, I think is, is with a digital twin, you have a digital in instantiation of that test environment versus have to stand up in another inc instantiation of the testing lot, if that makes sense.

So you can, so in theory, you can have a, a more cost effective way to do the testing with a digital asset versus a physical asset There any, okay. I think, I think Alan has a valid point in this regard. Every vertical industry has its own consortium and manufacturing groups and this, that, and the other.

And that's where this conversation should be at, because that's the use case for digital twins. So it may not, you know, maybe the digital twin consortium, you know, has some sort of role in helping to do that, but, um, I think it's a, you know, a means to an end, right? The end has gotta be how does the automotive industry use digital twins?

How does the airline industry use it? How does sports entertainment use it? And those are all conversations within those Verticals.

Fair. Let me ask another question on that, or not another, I wanted to make another point, not necessarily question, you know, reading the article and it's up on digital CXO in the notes here. Look, there's no doubt that we have, uh, and, and maybe there's a good use for the consortium.

We've tackled some really complex environments that we seek to digitize and, and use, you know, um, you know, whether it's weather simulations or construction projects or ocean flows, and I mean all, I mean, some really, really cool things that we are seeking to make digital twins up. Um, yeah, I've done a bunch of interviews on some of these larger products projects and they're worthy of, of digital twinning, right? And, and, and seeing how this comes out, I, you know, I interviewed someone from Siemens a couple weeks ago.

They actually digitized the US Olympic sail boats and, and the, the, uh, ocean around where the courts for the Olympics were gonna be. And they, you know, using digital twins came up with some novel and maybe unconventional, uh, tactics that allowed the US sailing team to win their first medal in 16 years or whatever, right? And they, and they, you know, they think this digital twinning model really helped.

It was quite an undertaking by Siemens to do this, right? Um, I think that, I think digital twins is a, is a really great way of doing some of these simulations. Yeah.

So Alan, I think the other part that you're kind of touching on is the reason why a consortium would be, you know, a valid place of a valid kind of approach is to take what you just described and make it repeatable for the ecosystem, right? Make it, so basically having ways to amplify the use case of digital twins, where some organizations and vendors have done it successfully to make that more of a blueprint or, or work, you know, a workflow that you can use and repeat it in your own environment. So let me, I, I agree with you.

So Paul Siemens put a li and by the way, Siemens has a whole, uh, a whole, you know, digital twin department, if you will. They put a lot of money into that. They will do it for you.

They will, you know, they have a ready made program. I mean, I'm a capitalist. Why, why, why do we wanna make it?

You know, this is not something I'd open source for instance, right? Why go to Siemens and pay the money? See, I disagree.

I think, I think they should have both. I think if you, if you, it's the same way about software development. Same way about anything else.

If you have the bench and the tech strength to do it, and you have the resources to do it, go for it. Make it. But it should have some, some community that you can go to to say, I'm having trouble developing this.

What can I, where can I learn more about this? But if you're not as an organization or vendor or whoever, if you're not looking at building it yourself, absolutely go to Siemens or or white company and have them develop it for you. Why not?

I mean, that's a, that's a, and as a service delivery partner should deliver your digital twin. That's a path to pass the resolution. Why not?

Yeah, I Think commercial and not commercial, we need to figure out a way to make this more accessible and bring down the cost of doing this, right? The fact that it requires Siemens to invest all that money limits the market, right? The total adjustable market is confined to, you know, people who are racing sailboats and F1 race cars and high-end engines.

And I think that there's maybe other use cases that could be done in retail or hospitals where you can't spend that kind of money to really do this. But we need digital twins that do something compelling in that setting, You know? But, but that's also the nature of technology in general, right?

It, it may be expensive at first, but then it comes down market once it commoditizes faster, Faster, faster. Man, that's always, yeah. But You know, one of the other things about digital lens, it enables you to do things.

Organizations were not able to do, um, without a digital twin. For example, space exploration, oil drilling, oil fields, uh, you know, life science and healthcare, uh, medical, uh, financial modeling, right? You don't want to take, oh, I'm gonna just try this on the, on the stock market and see what happens.

No, you want a digital twin of it to see if you tried something, it worked great, and if it, if it worked, then you did do it in real life. If it didn't work, you don't wanna try this. Like, you know, you can't get to some of these things without some type of virtual environment in order to get you there, right?

And, and I think that's where it's a lot of, uh, opportunity for it. That's where there's a lot of, uh, use cases that you know, whether or not, um, you're going to invest, especially say you're revamping your manufacturing, you said automotive earlier. If you're looking at revamping your automotive, uh, environment and you're, you're your manufacturing environment, are you looking to do that?

And you're gonna make a significant investment as a proof of concept. That's a lot of investment in the physical world. If you do that in the digital world, you can try and see it and then you have a, a, a, a test point to say, this is really where I'm at, and now we expect to see these results.

So I think it's, it's a definitely use case for it. I think the cost of experimentation comes down. You still eventually have to build something physical, but at the very least you have a better chance of knowing that this thing's gonna work.

Versus today, you know, people are sinking millions, sometimes billions of dollars on the projects and on e theory. Well, but, and, and, but, so that right there is the, the, the, the connection between when or what to build a digital twin versus, you know, the real world. But if the digital twin costs as much as the project itself for more, it, there's no sense doing it, right?

So you've gotta be able to build these at a cost factor where it, it's, it's feasible to do that. So I can save money and be more efficient in this project. And that's why some small projects may just, may not fit for this until it gets much, much cheaper to do that, Unless I just decide to turn on my 3D printer and keep making parts until it works, right?

Could do that too. But those 3D printers are slow. That's a whole nother story though, guys.

I, I think we've talked out our text on G for today. We've got our normal show in. Paul, thank you very much for joining us.

I'm glad to see you're home for at least a little bit. Thank you. Thanks for having me today.

It's been Great. Mike, enjoy Vegas. You won't be here tomorrow, right?

You are. Uh, I will, I will, I will be here tomorrow and we'll talk a little bit about what's going on at BMC. Oh, very good.

Looking forward to that. Actually, I won't be here tomorrow, right? That's right.

And I won't be here the day after. I'll be here the day after that. So you'll be here.

All right guys. I see you two days from now exactly through the magic of television. Thank you all for joining us today on Techstrong Gang.

We hope you've enjoyed this. Just a reminder, we've got a full tech strong TV schedule today, and we also have some, uh, some tech field day, I think Tech Field Day Cybersecurity going on. Um, so, and we'll have that on Textron Gang here too.

So stay tuned for that. Until next time though, this is Alan Shimmel. On behalf of Mike Ard, Paul Nati, thank you for joining us today.

Have a great day everyone.