The Hybrid Cloud Forecast Series Andre Tost

In this episode, AB Vijay stops by to talk with Andre about IBM's strategic outlook for the hybrid cloud, talking about practical use cases, and the work that goes into moving clients onto the hybrid cloud.
Check out AB's blog: https://abvijaykumar.medium.com/
Connect with AB: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abvijaykumar/
Art by Sam Smith
Intro by Nathan Brophy
Music "Happiness" by Mixaund https://mixaund.bandcamp.com/

In this episode of the Hybrid Cloud Forecast series, Andre talks with Rosalind Radcliffe, IBM Fellow, CIO DevSecOps CTO, where she is currently working on transforming z/OS into a modern platform with DevSecOps as a showcase for Hybrid Cloud, demonstrating to the world how Hybrid Cloud can work for enterprises. She emphasizes fit-for-purpose by running workloads where it makes the most sense in the Hybrid Cloud environment for business value. They discuss how siloed mainframe and distributed computing organizations today can use the same development processes, with many of the pipelines and toolchains being ported to z/OS. Andre and Rosalind discuss how DevOps has evolved into DevSecOps using automation to help simplify security challenges. She talks about the challenges of running the CIO organization for IBM, of being IBM’s client “zero”, with 6000 developers that build, run, and maintain all of the applications for running IBM. She is currently working on transforming z/OS to be infrastructure-as-code based to simplify management processes with application pipelines that are very highly efficient, with zero trust, no system programmers, all done through automation.

Art by Sam Smith
Intro by Nathan Brophy
Music “Happiness” by Mixaund https://mixaund.bandcamp.com/

In the second annual holiday episode of the Hybrid Cloud Forecast podcast, Andre takes a step back from the world of cloud computing and hears from his guest Faried Abrahams, IBM Fellow - IBM Consulting, about growing up in apartheid South Africa, how he came to work in IT, and the importance of his mentors along the way.

Art by Sam Smith.
Intro by Nathan Brophy.
Music “Happiness” by Mixaund  https://mixaund.bandcamp.com/

In this episode of the Hybrid Cloud Forecast series, Andre talks with Gosia Steinder, IBM Fellow, Hybrid Cloud Research, where she guides research teams in innovative research projects that advance the state of Cloud computing. Gosia began her career working on the first example of a system that offered compute capacity as-a-service to users, before virtualization and infrastructure-as-a-service existed. Then containers came along for managing applications, and she built the first of incarnation of IBM Container Service which ultimately moved to Kubernetes. Over the years, her role has naturally expanded across two areas: advancing the hybrid cloud platform, and ensuring it has the security and compliance capabilities that are required, especially in regulated industries. Together they discuss the challenges of securing multi-cloud solutions as the API services, semantics, and risks vary across Cloud providers. Andre asks her what it means to be a researcher and she describes how the role has changed over time. Gosia is currently working on a new technology from Red Hat, called “kcp”. It is a new spin on Kubernetes, which can be applied to a variety of other problems, not just container management. The kcp technology extracts the desired state management layer and applies it to different contexts by provisioning and managing the lifecycle of resources that have nothing to do with Kubernetes, such as VMs on another cloud, or network resources. You can learn more at https://github.com/kcp-dev/kcp

Art by Sam Smith.
Intro by Nathan Brophy.
Music “Happiness” by Mixaund  https://mixaund.bandcamp.com/
 
 

 In this episode of the Hybrid Cloud Forecast series, Andre talks with Ajay Apte, IBM Fellow, IBM Public Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).
Ajay describes the kinds of work that occur behind the scenes to design and build data centers, before you can even provision a VM. Sustainability is becoming a common theme in these podcasts, and Ajay shares that Fortune 500 CEOs are putting sustainability as one of their top three initiatives. Energy consumption is a major driver and he talks about the need to tune power consumption to ensure data centers stay energy efficient. He tells us that customers are more energy conscious than ever, wanting to measure energy consumption not only at the infrastructure level, but now also at the workload level and even at the application level.
He shares that for IAAS, abstraction and standarization is not as important as it is in the software stack. Most Cloud providers are not focusing on standardization. Rather, their efforts are spent on highly optimizing their stack for a standard set of hardware in terms of scale, performance, resiliency, and security. 
Finally, Ajay talks about the vast amount of data that is being accumulated and the work to gather meaningful insights for both the Cloud provider and the Cloud consumers. Another interesting space he works on is figuring out how to push more software functionality into hardware.

 Art by Sam Smith.

 Intro by Nathan Brophy.

 Music “Happiness” by Mixaund  https://mixaund.bandcamp.com/

In this episode, Andre talks with Andrew Hately, Chief Architect of IBM’s Public Cloud, about the past, present, and future of cloud computing. Andrew begins by sharing how his role in a position in South Africa shaped the way he approaches software engineering. He and Andre discuss why there is a hybrid cloud aspect to almost any modern application deployment.

They talk about the emergence of specialized industry clouds which address the reputational and risk concerns of industries like transportation, healthcare, government services, banking, and insurance.

Andre asks about repatriation of software that can occur due to cost, performance, or sovereignty reasons. Andrew explains how some markets require a backup plan to account for this capability. He describes how Open Source software provides a powerful safety net by enabling portability across platforms and eliminating the dependency on a single provider.
Andrew talks about the importance of understanding your data requirements. Legal jurisdictional boundaries are becoming critical, driving the need to be extremely explicit in the way you code your data boundaries. 
Finally, Andre asks Andrew his predictions for public cloud. He mentions two competing pressures - lowering our carbon footprint and energy usage versus the growth of digital business. The challenge will be how to build something that is always on and always secure, while still allowing for the computationally expensive data access and sovereignty.
Art by Sam Smith.
Intro by Nathan Brophy.
Music “Happiness” by Mixaund  https://mixaund.bandcamp.com/