Utilizing Tech - Season 7: AI Data Infrastructure Presented by Solidigm - 05x00: What is the Edge and What Tech is Utilized There?

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

Although the technology is roughly similar to datacenter or cloud, the unique challenges of edge computing require new approaches to storage, networking, orchestration, deployment, and more. We were kicking off a new season of Utilizing Tech focused on edge computing, featuring Alastair Cooke and Brian Chambers as co-hosts along with Stephen Foskett. One of the key differences for edge computing is the strictly constrained resources there as well as the massive scale. What we now call edge has existed for decades but the proprietary hardware previously used has been largely replaced by commodity and internet-connected systems that inherit technologies like virtualization, containerization, and hyperconvergence. Businesses and consumers expect more interactivity and capability in retail, restaurants, and hospitality environments, and the IoT revolution is strongly affecting manufacturing, military, and industrial settings. But what is the edge really, and how do we deliver services there? That's the question we hope to answer in this season of Utilizing Edge. Hosts: Stephen Foskett: https://www.twitter.com/SFoskett Alastair Cooke: https://www.twitter.com/DemitasseNZ Brian Chambers: https://www.twitter.com/BriChamb Follow Gestalt IT and Utilizing TechWebsite: https://www.UtilizingTech.com/Website: https://www.GestaltIT.com/Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/GestaltITLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gestalt-it/ Tags: #UtilizingEdge #Edge #EdgeComputing #EdgeTechnology @UtilizingTech @GestaltIT

Welcome to Utilizing Tech, the podcast about emerging technology from Gestalt IT. This season of Utilizing Tech focuses on edge computing, which demands a new approach to compute, storage, networking, and more. I'm your host, Stephen Foskett, organizer of Tech Field Day and publisher of Gestalt IT. Joining me today to kick off this season of Utilizing Tech are my co-hosts, Brian Chambers and Alistair Cooke. Hey, I'm Brian Chambers. I am the leader of the Enterprise Architecture Group at Chick-fil-A, and we are known for a lot of the edge compute work that we've done on-site at our retail locations.

I'm Alistair Cooke, and I write about tech and learn about tech and write about learning about tech. You can follow me as DemitasNZ. The NZ is for New Zealand where I live. You can also find me at demitas.co.nz. And I'm Stephen Foskett, publisher of Gishtalt IT. You can find me on the weekly Gishtalt IT on-premise IT podcast as well as our weekly rundown news show, and of course,

right here on Utilizing Tech. So thank you both for joining me this week to kick off this season of Utilizing Tech focused on Edge. We recently did our first ever Edge Field Day event, and both of you were part of that event. It was a lot of fun, and it was really interesting. It also opened up our eyes, I think, about this whole new world of edge. To me, from my perspective, the reason I wanted to do this podcast season on this topic is, well, frankly, my background was in data center IT, regular traditional enterprise IT, which has verticals like networking and storage and compute. And then I got really involved in cloud, enterprise cloud and hyperscaler cloud, which also has compute and storage and networking and so on. And all of those things are similar but different.

They kind of rhyme. And the thing that kills me about edge computing is that it's the same deal. Once again, we've got a new environment. We've got the same verticals, in many cases, the same technology, sometimes even literally the same devices. But just like cloud is different from data center, edge is fundamentally different from cloud and data center as well. And for me, that was the thing that really got me. What do you think of the edge as a different, I guess, horizontal approach to IT? I think there's, as you say, there's a lot of similarity between enterprise IT and cloud

IT and edge IT. And the fun part is finding the differences. So where are the things that you always do on cloud that just don't make sense on edge? And what are the things that you might always do in enterprise that again, don't make sense on edge? And then what are the unique things you have to do differently on edge? And that sort of new technology understanding its frameworks and how it works,

how it's different from what you already understand is always interesting to me. I always like to see how you approach solving different sets of problems. Fundamentally, there's a whole new set of problems at the edge that maybe suit existing methodologies and sometimes don't. To add to what Alistair is saying, I think it'll be interesting to explore how perhaps edge is maybe a little bit like the data center to cloud hybrid model. There are certain reasons that you had to keep certain types of workloads on

prem historically, and then people started to move some out, but had interesting interactions where maybe part of an application or an experience was in the cloud. And another part of it was still anchored in a data center, perhaps because it was a mainframe based or something like that. I think it will be interesting to see the paradigm between what things make sense to be kind of edge native to use a term I'm starting to hear out in the industry some. They're built for the edge and they really run in the edge, but then sort of that meshing

with the cloud, much the way that we mesh cloud with data center in the past, what will that dynamic look like? And then what will the application use cases look like within those? And then of course the tooling and the potential crossovers from the cloud to the edge as well. So I think that's an interesting space to explore this season. Yeah. One of the things that really is interesting to me is that in, well, I guess it's the same anywhere. It's not about having like some crazy new technology or some amazing insight. It's about building an application that's fit for purpose. And I think the thing that will surprise people coming from a data center or cloud space is that the constraints and the unique challenges at the edge really do fundamentally transform how technologies are

designed and deployed and built, even though it's the same stuff. And increasingly, it is the same stuff. I think that we should probably start by saying that. I mean, especially now, we're talking about hypervisors, we're talking about orchestration, we're talking about Kubernetes and containers, we're talking about clustering, SD-WAN, a lot of the technologies that were developed in data center and in cloud are at the edge too. And it's not a bunch of proprietary weird stuff anymore. Well, somewhat, but for the most part, it's not a bunch of proprietary weird stuff like it was when I first started working with retail environments. But it is, in in fact fundamentally different just because of the environment, right? And I guess, Brian, you're the one I think that has the most experience in basically

making this stuff actually work as opposed to sort of theoretically working. Yeah. One thing I was going to add to what you said, I completely agree. A lot of the technology is really the same, but it's with a new set of constraints. We don't get the benefit at the edge of some of the paradigms that people have gotten used to when they think about building applications in the cloud. Obviously, you're limited in terms of the resources you have available to you. The scale is much more finite. Clearly, it's always finite, but the hyperscale clouds make it feel infinite, right? It's all you would ever need, whereas at the edge, you're probably going to use more than you have at some point, or you're going to want to. So I think it's a very interesting thing to figure out for any given environment and use case that's thinking

about the edge. What are the constraints that you have to work with? That's not just the infrastructure, it's also the connectivity and a number of other things that go into thinking about how that use case is actually going to work out in the real world. I think there's another dimension to the real world as well, is that there's a lot of legacy that gets dragged along. And so although the Edge native idea is often presented as we build new applications using containers, the reality is that we're probably gonna be pulling older applications. We probably have still full Linux installed applications

if we're lucky, large Windows applications if we're a little less fortunate. And seeing solutions that encompass this idea that you've got to bring along some legacy is also going to be an interesting part of exploring what the edge is for people. Yeah, I agree with you. I think the legacy applications are a challenge. And Stephen alluded to some of the successes we've had deploying an edge architecture. One advantage we had is that pretty much everything that's gone there for us has been Greenfield. We've been able to start from scratch and be edge native, build things in containers. We run those on K3s, a slimmed down version of Kubernetes. But we had the benefit of

really rebuilding both the infrastructure and all of the connectivity around our solution within the constraints we had in a restaurant environment with unreliable internet connectivity, et cetera. So we had to acknowledge constraints, but within those, we got to build both our stack and our business applications that live on top of it from scratch, which is a huge advantage that probably not everyone, and maybe very few will actually have in the real world when they're thinking about how they deploy at the edge. So I think that's a great point. Yeah. And that's actually a really good point. As I mentioned, you know, I was working on, I guess, edge before it was called edge in retail environments, you know, probably 25 years ago. And frankly, it was horrible because it was just this big stack of proprietary weirdness.

And so, you know, I was in, well, retail gas stations. We were deploying, you know, point of sale systems. We were deploying inventory control and management, pricing, all sorts of things. Every one of those systems was bizarre and proprietary and had its, for example, they each had their own backhaul. We literally had multiple satellite dishes on top of the gas stations. We literally had, you know, oh, well, this one runs over a modem that connects with a phone line. And this other one uses this like huge, giant satellite dish. And, you know, oh, and this one requires this specific piece of hardware. And this one requires a completely different hardware that's actually literally the same thing,

but it has to be deployed differently. And it was just this total nightmare of technical debt and weird legacy. And I hope, I think that now that edge is a thing, I hope and think that that's changing. Is that changing? Is there more standardization? And can companies hope to be like Chick-fil-A and that they have like a green field and they're able to like write new applications that just sort of run? I'm sure there are companies who are starting completely green and there's that range, right? If you've got an existing deployed environment, you're typically going

to be building on top of it. Whereas Brian's benefit was that he was deploying this stuff out completely clean Greenfield environment, and there'll be a range. Those organizations that had the dedicated hardware and the custom hardware, and all of those satellite links will be really enjoying a move towards commoditization and towards shared hardware and shared links underneath. And probably even enjoying a move to using the Internet and VPNs rather than all of those satellite connections. And this commoditization is why we're seeing so much growth in the edge, because the cost, the sheer cost of putting in and supporting all of those systems that Stephen had experienced would have been astronomical. And so the places that you could put them into had to be much more profitable.

And so what we're seeing is with the commoditization and the use of the internet, that the options for where you can put edge compute, where you can derive more value, where you can deliver better service through this edge compute, just expanding and expanding. That's what's driving what we're seeing as a growth this edge compute, just expanding and expanding. And I think that's what's driving what we're seeing as a growth in edge compute. Yeah, to add to that, I think at least now with the landscape that we're seeing beginning to emerge,

there will be an opportunity to fix some of those legacy problems where you had many different solutions for the same things, all in the same physical premise. Will people be willing to bite off the work to re-architect? That's a question I think every company is going to have to wrestle with. But I think the technology that's emerging at the edge, like we said,

same stuff that's in the cloud, is very much more friendly to multi-tenant type solutions, has better security controls. I think back to our restaurant environments, we were in an environment where we've had edge compute, if you consider a computer at the restaurant, had that in place longer than I've worked at Chick-fil-A over 20 years. The difference with that is it was for a single purpose. It was proprietary and it wasn't open to allow other things to run on it. It was for a point of sale system in our case. Now we have an architecture that allows us to run any kind of application that people want to build.

In our case, as long as it's container-based, you can imagine other iterations of that, whether it's micro VMs or Wasm or whatever else the case may be, whatever the technology, people have the opportunity to use a lot of these tools to orchestrate a new kind of platform that allows multi-tenancy, which with it, I think can come some lower costs of management, less complexity,

more interoperability, all those benefits. Yeah. And I think the cat's kind of out of the bag on basically simple, complicated proprietary solutions at these environments. So again, what we were working on back in the 90s was basically what would now be considered hyper focused advertisement. So the idea was, oh, well, this guy usually comes in and buys a snicker bar. So I'm going to have a custom ad go to him in the 90s. Right. Nowadays, I think that stuff like that doesn't sound so radical. And I think that people even assume that environments are going to be more personalized, more customized, there's going to be more metrics, and frankly, consumer tracking and things like

that happening. I think people also expect now that there's going to be a lot more self-service actions that are going to be happening, whether it's retail or even, you know, kind of an industrial situation. I think that people are going to think that, you know, I have to be able to deploy more interaction, less rigid, structured computing systems. And therefore, we have to have commodity containerized, as you said, or virtualized, at least, systems that can basically allow us to deploy this stuff. Because otherwise, you know, the application owners, the business itself just kind of wouldn't function. I mean, think about go to a store, go to a restaurant, go to anything. You're going to have a bunch of interaction and applications running in those environments that you might not

have expected to encounter 10 years ago. And you can't put that genie back in the bottle. And it's not stopping. So that range of experiences and service is going to continue to increase and one of the things that strikes me is that each of these edge locations is in some ways a micro cloud and that it's delivering a set of software defined services that are being consumed by multiple application teams and so so I think there is a job function to be the manager of that micro cloud in a way that if you're actually using, consuming from public cloud,

it's somebody else's problem, right? AWS runs their cloud, Microsoft runs their cloud. Well, in terms of the developer experience of building those new applications to deliver out to the edge locations, they just want to consume cloud-like resources at the edge. And so there's a real strong place for building that cloud platform at the edge.

But as Brian says, that's completely different scalability. It's very, very limited scaling at that edge location. Well, one of the things that occurs to me as well, and this is one of the questions that I'm going to have for our guests all throughout this season, is that, as I kind of alluded to a minute ago, the edge and the edge and the edge, there's different edges here. So, you know, like I said, I have experienced the,

you know, gas station world and the retail world. Brian obviously knows quite a lot about the quick service restaurant world. Certainly, there is a whole world of factory and industrial IoT. There's also things, I was talking to a guy recently about mining and literally under the ground and above ground mines and the unique challenges of deploying devices in those kinds of environments. We've talked to people about cruise ships, about military ships, even I know a guy who worked on satellites and they approached that as an edge computing environment. There's a whole world here. Is there really such a thing as edge, or is edge just what we're calling a bunch of completely disparate things

that have nothing to do with each other? Well, I think one of the challenges here is that because the term edge is popular, it's being applied to a lot of different things. I wrote about this just prior to Edge Field Day 1 about different types of Edge. And we've been focusing on what I categorize as the far edge. So it's a location that belongs to the organization but doesn't have any IT staff ever visiting it. But there's also what I characterize as the near edge, which is a location that doesn't belong to us, but is a data center. So it might be that we're using co-location all over the place. And this is sometimes what you

see as the edge from the point of view of a telco or from the point of view of maybe a content distribution or gaming kind of use case, where the objective is to get close to their retail subscriber, but that subscriber is still accessing over the network. So for me, that's the near edge. It's still highly connected, more scalable, probably looks like a data center. And so you can run data center infrastructure in there. You can run hardware that needs cooling and needs power protection. Whereas what we've mostly been talking about at Edge Field, say, was what I characterize as the far edge. And so there's no power protection, there's no environmentals there. You cannot put data center equipment in there because it simply won't survive the amount of dust and dirt in that mine. So I don't think there is a single thing that is the edge. I think we need to have a more sophisticated view at it.

One of the slides that was put up in Edge Field Day by one of the vendors showed five different layers of Edge. And so I think it is important that we recognize a little bit that the Edge is not just a single entity and that there are different types of infrastructure, different constraints at those different Edge locations. Personally, I like the far edge. There are some really cool, interesting things happening in edge infrastructure being deployed into mobile locations, delivery trucks, into unattended sites, those kinds of things are really interesting. But there's still huge business in that near edge as well, where it looks much more like a data center deployment, much more like a co-locations site. Yeah, I might add to that and say, I think I totally agree that there's a large spectrum of what edge is. And I think it actually ranges increasingly all the way down to potentially like a mobile device.

There's been a lot of stuff that I've run across recently. I'm not sure if you guys have read it, but a lot of things talking about where Apple may go in this large language model game. And perhaps they have something that actually runs locally on devices, on their chips. Quite frankly, models living on mobile devices, executing know business stuff that's a type of edge then you've got the kind of uh the far edge the like our use case the on-prem in a restaurant uh type of edge and i think you've got these kind of regional edge points of presence whether they're like cdn pops cloudfront or uh you know amazon or whoever pick your place. They're starting to run serverless functions and things like that. So yet another place you can put applications to get the latency and the experience you

want for your applications and users. And then, of course, you've got cloud on the further end. And I just sort of see a future where all this stuff is meshing together into something that we probably can't really call edge. It's more of like a compute mesh or something like that, where you run the things where they need to be really as close to the cloud as possible, but close enough to the user to meet the requirements of that particular app.

So when I see all this stuff going on, I think that's kind of where the industry seems to be seems to be headed. And I think it is going to be a mix of different types of edges that make that happen. One of the things you brought up in there that's really significant is that all of this is about solving business problems. It's not about an academic definition of what the edge is. But you've got to understand in that framework of all these different places that the edge can be, where does this product work? What is this product useful?

How does it help me to build this application out? So although the definition doesn't help us to identify a business problem you're solving, so Far Edge doesn't tell me the business problem, but these characterizations help us to work out what is the right tool. And so they're a good, quick way of working out which tool should I be using for this because I'm sure Brian doesn't want to have a whole three-node rack-mount server environment going into each of the Checkfiller locations. That's just not going to make sense. Yet that, for some definitions, is an edge compute cluster. So it is useful to have that targeting of the terms and making it

simpler to identify what product's going to bring what benefit. Do you guys think that the edge outside of those more constrained environments, when it's in a regional data center at a CDN or when it's in a telco at like a fiber hub or something like that, do you think that paradigm is going to converge with cloud and the tooling and experience for application builders is going to be the same. And then it gets narrower with the constraints that come the closer you get to the user or something different. What's y'all's opinion on that? Yeah, I definitely think it will, Brian. And I'm already seeing basically clouds are getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

And for what it's worth, I mean, I see the sort of what is the edge and, you know, that sort of academic, like, let's define this word kind of thing as sort of pointless, because it was just as pointless in the cloud era when we were all like, oh, that's not cloud, this is cloud, you know? Absolutely, whatever you want to call it. If you look at things like, for example, CloudFlare workers, or what Ak Akamai is doing or what's happening in 5G with distributed applications and distributed containers or serverless. traditional cloud and becoming a more of, as you say, sort of a mesh of distributed services that are closer and closer to users. So I absolutely think that whatever the cloud is, it's going to go right out to the edge as far as it can in a unified fashion and that you'll deploy applications that will use workers that happen to be running in regional data centers or in the telco pop that also is, you know, the 5G,

or yes, even running in a retail store or even in a consumer's, maybe in a consumer's own closet. You know, I definitely think that's all gonna be more and more integrated over time. Yeah, to your point, we're already seeing some of that with like AWS Wavelength, which is a service that allows you to put some very basic, primitive Amazon compute services at 5G, but with its Verizon cell towers.

But we're already seeing that the cloud sort of expand further and further towards the user in those types of ways. So I think that's an interesting pattern to learn more about and keep an eye on. Yeah. And from my perspective, one of the things I do as a day job is teaching AWS training courses. And so wavelength and outposts and local zones are all ways of delivering those same cloud native services closer and closer. And even if you start looking at things like um the latest snow family the snow cone little tiny thing which is small enough to go out to a um to an edge location has wi-fi and has local computing extending those same development

paradigms that you have in cloud out to edge locations i think there's going to be a lot of different ways of of solving these problems continuing some more focused on extending that cloud native developer experience, others more oriented towards an in-house development or on-premises development that's extending out to the edge. And we'll see quite a lot of different solutions in that space over time. But given that, I guess, just like we know know, we know the cloud when we see it, we know the edge when we see it. What are the characteristics of the edge that we know that that means it's the edge? Some things that immediately come to mind, as Brian mentioned, is the unique constraints in terms of resources, of connectivity. We didn't mention, you know, people, you know, hands-on operations and things like that.

So that's one thing. Another thing is the scale and the distribution, which is different than scale. Meaning, yeah, you might have 10,000 servers in the cloud, but they're not in 10,000 locations. That's a unique characteristic and unique element. Another thing that we've talked about is the unreliability, is the fundamental lack of anything approaching high availability in these environments. Am I off target? What do you think are the characteristics that make Edge, Edge? I think the diverse range of locations is a really important part of it. And for different organizations, that means different scales. So if I've only got a hundred retail stores, my edge is going to be a hundred

retail stores, whereas if you've got 10,000 gas stations, it's going to be a little larger. Um, but yes, definitely that, that idea that it's scaling out some multiple physical locations and that it's a cookie cutter between those locations as well. I think that's one of the important characteristics is that at each of the locations, we're delivering a specific set of services that is usually largely consistent across those locations. It's not that we're delivering a general purpose compute platform that can be used for something different at each of those 10,000 locations. We are templating it out and deploying. Now, I'm not sure if that's just a relation of the fact that we don't have skilled hands at the site, and so we have to manage them remotely as a population, or whether we'll see over time more customization

for each particular site. That might be an interesting angle. But in terms of what is the edge, I think that there's still this idea that it's something outside of your data center or the public cloud. And those to me is the big criteria that makes it different at the edge. The one part that we've discussed in this call that I think is getting pretty marginal on being the edge is where it's a mobile device. I think mobile, the device in your hand is a general purpose platform for compute. And it's not nearly as specific to a task as what I consider to be edge infrastructure. from that operational technology, industrial automation kind of side where it is very specialized equipment that we're trying to access in a much more generalized way rather than having a general purpose tool

like your phone and delivering that to it. So for me, of the things we've talked about as Edge, that's the one that doesn't quite gel for me. Whereas I think, Stephen, I'm much more interested in the things that are data center near edge than you are. I think you're pretty clear of your edge is much more of what I categorize as far edge. Yeah, I think I generally agree with the way that you defined it, Stephen. I think you hit most of the big things. One maybe nuance to that is it seems like most of the edge applications,

at least that I can think of at the moment, y'all challenge me if I'm wrong, but they usually seem to be more targeted in nature. So it's not that you want to lift and shift your cloud computing workloads to the edge, because that's better for some reason. It's that you have, you know, two, three, four, five things that leaving them in the cloud is insufficient. So you need to find something that is closer to your user to meet their expectations or works when, you know, there's some other constraint, the network is too slow, it's offline, et cetera. So you're trying to move, privacy requires it, whatever.

You're trying to move that for a reason, but it's targeted towards a series of purposes, not just in their place to put any random workload that you have. It's not that we want to run the modules of our ERP for cash management from the edge because it'll be a few milliseconds faster. That's pretty trivial, but running things that are critical to your manufacturing probably make a ton of sense. So I think that's probably the big thing that makes it edge versus not edge is, are you slicing off work that really requires something that you can't get from the public cloud or from your own data center or things of that nature? Yeah. And that actually came up on Utilizing AI a couple of seasons ago on this very same podcast where we were talking about metrics collection and data processing at the edge and industrial settings specifically.

And one of the things that I thought was really kind of awesome and mind bending there was this. I don't know what the what the somebody it's somebody's law. I hope if it's not, we're going to name it after somebody that basically says that if you can process near sensors, then you are able to collect more data and process more data than you could otherwise. In other words, by moving things to the edge, by having low latency, you know, compute power, that's not subject to not just the latency, but the unreliability of networks and backhauls and so on. It opens up new possibilities for smarter and smarter, better, faster, stronger, whatever applications. And that that is a said, that came up in the context of deploying machine learning, tensor processing engines in factories and doing, you know, live video and sensor processing at the edge. I think that's really relevant to this discussion as well.

One of the things I used to always say about cloud computing is that the fundamental nature of cloud computing is that some applications just don't want to be here. They want to be there. They work better there. Whatever there is, it makes more sense. Like email is like the classic example. Email is better in the cloud than it is locally. It just fundamentally is because that's just what it is. Similarly, a lot of these edge applications are better there. And it's a new there, but it's hard maybe to put your head around it. But once you start thinking about it like that, you're like, oh, wait, yeah, this definitely should be done on site instead of in the cloud or in the data center. I think it's a corollary to Amdahl's law. So Amdahl's law is the best IO is the one you don't do. In this case,

it's the best network transfer is the one that you don't do. So rather than moving the data, and I definitely see Edge as part of the function of Edge is as a data refinery. So the Edge compute takes in lots of data from the site, refines that and works out what's worth sending back to head office and actually taking action on. So some things you act on very rapidly and some things you act on over a much longer term. And the things you have to act on rapidly, you process close. And then the things that are longer term, you send away some longer term insights. But what we do see is there's a flow in the other direction as well.

There's data that's being distributed out to be close to the users. So it's not just that it's a refinery for data that's being generated at the edge. It's also a place where we've got that presentation. Those targeted ads, they're not being generated at the edge, but they're being displayed at the edge. So there's definitely a two-way flow, which I hadn't thought through prior to Edge Field Day. Yeah, and I'm really looking forward to seeing where this goes. I think that we've hit on a bunch of things here during this discussion, and hopefully that this discussion will help those of you who have subscribed to previous episodes, previous seasons of Utilizing Tech. If you were listening to Utilizing AI, a lot of these things came up again. If you were listening to utilizing CXL, you know, a lot of

these same discussions, there's so much similarity, and yet so much different things, different interests, different areas. And in the end, it really comes down to what you're trying to do with technology, more than the fundamental aspects of the technology, you have to pick the right solution, the right tool for the job. And I think that that's what I'm going to be looking forward to in this season of Utilizing Edge. So please do tune in. This is a weekly podcast. We're going to be publishing a new episode of Utilizing Edge every Monday, starting now. This is episode zero. Episode one is coming. I promise there will be a new one every Monday. We are recording aggressively to try to fill that quota. And also, if your appetite for Edge is up, please do check out Edge Field Day, the videos from that.

Just type Edge Field Day in your favorite search engine and you'll find those videos because we talked to a lot of these companies. They did a lot of demos and so on. As well, I know that the two of you are doing some really interesting things, too. Where can we follow your thoughts on the edge, Brian? Yeah, for me, two places. It's at B-R-I-C-H-A-M-B, part of my name on Twitter, B-R-I-C-H-A-M-B. And then I just started a sub stack fairly recently where there's some devotion to edge pretty much every week when I write that. And I just started a Substack fairly recently where there's some devotion to Edge pretty much every week when I write that.

So it's called the Chamber of Tech Secrets. Thanks to my LinkedIn audience for voting on that name. I went with it. And you can find that at bryanchambers.substack.com. And my online identity is demitas.co.nz. Or you can just put my name, Alistair Cook, into Google. And as long as you put something tech-related, VMware or AWS, you'll find me.

If you don't put that in, you're likely to find some cricketer. And I'm looking forward to learning more about what people are doing and building and how you build applications for the Edge. I've actually built my own little demo application, and I'm hoping to have some Build Day Live events where we take that application and start deploying it out to lots of Edge locations. So there's

another place, builddaylive.com or builddaylive on YouTube. And as for me, as I said, you can find me at Gestalt IT, where I'm doing a weekly podcast on Monday called Utilizing Edge, which you might have heard of. Another weekly podcast on Tuesdays, the On-Premise IT Podcast, as well as a weekly tech news show on Wednesdays. So check that out, gishtaltit.com or YouTube slash gishtaltit video. You can also find me on social media sites like Twitter and Mastodon at S Foskett.

So thanks for listening to Utilizing Edge, part of the Utilizing Tech podcast series. If you enjoyed this discussion, as I said, you can find this in your favorite podcast application. Just type Utilizing Tech. Please do give us a rating, give us a review. We would love to hear from you as well. Send us some feedback.

This podcast is brought to you by gestaltit.com, your home for IT coverage from across the enterprise. For show notes and more episodes, go to our special website, utilizingtech.com, or find Utilizing Tech on Twitter or Mastodon as well at Utilizing Tech. Thanks for listening to this first episode of Utilizing Edge, and we will see you next week.