Utilizing Tech - Season 7: AI Data Infrastructure Presented by Solidigm - 05x17: Considering the Many Faces of Edge Following VMware Explore with Roy Chua and Brian Knudtson

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

VMware Explore 2023 featured a broad set of products and technologies, all of which could be included under the banner of edge. This episode of Utilizing Edge considers this dynamic and varied world with Roy Chua and Brian Knudtson, along with host Stephen Foskett. Virtualization, networking, storage, and orchestration are all key edge technologies, and VMware and its partners are deeply involved in bringing these technologies to the edge. VMware announced Edge Cloud Orchestrator, new security capabilities, integrated networking, client integration, and the exciting potential of private 5G networks. Dive into this episode to unravel the complexities and promising future of edge computing. Host: Stephen Foskett: https://www.twitter.com/SFoskett Guests: Brian Knudtson: https://www.twitter.com/BKnudtson Roy Chua: https://www.twitter.com/WireRoy Follow Gestalt IT Website: https://www.GestaltIT.com/ https://www.UtilizingTech.com/ Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/GestaltIT LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/Gestalt-IT Tags: #EdgeComputing, #UtilizingEdge, #EFD2, @UtilizingTech, @SFoskett, @BKnudtson, @WireRoy, @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 are two of our Edge Field Day delegates, Roy Chua and Brian Knutson. Welcome to the show. Yeah, glad to be here, Stephen. Again, I'm Roy Chua of Avidthink. We are a research firm focused on infrastructure technologies, including things like the Edge. And I'm Brian Knutson. I have been in the IT industry for a quarter of a century at this point, doing everything from development to infrastructure, done some storage, done a little bit of security. Edge has always been a topic of interest because not everything goes in the data center. So we've got to somehow figure that out,

and I'm glad it's finally getting its day. Well, it's interesting because those of us who've been in IT for a while, so again, I'm Stephen Foskett. I have also been in IT for a little while now. Looking at Brian, you'd think that he hadn't, but he has, just like me. He started when he was five. Yes. Yes. At the edge.

At the edge. Working my way in. Working his way in, yep. So those of us who've been in IT for a long time, we really have been involved. Because I think it's almost impossible to have kind of a nerd career without dealing with some application that is now lumped under the category of edge. Because basically, I don't want to say everything,

but a lot of things are lumped under the category of edge. So Brian and I were at VMware Explorer this week, and we saw a lot of companies talking about Edge. And it was such a wide variety. I met with a thin client company that had the word Edge on their stand. I talked to a private 5G company. I talked to VMware about SD-WAN to the Edge. We talked about VMware's Edge Orchestrator product. We talked about VMware Horizon. All of these products are Edge. And then we, of course, have like retail Edge. And of course, those of us who

experienced that with the Amazon, grab stuff and walk out kind of store, there's a lot of Edges out there, aren't there? I was going to say Edge is just not cloud, right? So anything that's not cloud is Edge, which covers a lot of things. And I think the reality is that the umbrella that's called the edge seems to be growing bigger and bigger and bigger. That's what I'm seeing. Yeah. And to me, edge is an extreme of a spectrum. Like you've got the cloud, you've got data center, you've got edge, but you've got use cases in between all those.

There's a variety of, you know, I've got edge but you've got use cases in between all those there's a variety of you know i've got three data centers one happens to be a large closet one happens to be co-located at equinix you know is is that closet that i operate as if it were a data center is that considered edge um i've only got one of those. So, you know, obviously, putting ruggedized equipment on a military helicopter would be, you know, an extreme edge case there. But, you know, how do you define the spectrum in between there is an interesting piece of this, you know, this new movement towards edge? Yeah, yeah. And as Roy points out, everything that's not Edge is called cloud, which I also experienced at VMware Explorer with companies who very obviously have traditional data center products, storage and things like that. And they're calling those cloud because why not? Right. But, you know, I'm not the Edge police, but I think there has to be a definition here of what is edge. And we've been talking about this since literally episode

zero of utilizing edge. And some of the things that we hit upon were limited or unreliable connectivity, a large number of locations that are not traditional locations. So like one closet is maybe, probably not Edge, but maybe. And then the other thing though, I think that this is something that we've been kind of noticing in all of the episodes this season. It really is one of those things where you kind of know it when you see it, because edge is as edge does. And if the application has the characteristics of what we would see at the edge, we call it the edge. And if it doesn't, then it's the cloud or it's, you know, just another data center. I mean, some companies have a lot of data centers too. I think that, you know, is that, I'm trying not

to have a cop out and just say, whatever, it doesn't mean anything, you know, I want it to mean something. Is that what it means? Maybe? Yeah, I think the edge is, I think, you know, it's, you can't really fully define cloud because clouds expanding is just as edge is expanding. And so, and some people are going to go around and tell you, oh, that's the edge cloud. You're like, okay, on the cloud edge, right? And you're like, okay, that doesn't help, right? So, and the other thing too, is the reality is maybe one person's edge is someone else's cloud, right? It's, I mean, but look at it that way, right? Which is that, you know, if you say, hey, maybe Aquanix is my edge because it's not cloud, someone else may

say, well, you know, from my little computer room here or my little retail store here, I look at the Equinix and the bare metal offering and SV5 and that looks like a cloud to me and look cloud-like to me. So I think there is some level of sort of relativity, if you will, around the edge. But I think as you said steven i think what we talked about in episode 0 all the way back there has to be some elements that make the edge different from cloud and disconnectedness lots of different locations um the lack of um well i would say maybe lack of standardization but maybe larger variety of devices or computing and storage devices, you know, tend to make up the edge, right? I think, I think those are, those tend to be some

of the attributes of the edge and generally edge is smaller than cloud, strictly smaller than cloud, generally speaking, if you would write it out that way. So, so there are some attributes of edge. And so I don't know if there's going to be a clear definition they can put in there is like, you know, if computing size less than x number of teraflops equals edge, right, because, you know, your phone's going to probably break that soon. But, but as it were, I would say, there are challenges at the edge, and they usually have to do with orchestration, management, robustness, resiliency, right? Things like that, that tend to be harder to manage, you know, at the edge than at a cloud, right? Which is pretty centralized. Yeah.

To be fair, we had a definition of cloud and we still fought about what cloud is. And we still, to this day, fight about what a cloud is. And so I'm not sure anybody's definition, even when you have a standards body likeness, defining what it is, is ever really going to give us an answer. So I kind of lean towards the, you know it when you see it approach to it, because everybody sees it differently. Everybody's going to judge it differently. We generally may agree. I like the definition of, you know, connectivity isn't as guaranteed as it would be to a data center. You may not be able to get the

resiliency on the connectivity. You know, it's generally going to be a smaller footprint and you may have to cut corners or make sacrifices in order to get it to fit into a certain shape, size, capacity, resiliency. You know, I mentioned the helicopter use case. That's a real one. And it causes systems to have to take shortcuts or, you know, it can't run as hot because you can't vent it as easily. Those types of things have to be taken into account. Yeah.

One of the companies I was talking to this week as well was saying that, yeah, they're working with a big name retail store and they are provisioning a storage array still. Because we, you know, much of the edge that we've been seeing this year or this season on the podcast has been hyper-converged. So the node has storage and then it's clustered in some way for high availability and maybe performance. But it's all kind of contained within the nodes themselves. But this company was talking about a big recognizable name that still is provisioning physical standalone dedicated storage arrays in every retail store because they decided that it was worth it because of the connectivity challenges that they're facing.

It was worth it to have on-site infrastructure and storage was a big part of that in order to queue up transactions and continue processing credit card sales and not have people standing there and abandoning their carts at the register. I do want to point out too, that if you look at the buzzword that VMware used at VMware Explorer 2023, it says enable the multi-cloud edge. So we don't just have cloud,

we don't have cloud versus edge. We actually have the multi-cloud edge, which I can't even. Taking three different terms we don't define very well in this industry and continue to argue over and just made them into one. Yeah, they need to apply some AI to that problem. I think if you combine enough terms, then you get to a general understanding, right? But I think, you know, given what's happening in the edge, I think if you look at what VMware

announced as well, you know, over at VMware Explore this week, it was the VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator. And what's in it today and what they'll be adding to it soon is some semblance of local connectivity in the form of private 5G. And I'm sure Wi-Fi and switching will get thrown in there. On-premises computing and storage. edge, and then the wide area connectivity as the WAN or SASE and some of level security in there over to the other side of the connectivity, which is some kind of metro edge or network edge right as well. And that whole thing, right, which is the metro edge, the WAN, the on premises compute, the local connectivity, that whole thing now is under the umbrella of edge, at least for VMware.

And it's not that different for a lot of other vendors as well. I think I'm seeing similar types of characterization of saying, that's all Edge, right? And now the Edge will work together with the multi-cloud, right, Brian? With the multi-cloud, they'll do something magic, right? No, but I do kind of like the fact that they are taking the approach of looking at edge as part of a of a infrastructure that involves multi cloud, because ideally you want your the whole goal of it right now is really just put the put things to run in the place it needs to be, which requires it to talk to whatever else it needs to be, no matter where, you know, the most ideal places for that back end piece. So it's a poor example. But you know, we're used to kind of our traditional three tier application of web server application server database. Well, maybe the web server is best out on the edge where you get that high connectivity

and it talks back to a database that's in the cloud because that can be more distributed, less distributed than edge, but more distributed than a data center. And that database is in the core data center and can access that. So I do like the fact that they're tying the story

together. I don't necessarily agree with the marketing aspect of how they tied it together as a single term. But the fact that they are thinking about Edge in a multi-cloud context, I think is important because all the pieces need to work together. On the note of the Edge Cloud Orchestrator, which VMware introduced this week, it's important to note that this is actually just a new name for an enhanced version of what they already had, which was the SASE Secure Access Service Edge platform. And they have renamed it, the SASE Orchestrator, SASE Orchestrator, they've renamed it to be Edge Cloud Orchestrator. They've also added more to it. And I think that this actually shows an interesting thing, too. One of the things we've been, much of what it's doing is networking, but also security.

And much of the enhancements that have been brought in from Project Keswick and Edge Firewall and Advanced Threat Protection and so on, these are all security features. And that's something that really wasn't seen too much. So we haven't really talked about that. But what do you guys think about security with all these many and varied locations? Yeah, I think the security is absolutely key. Anytime we talk connectivity, especially when we're talking about remote places

that may have questionable connectivity, I've seen lots of customers who um buy routers that have you know a 5g device inside of it so that they've got not only the fiber channel or the um dsl or even you know just traditional pots modem to connect, they've got, you know, multiple, multiple channels to go, to go with, um, being able to tie those together and, and secure it in a way that it doesn't matter which way you go. You, you can't count on the security on every single, you know, being the same. So having that security is key. Um, obviously SASE is, is generally pretty heavily reliant on SD-WAN type of technologies to be able to connect those pieces. The data that's out there needs to be secure, not only from a cybersecurity perspective,

but the devices themselves. You got to put them in at least a locked closet and put them in an open closet. So I mean, security has got to be considered in a lot of different ways with Edge. And it's good that companies like VMware are thinking so security first with these. Yeah, completely agree with Brian. I'd say, you know, generally speaking, when we speak with enterprises today, it's hard to say connectivity without security

being embedded as part of that conversation. Whatever you connect, it's got to be secure. And then there are obviously different variations on the security with regard to what level of security. Is it just privacy with encryption? Is it reliability and DDoS protection? Is it deep packet inspection? How deep into the payload do you go? Is it sort of layer three awareness, layer four awareness, layer seven awareness? And then within layer seven, how deep do you go into that protocol itself? Right. And I think but but regardless, some level of basic security is required, is expected.

I think it's not even required. It's expected by the enterprises today. I think that's one element in terms of the secure connectivity. But from an edge computing standpoint, I think security of the of the data in the edge locations. I think we talked about these being remote sites. And it's not like a data center where you can scan your iris to get in, you don't scan your iris to get into a retail store, computer room, generally speaking, right? And so security of the data, security of the storage, and in some cases in the future, probably security of the compute itself in the confidential computing type approaches will probably show up in many of these places eventually.

So that if you should, God forbid, walk out with the storage cluster or if you walk out with the compute cluster, then nothing's lost. So if someone is able to inspect that storage or compute cluster, it's going to make it hard for them to actually discern what's actually going on. I think that's going to be one of the critical things in terms of edge versus cloud. And from that perspective too, I'll point out another other component that VMware is bringing to the edge party is the secure access client. So basically what many of us would think of as a VPN client, except integrated with SD-WAN and secure access service edge. And that I think is another area that is, you know, yet another edge, right? I mean, because the client devices can be edge. And this leads me to another other area that we can talk about as well.

Another thing that VMware is getting involved in is private mobile networking. So many of you may be aware, but just in case the audience isn't, there's a thing of it's found a really great niche especially in the environments that we would call industrial edge basically anywhere that would be really hard to serve with wi-fi if you need more range fewer access points you're going to do that with private 5G. Or if you've got a roving workforce, you can have sort of an overlay private 5G network. So imagine like your own Verizon or three or whatever your Vodafone, whatever your favorite mobile operator is, you could have your own virtual mobile operator. And there's even other protocols. I'll just throw it out here. There's a protocol called You could have your own virtual mobile operator. And there's even other protocols.

I'll just throw it out here. There's a protocol called LoRaWAN that is low-powered and low-speed, but extremely long-range. And that also can have virtual. So another world of edge connectivity. And VMware is there as well. Yeah, there's a lot of things that I could definitely branch off on with that. I like the concept of 5G becoming the new Wi-Fi. I mean, that was always kind of the promise with 5G.

As they were preparing to launch it as, oh, we won't need Wi-Fi anymore because we have 5G. And that obviously hasn't happened. And I don't think it ever will because they are different use cases. They are different technologies. But the concepts of, I think that intersects very closely with another, is it edge or not topic is the IT, the IOT and the OT sides of things. You know, as you have a floor full of machines and devices that are building cars or whatever it might be, is that edge? Those things are having to make some level of decisions. Just like if you're talking about self-driving cars, is that edge? They've got to make some split-second decisions that you don't want to have to send data back and forth. You know, all of these things play into that. Connectivity is important, but we can't rely on that side of things. And of course, the security of some of that, you know, goes back to the

previous part of the conversation. So being able to see some of those private 5G, to me, is a bit like, yeah, we've got the open internet, but we all have a firewall in front of it and are able to do things behind that firewall. 5G is just kind of another example of that to some extent when you're talking about the private version. Yep. Yeah, no, private 5G definitely has a lot of, I would say, promises. I think there was some hype originally. I think that's how the work through now. And I think some of the uptake was hurt a little bit by obviously the COVID and also the supply chain challenges

in terms of getting the 5G equipment out there. But private 4G LTE obviously was available. And I mean, as Steven points out, the VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator is supposed to, at some point, support the Edge computing stack and the VMware private mobile offering stack as well, eventually, in terms of orchestrating all that. And what they announced at VMware Explore was a partnership with Federated Wireless, Boingo, and Betacom in terms of the offerings. And I know that because one of those is a client of ours. And so it's definitely an interesting place as part of that private connectivity.

And what Brian was pointing out is absolutely right, that private 5G does have the ability to, in performance and reliability, improve over what Wi-Fi can provide, particularly reliability. improve over what Wi-Fi can provide. Particularly reliability, it's definitely proving to be much better than Wi-Fi. And we've talked to some of our clients, customers on private 5G, and what they're saying, this is a very, very large retailer in the US,

huge retailer, warehouses, they're trawling out private 5G. And one of the radios coverage-wise, you know, can go indoors between six to eight times coverage from a Wi-Fi AP. And then outdoors, what we're seeing is 10X of that. So private 5G for industrial type use cases at the edge, right? Definitely, that's definitely a lot of value. Yeah. And we've heard a lot about this. I'll point out, at the mobility field day that we run here at Gestalt IT. So you mentioned Betacom.

They're definitely a leader in this space. Solona is another company that is doing quite a lot in this private 5G space. So if you're interested in this topic, check that out at the Tech Field Day website. Or, I don't know, you can find it on YouTube or whatever. But you have a bunch of companies working on that. And that's, again, I mean, it's like you uncover a rock and there's like a whole new world under there. And it's like, wow, I didn't know all this amazing stuff was happening on private 5G. And if we flip over another rock, we've got Retail Edge.

And that's another thing that VMware was talking about quite a lot. And, you know, there again, it's a whole other world. And certainly something that we've talked about previously on the podcast. In that space, it seems like VMware, actually in all these spaces, it seems like VMware is really keen on trying to partner as much as possible with service providers, with other software and hardware vendors, because that's sort of the nature of the beast. But I think that it's also, I mean, it's the nature of VMware, but it's also the nature of the industry, because as we've talked about, it doesn't seem like there's sort of a leading infrastructure solution here. It seems like everybody's doing this stuff differently, right? I like what you're touching on there, Stephen, because that was kind of one of the things I was going to bring up is orchestration.

You know, the name of the product itself is an important one because we talk about Edge being remote and it being in a place that isn't a normal data center and isn't a place that may have minimal staff. And and isn't a place that, you know, may have minimal staff. And that, that was always a challenge with customers I've worked with that were dealing with these types of use cases before we called it edge where the fact that, yeah, we've got to get this thing out to that, that school building or that store location. We don't have anybody to do it for us. And so partnering is an important aspect in that because, you know, sometimes you have a partner that is more wide distributed than you are,

and they can go out and do those things for you. I've worked at, you know, VARs, for example, that did that kind of thing. Being able to script the installation at a software level. Ideally, being able to do some sort of infrastructure as code type thing to be able to deploy the hardware pieces as well. All of that plays into this and makes these use cases not only doable in those small locations, but makes it scalable across hundreds of store locations for those retail or across thousands of cars in those use cases. So being able to do these things as code, to be able to build a partner network and make it so that it doesn't have to be a VMware expert doing it

every single time is super critical to me. And I'm glad to see they're at least indicating that with the name. Yeah, orchestration is absolutely important. I think, you know, we had a few day one, we had a bunch of vendors and they're talking about the different ways of orchestration, right? You know, how do you orchestrate edge devices? How do you manage firmware? How do you update the workloads and all that? And, you know, scale of ASA.

I mean, there's a whole bunch of companies in that space that the YouTube channel will have those presentations, right? And talking about how you do it. But orchestration, absolutely. I think if you look at not just VMware, but the hyperscalers themselves are all coming in with orchestration offerings. AWS, Azure, Google all have different orchestration.

Orchestration, a lot of it's about computing storage, but certainly seeing that expand into networking as well. And there are some open source orchestration efforts there. I mean, Google actually contributed the nephew, Codebase, over to the Linux Foundation, and that's now being used for the orchestration of Edge workloads. No surprise. A small company called On-R Networks that we've seen in this space working with Aquanix showing how, again, Aquanix, WAN, on-premises, again, the same type of formula, if you will. And I'm not sure how that's going to play out long term, but certainly VMware is going down the same route as well with the Edge Cloud Orchestrator. We really need an acronym for that. FECO? ECHO? I don't know.

It's got a good ring to it. It kind of echoes around in my head. But it is such an amazing space. And I guess let's just wrap up by thinking about what we've been talking about here. And again, I want to get back to what I said at the top, which is that I don't want to just throw up my hands

and say, it doesn't mean anything, whatever. Because that's what, I mean, that's what a lot of us did with cloud. A lot of us just sort of gave up and said, yeah, okay, you can call it cloud if you want. I don't care. I'm not the cloud police. Well, I'm not the edge police either.

But I think maybe we can celebrate instead of cursing the fact that edge has so many different faces and phases and aspects to it. And it makes the whole field a lot of fun. So I guess, Brian, you want to go first or tell us, you know, what do you what do you think about this? What's your your your summary of all these different faces of edge? I think ultimately, edge flexibilities, probably one of the biggest things, because edge can be so many things. Any solution that is going to declare itself an edge solution

needs to have a high level of flexibility, needs to have a high level of automation and security and be very resilient to both environmental situations and connectivity situations. So to me, it's less of, you know, it has to meet these criteria like we had with the NIST definition of cloud and more of a, you know, this thing is designed to scale down. We talk a lot about scale up, but it's designed to scale down so that it can hit a lot of different use cases and be able to work in those environments that don't have the guarantees we're used to in a data center.

Yeah, on my side, you know, sort of wrapping up in terms of the thoughts here, I think, you know, what Brian brought up at the end was orchestration. Orchestration, and automate, manage the workloads and across all the edge. And there's an edge for everyone, right? Because there's so many definitions of the edge, right? Everyone gets an edge. You get an edge, you get an edge, you get an edge, right? That's really good.

But I think eventually, I think when orchestration succeeds, there is no edge, there is no cloud. There is just resource that you compute on, right? And that's the dream, right? You basically declare what you need from the application and storage needs and the orchestration makes it so, right? You don't care where it runs, you don't care how it runs. All you know is that your SLAs are met, What you ask for is done. And where it does

it, you don't really care. It just does it. We're not going to get there for a long, long time, at least until ChatGPT takes over. But in the meantime, we have the edge and we have the cloud. And that's just fine with me. You just had to do it. You just had to bring it in, the chat GPT. It's paying me to do that, Stephen. It made me. It made me.

It was actually not you. It was chat GPT that put that in there. It's not me. It's the avatar. So the first three seasons of the podcast were about AI. And interestingly, we stopped just with AI as the topic, just as generative AI hit the big time. So I guess we were ahead of the times. But it's funny that it's now everywhere. I mean, it's, but maybe Edge is going to be like that, too. Or maybe not. Like you say, Roy, I really actually love that

aspect of it that maybe at the end of the day, everything we're talking about here is actually not that much different from DevOps or the cloud or orchestration on-premises. The idea is, as you say, that we need to make these systems autonomous and really integrated and that they need to support the applications wherever and whatever they need. And I think that that is what we're looking for. But of course, there is a novel aspect of the edge, and that is that it's not here, it's there. Meaning, you know, from connectivity, from processing, from heating and power and cooling, from security, also from operational. I mean, we've talked about that plenty of times, zero touch provisioning and no, you know, no administrator on site required. All of these things are really somewhat novel. Now, it's not like you have an administrator going in the cloud and unplugging cables for you. But the solution to

that was automation and orchestration and APIs. And that's what we're going to need as well for edge solutions in order to make this stuff happen. Just like in the data center, you know, you don't want to go in there, you know, it's cold, it's noisy. It's, I don't know, it's not a very friendly place if you haven't been there. And so we have remote, you know, remote consoles for these servers. I mean, most of us don't actually go into the data center and muck with our servers on a daily basis. They might as well be in a closet in Peoria because we're not going to go mess with them. So I think that this, you know, it really does come down to the unique aspects of the platform. Whether or not we want to define that as edge, well, that's immaterial to me. So thank you both for joining us for this fascinating conversation. This is the kind of thing that

people like us sit around and talk about at field day events in the evening. This is what we talked about at VMware Explore. This is what we talk about at Cisco Live. This is what we talk about at Aruba Atmosphere and all these other events that we go to. And it's a lot of fun. So I do hope to see some of you, if you're listening to this and you think that sounds like fun, come over and say hello. A bunch of people did with Brian and I just at BMR Explorer this week. It's really nice to hear from you

and it's fun to have these conversations. So before we go, where can people connect with you? And I'm going to throw another one in here to surprise you. And which events are you going to this year? So Roy, you're first. Yeah, so you can find me on avidthink, A-V-I-D-T-H-I-N-K.com.

Our reports are actually hosted at a different site, nextgeninfra.io. That's nextgeninfra.io. That's where the reports are, generally speaking, except those on our vendor sponsor sites. Where am I going to be? I'm going to be at a bunch of trade shows for the rest of the year, re-invent for sure. And then beyond that, TMT M&A Forum, WesmCon, KubeCon in Chicago, DTW over in Copenhagen, Fuse in Madrid, and then the UpperSide Sassy event in Paris in December as well, among others.

So, oh, OCP, Open Compute Project in San Jose on top of that. I'm down at OCP. You know me. Yeah, I'll hang out with you. I'll say hi. Brian, how about yourself? You can generally find me on most socials as bknudson.

I'm not super active on most of them these days. Mastodon is probably the primary one for me. Also, you can find my website at knudt.net or LinkedIn is usually the easiest way to get me if you need to get me there. Physically speaking, I'll be at Edgefield Day 2 coming up is really the only event I have for sure right now on my schedule. But things always kind of pop up as we go along through the year. So a lot of a lot of winds of change going on. So hopefully I'll be around and would. Yeah, like Stephen said, always happy to chat with anybody who who wants to discuss topics like this love love talking about definitions. And if you ever need a devil's advocate, I'm a good person to find there. And as for me, you'll find me at S Foskett on most of the socials, on Mastodon, on Twitter, on Threads, on Blue Sky, on LinkedIn, on all the socials.

And of course, you'll find me here at Utilizing Edge on the on-premise IT podcast on Tuesdays, as well as, of course, our news rundown on Wednesdays. If you were interested in some of the VMware Explorer topics, we did focus on VMware Explorer this week on the news rundown. So if you look at gestaltit.com, you'll find that. Also, as I said, I'm going to events. So my next one, I'll be at the Storage Developer Conference, which is SNIA's Storage Nerd Fest. And we're going to be doing Storage Field Day there.

I'll be at OCP, which is Cloud Field Day as well, that same week. I will probably be at KubeCon in Chicago. I will probably be at reInvent. Somebody said I'm going to be on the stage at KubeCon, but I don't know about that. We'll see. And I look forward to seeing you all. I wish I was going to Barcelona and Copenhagen and places in Paris. I mean, that sounds way better than Las Vegas. But

well, it's great wherever we can find each other. So thank you for listening to Utilizing Edge, part of the Utilizing Tech podcast series. If you enjoyed this discussion, please do subscribe in your favorite podcast app and leave us a rating and a nice review. This podcast was brought to you by gestaltit.com, your home for IT coverage from across the enterprise. For show notes and more episodes, head over to our dedicated website, utilizingtech.com, or find us on Twitter and Mastodon at Utilizing Tech. Thanks for listening, and we will see you next week.