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 and Guests:
Stephen Foskett, Organizer of the Tech Field Day Event Series, part of The Futurum Group. Find Stephen’s writing at GestaltIT.com, on Twitter at @SFoskett, or on Mastodon at @[email protected].
Roy Chua, Founder and Principal at AvidThink. You can connect with Roy on Twitter or LinkedIn and find out more on the AvidThink website. You can also read Roy’s report on NextGenInfra.io about the Middle Mile.
Brian Knudtson, multi-disciplinary technologist and freelance writer. You can connect with Brian on LinkedIn or on Mastodon and read more on his work on his blog.
Transcript
Stephen Foskett: 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.
Roy Chua: 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,
Brian Knudtson: 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.
Stephen: 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 the IT for a little while now. Looking at Brian, you’d think that he hadn’t but he has, just like me.
Roy: He started when he was five.
Brian: Yes, yes.
Stephen: At the edge.
Brian: At the edge, working my way in.
Stephen: Working his way up. So those of us who’ve been in it for a long time though, I mean we we really have been involved because I mean 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, well 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 heard it, saw a lot of companies talking about Edge and it was such a wide variety we had. I met with a thin client company that had the word Edge on their you know, stand. I talked to about 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’ve of course have like retail Edge and of course those of us who experienced that with you know, the Amazon you know, grab stuff and walk out kind of store, there’s a lot of edges out there aren’t there?
Roy: 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 is what I’m seeing.
Brian: 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 three data centers, one happens to be a large closet, one happens to be co-located at Equinix, you know, is that closet that I operate as if it were a data center, is that considered Edge? 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 you define the Spectrum in between there is an interesting piece of this you know, this new movement towards Edge.
Stephen: Yeah yeah and as Roy points out, everything that’s not Edge is called Cloud which I also experienced at VMware Explore with companies who very obviously have traditional data center products, storage, and things like that and they’re calling those Cloud because ah 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?
Roy: Yeah I think the edge is, I think you know it’s you can’t really fully define Cloud because Cloud’s expanding. It’s just expanding and so and some people are going to go around, tell you it’s oh that’s the edge cloud, You’re like okay or the cloud edge right? And like okay that doesn’t help right. 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 Equinix is is my Edge because it’s not Cloud. someone else may say well you know from my little computer room here on my little retail store here, I look at the Equinix and the bare metal offering in 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 but I think as you said Stephen, I think what we talked about in episode zero all the way back there has to be some elements that make the edge different from cloud and this connectedness, lots of different locations, the lack of, well I would 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 those tend to be some of the attributes of the edge and only edge is smaller than clouds strictly smaller than cloud generally speaking if you would write it out that way. 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. It’s like you know, if computing size is less than x number of teraflops equals edge right because you know your phone’s going to probably break that soon, 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 likethat that tend to be harder to manage you know at the edge than at a cloud right which is pretty centralized.
Brian: Yeah, to be fair, we had a definition of cloud and we still thought 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, like this 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 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.
Stephen: 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 and, but it’s all kind of contained within the nodes themselves. But this company was talking about a big you know, a recognizable name that still is provisioning physical stand-alone 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 I 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, we don’t have Cloud versus Edge, we actually have the multi-cloud edge, which I can’t even.
Brian: Take in three different terms we don’t define very well in this industry and continue to argue over and just made them into one.
Stephen: Yeah they need to apply some AI to that problem.
Roy: 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 announces 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 and then the wide area connectivity, SD-WAN or SASE, some of the level of 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 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 character authorization of saying that’s all Edge right and now the edge will work together with the multi-cloud right right with the multi-cloud they’ll do something magic.
Brian: But I do kind of like the fact that they are taking the approach of looking at Edge as part of an infrastructure that involves multi-cloud because ideally you want your Edge to not be tied just to the data center or just tied to AWS, you want an edge that is going to work with you know, the whole goal of it right now is really just 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 place is 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 you know web server application server database or 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 you know is more, 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 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.
Stephen: 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 security access service edge platform and they have renamed it the SASE Orchestrator, they 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 sort of dancing around a lot on the episodes this season is security. Well VMware is all about security and in fact the product that is now called Edge Cloud Orchestrator, 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 you know security with all these many and varied locations?
Brian: Yeah I think the security is absolutely key. You know anytime we talk connectivity, especially when we’re talking about you know remote places that may have questionable connectivity, I’ve seen lots of customers who buy routers that have you know a 5G device inside of it so that they’ve got not only the fiber channel or the DSL or even you know just traditional post modem to connect, they’ve got you know multiple channels to go with being able to tie those together and and secure it in a way that it doesn’t matter which way you go. You can’t count on the security on every single you know being the same so having that security is key. Obviously SASE is is generally pretty heavily reliant on SD-WAN type of technologies. To be able to not connect those pieces um you know the data that’s out there needs to be secure not only from a cyber security perspective but you know the devices themselves. You know you got to put them in at least a locked closet and put them in an open closet, so I mean security’s got to be considered in a lot of different ways with Edge and it’s good that companies like VMware are thinking social security first with these.
Roy: 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 you know, is it reliability and DDOS protection, is it deep packet inspection, how deep right into the payload do you go? Is it sort of layer three awareness, layer for awareness, layers seven awareness, and then within layer seven, how deep do you go into that protocol itself righ?t And I think 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 that I think that’s one element in terms of the secure connectivity. But from an edge computing standpoint, I think security of the data in the edge locations I think we talked about these being remote sites you know it’s not like a data center where you’re going to 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 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 actually if you should, God forbid, walk out with the storage cluster or if you walk out with the compute cluster, that nothing’s lost. So if someone is able to inspect that storage or compute cluster and it’s going to make it hard for them to actually discern what’s actually going on right? I think that’s going to be one of the critical things in terms of edge versus cloud.
Stephen: 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-LAN 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 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 private LTE and private 5G. This is actually taking a lot 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 you know, your own virtual mobile operator and 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 of edge connectivity and VMware is there as well.
Brian: Yeah there’s a lot of things that I could definitely branch off on them with that. I like the concept of you know, 5G becoming the new Wi-Fi. I mean that was always kind of the promise with 5G as they were preparing to launch it is oh we don’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 IoT and the OT sides of things. You know, as you have a floor full of machines and devices that are, they’re building cars or whatever it might be, is that edge? You know those things are having to make some level of decisions just like if you’re talking about self-driving cars you know is that edge? You know 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 IT 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 you know a firewall in front of it and are able to do things in behind that firewall 5G is enough just kind of another example of that to some extent when you’re talking about the private version.
Roy: Yep. Yeah no private 5G definitely has a lot of, I would say promises. I think there has been, 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 it’s as Stephen points out you know the VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator is supposed to at some point support the edge computing stack and the VMware private mobile offering stacks 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, I’ll just… And so it’s definitely an interesting place, it’s 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. 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 traveling 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, that’s definitely a lot of value.
Stephen: Yeah and we’ve heard a lot about this I’ll point out at the mobility field day that we run for here for Gestalt IT, so you mentioned Betacom, they’re definitely a leader in this space Celona is another company that is doing quite a lot in this private 5G space, so if you’re interested in this topic you know, check that out at the Tech Field Day website or I don’t know, you can find it on YouTube or whatever. But um yeah a bunch of companies working on that and that’s again I mean it’s like you know, 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 you know, yeah 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 so 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?
Brian: 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 is orchestration. You know the name of the product itself is 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 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 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 widely 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 that did that kind of thing, being able to 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 to deploy the the hardware pieces as well. All of that plays into this and makes 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 is super critical to me and I’m glad to see there at least indicating that with the name.
Roy: Yeah orchestration is absolutely important. I think you know we Edge Field Day1 we had a bunch of vendors in there 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 Avassa? 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 with AWS, Azure, Google, all have different orchestration. A lot of it’s about compute and 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 code base over to the Linux Foundation and that’s now being used for the orchestration of edge workloads no surprise. A small company called Arna Networks that we’ve seen in this space working with Equinix showing how again Equinix when right on-premises. Again, the same type of formula if you will, right, 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 right? We really need an acronym for that Echo? I don’t know.
Stephen: yeah it’s got a good ring to it. It kind of you know 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 think about this? What’s your summary of all these different faces of edge?
Brian: I think ultimately Edge flexibility is probably one of the biggest things because the 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 it’s, to me it’s less of you know, it has to meet these criteria like we had with the misdefinition of cloud and more of a you know, this thing is designed to scale down. We talk a lot about scale up but it 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.
Roy: Yeah on my side you know it’s sort of wrapping up in terms of the thoughts here. I think you know what Brian brought up at the end was orchestration and Stephen you touch on that orchestration. I think is going to be critical and very important, the ability to orchestrate and automate, manage the workloads, that’s and across all the action there’s an edge for everyone right because Edge is, there’s so many definitions of the edge right, everyone gets an edge, you can let, 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 you know. 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 longlong time you know, at least until Chat GPT takes over but it’ll be you know, but in the meantime we have the edge and we have the cloud and that’s just fine with me.
Stephen: You just had to do it, you just had to bring it in, the Chat GPT.
Roy: It made me. It was actually not you it was chat GPT that put that in there. It’s not me, it is the Avatar.
Stephen: Yeah 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 not actually not that much different from devops or the cloud or you know, 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 you know 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 youhave 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 and 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’ I don’t know, it’s not a very friendly place if you haven’t been in there. And so we have 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 Explorer. 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 VMware 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.
Roy: Yeah so you can find me on AvidThink, Avid t-h-i-n-k.com. Our reports are actually hosted at a different site NextGen infra dot IO, that’s next gen infra dot 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 it’s for sure and then beyond that TMTMA forum, wesmcon, KubeCon in Chicago, DTW over in Copenhagen, Fuse in Madrid, and then the upper side SASE event in Paris in December as well among others, so. Oh OCP, Open Compute Project in San Jose on top of that.
Stephen: I’m down at OCP, you know me.
Roy: yeah, I’ll hang out with you, I’ll say hi.
Stephen: Brian how about yourself?
Brian: Yeah you can you can generally find me in most socials as BKnutson. I’m not super active on most of them these days, Mastodon’s probably the primary one for me. Also you can find my website at knudt.net, k-n-u-d-t dot net or LinkedIn is usually the easiest way to get me if you need to get me there, physically speaking I’ll be at Edge Field 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 Winds of Change going on so hopefully I’ll be around and would, yeah, like Stephen said, always happy to to chat with anybody who wants to discuss topics like this. Love talking about definitions and if you ever need a devil’s advocate, I’m a good person to find there.
Stephen: And as for me, you’ll find me at @SFoskett on most of the socials, on Mastodon, on Twitter, on Threads, on Bluesky, on LinkedIn, on all the 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 re:invent, 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 uh to seeing y’all. I wish I was going to Barcelona, and Copenhagen, in Paris, I mean that sounds way better than Las Vegas. 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.