Today’s episode features an interview between guest host Jacob Smith, VP of Bare Metal Strategy and Marketing at Equinix, and Cole Crawford, CEO and Founder of Vapor IO. In this interview, Cole lays out his vision for creating the world’s first intelligent, hyper-modular data center solution, and how Vapor is fixing the fundamental architectural problems of the internet.
Today’s episode features an interview between guest host Jacob Smith, VP of Bare Metal Strategy and Marketing at Equinix, and Cole Crawford, CEO and Founder of Vapor IO.
Cole is also the co-founder of the Open 19 Foundation, founding Executive Director of the Open Compute Project, former Chairman of the Open Data Center Alliance, and co-founder of OpenStack.
In this interview, Cole lays out his vision for creating the world’s first intelligent, hyper-modular data center solution, and how Vapor is fixing the fundamental architectural problems of the internet.
Key Quotes
“The internet is still fundamentally broken today if you want to solve for autonomous robotics or autonomous driving or the future state of remote surgery…I think there are ways in which we can enhance the internet that we've built and make it better.”
“If you look back through every successful company, every big dot com, every big Silicon Valley startup, one of the things that they did really well—what ends up being the killer app for everything is economics and the easy button. If you can make it faster, better, cheaper, and you make it easy to consume, you're going to do well. That’s the mission that Vapor is on– to fix the architectural issues with the guts of the internet.”
“I think there are three things [that open hardware does]: lower the technical barrier of entry on the technical front, you increase the pace of innovation, and you democratize or commoditize those things that really have no value.”
Sponsors
Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.
The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Vapor IO, the leader in edge computing. We want to be your solution partner for the New Internet. Learn more at Vapor.io
Links
[00:00:00] Jacob: This is Jacob Smith. I'm a cofounder at packet and VP of bare metal marketing and strategy at Equinex. And I'm your host today for the, episode of over the edge podcast? So my guest today is someone that I'm. Super excited to talk to you. It's been way too long. Cole Crawford, CEO, and founder of vapor IO, the one and only Cole.
[00:00:19] How are you today?
[00:00:20] Cole: Hey, I'm great. Thanks for having me. This is exciting. Yeah. Yeah,
[00:00:23] Jacob: absolutely. Well, it's unfortunate that we can't do this in person. Cause those have always been the best times to get together and spend time, whether it's a Cambridge or San Francisco or Austin. But I hope you're doing well and the family and
[00:00:36] Cole: everyone getting through this time.
[00:00:37] Thanks Jacob. We are enough, obviously. Likewise. Yeah. Good deal.
[00:00:41] Jacob: Okay. So we have a lot to cover today when I was hoping to do it, start with, I mean, I think you have one of the more interesting, or maybe everyone has an interesting backstory, but you certainly do give the, give the listeners a little bit about where you came from.
[00:00:53] Who are you and how did you get here?
[00:00:55] Cole: Oh, how far back do we go in here? so I got my start in tech. I [00:01:00] remember it clear day. I was in high school and actually my younger brother and one of his friends were in his bedroom and I walk in and I see this blue screen and I kind of laugh at them like, Oh, you got the blue screen to death.
[00:01:15] And they're like, no, man, this is Linux. So it turned out yeah. That it was Slack. Where now the funny thing about Slack, where Linux is, it was founded by a guy named Patrick and Patrick Volcker ding was involved in something else that I was involved with that wasn't really tech related at all. It was.
[00:01:38] Something called church of the sub genius. I don't know if you guys know what that is, but, so it's basically a, it's basically a spoof on another religion that I won't name them.
[00:01:51] We're
[00:01:52] Jacob: not going in different religion and
[00:01:53] Cole: politics today. Essence of genius. The idea of this church of the sub genius was to create [00:02:00] Slack, which is effectively just Goodwill and sort of peace towards.
[00:02:03] Everyone and hence the name Slack ware. So from that moment on, I was hooked on Linux. You know, I was a very competitive tennis player in my youth. And I mean, I can almost say that the computers probably in large part took me away from probably a career in tennis. So I've been all over looking back.
[00:02:23] You might think it was like reverse entropy, but I kind of started my career. At an ISP that happened to be freebies. The, but, I ended up, while I was in school, I worked the night shift at America online. I ended up back in Denver, Colorado as a wider network engineer for us West and worked on shared infrastructure.
[00:02:42] Actually we had, you know, and all the WebLogic instances for us West as well. Went through the quest acquisition, then went through the IBM global services acquisition ended up working for Dell. And then I went to work as a contractor for the department of defense, where I co founded OpenStack, [00:03:00] started a company, the CTO of NASA called Nebula, which is big OpenStack startup.
[00:03:04] So that's Oracle. I was recruited by Facebook to build open compute. So I was the founding executive director for OCP. And then a LinkedIn reached out to me and said, Hey, that works for other people, but we're a much smaller shop that we need supply chains that we can retrofit our current data centers for.
[00:03:23] So I ended up co-founding open 19 with LinkedIn, invited your brother onto the board. And then very recently the LF edge spun up. And, you know, I'm very proud to be a board member of LF edge as well. So crazy career, look structured, but guaranteed was unstructured. Nothing planned.
[00:03:42] Jacob: Yeah. It's one of the funny things.
[00:03:43]you even find people, we have a question we ask when we're trying to hire for very key positions that our company says, did you work for an ISP in the late nineties, early two thousands? And if the answer is
[00:03:55] Cole: yes, just go forward. And
[00:03:57] Jacob: if it's not, you know, we can ask them
[00:04:00] [00:04:00] Cole: that was so I can check the box.
[00:04:02]I got a job at pack it. If I need it.
[00:04:04] Jacob: Yeah, exactly. Right. You're always welcome here, but I love the background. Yeah. And building of the early systems, which are, of course, you know, the internet goes back further. We can talk about that more in the rest of the podcast, but you know, there's this time where we're still kind of drawing upon the lineage of things we were doing in the two thousands and building Linux and making networks work and scaling them from 12 places to more places.
[00:04:25] And so it's a pretty interesting story. You find a lot of people have had a journey like that.
[00:04:29] Cole: Yeah. Well, I love the unstructured plan. Yeah, very cool.
[00:04:32] Jacob: Well, so, from ISP and working the night shift at AOL, where did vapor come from? I mean, after the OCP and you've got, you know, opened 18 in department of defense and doing all these different things, what made vapor, max?
[00:04:44] Why don't you do it?
[00:04:45] Cole: Tell us the story. Yeah, a great question. And again, you know, I think to your point around ISP, is it, you know, it used to be that you did everything, you know, in the late nineties, you racked and stacked them. Even you were building home Depot shelves and you're putting compact servers on home Depot shelves.
[00:04:59] So it wasn't [00:05:00] exactly the EIA racks that we have today. But you also did everything else. I managed the mail server. I, you know, like everything that configured the route
[00:05:08] Jacob: deal with the IP address space, I mean everything right,
[00:05:11] Cole: exactly. Right. Yeah. For a story for a different time would be how I gained access to a free class C and a T1 totally free for a couple of years may have been the.
[00:05:20] Best entrepreneurial decision I ever made. But anyway,
[00:05:22] Jacob: we'd love to know about it.
[00:05:25] Cole: It was kind of started again, recursively from the context around some of the work that I'd been doing in the department of defense, or I guess with the DOD, but also some of the, you know, some of what was happening in the industry, which was a lot more was being virtualized.
[00:05:40] There was a lot of talk around how do we move on prem workloads to cloud? How do we move cloud workloads on prem? You know, I've never. Then, well, let me say it the other way. I've always been a super big fan of open ecosystems and open source. Walled gardens are an interesting concept and wherever [00:06:00] possible, I like to tear down walled gardens and solve the open source work and the open consortium work that I'm involved in.
[00:06:06] So vapor, it was kind of started out of what I was seeing from a virtualization standpoint and infrastructure, but also the need for as a, as an old guard telco guy, you know, understanding those early protocols like slippery and the latency associated with that. That is something that we talked about, you know, your brother and I actually talked about this years ago at an event that we started back in 2017 or 18 called edge con the internet.
[00:06:33] It's still fundamentally broken today. If you want to solve for autonomous robotics or autonomous driving or the future state of remote surgery, and some of these things like the back haul associated with a telco network all the way into a cloud network. And I'll give you an example. I live in Austin, Texas.
[00:06:52] And my slippery connection. I'm not going to say what provider I'm on, but my separate connection ends in st. Louis, Missouri, something like thousands of miles to st. [00:07:00] Louis to actually get a letter for a dress. There's no periods st. Louis, Missouri. There's no big IIX in st. Louis, Missouri, but there is an Atlanta fifty-five Marietta.
[00:07:09] Building that you got, you know, you now kind of operate, so there's a big X they're appearing. So if I'm say from Austin, Texas on my smartphone to let's just say linkedin.com as just a, as a URL. If I'm not going to say the CDN, but if a certain CDN is working, they can cash a lot of stuff in Georgia. If I need to go get net new data, I'm actually going to a data center in San Jose.
[00:07:30] And then I'm taking fiber back to Austin, Texas. And that doesn't sound like internet that I want to actually, you know, use in perpetuity. I think there are ways in which we can build a, or I guess enhance the internet that we've built and make it better.
[00:07:44] Jacob: You got it. It's not a, you know, it's a physical thing in many ways.
[00:07:48] I mean, you talk about your lineage going back down to basically, but we're talking concrete and wires and racks of this,
[00:07:53] you
[00:07:53] know, this is what's at the base of the internet, but as you've had a career in virtualizing, a lot of that, we still need to think about the [00:08:00] architecture.
[00:08:00] Cole: That's right.
[00:08:00] Jacob: And so is that what vapors part of doing is thinking about the architecture
[00:08:04] Cole: of the internet?
[00:08:05] Oh, a hundred percent, you know, there's, you can algorithmically speed up a lot of it. You don't algorithmically speed up the speed of light, but that's impossible. So if you want to be closer to the edge, that's a proximity thing. And then if you're going to be closer to the edge, whose edge, you know, all of a sudden, it's not for us to choose the killer app for an industry vertical, but we can work backwards from physics and say, okay, what's needed to automate that edge.
[00:08:30] And if you look back through. Every successful company, every big, you know, dot com, every big Silicon Valley startup. One of the things that they did really well, and this ends up being the killer app for X, right? It's not the killer app for edge or 5G is the killer app for everything, economics, easy button.
[00:08:49] If you can make it faster, better, cheaper, and you make it easy to consume, you're going to do well. And that was the mission that vapor was on to fix this architectural issue with the call it the guts of the [00:09:00] internet.
[00:09:00] Jacob: And so then I'm going to ask for listeners who don't know, I'm gonna ask you to describe what Vapor does in two ways.
[00:09:05] So the first way you're talking to me, or one of those.com, you know, people who know how the internet works and explaining what a vapor does. That way. And then the other way I'm gonna ask you is if your partner, who I understand is in, real estate. Yeah. Or to explain what vapor does, how would that sound different?
[00:09:25] Like for somebody who's not in the industry, you know, what does it sound like? That's a edge computing space. So just kind of understanding it from those two lenses. Let's
[00:09:34] Cole: let's give it a go. Yeah. Okay. So to the first one, it's, you know, it's about bringing. Interconnection and network handoff and back haul elimination, closer to the metros, the underserved tier two metros that don't have and Equinix or digital or a co logics or QTS, or, you know, a big sort of data center provider there.
[00:09:56] With both the data velocity and data gravity associated with [00:10:00] front hall, mid haul and back haul. So that's, there's the technical first answer.
[00:10:05] Jacob: That's the one I understand.
[00:10:07] I know
[00:10:08] exactly what you mean
[00:10:08] Cole: If I said that sentence to my wife. I think it would sound like Greek to her. I would say if you want to experience, you know, the real time, augmented reality capability for a venue experience, you need the internet to be closer to you.
[00:10:26]more internet, more places.
[00:10:28] Jacob: How do you make this go faster and be cheaper?
[00:10:30] Cole: Right? You got it. You got it. Yeah. And how do you make that run as autonomy as possible? Right?
[00:10:38] Jacob: So you put it in more places,
[00:10:39] you put it closer to the user. And then you've mentioned a few times in that donation to the expert, you said the word interconnection, you said hand off a number of things
[00:10:48] about networks.
[00:10:49] So let's talk about that a little bit. What does vapor doing specifically? So tell us about your expansion that you've got going on and where you're going and what that means. And then also about the idea of [00:11:00] handing off all the packets.
[00:11:01] Cole: Tell us more. Well, yeah. great question. You know, and there's plenty of people.
[00:11:05] Yeah. There, that would say the edge competes with the core. And that's never been vapors view. In fact, every market that we're in, we're back hauling to an Equinix facility and other facilities. So, you know, cloud on ramps and all of the things that happen. We think that. You know, the core needs to be a part of that equation, but, you know, the reality is how many tier one markets are served today by a huge multi hundred billion dollar equity is worth a ton of money.
[00:11:31] So, so, and you know, obviously these big data center companies, they know how to make capital work with economies of scale, where you build big buildings,
[00:11:39] Jacob: concentration of tenants and other things that happen there. Right.
[00:11:42] Cole: You got it there. And that's why actually we call them data centers because they become centers of data, you know, at the edge where you care about latency and industry vertical, which by the way is if you're, I'm just going to say, like they might sent a cease and desist for using them, but I'm just using this as an example.
[00:12:00] [00:12:00] If I'm Apple and I'm making a smartwatch, I want the experience for that smartwatch to exist. Yeah, there you go. For the listeners. I know the video is not being published, but Jacob just showed me this Apple store. Sarah, you're going to want ubiquitous expense regardless of if you're living in Los Angeles or Akron, Ohio as an example.
[00:12:17] And you know, that might be from a latency perspective, not the best example to use, but I think it serves its point vapor. Primarily enters those sorts of markets. And because we trade physical redundancy for high availability through diversified routes, I think we're unique in the data center street because we actually operate on fiber networks and every market we go to and, you know, those fiber networks end up looking like a city scale mesh network.
[00:12:45] And that's how we make the economies of scale work, because the reality is as big as, you know, a publicly traded a hundred billion dollar data center company. Can be the cost of an HVAC system is still the cost of an HVAC system. [00:13:00] And if you're going to build that into a fault tolerant environment, doing that at 200 kilowatts is really hard to make the economics work there.
[00:13:08] So trading physical fault tolerance for resiliency through routing is. Kind of that cloud native way that I think vapor has chosen to offer that similar sort of SLA while still bringing that telco who sits in Akron, Ohio, and wants to connect back to a cloud. That's what vapor does. We kind of view ourselves is that middle mile in that tier two market.
[00:13:33] Helping to eliminate back call through, you know, shared economics and neutral hosts, multitenant sort of thesis that obviously packets always had. and Equinix certainly has had an in other data center companies. So that's kind of what we do. We put distributed data centers, you know, small. Multitenant edge data centers out in these under, I would say underserved, but certainly smaller markets than the NFL cities tier one cities.
[00:13:57] And then we bring them back sure.
[00:13:59] Jacob: From a [00:14:00] structure of the internet underserved. Right, right. You can't put everything everywhere in that scaled sense. Right.
[00:14:05] Cole: Yeah. Very interesting.
[00:14:06] Jacob: And I'm intrigued because of your background in the open. I mean, you've got it. You got four things on your resume that aren't vapor that I see.
[00:14:13] And three of them involved the word open. And so. When you think about open, how does that inform the strategy for vapor and for the way the internet should work or could work in this next? Stage which I'm here in front of you. What you're describing, you know, we're talking about a shift and new kinds of experiences, new kinds of scale.
[00:14:31]we can even touch on the pandemic and how that might've kind of pushed things forward in many ways, but how does the open inform what vapor does? Like what DNA is
[00:14:39] Cole: there access to data? Access to democratize data is something I've always been passionate about, which is why, you know, Linux was such a cool thing.
[00:14:48] That's why OpenStack and open compute was such a cool thing. As an industry, you don't have to look beyond some of Intel's predictions or Forrester's predictions or arm's predictions, or [00:15:00] Intel's predictions to say IOT, and, you know, the industrial sort of the industry 4.0 world is going to have call it 20 times.
[00:15:10] 10 or 20 orders of magnitude, more sensors doing more things and humans today, humans, we've basically mechanically turked the internet, right? it's actually kind of crazy to me that if you think back to the black and white switchboard pictures, where. People are plugging things in to switchboard to connect phone calls.
[00:15:31] We're doing that today for the internet. This is some, this is a human powered thing. Yeah. We're doing today. And I don't know that we can mechanical Turk, that future state of billions and billions of connected devices, all doing things. So if you've got a data, plane and control plane that can automate a bunch of that, we're big fans of that.
[00:15:49] So. If you break down, like what makes the internet work at the architectural level for people that live, breathe, operate both the operators, [00:16:00] technology, which is kind of the data center stuff. And then the information technology, which is the servers and the network stuff, all that stuff. It's really funny that the rack itself has always been no man's land.
[00:16:10] Because the data center has everything up to the rack and the, you know, the, it guys have everything in the rack, but where has the contextualization been? Right. There's never really been it OT concerns. And if there has been, it's come through some super proprietary offering. So we understood early on that we don't operate.
[00:16:29] Owner operated data centers. We don't operate colo big colo facilities, but a lot of customers are asking for more data because there's a lot more virtualization and they want the orchestration engines doing more of if you're gonna, you know, there's a Scottish scientists, Lord Kelvin, who was quoted as saying to measure is to know if you can't measure it, you can't know it.
[00:16:50] And all we wanted to do was democratize those really old legacy. Binary wire protocols that HVAC systems use and ups [00:17:00] systems use and generators use and build a JSON interface into that build a codafide interface. So you could contextualize your owner operated environment with your colo environment, with vapors, you know, environment and give you a data plane that you can, you know, with about 20 minutes of time, you write a driver for, and now you're contextualizing a bunch of stuff.
[00:17:20] And, you know, our goal was always to be. From a data perspective, the most transparent company. I mean, we give everything to you, you know, as a packet, as a customer is a customer yet everything we could throw at you, right? You had ups systems, you had everything that we were monitoring available to you in real time.
[00:17:38] And as you're virtualizing more of the network as your, you know, as new capabilities around. SD wham come into play in virtual network functions, come into play and orchestrators like, you know, think VM-ware or think even OpenStack or Kubernetes or whatever. If that orchestrator doesn't have to just think about the amount of CPU, the amount of memory, the amount of [00:18:00] disc on the amount of network.
[00:18:01] If there's more for that orchestrator to contextualize, I think that's how we automate this future internet. And that should you shouldn't differentiate on protocol for that. You should differentiate on service and. That's why we did it.
[00:18:15] Jacob: So open, and it's funny. Cause you know, you could be mistaken in listening to you.
[00:18:20] Describe that you're a software company, not a data center company code watch out, you know, you might get a miscategorized, but the idea that software is your customer is a really interesting point here.
[00:18:32] Cole: Well, we've always shared with you guys, the thesis that even for data centers, the developers, the new customer, right.
[00:18:38] That's been a packet mantra for as long as I can remember. And I will say, you know, yes, we're a data center company, but we are a cloud down data center, not a brick and mortar update us in our company. Yep. Makes sense.
[00:18:51] Jacob: Well, I love, I'm going to quote Lord Calvin now that you told me who he is, because we always said internally, If you don't know what it is, you can't automate it.
[00:18:58] Asset management, super [00:19:00] boring, but it's one of these things. And if you don't have access, like you said, I mean things that, you know, it's not your everyday software programmer that says like, wonder what my PDU, I don't even know what the PDU is, but I wonder what it's doing. But when you're talking about these new experiences, there's a layer.
[00:19:15]physical meets digital, right? And that's where you're talking about shining the flashlight and say, we need to put more, we need to put more software here and we need, that means you need to be more open and more and expose more things. So more software, cause your customer, it could be a hyper scaler, you know, service provider, a car company.
[00:19:32] You know what you have common, there is open standards and open things.
[00:19:35] Cole: Right? Interesting. You got it. A hundred percent. Cool.
[00:19:38] Jacob: Well, I love it. So one angle, that I'm intrigued by is most people think about open source and they think about limits, right? They think about software and, you know, you've got a couple well major projects that you've been like deeply involved in.
[00:19:51] You're talking about hardware and in the way, you know, we've all kind of got a sense or at least that the cloud ecosystem really. [00:20:00] Understands the impact of open source software, but what do you see going forward? What is the role of open hardware? Like, what's that all about and where do you think it's gone?
[00:20:10] Cole: Yes. this is something we could talk for several hours on, in a nutshell. So there's another guy I wanna kind of quote, not necessarily a quote, but Jim gray was a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, went missing. He wrote a book called the fourth paradigm and it's a, it's actually free. I think you can download it on Microsoft's website for free, but it was basically.
[00:20:30] I mean, if this was, this book was printed decades ago and he predicted rightfully so, I might add that at some point it would no longer be efficient to move the storage to compute. We'd have to move the compute to the storage. And that's a little bit of why the edge is kind of, you know, where it's at today.
[00:20:50] Cause there's a lot of data gravity and a lot of date of loss this happening in a localized way. And so to kind of use that analogy, Lennox was always interesting to [00:21:00] me because it was a way, I mean, if you think about when Lena sent his initial email out for what he was working on, It's not going to be very big.
[00:21:08] And it's only going to work on this hardware and look where Linux is today. It's running on our phones, it's running in embedded systems. It's running in cars, it's running, you know, in lots of different places. I believe open hardware is the solution. Again for democratizing both the access because you know, hardware, it's kind of a pun, but hardware is hard.
[00:21:29] You know, software is almost free. If you've got a laptop, you can code. You get a simple IDE and you can kind of teach yourself from YouTube or Python for dummies or pick a language and you can write code and, you know, ones and zeros are pretty easy to generate and you can iterate on those mistakes, you know, very inexpensively, We've always said the manipulation of atoms is way harder than the manipulation of bits and add, you know, in hardware, rev cycles are slow.
[00:21:57] When you talk about source code, you know, you're not [00:22:00] talking about a simple git hub repo. You're talking about PCP layouts, then Gerber files and mechanicals, and lots of crazy things that go in and to the circuitry and the sort of. atoms that make up all of the physical aspects of this thing. We call the internet and I've always had a passion for the, you know, coming at the panacea of an opportunity from both sides of the equation.
[00:22:25] So if you have an open operating system and an open hardware platform, I think that's the combination. Those are the ingredients you need to optimize exactly what you're going to need for your. First party or third party service. And, you know, meanwhile, you've got a lot of callm them I wouldn't say SMB is maybe slightly larger than, you know, an SMB where you do have to think about a bill of materials or a skew, and being able to leverage a supply chain where you have the purchasing power of a Facebook or a Microsoft or [00:23:00] LinkedIn, which is now Microsoft, but where you've got that capability, if you can.
[00:23:05] If you can share in some of the economics, like, I think there's still a huge opportunity for somebody to basically come in and say, okay, X company. We'll just say, you know, we'll just say Microsoft, as an example, Microsoft is buying 1 million servers for the next, you know, for the next quarter, hop onto the thing everyone's motherboard, you know, get it fractionally cheaper and doesn't SSI.
[00:23:28]we'll ship your stuff to you. We'll put in the bios, you need it. But in that stuff, it always seemed to me that I wouldn't call it a groupon for procurement supply chain, but somebody that could help the economies of scale for that. That's one of these things that I think is. It's still a big opportunity in our industry for open hardware, because as you know, supply chain isnt easy.
[00:23:49] Right. I mean, managing, a hardware supply chain is really hard. And then after procurement, you've got vertical integration. How far do you take that to L seven? You'd take that. L 10 11. [00:24:00] Once that's done are, you know, do you have the right software teams working on the implementation and the provision?
[00:24:05] Like there's a lot of complexity that goes into that.
[00:24:08] Jacob: Yeah. All kinds of specialized knowledge. Yeah, all kinds of people that were in the late nineties, pretty much, you know,
[00:24:14] Cole: which is crazy. Right. Cause we used to do everything and now we're like massively specialized, even in right. Even on our own first party capabilities.
[00:24:22] So open
[00:24:23] Jacob: in a way is proxy for inviting more people into it. Right. And so. You know, open source, certainly allowed that to happen. I think we've seen immense power and it's our software, you know, that allows more opinions, right. More innovation at the layer. And I think you mentioned earlier add, you know, your value or protect your Mo whatever it is at the place where you can really do unique value.
[00:24:45] You know, when we're talking about hardware, obviously there's a huge barrier. You just feel like with co-location right. Getting stuff in play places is difficult, you know, especially today's more globalized world where, you know, it used to be, Hey, I need to be in USC, maybe U S West, a couple other places.
[00:25:00] [00:25:00] The idea of being at the edge and taking advantage or promising, like you said to your wife, if you want all the good stuff, then you're going to need to deploy your applications or put your opinion or do whatever it is in more places. And so open invites, more people to participate and that's. From what I'm hearing from your background, a good thing, more people doing more things,
[00:25:20] Cole: solves bigger problems faster.
[00:25:22] I think that's exactly right. I think there's three things, right? Three bullet points, lower the technical barrier of entry because not everybody has pick and place machines and you know, the capabilities to design hardware. So you see you lower the barrier of entry on the technical front, you increase the pace of innovation.
[00:25:40] Which I think is a good thing for the industry and you democratize or commoditize those things that really have no value. I never understood why Dell and HP had different pen outs for a power supply that never made sense to me.
[00:25:56] Jacob: Right. Well, it's definitely, you know, definitely something that we need to be looking at as we [00:26:00] try to do more with technology and, you know, the world we live in today, and I know that we're all living very interesting and very different lives right now.
[00:26:07] And a lot of us. You know, are thinking about ways to solve problems a little bit quicker maybe than we were even a year ago. I know you're forward looking guys. So you've been looking at the future, basically your entire career, but it seems like the future is decided to come to today for a lot of companies decided to make it a reality now.
[00:26:26] And are you seeing as a result of that, you know, as a result of everything with work from home and new experiences being digital needs so important, is that impacting your business? Is that like, is that a thing
[00:26:36] Cole: for you? As frustrated as I think everybody is with having to deal with this pandemic for infrastructure companies that want to help make the internet better.
[00:26:46] It's been a blessing. And I would argue that if COVID happened 15 years ago, from a supply chain perspective, we'd be in a much worse situation. I mean like globally, I think deaths would be [00:27:00] much higher access to food and drugs and, you know, the things we need in our daily lives. I think that would be much tougher.
[00:27:08] So I think the cloud has been a huge blessing and a silver lining, for this, you know, really. Terrible pandemic and certainly vapor focusing on those things. This is, the event has been positive for vapor, but not for a reason. I'm proud of sure. I
[00:27:29] Jacob: mean, it's just the reality and I think it's, You know, it's, like I said, fast forward at a lot of the things that were already happening, which, you know, technology and innovation is a wave.
[00:27:38] That's hard to think about stopping. And so doing good with that and accelerating that word makes sense. And like you said, driving towards more people, participating in it, more companies, more. Whatever is it is part of your mission. Very interesting to see that kind of get sharpened to a point where it says like, well, there's really not a choice.
[00:27:56] You know, you gotta think about these experiences and how are you going to [00:28:00] be innovative with them? How are you going to add your unique value?
[00:28:03] Cole: Right. Vapor has always had this it's part of our, you know, sort of corporate culture. It's kind of written into our corporate culture do well by doing good. Ben Franklin one
[00:28:12] Jacob: Oh one.
[00:28:14] Cole: There you go. Yeah,
[00:28:15] Jacob: absolutely. Well, one of the original hackers, Ben Franklin right there.
[00:28:19] Cole: So you got it, you
[00:28:20] Jacob: know, had it all going on. Let's close that we've got a couple more things to do here, which I'm super excited and I'm just like really enthusiastic about the vision. Vapor has an is I'm sure. You know, people are going to hear a lot more about edge computing in the next year or two.
[00:28:36] If you could look into your crystal ball, what does it look like? I mean, this is a, you know, summer 20, 20, what's it look like at the end of 2021? Like where are we at as an industry? Certainly the edge computing and edge ecosystem has gone through the usual troughs and, you know, hype and everything else.
[00:28:53]where do we land in a year and
[00:28:54] a
[00:28:54] Cole: half. Yeah. I mean, and I guess I could answer your question in one of two ways [00:29:00] I could answer it. And where are we as an industry? Like building it out or I could answer it and, or like, what are the experiences we're enjoying because of it.
[00:29:09] Jacob: And it's like, question one and question two that I asked you about describing vapor.
[00:29:12] So let's do it both ways.
[00:29:13] Cole: Okay. Sure. So as an industry, my hope is that people are using again, open ecosystems and open APIs and open source too. Try and automate what they can, because the other thing that COVID did was make us all think about how can we do more with less interaction today.
[00:29:31] And I still, I think that, you know, automating our infrastructure is something packet I know cares deeply about, especially from a remote perspective. I think that's generally just good for everybody. So I expect to see more automation. I expect to see. More integration, but I think that integration happens at the data center and fiber level.
[00:29:52] I actually see the cloud companies and again, just a bet, but I actually see more [00:30:00] vertical integration happening at the cloud level. So the developer tools and, you know, the interfaces that you're already using and in your cloud of choice, I think that those ecosystems get a more robust vertically, but also I don't want to use the analogy of the hotel California, but I think it does get harder to leave.
[00:30:23] Jacob: Very nice.
[00:30:23] Cole: Yeah. but the tools are gonna be so good. I mean, you know, I remember reading something, I think Amazon. It was Amazon that announced a, like almost a codeless mobile development platform. You didn't have to code the trade off. You're going to get for that is you're going to be using those APIs, which are available to you on Amazon.
[00:30:44] So, and I don't know that's necessarily a bad thing, but getting to Amazon, getting to Microsoft, getting to Google, you know, the, again, if we separate the internet out into like a nervous system, And the cardiovascular system, I care more about the cardiovascular system. I care [00:31:00] more about the heartbeat, you know, and the dial tone of the internet than I do the brains or doing all the, you know, really interesting things, and creating these sort of, you know, higher order solutions.
[00:31:11] So I do see more collaboration. I hope that club includes open API. So that's the first, the second, from an experience standpoint, I just hope that as consumers, we just get to experience all the cool back to the future. Like things that have been promised us, you know, five G is supposed to be this panacea of go look at a shot on goal, you know, sit next to famous person X at the LA Lakers game.
[00:31:38] And you know, like,
[00:31:40] Jacob: I'd just like to grab a drink with you. Call.
[00:31:41] Cole: That would be fun, right? Exactly. we need a. We need 40 for that, Jacob, we need to be tastes
[00:31:50] Jacob: holiday. We need the holiday.
[00:31:53] Cole: Okay. The holodeck then dammit. We did it.
[00:31:56] Jacob: It was fine.
[00:31:58] Cole: But to a, you know, to [00:32:00] a person who has actually running a business, say a healthcare company, my hope is that at the end of 2021, we've made great strides.
[00:32:10] To fix the digital divide. And I think we're close. If you think about what, like Elon Musk is doing with Starling, if you think about, you know, some of the work that is doing and bridging municipalities, like maybe underserved municipalities and bringing that into a tier one Connecticut edge where, you know, you now, you know, like there's a lot of people, a lot of kids working, you know, trying to learn from home.
[00:32:34] And you should not based on zip code, either have an advantage or a disadvantage to learn, and that, you know, that doesn't sit well with me personally. So if we can fix that digital divide, but then provide the safeguards and the guide rails. So as those kids go back to school, if that school is connected to a hospital and you get to do real time, contact tracing, you get some [00:33:00] anonymized data that allows cities to react.
[00:33:02] Better. I also think that should just be built into what we call like a smart city or the next generation for structure. And I think that, you know, there's ways to get there without being intrusive into privacy. I think there's absolutely ways to get there without having to intrude in someone's privacy.
[00:33:20] And so we've gotta be mindful on the governance, so this data, but again, that's where. Data, Providence data, localization, data sovereignty. That's where those things come into play from an edge perspective. And my hope is that on that side, it's almost just, it's almost just seamless. It's just more internet and more places, right?
[00:33:38]Jacob: more things in more places, but it works. I mean, in a way like the internet does in this version to most consumers,
[00:33:43] Cole: it just works.
[00:33:45] Jacob: Now, sometimes it works not as good as you want, and we're trying to do more with it and it's stretching, but most people don't see under the hood where we're like, no, that's not going to work out great.
[00:33:53] Most people are like, it's like air, I breathe it. And so that experience has kind of what we hope to deliver as we reach [00:34:00] new. New kinds of services and new experiences for people.
[00:34:04] Cole: Yeah. I tend to agree. It works when it works, but when it doesn't work, you know, it doesn't work. And why doesn't it work?
[00:34:11] Typically it doesn't work because a human made an error. A human generally caused that bad route push config or that patch panel, you know, config that got updated.
[00:34:23] Jacob: It's always BGP or DNS. Come on. We know it. It's one of those.
[00:34:28] Cole: Well, you know, I am going to send this link to Paul Maka. Petra is the inventor of DNS and we'll see what he's got to say, but, but I tend to agree with you, right?
[00:34:36] It's usually BGP or some kind of resolution thing. And, you know, there's ways in which I think that. BGP is as old as you know, I mean, we're to think of, we're not on rip anymore, but, you know, yeah. We're using 20, 30 year old protocols to route bits and bytes around the internet.
[00:34:53] Jacob: Okay. I got two questions then as the closest out.
[00:34:55] So the first one's softball, right. Which is vapor, where does the name
[00:34:58] Cole: come from? [00:35:00] What are clouds made out of? Yeah,
[00:35:01] Jacob: I got that, but like, how did they come to you?
[00:35:04] Cole: You were sitting there staring up at
[00:35:05] Jacob: the clouds. You sit on.
[00:35:08] Cole: Well, so I wanted to, there was a couple, there's actually three things. One of the first ideas that I had around vapor was there was a university in Spain that was working on like a metamaterial that as hot air float through it, it cool.
[00:35:28] But the reason it cooled is because the material, sweat and the byproduct of that was. Was basically water vapor. And so that was really neat. Now it turned out to be that didn't work at scale. There was no way to actually do that. Second was obviously, you know, clouds are made out of paper and we kind of, well, we're not an it cloud company.
[00:35:47] We do think of ourselves as no T called company. And then third there was, is, was, is a company that had something called. Mist. And we're like, well, what's even [00:36:00] finer than miss. Like what's missed, made up of right at the edge. Let's be a little contrary. And from that perspective, and then obviously the fourth is everyone likes to talk about vaporware.
[00:36:13] Right. Everyone likes to talk about February where there's nothing there. Well, okay. So, so a little bit, and this was like 5%. In fact are, if you care about censor any of the open source stuff that we do on get hub, you can actually go to vaporware. So that's, there you go. But if we actually achieve our mission of you know, being prolific and.
[00:36:35] Excuse me where our code runs and being successful. Obviously the company vapor the term vapor vaporware, I don't know how much longer that can persist. We'll have changed the game. And there's, you know, a little bit of contrarion view that goes into that as well. I
[00:36:50] Jacob: liked it. Well, if you want to learn more about vapor IO.
[00:36:54] And so my last question for you, it goes back to the beginning of the interview. When you said you had a choice in high school, you're thinking [00:37:00] in that. Sit down on that Linux terminal and figure out what the blue screen was all about, or you're going to go become a professional tennis player. So if you could play for G you know, or five G enabled virtual reality, a tennis with someone who would it be?
[00:37:13] Cole: Ooh, so sorry, Jacob, you broke up for five seconds, but I think I got your question. If I could play tennis with anyone,
[00:37:19] Jacob: play tennis with anyone.
[00:37:20] Cole: Do they have to be a tennis player? No, absolutely not. Oh man. That's easy. Christopher Walken.
[00:37:25] Jacob: Okay.
[00:37:27] Cole: I mean, incredible tennis experience.
[00:37:32] Jacob: I love it. So it's Christopher Walken and Cole Crawford.
[00:37:35] You know, it's 20, 27 and we have our holodeck and you're playing tennis together. I got it.
[00:37:41] Cole: I just, you know, you could, and I don't do a very good cause for walking impression, but he like SAS serve. That was incredible. Yeah.
[00:37:53] Jacob: Well, it's always awesome to talk to you about the future about the past. I mean, all open all the time and that [00:38:00] what you guys are doing at vapor and what you've represented in your career. You know, it's this really fascinating mix of hardware and software and said, like, I can't wait to touch base next time we can see each other.
[00:38:09] It's probably going to be six months from now. So the world will have changed yet again. But thanks for coming on and sharing all about paper today.
[00:38:15] Cole: I really appreciate the time Jacob. I hope you and the family are safe and well, and, I'm looking forward to that beer.
[00:38:21] Jacob: Okay. So that's good. Take care.