What is the future of IT and how does it affect careers at the edge? In this episode, Bill sits down with Brad Maltz, Senior Director of the DevOps Portfolio and DevRel at Dell Technologies to discuss DevRel, EdgeOps and how IT can adapt to the momentum of edge technologies.
What is the future of IT and how does it affect careers at the edge? In this episode, Bill sits down with Brad Maltz, Senior Director of the DevOps Portfolio and DevRel at Dell Technologies to discuss DevRel, EdgeOps and how IT can adapt to the momentum of edge technologies. They explore how people in IT should navigate their careers at this technology juncture, and whether the terms edge, cloud and data center will remain relevant.
Key Quotes:
“Do you truly need to designate that physical destination as an edge versus cloud versus data center? I don't think you do.”
“The DevOps movement is well positioned to help the edge going forward.”
“DevOps to me is an operating model. It's all about IT technology-oriented folks needing to become more agile to partner and satisfy their end users.”
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(01:10) How Brad got started in tech
(02:47) What is DevRel and why is it important?
(06:28) How should IT adapt to growth at the edge?
(09:39) Who is IT at this point?
(12:24) How can IT prepare and stay relevant?
(24:56) If Brad were starting in tech now, what would he focus on?
(28:50) The role of platform engineering
(31:15) Will the terms data center, cloud and edge matter in the future?
(37:43) What is Brad looking forward to in Devrel and IT?
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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting dell.com/edge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
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Over the Edge is hosted by Bill Pfeifer, and was created by Matt Trifiro and Ian Faison. Executive producers are Matt Trifiro, Ian Faison, Jon Libbey and Kyle Rusca. The show producer is Erin Stenhouse. The audio engineer is Brian Thomas. Additional production support from Elisabeth Plutko and Eric Platenyk.
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Follow Bill on LinkedIn
Connect with Brad Maltz on LinkedIn
Check out Brad’s DevOps Thought Leadership vlog and Webinar
Narrator 1: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Over the Edge. This episode features an interview between Bill Pfeiffer and Brad Maltz, the Senior Director of the DevOps Portfolio and DevRel at Dell Technologies. Bill and Brad dive into the momentum at the edge and how it's changing traditional IT, discussing how IT should adapt, and offering advice for how IT practitioners can navigate their careers at this transition.
They explore questions like, who is IT today? And will the terms edge, cloud, and data center be relevant in the future? But before we get into it, here's a brief word from our sponsors.
Narrator 2: Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with Edge solutions.
From hardware and software to data and operations across your entire multi cloud environment, we're here to help you simplify your Edge so that you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting dell. com slash edge for more information. Or click on the link
in the show notes.
Narrator 1: [00:01:00] And now please enjoy this interview between Bill Pfeiffer and Brad Maltz, the Senior Director of the DevOps Portfolio and DevRel at Dell Technologies.
Bill Pfeifer: So Brad, thanks for joining us. I know we've been talking for a while about having you on the show and I'm excited to finally get to have our conversation here.
Brad Maltz: Yeah, very happy to be here today.
Bill Pfeifer: So tell me, going way back, how did you get started in technology? What brings you into this conversation and to Dell?
Brad Maltz: Wow. Okay. Way back as a while ago, for me, what brought me into tech, honestly, to be open was in college. I was actually a mechanical engineer. That's how I actually entered college. And that was, I'll date myself, mid 90s. That's awesome. I was a civil engineer, actually. There you go. And Basically, I said, Oh, there's this computer thing.
And I did not know much about computers before that. And I was like, let me go learn about that. And they actually forced me to take a Pascal and Fortran class in my freshman year. And I was like, Oh, this [00:02:00] programming thing is kind of cool. And honestly, within the first semester, I flipped over to computer engineer, and it's been a ride ever since then.
I just loved everything from building machines to gaming, to programming, to solutioneering. I've kind of been a jack of all trades in the computer industry. Fantastic.
Bill Pfeifer: And I know you've had a really kind of a winding path at Dell, right? You did some stuff with, with Okto, the office of the CTO, you were working in AI for a while.
You've done some work on DevOps and building up that team, and now you're doing Developer Relations or DevRel. So I know that's your current focus, but that was a new term to me. For any listeners who don't know it well, who don't think about this stuff all day, every day like we do, can you tell us what's DevRel and why do you care?
Brad Maltz: Yeah, no, that's a great question. So developer relations, aka DevRel for a lot of people, was really something started [00:03:00] many years ago, but it's the notion that there is a end user base out there that This daily job is utilizing software, developing software, APIs, automation, you name it. It could be end user applications all the way through infrastructure level stuff.
And as companies deliver product and technology to the industry, whether it was through open source or through productized selling mechanisms, those companies, those software companies, How do they actually interface with their end user? Not via a sales process, but via the community. How are they able to help educate them?
How are they able to take their inputs back from that kind of community and bring them into product management and marketing and engineering? So DevRel. It's really many things rolled into one, but I equate it back to, there's a level of education and evangelism, [00:04:00] and there's a level of advocacy, usually back into the business from the end users.
So that's really kind of how I look at DevRel from an industry perspective. So
Bill Pfeifer: this is really about making it a two way conversation. Right? Interacting with IT, with DevOps, with developers, with customers as a whole, and forming a more of a conversation, more of a two way conversation rather than The vendor talking at the customers.
Here's what we built. Here's what you should do with
Brad Maltz: it. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's definitely, it's also, I like to harp on the education side as much as the advocacy, especially from my background. And I think yours coming from the IT system admin, right? Server storage, networking, virtualization space. Those folks by their nature are not developers.
They don't use APIs. They're not as comfortable writing code. And we as Dell, we work with those types of customers all the time. So how do we help them [00:05:00] move themselves into that uncomfortable space that DevOps kind of operating models require? How do we get them comfortable in GitHub, get comfortable with pipelines, get comfortable with infrastructure as code?
So that is really the genesis of DevRel within this space. So that's, that's a
Bill Pfeifer: conversation that resonates with me. I'm an old school network and security guy. So I came from like classic IT and was not part of the DevOps movement. So that actually feeds into a really great conversation, right? IT has been moving toward the cloud for over a decade, and we're getting real momentum now, but now we also, we're starting to see major momentum at the edge, moving things back toward distributed, right back toward that like workgroup computing stuff that we saw way back when, and then moved away from into data centers and clouds, but that's not a zero sum game.
Right. We're still seeing growth in the cloud. We're still seeing some growth in the data centers, but some decent growth in the [00:06:00] cloud, massive growth at the edge. So we've got this net new, just massive pile of stuff happening at the edge. But that's a major shift from traditional IT type roles, right?
Build and run the data center. And then shifting out of the data center to cloud and now shifting back to on prem, but not the data center. What is that doing to tech operating models inside customers and how, how is IT adapting to that? Or how should IT adapt to that?
Brad Maltz: I mean, if IT didn't have a hard enough time before, Then like, I don't know, right now they must be going insane.
Right. Cause when you look into your point, when you look at the edge, just to throw out a quick little reference, it's kind of the final frontier when you look at that kind of Star Trek type approach. Right. It's like, that is the end state that people haven't really focused on. And from an IT perspective, they had to deal with all these shifts of, to your point, [00:07:00] client server, virtualization, now go figure out how to use the cloud, now figure out when you should use the cloud, and now also go into a hybrid cloud of on prem plus cloud, and where does Colo fit in, and so this is the daily thought process of IT, is that that world with all the nuances of all of that, now enter the discussion of, hey, You can't forget about the edge because society moving forward becomes more and more reliant and tied to technology.
And as consumers and end users and businesses and life around us becomes more technologically driven, we as Industry and companies and businesses need to figure out how to drive our products into the edge. How do we impact everybody, whether it's the business side of the edge or the consumer side of the edge?
And unfortunately, [00:08:00] that means that these IT people that have their day jobs now have to figure out, okay, well, have fun, go out there and deal with 10, 000 sites, or 100, 000 sites. And guess what? At those sites, you only get five people to work on 10, 000 sites. And when you have to go deal with something at those sites, well, it might be a warehouse worker, a cashier, or somebody else out there.
So you might want to try to automate as much of that as possible so those people at the edge don't have to really know IT, which that's not what IT is comfortable with. IT is used to having experts tied to each of the localities that they get to manage technology. It's just a totally different paradigm that I think the DevOps movement is well positioned to help the edge going forward.
Bill Pfeifer: So yes, the edge is all about distributed operations and IT was formed [00:09:00] to build, to own, to run. Data center, right? A few discrete locations. You can go there. You work there every day, right? I've worked for years inside data centers and just, you know, the fans blowing all around me and all that stuff. Super fun.
Good times. So now, now we're distributing all of that stuff. Out there, and IT may never even see the hardware that's being distributed out to the edge, which is, which is an interesting challenge. How do you see DevOps and IT interacting? Is DevOps fusing into fusing into DevOps? Do they still have separate functions?
I mean, now that IT is not that centralized function, who are they at this point?
Brad Maltz: That's, uh, you're asking a very controversial question in the DevOps community, by the way. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna take what I believe is more of a purist view of the world. DevOps, to me, is an operating model. It's all about IT, [00:10:00] technology oriented folks needing to become more agile to partner and satisfy their end users, a.
k. a. the application owners and application developers. When certain people look at DevOps in the industry, they're looking at like, well, you DevOps team manage CI CD pipeline over there, and you manage a few of the developer tools. That's kind of one view of the world. But I don't think that was the original intent of DevOps when it was really kind of Thought about back in the day.
I really think it was more about we as an operating model need to become agile so that our daily processes that we do every few seconds, every few minutes, every few hours, those processes can get automated. We can apply observability, we can provide platform experiences, and all of that comes up to be able to proactively help your end users and your application owners in the future, if you take that view.
The edge [00:11:00] is exactly the same problem space. It's just another set of localities. Mind you at a different scale, but the same people on the backend that have to go do the automation of data center assets should be focused on automation of the edge assets as well.
Bill Pfeifer: So in the early days of cloud, we had it building and running the data center.
And we had business groups, business owners, operational technologists putting stuff in the cloud and not necessarily clearing it through IT, right? They just swipe their credit card and spin up some workloads. IT may or may not know about it. They may or may not have any footprint in it, but we had this massive shadow IT problem in the early days of the cloud.
And then IT started moving toward understanding what the cloud was and accepting it and centralizing some of those efforts. It's still More distributed than it was, but I don't hear many conversations about the problems of shadow IT now. People understand that, but with the edge, I [00:12:00] think we're going to come back to that pretty quickly.
We've got business groups and operational technologists that are trying to add technology into areas of the business that didn't previously have technology. They may or may not start that with IT. So we're going to end up with some shadow IT challenges again, where we have these globally dispersed deployments.
What can IT folks do to prepare for that today? And maybe more, how does IT leadership position their teams to stay relevant as, you know, again, we take this technology out of its distributed core and just start solving business challenges with it.
Brad Maltz: Yeah. This is the tough. Part of this is, where are you, you as IT willing to challenge yourself?
A lot of IT organizations, and by the way, there's not one answer for the industry. That's part of, I think, the big [00:13:00] conversation, right? There's a group of companies out there that are comfortable with change. Not a big group, but there's a group. They're always challenging themselves. They're willing to fail, basically, in a way that allows them to keep moving forward.
That group of people, they're all set for this future that we're talking about, because I think they're already in that world. They're already thinking the right way. They're already utilizing technology in a way that it makes sense. But the majority of people out there are still thinking about boxes, and they're thinking about applications at kind of, I'm going to use a very old analogy, pets versus cattle, right?
This has been around forever, but it seems to be still very relevant because they think of their applications specifically as pets. They want to feed that, pet that, love that. But the reality is Until you disconnect yourself from an individual asset or an individual thing in the [00:14:00] business and you think about the larger outcomes, then you truly are never going to get to the point where you can proactively start operating differently.
Part of that is there's a personal challenge that everybody undertakes. If you have a storage SME, And their job for the past 15, 20 years has been to manage storage, which we have a large customer base like that, especially at Dell. What if storage was a set of features? What if storage was not a separate box that you had to manage, but storage was natively definable and controllable?
Through the abstractions like Kubernetes and service catalogs and all this other stuff that you're consuming so that you don't need a storage admin doing anything on a daily basis. A storage admin's job becomes somebody that helps to operate the larger platform behind the scenes and when they have to [00:15:00] triage an issue, that storage admin is the SME that can jump in quickly and go and try to help fix the storage feature under the covers.
What I'm describing is just such a different way of thinking than I think IT has traditionally thought.
Bill Pfeifer: And just for any listeners who aren't as familiar with the older conversations, pets versus cattle, just explain that for, for any, who may not know.
Brad Maltz: So you can tie pets versus cattle to, I think I'm going to mess up the dates here, roughly the 2012 timeframe.
I think it was, it started out by, there was a few people. There was one specific person. I forgot his name. Cause I wasn't prepped for the reference. Two, he's used it in one of his talk tracks. And then there was a whole level of people that started using that analogy going forward. And what pets versus cattle is, is basically this.
Think about how you as a pet owner, you take care of your pet. It's another part of the family. You do everything [00:16:00] you can to make sure that that pet is healthy and safe and well fed and loved and all that stuff. If you go into more of the farm animal side of it, you can say chickens, you can say cattle, you can use whatever animal you want.
When you move into the farming industry, those animals are not basically part of the family. What those animals are is they're part of the business. You look at them as an asset. You manage them in a more standardized operational way that they are all treated equally, no matter what. And when the time comes, you can keep adding in more cattle and more chickens and you manage them the same way.
Well, Pets vs. Cattle then got applied to applications, right? Cloud Native, 12 Factor, it was all around the similar time frame where we always treated applications as pets, right? That database was the, was the, oh my god, if that database ever [00:17:00] went down or anything happened in that database, the business is gone because that one database was the thing that you had to keep feeding for the next 30 to 50 years.
Well, in the new world, meaning more cloud native 12 factor type of application land, the database should just be a component within the larger lifecycle of the outcome that you're delivering. And you should have the ability to swap out that database when needed. You should be able to down rev it to up rev it.
You should be able to delete it. As long as the outcome you're desiring actually ties with the lifecycle management of that thing. So we can still drive the pets versus cattle analogy forward at this point, because it very much still applies to servers, to storage, to applications. We got to stop treating servers and storage as pets.
You should be able to swap a server whenever you want to under the covers. Swap an edge device. You should be able to send that person that knows nothing about IT out to that edge, swap that device, and the application should be able to spin back up on that with no problem. That's how you apply Pets versus Cato in kind of the new world.[00:18:00]
Bill Pfeifer: When I ran a data center, I had, I had pets. I had a bunch of servers and every one of them had a different personality and I knew their personalities and customized everything so that we got the most out of it. That was when it was more of an art form and now there's a lot more standardization and a lot more scale and it's much more.
Cattle. And when something fails, you get rid of it.
Brad Maltz: To like that, this leads into the proactive versus reactive type discussion, right? Part of this DevOps movement, part of the edge and edge ops and cloud and cloud native is driving us to a world where IT, we cannot find enough people in the industry to scale all the needs that every business has out there.
It's just, it's hard to find help. And when you tie that into technology, moving at the pace that it keeps accelerating over, it feels like it accelerates even faster. I mean, everything from quantum to Gen AI and every other buzzword coming out right now, like it's crazy to watch technology, but the impacts [00:19:00] they're, they're making on the business, how does it keep up with all the trends while not having to sit there and be reactive to everything in their environment?
Cause back to what you had to do when you were in the data center. You just waited for the application to have an issue. You were reactive and upgrades and all that. Everybody was now we need to get ahead of that. We need to be proactive and treat them with larger policy management and larger operational efficiency.
That's, I think the pain that we as an industry are going to live for the next, Oh, I don't know, 10, 20, 30 years.
Bill Pfeifer: So as we move from this pets versus cattle conversation, right, we still have some pets around. There are still some mainframe applications, right? It's running in its corner, on its little mainframe.
It's the core of the business. It ain't broke. Don't fix it. You don't necessarily want to, you know, refactor that whole thing so that it does the same thing, just now with some more, some new bugs that [00:20:00] didn't exist before. Just leave it alone. Let it run. Have people who are dedicated to feeding the pet.
That's okay. But then as you move more toward this cattle based approach. Now you're talking about bringing up a whole new group of DevOps minded, automation, high scale people. And when you have problems, when you hit bugs, when your storage doesn't write effectively, when your server doesn't behave the way you expect it to, but you have this high scale mentality, who fixes that stuff?
Where do you get those skills of the underlying infrastructure as opposed to, right, at what point do we abstract this to such a high level? That when there's a problem, who do you call? I don't know, Ghostbusters can't
Brad Maltz: help you with that. I heard Gen I is going to take over. So Gen AI is going to do it all for us.
So just go hire a Gen II thing, right? We're all set. Yeah, we'll just ask
Bill Pfeifer: ChatGPT why storage isn't running. And then it'll crash because
Brad Maltz: storage isn't running. [00:21:00] You mean technology has to run AI? Mind blowing.
Bill Pfeifer: Exactly. Yes. Yeah. So where do we get the balance? I mean, we need so many new and different skills to run all the different ops models, right?
DevOps and FinOps and ITOps all the ops, but then who actually runs the storage or the compute?
Brad Maltz: So I think there's probably three things that are going to have to come together for us to really do this properly. One that you're poking at is people have to really look at their daily jobs and their careers.
What do you do on a daily basis? If you are somebody that is managing any infrastructure asset and all you do is live in pretty GUIs, And you, you watch pretty monitoring dashboards and you haven't thought about how you do less with more, then you're probably not prepped for the future. So you as an individual need to [00:22:00] start questioning, do I really need to be doing this task?
Or can I just automate this away? And now what does that mean? That means you might be like. Okay, as an individual, I don't know how to write code. I don't know Python. I don't know Goang. I don't know anything about this stuff. How do I even learn that? I think step one is to challenge yourself to even do the most basic levels of just Go try to learn some Python out of all the languages, probably the quickest and easiest to learn when it comes to kind of scripting things.
Step two is to start to look out into the community around you. And this is something that part of my role for the past roughly year, year and a half has been to try to become a better community partner. Go find your local DevOps days to set of conferences around the world is, I think, probably around 50 of them, at least there in tons and tons of cities, go meet people that are working with Terraform, with [00:23:00] Ansible, that are going to work with open source technologies, learning Kubernetes, you need to start to find some niche within the space of what you want to go learn.
So you have that set of things that I think you as an individual, you need to start educating yourself. And by the way, if you're scared, join the club. So is everybody else in the industry, right? This is don't assume that, Oh my God, that person over there is so good at whatever, you know, how they got there.
Because they learned it, they did it, and they made time for it. So that's number one is on you as an individual to challenge yourself. Number two is the industry itself. I believe technology and I'm, you know, we can make jokes about Gen AI and all that. I'm actually going to leave that off the list for right now.
I believe other technologies have actually gotten to the point that technology has finally become an augmentation, not a hindrance in these conversations. Back, I would say just 10 years [00:24:00] ago, maybe 12, 15 years ago, when you talked about, I need to automate something, you had to go learn bash scripts, you had to dig into the weeds of the original puppet and chefs that were out there.
And some of these things were really hard to utilize. They didn't work well. There were no ecosystems built up around them. And we as an industry, we're still working with things like bare metal operating systems, which were all snowflakes, depending on the pet application that ran on top of it. Well, now we have things like Kubernetes and containers and 12 factor applications that have become an ability to standardize away complexity and all the tools have followed along with those standardization capabilities.
So now you have the best chance to learn something because technology has progressed to the point. where the learning curve should be that much quicker for you. So
Bill Pfeifer: a different angle of that. If you were getting started in tech today, what would you focus on?
Brad Maltz: Oh, that's a [00:25:00] hard one. Bitcoin. No, maybe not.
We'll skip the crypto thing. Five years
Bill Pfeifer: ago. Yes,
Brad Maltz: exactly. Let's see. I guess I'm going to make this a little bit of a question. So it's a multiple choice kind of answer. It depends like every other IT answer. Where do your passions lie is I guess what I'm going to push back on. If you as a person love working with other people.
Which is one side of the equation. And you want to do that from a technology enablement perspective. Then you might want to start to learn about things like service catalogs, like developer experiences, like platform experiences. You might want to learn about technologies like MFEs, micro front ends.
Things like that, where part of your job is to think about user journeys and workflows and [00:26:00] how your end users are going to consume the things that you are actually developing inside of the platform. That's an area that we have people in the industry, but I think it's an area that most people in IT are not very well versed in.
On the other end of the spectrum, if you're somebody that loves to basically optimize your life, if you're somebody that likes to make every single task you're doing on a daily basis easier, you should get into the infrastructure as code automation type of game. Pipelines, a lot of that stuff, you should figure out how do I convert process into code to another group of people out there that love that part of it.
And then comes the people that I'm going to say are the weirdest people of them all, but you gotta love them. People that love to troubleshoot, the people that love to basically take a problem on that's just seems to be either [00:27:00] unsolvable or an issue. And what those people are able to do if they have an issue is they should be able to get into something like SRE.
And in the SRE space, what you're actually looking at is people that need to be able to be triaging, continuously optimizing, and working on kind of fixing All the different systems within the customer, all the way from the experience down to the automation. So
Bill Pfeifer: with all of that, I mean, I came in from more of a classical IT approach, right?
And I ran my datacenter from end to end. And now I look at what we're doing with datacenters, with clouds, with the edge, and capturing the data and cleaning it. is a whole subspecialty that is massively complex. Doing something with that data is a whole subspecialty that's massively complex. This is to say nothing of, you know, then building the applications and deploying them, deploying the hardware, dealing with the security aspects, which is even more complex than all of that stuff because it's [00:28:00] constantly evolving.
And so this idea of, you know, you're going to learn all of IT at this point is, Boy, that's, that's a tall order. 100%. So with all of those, with all of that fragmentation, with all of those specialty areas, who sits in the middle orchestrating all of that stuff? Who's looking at the comprehensive, like, this will all come together into an answer eventually?
Who sits at the center of that web?
Brad Maltz: There's a group of people that need to be able to look at that experience, that catalog, that how we deal with applications on the north side of this. And they have to be able to translate that to all the people behind the scenes that are operating the bits, that are writing the automation.
That's the middle group. And that group is kind of a piece of this newer concept called platform engineering, which is the concept of the business from an [00:29:00] IT perspective has to learn from the public cloud, has to learn about what the cloud did well, which is basically delivering. Such an awesome experience and abstracting away the complexity of infrastructure that people were happy just giving their credit card and starting to deploy an application.
Now the business needs to do the exact same thing. And this group of platform engineering folks have to be that. Unifying force under the covers to basically figure out how do they deliver that platform with the right experience, with all the right piece parts, between a set of guardrails that they can manage at scale and all of that is that middle group that I think that you're hitting on.
Okay,
Bill Pfeifer: so it's kind of like SRE plus project manager.
Brad Maltz: Product. It's actually product manager. So I'm going to actually take that one step further. I think project manager versus product manager are very different, [00:30:00] right? A project manager is just somebody trying to keep this project on the rails more closer to program manager.
Typically, product manager is somebody that's always thinking about their end user. And how the end user is consuming the thing and where the next set of requirements are coming from. Well, that platform engineering team is a product. The platform is a product. How do you deliver that as a product to your end users?
So it's a nuance, but I think it's an important nuance because IT traditionally doesn't think about products. They consume products from Dell and all of the vendors out there. Now they are a product engineering team themselves.
Bill Pfeifer: That's an interesting. Angle for that conversation. Okay. I like that.
Brad Maltz: My job's to throw you off today, right?
So. I love it.
Bill Pfeifer: Yeah, this is totally unscripted and it's flowing really well. And I love it. We're just kind of bouncing all over the place. And I'm so glad to have you here. So as we [00:31:00] have all of this fragmentation and we're building platforms and we have DevOps and infrastructure as code and all of these pieces that are sort of pulling it together, but abstracting out the locations, will the terms data center, cloud and edge even matter moving forward or does it just become a platform that runs where the pieces need to run and the platform decides that?
Brad Maltz: That's a great question. Let me go the theoretical route. I would actually challenge to say the terms edge, data center, and cloud are market texture terms. I'll explain what I mean for the audience in a minute. But if you are truly in the development of the platform and the platform experience, when you designate a location as a site type, you are probably not calling it a edge data center [00:32:00] cloud.
You might be calling it a zone. A site, you're using most likely a more standardized term to the point that I think what you're hinting at, and I agree with, shouldn't you be managing the edge, the cloud, and the data center from a set of common abstractions and a common experience? And maybe you didn't say that, but that's where I'm going to go with it.
Because why not? You might have a different set of end users. You might have a different set of hands in the data center, public cloud. You have zero hands because you don't know about them. They're little elves and dwarfs and gnomes behind the scenes that are having fun with the infrastructure in the data center.
You probably know who the hands are because you're probably friends with them and or you pay the people. So you know who they are in the colo at the edge. You won't know who they are because they're not in IT. They're most likely, as we mentioned before, people that have some other job in the company. So how do you deal with three types of physical local people in a [00:33:00] standardized way?
And do you truly need to designate that physical destination as an edge versus cloud versus data center? I don't think you do. I think you're going to start calling them out based on their requirements. Based on the governance side of the business. And that's how you start actually designating each of those sites or zones.
Yeah, that
Bill Pfeifer: resonates. So, I'm going through sort of some internal questions right now, and it's just fun to have this conversation outside, too, at the same time. Why not? But really, you know, we had data centers since forever, and a cloud is just a very big data center with some nice usability software laid on top of it.
So, you don't have to focus on the pieces of infrastructure, and the edge is Tiny distributed data centers with hopefully some software overlaid. So you're not as aware of the locality, but then it's all kind of the same, you know, it's just a layer of [00:34:00] technology that we slather onto various spaces or all over the spaces, but as they start to come together into this larger abstraction, what do we call it?
I don't know. I'm still wrestling with that. It's going to end up being referred to as something, otherwise it's going to keep being called data centers and clouds and edges. And we've got people that are talking about the far edge, the near edge, the thin edge, the thick edge, the industrial edge, the retail edge, like all these different, you know, so now we have.
40 different kinds of edges depending on who you're talking to. And do you slice it by industry or by compute power or by how far it is from you?
Brad Maltz: Or, well, you're, but you're hitting on what I was saying is every type of edge is usually driven by a requirement. Thin edge. Well, that's a footprint discussion.
Far edge. Well, that's probably a networking conversation, right? [00:35:00] And footprint plus networking. See. I think the reason edge emerged into this problem space of all the edges is simply because you have a lot more physically driven use cases than you typically do in the data center or the cloud. Can you pull them all together into one vernacular that you're talking about them all through the same language?
You could, I would debate why, what's the benefit of that? Is it because we don't want to say that there's 30 different types of edges and we can't figure it out? Sure. But again, that goes back to, I don't know if we're going to land on a term that's going to let us define all of that together as one. I think we're too young and immature in the operating model of the industry right now.
That's
Bill Pfeifer: fair. That's fair. It's the engineer in me. I want some precision and some specificity. And, you know, 15 years ago, there were all these conversations about what is the cloud anyway? [00:36:00] And everyone had their own definition of what it was and where it was and why it mattered. And now we're back to that with the edge.
And I don't want to have 15 years of conversation. Before everyone just kind of loosely understands what the edge is, but can't exactly say it, like we still have these conversations about what exactly is the cloud and what makes it a cloud versus not a cloud. And now we're, we're overlaying the edge on top of that.
And it's just going to get. Messy, and that's okay. You
Brad Maltz: can equate it back to like psychology where, you know, at some point they had to go and define all the personality types. And then all of a sudden you had all these different systems out there that, well, are you a type A, are you a type B, are you a type EI or an FG, or all of a sudden you had, and you had to then understand what did that mean?
Oh. That means that I'm this type of personality. You're trying to almost do the same thing and come up with a model to define the broader edge data center, cloud vernacular into one. [00:37:00] It is a very logically engineer scientist driven thought process. You're giving me
Bill Pfeifer: edge therapy.
Brad Maltz: Basically, you'll become the Edge doctor.
I think I have a new podcast for you. There you go. There you go.
Bill Pfeifer: All right. So getting back on track with the actual point of this, what are you most excited about that's going to be coming with the rise of Edge, the rise of platform engineering, the rise of, you know, the ongoing operation and integration of DevOps and DevRel into Regular IT operations and businesses with all this stuff that's changing and moving and coming.
What are you looking forward to most in the coming years?
Brad Maltz: Acceleration of our daily work lives. And what I mean by that is we're in enough conversations now where half the time we're talking about things like we've been doing a little bit on this call, things that we've been [00:38:00] doing for 20 years, and we still operate the same way.
I think we're at that inflection point where there is a large enough majority in the industry, in the world that is trying to push for. Operating differently, finally, and what I'm excited about is as we move into that world that operates more efficiently, more automated, using newer technologies, what is IT beyond that?
What if we didn't have to go and do those 50 tasks that you do as an IT person on a daily basis? And you have that time back, but you still have the job of operating outcomes and applications. What does your job look like? And I think that's what excites me is technology is getting us to the point that we can change how we operate over the next five to 10 years.
Then what is our job in 10 years from now? That's I think pretty cool to think about is [00:39:00] let's go start thinking about that.
Bill Pfeifer: It's going to be interesting to see where that takes us all. Yeah. I, I saw a conversation not too long ago with one of the communication service providers that the CTO, CIO, someone, someone high up in one of the, one of the CSPs.
And he said that his company actually had a, a, a, a, a, a As many as or more data scientists than Google, but none of their data scientists were Google data scientists. Right? Like there's a, there's a tiering there and they're not doing that like high level build the next massive AI model kind of stuff.
They were executing the AI models and they were doing it quite respectably. It's going to be interesting to see where that takes us, right? Like now we've got rockstar data scientists. Like when we were kids. Being a math nerd wasn't like, wow, you're a rock star math nerd. Uh, sorry, what? You know what I want to be when I grow up?[00:40:00]
A math nerd.
Brad Maltz: Hey, it paid off for all those data scientists, right? No doubt.
Bill Pfeifer: Yeah. Who's laughing now? Exactly. So, yeah. It's going to be really fascinating to see where that takes us. What comes next for, for you? You've gone through AI, you've gone through DevOps, you've gone through DevRel. I mean, you're getting more into like the person side of the, the people side of it and helping to lay out career pathing and stuff like that, as you just did.
You gave some really great advice there. Where do you go next?
Brad Maltz: That's an open question. I think what I'm enjoying now, again, eight years CTO office at Dell EMC, now one year plus one and a half years in product management and plus the DevRel stuff, I think for me, when I first joined EMC, I think I quickly mentioned this, right.
My goal coming out of that field facing customer facing world was to try to truly change EMC from [00:41:00] the inside out to help products deliver more value, to deliver better experiences. I think I'm in an interesting position now inside of Dell where I have the opportunity to kind of bring forward more of that.
Other person thought process, not the traditional server storage person, but the DevOps, platform engineer, SRE type of people. And I think my mission for a while going forward is to help our portfolio satisfy, That future state we're talking about to help us get to that fully automated world, full observability, thinking about outcomes, delivering developer experiences, and really looking at Dell Technologies portfolio as a larger portfolio consumed as a platform instead of a whole bunch of piece parts.
I think that's really where all of my past experiences have really brought me to at [00:42:00] this point. That's a pretty big goal. Ah, it's small. I can solve it.
Bill Pfeifer: Well, yeah, I mean, API based and centrally manageable and abstract out the hardware a little bit more. And yeah, I could see you getting there, but that would make a real difference.
That's, yeah.
Brad Maltz: People I think they mistake abstraction of technology with commoditization of technology. They're not the same thing. This is maybe a rattle for one minute. Is, when you look at abstractions, abstractions are designed to help hide things under the covers. And to automate complex tasks underneath it so the consumption is easier.
That does not mean you cannot surface value added storage, server, OS, other features up through the abstractions. And I think when people look at Adele. [00:43:00] And they say, Oh, Kubernetes is the new landscape that we're working in, and that's our abstraction of choice. Well, guess what? Even in the Kubernetes space, you need to define your AIML applications properly to consume the right GPUs, the right networking configs, the right security paradigms, all that stuff under the covers.
And I think the challenge that I do enjoy going after is Through that portfolio view, the platform view of the portfolio. How do we as Dell make it easier to consume our portfolio while surfacing all of the Dell value add from storage, from server, from data production, from all the pieces that we have under the covers.
That's the challenge that I'm trying to take on now. And I believe we can do it. It's just a big task. Very
Bill Pfeifer: cool. That's a fun place to wrap up, I think we probably should, because otherwise we'll just keep doing this all day. Totally. So Brad, how can people find you online and keep up with the latest stuff?
Brad Maltz: So let's see, multiple ways. You can always get me on LinkedIn, very active on [00:44:00] LinkedIn all the time. Sort of active on Twitter and, or X as you should call it now, at bmaltz if you want. I don't really tweet as much, but you can contact me on there.
Bill Pfeifer: All right. Well, Brad, thank you so much for the time and the perspective.
It was a really fun conversation. I hope everyone enjoyed listening to it as much as we enjoyed having it. Thank you, Bill.
Narrator 2: That does it for this episode of Over the Edge. If you're enjoying the show, please leave a rating and a review and tell a friend. Over the Edge is made possible through the generous sponsorship of our partners at Dell Technologies.
Simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting dell. com slash edge.