This episode of Over the Edge features an interview between Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios and Matt Trifiro, Chief Marketing Officer at Vapor IO. In this episode Ian and Matt discuss the future and evolution of Edge computing, its scope and definition, and what that means for this podcast. They go over how Edge computing is powering the evolution of the internet grid, and what’s driving change in the industry. Ian and Matt also delve into the requirements for real time responsiveness, speed, and bandwidth to accomplish everything from complex computations to simply running a home appliance, which blur the line between what is traditionally considered the Edge and the Internet.
This episode of Over the Edge features an interview between Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios and Matt Trifiro, Chief Marketing Officer at Vapor IO.
Matt leads Vapor IO’s global marketing, branding and communications efforts. He is an expert in strategic positioning and edge computing, Co-chair of the State of the Edge Report, and Chair of The Linux Foundation’s Open Glossary of Edge Computing. He is an expert at strategic positioning, category creation, and PR. Matt always asks a lot of questions in search of the threads of understanding that move markets.
In this episode Ian and Matt discuss the future and evolution of Edge computing, its scope and definition, and what that means for this podcast. They go over how Edge computing is powering the evolution of the internet grid, and what’s driving change in the industry. Ian and Matt also delve into the requirements for real time responsiveness, speed, and bandwidth to accomplish everything from complex computations to simply running a home appliance, which blur the line between what is traditionally considered the Edge and the Internet.
“As we improve the technology for virtual reality and augmented reality, and we reduce the weight of those headsets and the need to have a tether and all of these things, it may in fact become a much more compelling experience than it is today, which already is a fairly compelling experience. What are the challenges in delivering all these new experiences though Is that the internet can't do. It's not fast enough, it's not close enough. Or you start dealing with the speed of light as a problem among others and the infrastructure and the mechanisms to deliver these new kinds of services.”
“What's the difference between edge and on premises? Nobody has a good answer. The real answer is nobody cares. Nobody cares where the computer is. You just want it to work. And so what's much more important is that we build the infrastructure and the software systems that allow us to place workloads that are, whether it is driving a factory, or autonomous car, or a streetlight, or AI inferencing for a video camera, or a game for my twelve-year-old - you want suffer systems that place these workloads at the right place automatically and run them autonomously at machine speeds, which we've never been able to do before.”
“This idea that as a user, you're not thinking about where the electricity is coming from or how it's getting to you, or whether it's the right voltage or how many Hertz it's cycling between positive and negative. You're not thinking about any of that because that's not important. Just as long as your dishwasher, or your blender, or your coffee machine works, that's what you care about. And all this other very, very complex stuff happens on the backend in order for that to be possible. But you don't care about it, just as long as it works, and that's how the internet should be.”
“There's a lot of insights that come from one field that when applied to another field, give you advanced technology. So, biology applied to engineering or engineering applied to biology, or neuroscience applied to chemistry. It's really interesting how different fields create different metaphors and ways of things that when applied in a new field, create insight. And I just want to create that opportunity for more people to understand how all these pieces might fit together, to be excited about it, but also just to elevate the understanding of how the world works.”
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 DellTechnologies.com/SimplifyYourEdge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
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[00:00:00] Narrator: Hello and welcome to Over the Edge.
Today’s episode features an interview between Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios and Matt Trifiro, Chief Marketing Officer at Vapor IO.
Matt leads Vapor IO’s global marketing. He co-founded the State of the Edge project at The Linux Foundation and is considered one of the world’s foremost experts on edge computing and the emerging open grid. As host of this podcast, Matt searches continuously for understanding and insights on what moves markets and what’s impacting the future of connectivity.
In this episode Ian and Matt discuss the future and evolution of Edge computing, its scope and definition, and what that means for this podcast. They go over how Edge computing is powering the evolution of the internet grid, and what’s driving change in the industry. Ian and Matt also delve into the requirements for real time responsiveness, speed, and bandwidth to accomplish everything from complex computations to simply running a home appliance. They talk about how the lines between what is traditionally considered the Edge, and the Internet, are starting to blur.
But before we get into it, here’s a brief word from our sponsors…
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 for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
And now, please enjoy this interview between Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios and Matt Trifiro, Chief Marketing Officer at Vapor IO.
[00:01:45] Ian Faison: Welcome to over the edge. I mean phase on CEO of Caspian studios. And I have our wonderful host with me here today, Matt, how are you?
[00:01:54] Matt Trifiro: I'm doing terrific, Ian, how are you doing? I'm doing
[00:01:56] Ian Faison: great. I'm excited. We got seasoned [00:02:00] two. Ready for the listeners. And we wanted to talk about that a little bit. Talk about what's changed in the industry, what we're going to expect in season two and all things edge as always.
[00:02:12] Ian Faison: So first off, Matt, why the heck has it taken so long to get season two going
[00:02:17] Matt Trifiro: we're waiting for the right sponsor, which is Dell, but now honestly, the industry has gone through quite a bit. Of changes. And I really struggled with edge computing as a concept because we had interviewed most of the people that I thought had anything to say about edge, but also the more time I spent in this world, the more I realized that the edge is kind of an artificial construction that actually most people who consume the services that edge competing with.
[00:02:49] Matt Trifiro: I don't care where the computers, they just care that it works
[00:02:53] Ian Faison: interesting. And so edge is changing. The future of the internet is changing constantly. [00:03:00] I was just watching the Adam project on Netflix. Boy, things get crazy in 2050. Let me tell you, we got time travel. We got space flights, but in the interim, the internet is changing.
[00:03:12] Ian Faison: What's driving the changes in the industry.
[00:03:14] Matt Trifiro: Well, there's a lot of things. I think that at a very high level, you've got companies. Metta AK Facebook moving significantly in a new direction, looking to create the metaverse. And whether you believe you actually want to sit in a 3d virtual world and interact with your coworkers, mark shows in the video or not, the metaphor is going to happen.
[00:03:38] Matt Trifiro: It may take many different forms. I mean, my kids play Fortnite. That's a metaverse in some ways it is a artificial world that you step into with your computer. And we have historically made those experiences more and more real. And as we improve the technology for virtual reality and [00:04:00] augmented reality, and we reduce the weight of those headsets and the need to have a tether and all of these things, it may in fact become a much more compelling experience than it is today, which already is a fairly compelling experience.
[00:04:15] Matt Trifiro: What are the challenges in delivering all these new experiences though? Is that the internet can't do. It's not fast enough. It's not close enough. You start dealing with the speed of light as a problem among others and the infrastructure and the mechanisms to deliver these new kinds of services in London.
[00:04:36] Matt Trifiro: It's just talking about virtual reality, but I mean, digital twins to improve how a city operates, how a factory operates, artificial intelligence for crowd control and security and all of these capabilities. Really require real time responsiveness and the internet is really good at getting. The signal from one part of the world to the other [00:05:00] part of the world, but it's a best effort.
[00:05:02] Matt Trifiro: And for humans consuming things for most things, we do best efforts. Fine. If this call has a little bit of an audio delay or anything like that, we as humans, it's not that big of a blip. I mean, if my LinkedIn takes another quarter of a second to refresh it doesn't affect my day, but machines operate at such a different scale.
[00:05:24] Matt Trifiro: The scale of nanoseconds and microseconds and milliseconds, and the internet is going to become largely machines talking to machines, and we need a new infrastructure for that. And for a long time, we called that edge computing. But. I mean, you can ask people where's the edge. In fact, that was what we did for the first, like five or six episodes.
[00:05:46] Matt Trifiro: We say where's the edge. But I actually started asking a different question, which is what's the difference between edge and on premises. And nobody has a good answer. And the real answer is nobody cares. [00:06:00] Nobody cares where the computer is. You just want it to work. And so what's much more important is that we build the infrastructure and the software systems that allow us to place workloads that are, whether that's driving a factory or autonomous car or a streetlight or.
[00:06:18] Matt Trifiro: AI inferencing for a video camera or a game for my twelve-year-old. You want suffer systems that place these workloads at the right place automatically and run them autonomously at machine speeds, which we've never been able to do before I be
[00:06:33] Ian Faison: to defer that to any latency in this podcast would not traumatically natively affect me.
[00:06:40] Ian Faison: No, it's I mean, it's very point. The end user never came. They just want it to work.
[00:06:44] Matt Trifiro: We're all end-users. I mean, that's what it is. And I mean, you think about like, what is the services deliver of a unit? Well, it's a computer that's producing some output based on some input. That's all it is. Right. And the difference between having a computer on my desk, That I'm [00:07:00] interacting with it.
[00:07:00] Matt Trifiro: You're not playing with a video game. That's not connect to the internet. And just playing is that all the input output is happening between me and the machine. That's under my desk. The internet is just taking that machine and putting it somewhere else. I mean, I'm oversimplifying it, but that's essentially what it is, but now we've got, I mean, the cloud is millions and millions of machines that are all attached to these.
[00:07:22] Matt Trifiro: And theoretically, you could take a workload, whether it's a game or an AI inferencing or a financial transaction and run it anywhere. So how do you figure out where do you run it? So one thing might be performance, which is really what drove edge computing for so long was latency. So I need to run this workload close enough to the end user so that it minimizes the number of network hops, the reduces the amount of congestion and.
[00:07:50] Matt Trifiro: Frankly scapes the speed of light because it's closer because at nanosecond and microsecond scale distance matters, the speed of light actually matters. [00:08:00] I figured out what just play sit close enough. So that works. But when you're actually trying to place workloads, you really want to consider a lot more than just latency and speed, and then give you some.
[00:08:11] Matt Trifiro: So what about carbon footprint? What if I want to run my workloads? So that minimize its, its its carbon impact or cost. I want to run my workloads so they minimize costs or I want to re run my workloads to maximize resilience. I mean, and you can come up with an infinite number of potential possibilities.
[00:08:30] Matt Trifiro: And so in this future, we're starting to think of this next generation internet as a grid, which is sort of funny because. If you look at the history of cloud computing, sun Microsystems, which now is just a, a brand that Oracle owns. But so Microsystems was the, I mean, they, they came up with the phrase.
[00:08:50] Matt Trifiro: The network is the computer. They sun was the foundation of the internet and many, the modern internet in many, many, many, many. And they created before [00:09:00] Amazon web services was even a gleaming, Mr. Bezos, his I that created this concept of cloud computing, but they called it the grid. It was called sun grid.
[00:09:11] Matt Trifiro: And the reason they call it, the grid is because they said, look, compute should be like electricity. Like. You have all these devices in your house and you plug them into the wall and they work. We should be able to connect to compute in the internet and draw upon as much power as we need when we need it.
[00:09:30] Matt Trifiro: And then when we don't need it, it goes to somebody else. And so in some ways, when we talk about this idea of a grid, we're paying homage to. The early pioneers, sun Microsystems, but also this, again, this idea that as a user, you're not thinking about where the electricity is coming from or how it's getting to you, or whether it's the right voltage or how many Hertz it's cycling between positive and negative.
[00:09:58] Matt Trifiro: You're not thinking about any of [00:10:00] that because. That's not important. You just, as long as your dishwasher or your blender or your coffee machine works, that's what you care about. And all this other very, very complex stuff happens on the backend in order for that to be possible. But you know, you don't care about it.
[00:10:16] Matt Trifiro: You just, as long as it works and that's how the internet should be, but that's at least that's the direction I see it going. And as you know, edge computing is a part of that, but it's so much more interesting and complex. So
[00:10:28] Ian Faison: you are Dr. Edge. Are you going to be Dr. Greg? Now I
[00:10:31] Matt Trifiro: actually, I actually changed my Twitter handle for like a hot minute Dr.
[00:10:36] Matt Trifiro: Grid. And then I just said, oh, I don't, I don't know what I'm going to do. I may just retire that count altogether. Cause I have like 15,000 followers from an earlier life that have nothing to do with the future of the internet and just start a new account. But, um,
[00:10:52] Ian Faison: in fact, over the years,
[00:10:56] Matt Trifiro: I am. I'm glad we picked that name for the [00:11:00] podcast, because I think we can do this repositioning of it that I want to do to take it in this direction of the future of the internet without changing the name.
[00:11:09] Ian Faison: It's very appropriate. And also like, I mean, I think there's a lot of power in terms and knowing that all of the work that you've done on state of the edge and how much work everybody in vendors and people have done on edge, it's like the edge. It's not like you said it doesn't go away. It's more just.
[00:11:24] Ian Faison: We need to, up-level the conversation to be inclusive of this idea that like it's probably changed and evolved in a way that we need to talk about it slightly differently than we used to even a year ago, which is crazy. But that's how fast things go.
[00:11:42] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. Well, I mean, I liked the power of metaphor because you can go back into history, but if you go back and look at these old Sears catalogs back when Sears was a company, Had some presence as a brand and sent out these printed catalogs and electricity was [00:12:00] relatively new for at the time modern American homes.
[00:12:05] Matt Trifiro: That's what you bought. You bought a motor and you bought all these attachments to the motor. You bought a washing machine attachment and a dishwasher attachment and all these things. You had a motor. And now when we buy appliances in our house, like many of them have motors, but we don't, I don't think about it.
[00:12:21] Matt Trifiro: I don't think about the motor. And most of them have computers. I mean, I actually had a coffee grinder really, really high end expensive. I paid way too much. This coffee. And look mind you. I work in technology, right? And it's, it started misbehaving. It was kind of not really grinding. So I sent a video into customer support and I said, it helped me with this.
[00:12:41] Matt Trifiro: And they said, well, look at cereal and all this we'll help you replace it. But before we do that, Try unplugging it for 10 seconds and plugging it back in. We actually did. So, you know, it turns out like coffee grinder has a computer in it and yes, I unplugged it and plugged it back in and it works perfectly.[00:13:00]
[00:13:00] Matt Trifiro: And I think so much in our world, we're constantly creating these new there's a phrase. And I don't, I wish I knew who came up with it, but like all problems in computer science are solved by new levels of abstraction. And I think that's really true as we. Problems. We push them down lower. Like we have motors that work reliably for years.
[00:13:19] Matt Trifiro: So we don't think about them anymore. Now we're building these smarts on top of the motor that like sensed the dirt that's in the water and add the right amount of detergent to perfectly clean your clothes. And pretty soon there'll be robots folding our clothes, and those will all have motors in them, but we won't think of it.
[00:13:37] Matt Trifiro: A bunch of motors. We'll think of it as a close folding robot that just works. I
[00:13:42] Ian Faison: think Sears went downhill after robot cleft to be fully honest, but we didn't know. It's crazy that we got a plug in that you're right. It's like we need a hard reset for things that are physical now. And it speaks to how important and how complex all this stuff is.
[00:13:55] Ian Faison: So obviously you co-founded state of the edge and [00:14:00] you've been involved in, in edge for a long time. As we mentioned, this podcast is changing. So, what is this podcast going to be? Who are we going to be talking to? Obviously still leaders in edge, but who
[00:14:11] Matt Trifiro: else they say that most books get written because the person can't find the book they want to read.
[00:14:17] Matt Trifiro: So they write it themselves. And I can't find the podcasts that I want to listen to on this topic, which is really, really in depth, thinking on thought leadership on the future of the internet. Brought to a wide audience and an audience of intelligent, you know, it's kind of like the scientific American of the internet.
[00:14:38] Matt Trifiro: Sure. So you bring the experts in, but you don't expect them to talk directly to other experts in, or at least not to people that have the same level of expertise. And my job as an interviewer is to draw out of them, the explanations and insights in a way that. Ian Faison can understand [00:15:00] and make sense of and learn from without having to go get an engineering degree.
[00:15:06] Matt Trifiro: And there's so much, it's interesting, you know? One of the guests hearing minor.
[00:15:11] Ian Faison: Thank you, Matt. Okay. Systems engineering.
[00:15:18] Matt Trifiro: Oh boy. Do I have egg on my face? Well, I have not seen your engineering chops yet, so, so I apologize. I'm sure they're there, but, but no, either the long gone they're long gone long
[00:15:30] Ian Faison: gone
[00:15:31] Matt Trifiro: that I, I mean, I used to program computers.
[00:15:34] Matt Trifiro: I can't program my way out of a paper bag. But I really enjoy learning about technology, but not at a superficial level. I like learning about like, actually want to know how it works. I don't want to be able to repair my Tesla, but I do want to know how it works. I'm interested in it because it, it fascinates me.
[00:15:52] Matt Trifiro: And one of the things I've learned in my career is that there's a lot of insights that come from one field that when applied to [00:16:00] another field, Advanced the technology. So biology applied engineering or engineering applied to biology or neuroscience applied to chemistry. It's really interesting how different fields create different metaphors and ways of thinking that when applied in a new field create insight, and I want to create that opportunity for more people to understand how all these pieces might fit together to be excited about it.
[00:16:24] Matt Trifiro: But also just to elevate the understanding of how the world works. What's the open grid line. So the upgrade Alliance is a, it's kind of like stay to the edge 2.0, in some ways, although it's not a research organization, the upgrade Alliance was founded by six companies that the two lead founders were the company that I worked for, which is vapor IO and VMware who most people know is the server and data center and network everything virtualization company.
[00:16:50] Matt Trifiro: And we had a vision of all these things that we talked about just a few minutes ago, which is. Creating a set of mechanisms and bringing [00:17:00] all the parties together necessarily. I mean, the groups now over 36 members includes heavy hitters like Intel and arm. And, you know, you kind of go down the list and it's, it's, it's a really, really August group of, of founding.
[00:17:14] Matt Trifiro: And the idea is to rearchitect the internet, not change the internet. I mean, not, not reinvent the internet, so to speak, but to, to augment it, to bring these new capabilities to the internet. So literally a developer could. Build a workload and handed off with all of its constraints. This needs to run in this geography with this level of security, with this carbon footprint at this cost or less, and this kind of latency and all of these things and the grid, just like your electric grid, just magically makes it happen.
[00:17:48] Matt Trifiro: And that's going to take a lot of collaboration and a lot of really, really hard engineering and AI and lots of data to analyze what that AI, but. In order to bring about this [00:18:00] future world and we need something like that. We need to be able to move workloads around globally in real time, optimized for whatever.
[00:18:09] Matt Trifiro: Use is necessary for a whole lot of reasons, but just kind of it's reached its peak, given its current architecture. And so we need to rearchitect it. And that's the, the OpenGov Alliance is an organization that's trying to spearhead some of that collaborative work in order to do that. So for
[00:18:26] Ian Faison: guests, for season two, we're not.
[00:18:29] Ian Faison: Tease out any here today, but there's a lot coming, a lot of heavy hitters come coming. We've been in the lab. We've been producing. You've been talking to people. We have some great stuff coming. Any, any teasers in terms of the type of conversations that we're going to be having here in season two?
[00:18:46] Matt Trifiro: Yeah, I think, I think one of the most interesting interviews is, is I get into, into what's called web three and it intersects the.
[00:18:58] Matt Trifiro: Uh, Bitcoin [00:19:00] crypto distributed ledger world. But the basic idea is, again, this idea that you can run workloads anywhere, which also means that anybody who owns a computer, whether it's your X-Box or a phone or your desktop machine, or a bunch of servers in a building, should be able to offer that for, for sale or rent.
[00:19:22] Matt Trifiro: And there should be a way to transact that there's a company called helium. And maybe we'll try to get their CEO on the show, but helium is you and I as a consumer buy a thousand dollar box and we stick it in our home, we plug it in and we're responsible for that box. We have to upgrade its software and do that.
[00:19:39] Matt Trifiro: And what that box does is it creates a, a part of a wireless network. And so it emanates from our house. And when other people use our wireless network that we're creating right. You get a little bit of money, you generate a, I guess, a helium coin or, or something of that sort. And so now there's this marketplace [00:20:00] of fungible assets, right.
[00:20:03] Matt Trifiro: That, that never existed before. I mean, there's nothing like quite like this, and I'm not entirely sure that it's really going to work at scale, but it's fascinating. I mean, even the environment. Opportunities are tremendous because 80% of the computers in the world are idle most of the time. And so why not use that excess capacity?
[00:20:23] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. That's why rather than building new computers and sticking them out there and all the toxic chemicals that go into them. Why not just get better utilization? We could easily quadruple or even quintuple the compute power of the world just by using all the machines that are out there more efficiently.
[00:20:40] Matt Trifiro: And I think creating a liquid marketplace. Workloads to run on, on computers and networks that other people help pay for is, is a pretty interesting way to do. And all of those
[00:20:53] Ian Faison: computers are in use when the new season of the bachelor drops. Matt, I'm super [00:21:00] excited. I love this show. It's really cool. Like you said, building something that isn't, isn't out there right now.
[00:21:06] Ian Faison: I know our listeners love it. Because we have had a bunch of people along for the ride for season one, and hopefully it will turn for season two, a lot of cool stuff in the works here, special shout out to Dell for being awesome and being our sponsor for this season. We'll be sharing a bunch more about Dell and the cool work that they're doing in edge and a bunch more to come there, but shout out to.
[00:21:31] Ian Faison: They're awesome, but we couldn't do it without them. And for our listeners, if you have recommendations for who you want to hear on the show, if you want to get your company involved in the show in some way, if you just want to hear Matt's thoughts, you can always ping us, uh, at team@caspianstudios.com or you can hit up Matt in many different places where he's on the internet and we'll link that up in the show notes.
[00:21:53] Matt Trifiro: Happy talk to yes. And I thank you, Ian. I think that's, that's one of the things I would like to do with season two is to expand [00:22:00] beyond the network that I have easy access to. I mean, I'd love to talk to the professor in Germany, that's working on something really amazing for the future of the internet or some startup entrepreneur in his or her twenties.
[00:22:13] Matt Trifiro: That's doing something interesting and I don't necessarily have access to those. So I really am looking to our listenership to help fill out season two and that'd be. Well, that's it. That's all we
[00:22:23] Ian Faison: got for today. Matt, any final thoughts here before I turn it over to you for the rest of the episodes? I like to just do my moonlighting on, uh, on episode one.
[00:22:32] Ian Faison: And
[00:22:33] Matt Trifiro: I really liked that we do this. We have to have a season three and we have to do this again where you just, you, you say, okay, what, what changed last time? How did this grid thing actually worked out with. That's right, correct. Yes. About to rename it over the grid. Now I don't have anything else. And I'm really looking forward to running our first episodes and recording the rest of the season.
[00:22:50] Matt Trifiro: Super exciting. Awesome. And thanks to
[00:22:52] Ian Faison: everyone who listens. We really appreciate it. And like I said, if you have any questions or ideas or anything, just send it to team@caspianstudios.com and we'll, [00:23:00] we'll filter it to the right place
[00:23:02] Matt Trifiro: 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.
[00:23:13] Matt Trifiro: Simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting dell.com.