Cloud Field Day

Day 2 of Cloud Field Day kicked off at Dell’s offices here in Santa Clara, which is a very nice Executive Briefing Center. It’s been a while since I’ve seen some Dell hardware, unfortunately I wasn’t able to get behind the glass to give these guys a hug. Dell started their presentation with Prateesh Sharma laying the groundwork for multi-cloud, and the important of a universal storage layer for companies who are trying to manage and operate across multiple environments.

You’ve likely heard stories and whispers of “on-prem” being sexy again, not that it ever wasn’t, right? But public cloud had a lot of promises, some of which it lives up to, some of which it doesn’t, and some of which it does but it’s just painfully expensive. If you’re considering a refresh of your on-prem solution, or are looking to move some or all workloads back to a solution you manage, its a great opportunity to revisit your requirements, and look at implementing an actual private cloud, rather than just a virtualisation platform which oh so many of us have seen and managed.

Cloud Field Day #19 kicked off with NeuroBlade, and I’m glad I had a coffee before hand, as data analytics is not my expertise, but I learned a lot in the session thanks to NeuroBlade and other delegates. “Revolutionizing Big Data Analytis with NeuroBlade’s SQL Processing Unit” NeuroBlade were founded in 2018, have over 120 employees, and $100m+ in capital funding. A key line they used during their funding round is they “Want to be the NVIDIA of Data Analytics”.

Most kubernetes clusters are running at 30% or less utilisation, which means there’s a lot of resource wastage out there in the wild, which translates to dollars being spent for no value. Platform9 want to help you save some money by tweaking the way you run your EKS clusters, and this same pattern could make its way to other managed kubernetes solutions in the future. Platform9 were founded in 2013 with a relatively clear mission: Democratize cloud computing.