>> Welcome back to the Seaport in Boston
and this is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022.
I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Paul Gillin.
Rob Belson is here
as the Developer Relations Lead at Verizon.
Robbie great to see you.
Thanks for coming on theCUBE.
>> Thanks for having me.
>> So Verizon and developer relations.
Talk about your role there.
Really interesting.
>> Absolutely.
If you think about our mobile edge computing portfolio
in Verizon 5G Edge,
suddenly the developer is a more important persona
than ever for actually adopting the cloud itself
and adopting the mobile edge.
So the question then quickly became
how do we go after developers
and how do we tell stories
that ultimately resonate with them?
And so my role has been spearheading
our developer relations
and experience efforts,
which is all about meeting developers
in the channels where they actually are,
building content that resonates with them.
Building out architectures that showcase
how do you actually use the technology in the wild?
And then ultimately creating automation assets
that make their lives easier in deploying
to the mobile edge.
>> So, you know, telcos get a bad rap,
when you're thinking it's amazing what you guys do.
You put out all this capital infrastructure,
big outlays.
You know, we use our phones to drop a call.
People like, "Ah, freaking Verizon."
But it's amazing what we can actually do too.
You think about the pandemic,
the shift that the telcos had to go through to landlines
to support home, never missed a beat.
And yet at the same time you're providing
all this infrastructure for people to come over the top,
the cost forbid is going down, right?
Your cost are going up
and yet now we're doing this big 5G buildup.
So I feel like there's a renaissance
about to occur in edge computing
that the telcos are going to lead new forms of monetization
new value that you're going to be able to add,
new services, new applications.
The future's got to be exciting for you guys
and it's going to be developer-led, isn't it?
>> Absolutely.
I mean it's been such an exciting time
to be a part of our mobile edge computing portfolio.
If you think back to late 2019
we were really asking the question
with the advent of high speed 5G mobile networks,
how can you drive more immersive experiences
from the cloud in a cloud native way
without compromising on the tools you know and love?
And that's ultimately what caused us to really work
with the likes of AWS and others to think
about what does a mobile edge computing portfolio look like?
So we started with 5G Edge with AWS Wavelength.
So taking the compute and storage services
you know and love in AWS
and bringing it to the edge of our 4G and 5G networks.
But then we start to think, well, wait a minute.
Why stop at public networks?
Let's think about private networks.
How can we bring the cloud and private networks together?
So you turn back to late 2021
we announced Verizon 5G Edge with AWS Outposts
but we didn't even stop there.
We said, "Well, interest's cool,
but what about network APIs?
We've been talking about the ability
and the programmability of the 5G network
but what does that actually look like to the developers?
And one great example is our Edge Discovery Service.
So you think about the proliferation
of the edge 17 Wavelength Zones today in the US.
Well, what edge is the right edge?
You think about maybe the airline industry
if the closest exit might be behind you
absolutely applies to service discovery.
So we've built an API that helps answer
that seemingly basic question
but is the fundamental building block for everything
to workload orchestration, workload distribution.
A basic network building block has become so important
to some of these new sources of revenue streams,
as we mentioned, but also the ability to disintermediate
that purpose built hardware.
You think about the future of autonomous mobile robots
either ground and aerial robotics.
Well, you want to make those devices as cheap as possible
but you don't want to compromise on performance.
And that mobile edge layer is going to become so critical
for that connectivity, but also the compute itself.
>> So I just kind of gave my little narrative up front
about telco, but that purpose built hardware
that you're talking about is exceedingly reliable.
I mean, it's hardened, it's fossilized
and so now as you just disaggregate that
and go to a more programmable infrastructure,
how are you able to and what gives you confidence
that you're going to be able to maintain that reliability
that I joke about?
Oh, but it's so reliable.
The network has amazing reliability.
How are you able to maintain that?
Is that just the pace of technology is now caught up,
I wonder if you can explain that?
>> I think it's really cool as I see reliability
and sort of geo distribution as inextricably linked.
So in a world where to get that best in class latency
you needed to go to one place and one place only.
Well, now you're creating some form
of single source of failure whether it's the power,
whether it's the compute itself,
whether it's the networking,
but with a more geo distributed footprint,
particularly in the mobile edge
more choices for where to deliver that immersive experience
you're naturally driving an increase in reliability.
But again, infra alone it's not going to do the job.
You need the network APIs.
So it's the convergence of the cloud
and network and infra and the automation behind it
that's been incredibly powerful.
And as a great example, the work we've been doing
in hybrid MEC the ability to converge
within one single architecture, the private network,
the public network, the AWS Outposts,
the AWS Wavelength all in one
has been such a fantastic journey
and Red Hat has been a really important part
in that journey.
>> From the perspective of the developer
when they're building a full cloud to edge application,
where does Verizon pick up?
Where do they start working primarily
with you versus with their cloud provider?
>> Absolutely.
And I think you touched on a really important point.
I think when you often think about the edge
it's thought of as an either, or.
Is it the edge?
Is it the cloud? Is it both?
It's an and I can't emphasize that enough.
What we've seen from the customers greenfield
or otherwise it's about extending an application
or services that were never intended to live at the edge,
to the edge itself,
to deliver a more performant experience.
And for certain control plane operations,
metadata, backend operations analytics
that can absolutely stay in the cloud itself.
And so our role is to be a trusted partner
in some of our enterprise customers' journeys.
Of course, they can lean on the cloud provider
in select cases, but we're an absolutely critical mode
of support as you think about what are those architectures?
How do you integrate the network APIs?
And through our developer relations efforts,
we've put a major role in helping to shape
what those patterns really look like in the wild.
>> When they're developing for 5G
I mean, the availability of 5G of particularly
you know, the high bandwidth 5G is pretty spotty right now.
Mostly urban areas.
How should they be thinking in the future
developing an application roll out two years from now
about where 5G will be at that point?
>> Absolutely.
I think one of the most important things
in this case is the interoperability
of our edge computing portfolio with both 4G and 5G.
Whenever somebody asks me about the performance of 5G
they ask how fast?
Or for edge computing.
It's always about benchmark.
It's not an absolute value.
It's always about benchmarking the performance
to that next best alternative.
What were you going to get if you didn't have edge computing
in your back pocket?
And so along that line of thought
having the option to go either through 4G or 5G,
having a mobile edge computing portfolio
that works for both modes of connectivity
even CAN-AM IoT is incredibly powerful.
>> So it sounds like 4G is going to be with us
for quite a while still?
>> And I think it's an important part of the architecture.
>> Yeah.
>> Robert, tell us about the developer
that's building these applications.
Where does that individual come from?
What's their persona?
>> Oh, boy I think there's a number
of different personas and flavors.
I've seen everything from the startup
in the back of a garage working hard
to try to figure out what could I do
for a next generation media and entertainment experience
but also large enterprises.
And I think a great area where we saw this
was our 5G Edge Computing Challenge
that we hosted last year.
Believe it or not 100 submissions
from over 22 countries,
all building on Verizon 5G Edge.
It was so exciting to see
because so many different use cases across public safety,
healthcare, media and entertainment.
And what we found was that education is so important.
A lot of developers have great ideas
but if you don't understand the fundamentals
of the infrastructure you get bogged down
in networking and setting up your environment.
And that's why we think
that developer education is so important.
We want to make it easy
and in fact, the 5G Edge portfolio was designed
in such a way that we'll abstract the complexities
of the network away
so you can focus on building your application
and that's such a central theme
and focus for how we approach the development.
>> So what kind of services are you exposing via APIs?
>> Absolutely, so first and foremost, as you think
about 5G Edge with say AWS Wavelength, the infra
there are APIs that are exposed by AWS to launch your infra,
to patch your infrastructure,
to automate your infrastructure.
Specifically that Verizon has developed
that's our network APIs.
And a great example is our Edge Discovery Service.
So think of this as like a service registry
you've launched an application in all 17 edge zones.
You would take that information,
you would send it via API to the Edge Discovery Service
so that for any mobile client say,
you wake up one morning in Boston,
you can ask the API or query,
"Hey, what's the closest edge zone?"
DNS isn't going to be able to figure it out.
You need knowledge of the actual topology
of the mobile network itself.
So the API will answer.
Let's say you take a little road trip
1,000 miles south to say Miami, Florida
you ask that question again.
It could change.
So that's the workflow
and how you would use the network API today.
>> How'd you get into this?
You're an engineer it's obvious
how'd you stumble into this role?
>> Well, yeah, I have a background in networks
and distributed systems
so I always knew I wanted to stay in the cloud somewhere.
And there was a really unique opportunity at Verizon
as the portfolio was being developed to really think
about what this developer community looked like.
And we built this all from scratch.
If you look at say our Verizon 5G Edge Blog
we launched it just along the timing
of the actual GA of Wavelength.
You look at our developer newsletter also
around the time of the launch of Wavelength.
So we've done a lot in such a short period
and it's all been sort of organic,
interacting with developers,
working backwards from the customer.
And so it's been a fairly new,
but incredibly exciting journey.
>> How will your data, architecture, data flow
what will that look like in the future?
How will that be different than it is sort of historically?
>> When I think about customer workloads
real time data architecture is an incredibly difficult
thing to do.
When you overlay the edge, admittedly,
it gets more complicated.
More places that produce the data,
more places that consume data.
How do you reconcile all of these environments?
Maintain consistency?
This is absolutely something we've been working on
with the ecosystem at large.
We're not going to solve this alone.
We've looked at architecture patterns
that we think are successful.
And some of the things that we found that
we believe are pretty cool this idea of taking
that embedded mobile database,
virtualizing it to the edge,
even making it multi-tenant.
And then you're producing data to one single source
and simplifying how you organize and share data
because all of the data being produced to that one location
will be relevant to that topology.
So Boston, as an example, Boston data being produced
to that edge zone will only service Boston clients.
So having a geo distributed footprint really
does help data architectures,
but at the core of all of this
database, architectures, you need a compute environment
that actually makes sense.
That's performant, that's reliable.
That's easy to use
that you understand how to manage
and that the edge doesn't make it any more
difficult to manage.
>> So are you building that?
>> That's exactly what we're doing.
So here at Red Hat Summit we've had the unique opportunity
to continue to collaborate with our partners at Red Hat
to think about how you actually use OpenShift
in the context of hybrid MEC.
So what have done is we've used OpenShift as is to extend
what already exists to some of these new edge zones
without adding in an additional layer of complexity
that was unmanageable.
>> So you use OpenShift so you don't have to cobble this
together on your own as a full development environment
and that's the role really that OpenShift plays here?
>> That's exactly right.
And we presented pieces of this
at our re:Invent this past year
and what we basically did is we said the edge
needs to be inextricably linked with the cloud.
And you want to be able to manage it
from some seamless central pane of glass
and using that OpenShift console is a great way.
So what we did is we wanted to show a really
geo-distributed footprint in action.
We started with a Wavelength zone in Boston,
the region in Northern Virginia,
an outpost in the Texas area.
We cobbled it all together in one cluster.
So you had a whole compute mesh separated
by thousands of miles all within a single cluster,
single pane of glass.
We take that and are starting to expand
on the complexity of these architectures
to overlay the network APIs we mentioned,
to overlay multi-region support.
So when we say you can use all 17 zones at once
you actually can.
>> So you've been talking about Wavelength and Outposts
which are AWS products,
but Microsoft and Google both have their distributed
architectures as well.
Where do you stand with those?
Will you support those?
Are you working with them?
>> That's a great question.
We have made announcements with Microsoft and Google
but today I focus a lot on the work
we do with AWS Wavelength and Outposts
and continuing to work backwards from the customer
and ultimately meet their needs.
>> Yeah I mean, you got to start with an environment
that the developers know that obviously a great
developer community, you know, you see it at re:Invent.
What was the reaction at re:Invent
when you showed this from a developer community?
>> Absolutely.
Developers are excited
and I think the best part
is we're not the only ones talking about Wavelength
not even AWS are the only ones talking about Wavelength.
And to me from a developer ecosystem perspective
that's when you know it's working.
When you're not the one telling the best stories
when others are evangelizing the power
of your technology on your behalf
that's when the ecosystem's starting to pick up.
>> Speaking of making a bet on Outposts
you know, it's somewhat limited today.
I'll say it it's limited today in terms of we think
it supports RDS and there's a few storage players.
Is it your expectation that Outposts is going to be
this essentially the cloud environment
on your premises is that?
>> That's a great question.
I see it more as we want to expand customer choice
more than ever and ultimately let the developers
and architects decide.
That's why I'm so bullish on this idea of hybrid MEC.
Let's provide all of the options
the most complicated geo distributed hybrid deployment
you can imagine and automate it, make it easy.
That way if you want to take away components
of this architecture all you're doing
is simplifying something that's already automated
and fairly simple to begin with.
So start with the largest problem to solve
and then provide customers choice
for what exactly meets their requirements
their SLAs, their footprint, their network
and work backwards from the customer.
>> Exciting times ahead.
Rob, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.
It's great to have you.
>> Appreciate it, thanks for your time.
>> Good luck.
All right, thank you for watching.
Keep it right there.
This is Dave Vellante for Paul Gillin.
We're live at Red Hat Summit 2022
from the Seaport in Boston.
We'll be right back.