Democratizing Cloud Infrastructure | Kevin Carter

Discover how Rackspace Spot is democratizing cloud infrastructure with an open-market, transparent option for cloud servers. Kevin Carter, Product Director at Rackspace Technology, discusses Rackspace Spot's hypothesis and the impact of an open marketplace for cloud resources. Discover how this novel approach is transforming the industry.

TIMESTAMPS

[00:00:00] – Introduction & Kevin Carter’s Background

[00:02:00] – Journey to Rackspace and Open Source

[00:04:00] – Engineering Culture and Pushing Boundaries

[00:06:00] – Rackspace Spot and Market-Based Compute

[00:08:00] – Cognitive vs. Technical Barriers in Cloud Adoption

[00:10:00] – Tying Spot to OpenStack and Resource Scheduling

[00:12:00] – Product Roadmap and Expansion of Spot

[00:16:00] – Hardware Constraints and Power Consumption

[00:18:00] – Scrappy Startups and Emerging Hardware Solutions

[00:20:00] – Programming Languages for Accelerators (e.g., Mojo)

[00:22:00] – Evolving Role of Software Engineers

[00:24:00] – Importance of Collaboration and Communication

[00:28:00] – Building Personal Networks Through Open Source

[00:30:00] – The Power of Asking and Offering Help

[00:34:00] – A Question No One Asks: Mentors

[00:38:00] – The Power of Educators and Mentorship

[00:40:00] – Rackspace’s OpenStack and Spot Ecosystem Strategy

[00:42:00] – Open Source Communities to Join

[00:44:00] – Simplifying Complex Systems

[00:46:00] – Getting Started with Rackspace Spot and GitHub

[00:48:00] – Human Skills in the Age of GenAI - Post Interview Conversation

[00:54:00] – Processing Feedback with Emotional Intelligence

[00:56:00] – Encouraging Inclusive and Clear Collaboration

QUOTES

CHARNA PARKEY

“If you can’t engage with this infrastructure in a way that’s going to help you, then I guarantee you it’s not up to par for the direction that we’re going. [...] This democratization — if you don’t know how to use it — it’s not doing its job.”

KEVIN CARTER

“Those scrappy startups are going to be the ones that solve it. They’re going to figure out new and interesting ways to leverage instructions. [...] You’re going to see a push from them into the hardware manufacturers to enhance workloads on FPGAs, leveraging AVX 512 instruction sets that are historically on CPU silicon, not on a GPU.”