 Welcome back to the C-Port in Boston. This is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. I'm Dave Vellante with co-host Paul Gellin. Rob Belsen, the series developer relations lead at Verizon. Robbie, great to see you. Thanks for coming to 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, the 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. You know, it's amazing what you guys do. You put out all this capital infrastructure, big, big outlays. You know, we use our phones and drop a call. People are like, ah, frigging Verizon. But if it's amazing what we can actually do today, you think about the pandemic, the shift that the telcos had to go through to landlines to support home, never missed the beat. And yet at the same time, you're providing all this infrastructure for people to come over the top. The cost per bit is going down, right? Your costs are going up. And yet now we're doing this big 5G build out. 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 started 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, infrastructure is 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 of the closest exit might be behind you. Absolutely applies to service discovery. So we 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. It's 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 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, but it's so reliable, the network is amazing reliability. How are you able to maintain that? Is this 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 an extricably 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 mech, the ability to converge within one single architecture, the private network, the public network, the AWS outpost, 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, that when they're building a full cloud 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 the cloud, is it both? It's an and, and I can't emphasize that enough. What we've seen from 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. They're developing for 5G. I mean, the availability of 5G, particularly the high bandwidth 5G is pretty spotty right now, mostly urban areas. How should they be thinking in the future, developing an application rule 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 benchmarking. It's not an absolute value. So it's 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 Canon 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. 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 and 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 is 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 developer. 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, let's 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 a thousand miles south to say Miami, Florida, you ask that question again, it could change. So that's how 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? Yeah, I have a background in networks and distributed systems. So I always knew I wanted to stay in the cloud somewhere and there's 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 architectures 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 is 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 shard 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 computer 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. And- 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 we've 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're going to have to cobble this together on your own as a full development environment and that's the role 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 outpost 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 great developer community, 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. So if we could bet on outposts, you know, it's somewhat limited to this. I'll say 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 Mac. 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 was great to have you. Appreciate it. Thanks for the time. Thanks. 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.