Podcast Host – Madhura Gaikwad, Synerzip

Podcast Guest – Vinayak Joglekar, CTO at Synerzip

Brief Summary

Like everyone in the tech industry, we have done our own research on what technologies will be under the limelight this year, which has been cited as the year of innovation, recovery, and renewal.

Cloud remains the primary focus for businesses based on our technology survey and the research conducted by experts such as Gartner, Forrrester, and Forbes. Businesses continue to invest in cloud as they try to accelerate digital transformation and increase accessibility for remote teams.

Tune into the first episode of this 3-part series where we gain the perspective of a CTO on cloud as one of the top technology trends in 2021. Vinayak Joglekar, CTO at Synerzip, talks to us about:

• Accelerated cloud adoption
• Hybrid cloud models
• Edge computing to fasten decision-making
• Prioritization of Cloud security
• Cloud and 5G in 2021

Transcript

Madhura Gaikwad (00:08):

Hello, and welcome to Zip Radio podcast powered by Synerzip I’m your host Madhura Gaikwad. And I’m joined today by one of our guests, Vinayak Joglekar, who is our CTO at Synerzip in today’s episode. I’m going to chat with Vinayak about the technology trends and predictions for 2021. Like everyone in the tech industry, we’ve been doing our own research on what technologies will be under the limelight this year, which has been cited as a year of innovation, recovery, and renewal. So welcome onboard Vinayak. And, and thank you for joining us today.

Vinayak Joglekar (00:44):

Thanks Madhura. Thanks for the introduction. You know, I’m really excited about 2021, 2020 was not really a good year that one could look forward to give the COVID situation and all that. But 2021 is really exciting me, Madhura. And I thought that there is so much to talk about the trends in 2021 that let’s divide and conquer by talking a little bit about cloud today. And particularly since Synerzip, we are advanced partners of AWS and as your partner. So, we should focus today’s conversation a little bit on cloud, and then we could have another episode to talk about other things. Would that be, okay? Madhura.

Madhura Gaikwad (01:35):

Absolutely. That completely makes sense when I, and since we have a lot to talk about, we’ll just get started right away. So, my first question to you is that a cloud has been highlighted in every 2021 predictions of Tech trends, such as Gartner, Forrester, Forbes. And we’ve also validated it through our own survey where our respondent said that the top skills that they will focus on in 2021 will be around AWS. So, what do you have to say about this?

Vinayak Joglekar (02:04):

Yeah, so, you know, cloud has been the active you know, cutting edge or you would say for many years now, so per se saying that cloud will be at the forefront is it’s a no brainer. It’s like, it has been there for many years now, so it’s going to continue, but what has changed? So, let’s look at what was happening till now. So, in terms of adoption of cloud, there were many enterprises who were kind of just sitting on fence or paying lip service, if you will. They were not really going there though. They kept saying that they wanted to, but this 2020 COVID thing has now forced everyone to not sit on fence anymore. So now they have to, so it’s like a now or never kind of situation for many industries take retail, for example, right? I mean, the restaurants are closed.

Vinayak Joglekar (03:05):

Now you have to think of, you know, your business differently. Restaurants can’t be the same that they wear and food delivery for example, takes precedence over the traditional restaurants, right? You have cloud kitchens, there are many businesses who don’t look like a restaurant at all. It’s just a kitchen connected to cloud. So that’s where you know, the business models are changing. Take retail. For example, you don’t see people going out for shopping. It is materially and can say irreversibly changed habit of people. People have started buying online. And that is the norm. That is the default. Now one would go shopping only if, you know, it’s something like a garment or something like a fashion accessory where you can’t really judge, unless you wear it. And, you know, look at yourself in the mirror. So, some of those things won’t change, but you know, commodities, groceries and things, which are like, you know, don’t really require much of decision making.

Vinayak Joglekar (04:09):

They will all move to the cloud. So that’s the default model. So, you know, it was already happening, I would say, but this has been like one would say, we have just crossed a tipping point and now it’s become mainstream. So earlier the default model was the brick-and-mortar shop or the brick-and-mortar restaurant. Now the default model is changing. So that’s the big difference that I’m really excited about. Take healthcare. For example, I have seen a lot of doctors there way of patients coming in because they themselves are to protect themselves. So. they’re doing a lot of telemedicine. Now you can have a zoom call with your physician and ask him, and he’ll send you the prescription via email. So all those things are now totally a different way of working. And I think product material that is already good public and overall, the business cycles are becoming faster because of this, because you don’t have to really wait for, to get to a particular location, physically get to there by traveling there. The decision once it’s made in your mind is just a click away for you to execute on that decision. So overall I think there’s going to be more of that in 2021. And that’s what I’m excited about.

Madhura Gaikwad (05:27):

Absolutely. And so, this pretty much will continue. We’ve seen this a lot in 2020, and this will of course continue in the coming year. So based on that subject, as we are on that subject, let’s talk about the upcoming trends in cloud, such as hybrid cloud and distributed cloud styles. You know, we are listening and watching and reading everywhere about these hybrid and distributed clouds such as on my public cloud IOT edge cloud and Metro area, community clouds. So, anything that you want to, share with us about those?

Vinayak Joglekar (05:59):

Yeah. So, they say that every cloud has its silver lining. Right. And that is that edge of the cloud. It is something like that, it’s the edge of the cloud that is going to bring in a lot of new innovation. So of course, there will be continuity into of what you see in the mainstream cloud. There will be, you know, whether it is elastic services such as AWS, EC2 or S3, and you know, the traditional Lambdas and EKS and all that is going to continue. There’s not going to be much change in terms of that, but it’s the IOT and IOT green grass that is going to, and similar services by other cloud providers, like Azure, Google cloud service or Ali Alibaba, these are you know, I’m going to talk little bit in terms of AWS because that is closer to my heart, but there are similar services available.

Vinayak Joglekar (06:54):

So, the listen should not take the brand constraint. It is a generally I can say that every brand will have its own offering in this area. So, coming to what’s going on here is there are two reasons why hybrid cloud makes sense. One is the, you know, the way people are used to having their own data on prem, their security concerns, particularly for the healthcare and FinTech sectors, they need to have a part of their data and their application residing on their own private cloud. So that is something which has been made possible because last year or year before, there has been a way that the clouds operate uniformly. So let me explain a little bit, what is happening is that Kubernetes, for example, has become the defector standard for most of the microservices, which are running, whether it’s on Azure or on AWS or on other cloud.

Vinayak Joglekar (07:58):

And as a result, what has happened is that if you build an application that runs on containerized application, which is microservices based, and it can be easily migrated from your private cloud to a public cloud and vice versa. So really speaking, you could have a company such as Synerzip building your application use on the public cloud, and then you could easily take it from there and with a push button and deploy it on your private cloud. So really speaking that there was some level of resistance or some level of difficulty that was involved earlier in building applications hybrid in nature. But now it has become so easy because of this underlying common, you can say orchestration framework and the common model of building containerized services. So that has made it possible. So, this is one thing that definitely is the trend. The second is in terms of edge computing.

Vinayak Joglekar (09:04):

So, in edge computing, lot of devices are now particularly where IPV6 becomes the norm, which is this. So, in which case, there will be millions of and billions of devices. So, imagine Madhura of what happened when we went from the, you know, the IT industry was focused mainly on the laptop and desktop computers. And that’s where the number of devices was limited. Like, and then when the mobile revolution happened somewhere 10, around 10 years back, certainly the number of devices that were connected, increased manyfold, and then, you know, totally new type of applications came into being the same thing is going to happen again, there is going to be a hundredfold increase in the number of connected devices, because everything now, whether it’s your toast or refrigerator, I mean speaking, it’s a cliche, but then figuratively speaking, everything will be connected. And, you know, there will be so many devices.

Vinayak Joglekar (10:02):

So, the same type of revolution that we saw in the mobile devices, where came into the mainstream 10 years back, the same thing is going to happen again, repeat itself now. And that is going to make it possible for, are you to do lot of computing at the edge? So, this is something which excites me a lot because, and at the edge, no, I’m currently using a postcard size. I mean, it’s just half an inch by half an inch processor, which has a built-in radio and a modern, which has, you know, underneath I can SIM card and it can connect using 5g and I can write Python code to run on it and it’ll do a lot of crunching. It as its own file system, right? Is there like you know, it could be 300, 400 meters away from the hub and it can connect to hundreds of search devices maybe in plant or anywhere.

Vinayak Joglekar (10:59):

So, decisions can be pushed to the edge. Right? Okay. So, there is no heavy lifting required. You don’t have to take the data, take it from the edge, then put it on the cloud and then run your software there to decisions, and then communicate those back to the edge. Right? So here, what is going to happen is you capture the data there and, you know, you just push the decision model to the edge and the decision model will be applied, whatever you can use, machine learning, artificial intelligence to build that model, but push that model to the edge and all the decision making will happen at the edge itself so that, you know, lot of heavy lifting traffic that used to happen that is not really needed. So, it’s very excited and 5G. Yes. I mean, the story is not complete without talking about 5g.

Vinayak Joglekar (11:49):

5G is going to make it possible for you to communicate using these. Now imagine having a device that is able to communicate, let’s say in real time, video streams across to the cloud from the edge. So, there’s a camera sitting somewhere. And then that camera could in real time sitting streaming data up, so speeds using 5g. So, you know, currently you just don’t get those kinds of speeds using 4g. So, this is going to make a big difference once the 5g network and applications, which are at the edge, which are communicating back to the cloud, using 5g and IOT green grass is another thing where, you know, it works the same way it would work. I mean, if you write a lambda or a serverless function on the cloud, it works on the cloud. It works on at the edge as well. So, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel it’s as if the cloud functionality that you are so comfortable with.

Vinayak Joglekar (12:49):

If you are happy with that, if it is available, when you are connected to the cloud, it’s when you’re not connected also at the edge. So that is a different type of edge where you have processing at the edge computing happening, maybe using small computers, like raspberry pies, or you might use AR boards or whatever. I mean, there’s a number of these processes that are, so I think, as I said, silver lining at the edge, right. That’s how I would describe 2021. So, look at the edge and that’s their silver lining. You’ll see a lot of activity in that area.

Madhura Gaikwad (13:25):

Absolutely. So, it says Forrester. So, it says Gartner. So that makes complete sense as to how 2020 will be enlightened with edge computing and how everything going hand with edge computing, like 5g and facilitating the use cases for edge. So, yes, which brings me to our next question. Do you remember, we talked about how serverless will become mainstream in the coming year? And we recently even had a zip chat with panelists from AWS and Alchemy where we had, you know, know a topic about how server technologies, the adoption of server technologies, the challenges, the benefits. So how do you see server as becoming mainstream in the coming year?

Vinayak Joglekar (14:07):

Yeah, so, you know whether it’s serverless or whether it is consumer data services, these are all progressions in the value chain, right? Initially we used to have just virtual servers or EC2 instances if you will. And that was the way people were happy with it. And they were operating then with EKS you had containers and, you know, or GKE you had containers, you know, worry, you stopped worrying about instances. And instead, you were deploying your applications inside containers. And you know, that abstracted away, a lot of headaches that was there or managing the environment, configuration scalability. And there are so many things which you are taking care of. Now, you know, why even that serverless is the next step progression in the same value chain that why even bother you about containers and all that. You write your code and zip it and upload it.

Vinayak Joglekar (15:08):

And then, you know, the provider, whether it, it is Google or whether it is AWS, they will take care of it and you’ll have serverless function. So that is going to be increasing because it makes a lot of sense. First of all, it’s scalable and you don’t have to worry about lot of you can say DevOps stuff. So, so the amount of hours, one would spend on building your pods and your deployment files and all that, and thinking about it, designing all that, is it because then you are just, don’t have worry about it. It is all taken care of by the provider. So that is, and also then early, I talked about using the same paradigm also at the edge. So, you can even very seamlessly migrate your applications from cloud to the edge. Cause there’s the same serverless architecture that works.

Vinayak Joglekar (16:05):

And, you know, even clients such as Alexa, they directly to your cloud, right. And they will directly talk with these serverless functions or Lambda. So, your clients on the client side are also now smart and they expect serverless function and not an endpoint like a microservice or something. So, on the whole everything, including the client side, as well as the server side, both are moving up the value chain. So, this is a progression, same thing. I’ll take a little bit of time and talk about the data services. So initially when we started working on the cloud, we used to have just dead storage, S3, you know we call it data lake or whatever, where object storage, you dump your files or whatever, and that’s just your storage. And there was no real value addition, but then, you know, now you have Redshift and then you have snowflake, and you have in number of other values added, you can say managed services available on top of that.

Vinayak Joglekar (17:14):

So, you don’t have to worry about installing or configuring or managing these things. So, these are all managed services, which are offered you just worry about your data model. That will sit on top. Now, the funny thing is that now, you know, the next thing that is going happen is you’re going get data available. So not only that it’ll be modeled along in these frameworks or in these business intelligence data warehouses, but also the data itself would be made available for a price. So, there’s a lot of public data that can be shared and that can be put in these data warehouses. And that is going to be the next thing I think in 2021, you can look forward to having a lot of these, what do you call as the consumer data services? And I’m sure when we talk about it next year, you know, there will be something else that is put on top and we’ll be moving one step ahead in the value chain. I don’t know what that would be, but for now I think these are all natural progressions. And I see whether it’s on the computing side or whether it’s on the data side, both ways, we’ll be going hand in hand and going to the next level in the value chain.

Madhura Gaikwad (18:30):

Absolutely. And one such example Vinayak, that you and I were discussing earlier was about AWS’s workspace offering about desktop as a service. So that is an example, which is pretty exciting and hopefully will scale in the coming year.

Vinayak Joglekar (18:46):

Absolutely with work from home situation happening in family, least you don’t have control on you know, who has access to the laptop. You know, if it’s lying there, then somebody’s going to download or use it for watching Netflix or whatever. Right. And definitely that is going to a major threat for corporates with all everyone working from home. And you can’t really dictate to employee what they should be doing with their devices at home, right. As long as they’re able to connect to your cloud. So, the right thing to do there would be to virtualize the desktop on the cloud, using workspaces. And that’s going to be the trend because then that is your office in the cloud. So, you know, it doesn’t matter, you know, what, what kind of laptop you use to connect to it, or what kind of device you use to connect, you’ll get the same experience.

Vinayak Joglekar (19:38):

And it’ll be a very sanitized environment of which companies would be very secure and they’ll get that comfort that they need that, you know, even though the employees are connecting you, using your laptops from home, they’re not introducing malware or they they’re. No. So as far as the enterprise code and enterprise software is concerned, it is all kosher or sanitized. I mean, so that’s the assurance that companies would need and going forward, I think the, we will see a lot of, of these development environments also, you know, people use it even for day-to-day work. Like, you know, I know of a company in Singapore, it has lawyers. So, they have some applications like Microsoft word or Adobe viewers or whatever, the standard stuff that legal system would use. Those things are installed. And, you know, they can connect to that using their, you know, iPads or whatever tablets or whatever device they don’t even need a laptop to connect with.

Vinayak Joglekar (20:43):

So, these kinds of things are very promising. And you know, when it’s a situation where you are not only working from home, but working from anywhere, you know, so it doesn’t matter what kind of device you’re using. You should be able to connect to the same workspace or desktop that you would normally use using whatever you are holding in your hand. Maybe at some point of time, you might be to even issue voice commands to it one, nevertheless. So, you know, that is another trend that I see, you know, coming up very soon and it would be mainstream in the coming year 2021 definitely would be a good mark year in which you would see a lot of people who are a lot of companies having their employees, working from home, connecting to these or desktops in the cloud.

Madhura Gaikwad (21:33):

Yes, that is true. So, Vinayak, before we wrap up one important question and obvious question that I have for you and which is addressed in all these strengths and predictions is about how cloud security will be one of the most important and critical subjects for the coming year, since everything is going to be on cloud.

Vinayak Joglekar (21:52):

Yeah, absolutely. Whether it is data privacy. So, these are the main things. So that is why I said, that’s where I see two definite trends that are happening. One is you have different levels of encryption private key, public key setting, and all that would be very, very normal. I mean, it’s not just the authentication authorization that you are used to using password protection, but you’re going to have lot more of that in all the interaction between users and the networks. Second thing, as I said, was a hybrid cloud part where you’ll have a very secure data or private areas where, you know, the access itself would be controlled and there will be a lot that is virtualized. So, you know, firewall for example, or it’s a switch or it’s a gateway, so you’ll have virtualization of those. So, you’ll be able to configure your own virtual network within a cloud setup.

Vinayak Joglekar (22:58):

So just the way, what you had a few years back in your office, you would have connected computers in the office, which are secure behind the firewall. And then, you know, you have firewall policies that are set up and everything that protects it from outside world. So, you had your own private within the four walls, your office, the same thing you can do in a virtual space. Now you can set up a virtual kind of firewall. You can set up a virtual switch, a virtual gateway. So, I mean is going to be physically, not press all virtual, but it is going the same functionality in the same way. It protected us the outside world. It protects our data our virtual and our hybrid. So, I think there is lot of things in security and security. One thing about the security is that, you know, there is no end it.

Vinayak Joglekar (23:54):

I mean, the more you have it, the more people will want it because it’s a game where, you know, people who are trying to breach the attack surface would grow. Attackers would be become smarter. And then, you know, you have protective majors that have to, again, respond to that. So, this is going to go on and on. But in the coming year, I see the trends that I talked to major things that I talked about. One is public key, private key based I mean, it is more, more or less. It’s going to be the norm that you’ll always have a key with which you would be able to access something. So that will be a norm. So that is one next second is the hybrid cloud where you’ll have virtual environments, which are configured to protect your network, your data from the outside public cloud.

Vinayak Joglekar (24:46):

So that I think is going to be a major trend in there’s one last thing before we wrap up that I wanted to touch up on. And that’s a big thing that is happening is the availability of GPUs, right? Yes. On the cloud. So, you know, GPUs have been more or less used extensively for manufacturing Bitcoins, right? And that is something where it has earned its whatever reputation you can call it. But you know, going forward, GPS will be used extensively for artificial intelligence, machine learning applications where speed mutations are required only for a short while. I mean, if you’re making a model, that model requires you to use it for a day or two days and you, once your model is ready, you don’t need that computing forward. So, it doesn’t make sense for you to even acquire that. So, you know if it is available, you can spin up GPU on the cloud. Nothing like it. I mean, you would rather do that. And then, you know, I have seen those applications, which take, you know, machine learning training sessions, where you are training a machine learning algorithm that session could go on for hours and hours. But if you use a GPU, it can get over within minutes and seconds. So, it makes a lot of difference though. GPU time is going to be more expensive, but I foresee that cloud-based GS are going to be the way to go, particularly for AI applications.

Madhura Gaikwad (26:25):

That is brilliant. And unless the, is anything else, Vinayak, that you would like to share about cloud that we have missed out on? I would like to wrap up this session and kind of talk a little bit about upcoming episodes.

Vinayak Joglekar (26:38):

Yeah. So, one last interesting thing about data is that still you would require a lot of this data to be tagged and there will be this new breed of people who will be tagging data and making it ready for machine learning applications. And, you know, those would be not office workers working from an office and doing, working as analyst, but they’ll be specialists who are specialized in a certain field, but, you know, they offer their services to tag the data from wherever they are using their mobile devices, connecting to the cloud. So, this kind of you can say democratization or crowdsourcing of tagging is going to be something that is going to be facilitated by cloud. So, I, I am very, very excited about this because you there’s lot of data that is there, but unless you tag it, it can be used for training, artificial intelligence algorithms.

Madhura Gaikwad (27:42):

That is true. That is true. And speaking of AI and democratization I’m excited to host you again, Vinayak in the coming episodes where we discuss the other two trends that we’ve identified, which will be big in the year of 2021. So, thanks again, Nia, for joining us today, it was a very interesting and insightful chat and I see you in the next episode again.

Vinayak Joglekar (28:06):

Wonderful. Thank you, Madhura. Thank you for having me.

Madhura Gaikwad (28:08):

Me and thank you everyone for tuning in. If you are looking to accelerate your product roadmap, visit our website, www.synerzip.com for more information, stay tuned to future zip radio episodes for more insights on technology and agile trends. Thank you.

For more insights on technology trends and predictions, download  – 9 Technology & IT Trends and Predictions 2021

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