Red Hat VP Chris Wright Speaks at the 2020 Open Cloud Workshop

About the Speaker
Chris Wright, the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Red Hat, was the Keynote Speaker at the 2020 Open Cloud Workshop, held this past March at the George Sherman Union on the campus of Boston University. Chris’s responsibilities at Red Hat include incubating emerging technologies and developing forward-looking perspectives on innovations such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, distributed storage, software-defined networking, and network functions virtualization, containers, automation, and continuous delivery, and distributed ledger.

The Concept of Data Centers is Changing
During his talk to a packed auditorium, he spoke about how operational experience, developer velocity, and elasticity are essential characteristics when it comes to defining the cloud. He explained how the economics of modern applications, changes in the distributed data center, and the revival in hardware drives are important trends that drive the development of the cloud. Through his talk, we got an insight as to how the concept of data centers is changing. These data centers are becoming smarter, and they can generate more data while providing users with more personalized and pleasant services. As the cloud evolves, operating software becomes a core expectation. Access itself isn’t enough, and operability is required, as it is vital to building an ecosystem with open operations. Users and developers should have a wide range of services to choose from, regardless of the cloud they decide to use. With an open cloud upstream, open hybrid cloud can have ecosystem parity with proprietary public clouds.

Heterogeneous computing requires good collaboration within the industry. With multiple vendors, there is a need for a standard protocol. The Mass Open Cloud (MOC) is an open space for innovation as it provides an accessible environment for open source projects to develop with the same advantages that public cloud developers have available today.

The Mass Open Cloud (MOC) is a new production public cloud being developed based on the model of an Open Cloud Exchange (OCX). In this model, many stakeholders, rather than just a single provider, participate in implementing and operating the cloud. Hosted at Boston University and housed at the Hariri Institute for Computing, the project is a unique collaborative effort between higher education, government, non-profit entities, and industry.