Exploring the Role of Cloud-Based Systems in Climate Change

Speaker A: Welcome to beyond the Screen, an Ionis podcast where we share insights and tips to help you scale your business's online presence, hosting genuine conversations with the best in the web and IT industry, and exploring how the Ionis brand can help professionals and customers with their hosting and cloud issues. I'm your host, Joe Nash. Welcome to another episode of beyond the Screen, an Iona's podcast. Joining us today is Calixo Diaz, a eight time certified cloud solutions engineer at Oracle. He's relatively new to the industry, but at just 27 years old, he's already gained years of experience in cloud engineering. Earlier this year, he made it to the final round of the Accenture Innovation Challenge with his project tracking carbon emissions on oci. We're all seeing the effects of climate change and there's an important discussion to be had about how cloud based systems could be doing more. Welcome Calixto. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Speaker B: Hello. Hey Joe. Yeah, excited to be here. Yeah, super excited to kind of get on this podcast and see what you guys have for me.

Speaker A: Well, let's get straight into it. Our first question for you. So, you know, as we mentioned, you're fairly early in your career, big stack certifications, which we, you know, we've discussed the importance of in earlier episodes on the show. But can you tell us a little bit about your journey so far? Ah, how did you come to be where you are today?

Speaker B: Yeah, let me just start off with, you know, I barely knew what cloud was when I first started working for Oracle. I actually got my degree in industrial engineering and was very much kind of headed towards manufacturing sites and process controls and Lean Six Sigma. That's kind of the main area where I thought my career was going to go. But luckily enough I met some people in the technology industry, specifically in robotics, that were working within these manufacturing sites and that kind of gave me my first taste at just the tech world. And then once I graduated from college, you know, I was looking at jobs to actually apply for and cloud solutions engineering, you know, popped up as one of those types of jobs, was actually recommended by my college. And you know, at first I was very scared. I said, I, I don't know how to code, I am not a coder. But, you know, took a chance. And the first couple languages that I learned was, you know, SQL and uh, NoSQL, MySQL, all of those, you know, it's kind of like English level, easy to understand type of languages. And then came Python, all these things. Right. But how I essentially got started was through my job in this program called the cosi. So class of solution engineers at Oracle, which is a great program, kind of brings in all these brand new engineers freshly out of college and trains them up, makes sure that they get certified, that they understand. And not only that, but also gives them projects to kind of go along the way, which I think we'll touch on a little bit here later. But yeah, that's, that's kind of how I got started all the way from college to where I started at Oracle.

Speaker A: That's fantastic. That's really exciting. So I hadn't heard of the Cozy program. That sounds wonderful. So it's like you apply without having the background and it's built in mind to get you there understanding correctly.

Speaker B: Right, exactly. And so typically, I think you have to have, you know, some sort of, not necessarily computer, uh, science degree, but some sort of degree that would make sense, you know, in that realm of tech. And I actually had the privilege of having a lot of experience from four, um, different internships that I did, you know, my junior year and my senior year. So I was stacked up with a lot of, like, experience. But there is all, like, types of different people in the program. And it was super cool to see the different dynamics. Some people were very, very technical, some people were not so technical. And then, you know, everyone just kind of melted together. Now that it's been, what, two and a half years, it's crazy to see how much people have grown.

Speaker A: That's awesome. That's very cool. So, you know, one of the questions we often ask folks on the show is how has technology changed throughout their careers? I'm excited to ask this to you because I have this, like, general suspicion that in tech we talk about, like, tech moving very fast a lot. And so I'm really interested, like, you know, coming from industrial engineering where, you know, things are, uh, obviously there are new innovations and things move along, but like, you know, there's also a fairly established way of doing things, right? And then you come into tech and I imagine it's just a stilled chaos. So how does it feel being over here?

Speaker B: Yeah. So whenever I was working in the manufacturing site, I mean, the biggest complaint was, we don't want change. And for a, uh, continuous improvement engineer, that's like the worst thing you could hear, right? Especially being young, being 20, being 21, you know, and here comes this guy with this control charts and working with that dynamic of, uh, constantly getting told no and no, and like, this is why you're wrong. But then having the data and stuff to prove it was frustrating, but also it definitely helped me with my people skills and how to persuade people and make them understand, right. Of like why we're doing this. Now switch over to the tech side. And it's kind of like the complete opposite. Right. Like there's a lot of change, maybe sometimes a little too much change. If there's one thing that everyone says is that the only thing that stays is change. And so when I first joined on, I started out with really, really good manager, um, and we were mainly focusing on analytics. And I love that because that was what I did my minor on, I'd studied for. So I said, awesome, I'm finally using my degree. So we did a lot of analytics type of training and projects and all of that. And then just within one second it's like everyone changed. I'm in a new department and now I'm focusing on big data and I'm not even touching analytics at all. And I'm like, I have no idea what this is going to keep you sharp. Yeah, exactly. And so I, you know, sit down, start reading, reading, starting small little projects and everything and just building, building, but. And then six months later moved on, uh, to something else. Right. AI is huge. Boom. It blew up chat. GPT changed everything. So now I'm over here, you know, creating my first large language model. Right. So it's, it's crazy, like it's so crazy to see how just two years ago I was first understanding what SQL stood for and then now, you know, two years later I'm um, like completely changed into like understanding what large language models are and things. So yeah, huge.

Speaker A: That's awesome. I think regardless of company or setting, that is a, uh, lot of different areas for you to bounce around in the stand of the time you've been there. But you know, great experience getting to touch lots of areas. So moving on to the project we mentioned. So you worked on this project, tracking carbon emissions on oci. We'd love to hear more about the project, talk about it. And I guess one place to start with, what is oci? What does that stand for? What does it M mean?

Speaker B: So Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. So Oracle is mainly known as a database company or Oracle runs, you know, most of the world's databases today and has for many, many years. But they decided to make a big investment, venture into the cloud computing space. So competing with the US is the gcps, the Azures of the world. Right. So we're another cloud provider and that is our cloud name, if you will. Oci, Oracle Cloud. So Essentially, what OCI is, right, in cloud computing in a way, is we're taking the processing power that companies or users need, right? Like, for example, this computer that we're using today, right? This computer, the processing power is on my actual laptop, right? But what we figured out was, well, we don't necessarily need to have the processing power on the hardware device. We could have that processing power in some sort of data center and then we access through different protocols and different connections that processing power. That's a very high level way of explaining cloud computing. But that's what we're doing and that allows us and customers to expand and grow and not have to worry about their IT infrastructure cost, right? So let's say I'm, uh, a startup company and hey, I have a really cool product, you know, about watering plants, you know, and I love it. And it's an app and it's super innovative and it's super cool and it's going to help all the plants in the world. But I have no idea on hardware on the rack systems that I need to purchase, the electricity bills that I'm going to have to pay to cool all these fans for these computers, all of that stuff, right? So instead what cloud computing and you know, OCI does is say you worry about your data, uh, your applications and we'll take care of the rest, right? Kind of in a way, as an, uh, infrastructure, as a service, that's literally what, you know, what are the acronyms. And so with that, the project came about because as you can imagine, you know, the example that I gave is probably very minimal. But if you're talking about a company that's huge, huge company, it's got, you know, millions in running, just imagine just electricity. Let's just talk about electricity and ac, right? Powering a data center is very, very expensive. And so now you have this company that their main job is not be super efficient at their data centers. That's maybe part of their job, right, because it helps with the bottom line. But that's not their main goal. Their main goal is to sell water plants or whatever it is. And so there was this kind of shift in industry, right, to understand, okay, cloud computing is the future, like, it just makes economical sense for everyone to move there. And then we had two really good people, right, asking the right questions about, hey, what's going on in the world, the global crisis that we're doing. And so that just added on to the initiative of, well, why as a company are we going to spend so much money in creating this Carbon footprint where we could just utilize the economic scales. Right. Of everyone else and start using that. So that's kind of where the project came about was tracking how much admissions either you're saving or you're using by using OCI? Right. So very high level example, you are using 10,000 kilowatts in your data center, let's say, and then now you move to OCI because of the shared resources and everything. You are now using five. Right. So you save 50% in your business.

Speaker A: Awesome. Yeah, that makes total sense. I understand. Okay, so I guess to leap on from there, you know, you gave that, you know, the hypothetical example of like, you know, if you're in Data set in 10 kilowatts you move to OCI and it's five. And you mentioned that there are economies of scale that bring the power consumption down and I imagine that's intuitive to most of our listeners. But what are some of the areas or reasons that actually happens? Like what is it about running servers at a cloud scale that does that?

Speaker B: So Oracle has an initiative to be net zero by 2025. Right. So we are specifically targeting to offset every electrical thing that we plug in, whether through solar panels or solar winds or anything like that, or being really, really efficient in the energy that's being used in these data centers. So that's kind of the main reason is because we strive to be as efficient as possible. But then also there are specific areas that are a lot cleaner and just a lot better overall to host a uh, regional data center. So let's say for example, if you were to host a data center somewhere where it's fairly cold all the time, just by the nature of the land. Well, you could have uh, that there and there's less electricity being pulled just naturally. Now if I'm that company, I can't necessarily do that. Right. I can't run my data center in some offshore cold place and make sure it's maintained and all that. That's a lot of head costs overhead, all that. So but when you, you know, leverage on the cloud, of course you can do that. Right. As long as you're okay with the latency time or whatever, the restriction may be more welcome to do that and even better for the world climate.

Speaker A: Right, awesome. Uh, so I guess on the flip side of that, you know, these are some ways that cloud computing can be leveraged to reduce emissions. What are some of the unexpected ways that cloud computing produces emissions or pollution that folks might not necessarily be aware of because not everyone has an in depth understanding of how these data centers work, I guess.

Speaker B: No, no, no. 100%. That's a very, very valid question. And I think I would say, I would maybe call it like the trigger happy issue. You get into an environment where you're no longer limited by hardware. Right? So I'm a dba, I'm a, uh, database administrator and I want to spin up ten, uh, databases because I want to try my shiny new tool that I have. And on premise you'd have to buy the servers, you'd have to buy the, you know, all these things, the cores, the license, everything. So it would take weeks. Maybe you're just like, I'm not going to do it where now in the cloud, you're so innate. Right? So if he wants to spin up 10 databases and, and just spin them up and leave them there and leave them running. Right. It's that easy. So it definitely comes with a level of responsibility and that's actually predominantly, uh, one of the things that, you know, I do at Oracle is to understand what customers are doing with their clouds. Does it make sense? Is it efficient? So it's still the same job, it's still continuously improving, but now more of a business process than a manual process.

Speaker A: No, that makes a lot of sense. I think that it's efficiency of how we use cloud services. You know, both on the example you gave, you know, as an uh, engineer for whom the cost of this compute, and both in monetary but also environmental is like so abstract they couldn't possibly factor it in. But also I think I've seen a lot of discourse around this, around like the consumer end as well. You know, everything is streamed or downloaded from a cloud service now. And so we don't think like, oh, hey, I've listened to the Same Song on YouTube 25 times and like that means you've transferred those bits 25 times. Whereas previously it would have just been on a disc, uh, or you would have downloaded it and you know, that's energy that's being spent. Right. So no, that makes total sense. I think that's a really great point.

Speaker B: I would maybe also add, definitely we all have to be careful because you know, right now, LLMs and AI, all that stuff, machine learning, it's great, I love it. But it's very computational heavy and so yes, it's awesome that you want to start a project to learn, but you do have to be aware of what the impact that you are making by creating these large, you know, computers running all the time.

Speaker A: I'm, um, so glad you said that. Yeah, we've spoken about LLMs a whole bunch on this show. I don't think we've really touched on the energy and compute cost part of it. But, you know, I think you're spot on that one of the things that many people do know about them is they require a lot of compute to be trained. Right. And that's expensive. But also the, uh, end application bit, every time you want an answer to something, you go and ask an LLM to generate it for you. That's a lot more than looking it up in the base. Right?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, true.

Speaker A: So to continue on this thread means talking about this tool and how it can help businesses assess their computer usage to find a more sustainable route. In your experience, like, what are some of the things that would stop a business kind of in this position of having something like their own data center from becoming more sustainable?

Speaker B: So I would probably say, you know, a big one would be overall, like, a lot of companies have specific requirements on the people and location of their data. So because of that they're restricted to where their data could be. Right. So in that scenario where I was saying, hey, you live in Texas where it's very hot, and you can have a data center in, you know, Minnesota, where it's really cold, so, you know, less electricity, that may not be a solution for a specific company due to their requirements to data sovereignty and data security and all that stuff. That's kind of one example that kind of comes off to my head.

Speaker A: Yeah, perfect. Yeah. Going back to what you said earlier about, you know, location of data centers being important for, um, you know, temperature control reasons. That makes total sense. So I guess I kind of move on to a slightly different topic. I guess you would have started your career in the middle of the pandemic and the different way of working. How do you think the current stage of the pandemic that we're in and you know, what has happened in the last couple of years has, has changed, you know, your workflow as a career starter, but also the workflow of the wider cloud industry.

Speaker B: Yeah, I feel like I should make a, ah, Excel sheet now with like my pros and cons of this because I just. It's still like a balancing act.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Of, um, There's a lot of good, a lot of bad that came from that. But overall, I mean, for me. So going back, I graduated with my undergrad in industrial engineering from Texas A and M, you know, Covid, and everything started and I said, all right, well, I can either try and join this really lucrative Industry and see what happens. Or I can, you know, wait a little bit, sharpen up my skills, get my master's and go back. And so that's what I did. That was like probably the first big life decision that Covid impacted my life, right. Was, hey, you're not going to go straight to work, even though you did all these internships and prepared, you're going to go back to school. So I did that, and I'm glad I did. I learned a lot and, you know, set myself up a bit better, you know, down the line. So whenever I got my job, it originally was supposed to still be in person. So, uh, I made plans. I was living in College Station, I moved to Austin, Texas, did all that, was super excited. And then I think maybe within a week or two or something like that, we're supposed to start. They're like, no, you're not coming in here, stay home, you come back in six months and then come back in six months. And then eventually just became a remote role. Right. In that remote role. Uh, it was definitely nothing that I thought would be attainable, like at a young age. I've heard of people, you know, when getting older and all that stuff, but I never thought that that would be something that would be feasible for me. Right. Especially me, because I was like, used to being in manufacturing sites nine to five every day. And so to go to this environment where now it's remote, I have the flexibility to wear what I want, you know, work however I want. Yeah, it was a huge change. It was a definitely huge, huge change. I think net though, for me specifically, it was a positive change and it's allowed me to one, focus more on what I'm doing, like my job and the tasks that I want to accomplish, and two, travel and just not stay away from the things that really matter in life, which is family, friends and seeing the world and climate. Right. You know, things that are really important.

Speaker A: And that's because you don't have to be near an office all the time. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I can, if I want to work from the car, I do. I do that. And so, like, that's awesome.

Speaker A: Perfect. So this is really interesting because I've always worked remote. I'm a huge, like remote working fan. And one of the things I think I've seen a lot of since the pandemic has made more people move m remote is this fear that remote's not viable for career starters, that you need to start in an office to get that first face to face contact to get Mentored. You mentioned a really great manager earlier. Obviously you've been through lots of changes in what you're working on, so you've had to be mentored and upskilled on the job like a whole bunch. So has this been a challenge for you if you, how, how do you deal with that in your remote situation?

Speaker B: Yeah, great question. I would probably be on that bus as well. I would add that, uh, it is very hard to get your career started and understand just the dynamics of your working environment and the people around you without the physical environment around you. As I mentioned, I think there was two things that helped me specifically. One was the four experiences that I had in my internships over the last two years. Before that, that was in the manufacturing sites and all of that, that paved the way for me to understand how companies work and all of that stuff. So that helped me. And my manager was really great. I mean she didn't live here, but she flew down, made an effort to meet with us. Uh, you know, we had these lunch on Larry sessions where we would, every Friday we would go and have lunch with the team that was here. Right. So doing things like that was a huge, huge difference into what a lot of other experiences that my fellow cozies had. This was the first job out of college and they're getting on zoom maybe once or twice a week with their manager. And so they don't have a lot of direction. They were kind of very lost, didn't understand like what is really the company strategy. Like, yeah, okay, I'm here on the Q4 call, but I'm not really understanding what's going on. Right. You kind of really get that by the sense of the people that uh, you work around with. And so, yeah, I would definitely say I agree. I think it is hard and I think it is necessary for young people starting their careers to have that face to face experience. You know, seek it out 100% but also, you know, be agile, be able to step back and work a little bit remote and see the value of it. For sure.

Speaker A: Yeah, awesome. Perfect. I think, very insightful. Definitely tracks of some of the advice that uh, even remote first managers I've had have always said that, like, hey, if you're working remote, it's important to get FaceTime at least like sometimes in the year. So to bring us kind of the close towards the end of time here, what innovations do you think or do you hope that might emerge in the technology industry in the next, I don't know, say five years?

Speaker B: I would really want just to see more projects and more of our technology being used to help the greater good. I think we've forgotten about that. Like we've forgotten that technology came about to help and to be better right as a society and everything. And so I'm hoping that the right people take the right leadership roles and push for the right projects because we're at a pinnacle point in our society where we can go left where we can do fairly bad things with technology. And I just really, really hope and aspire and hopefully I definitely a voice and leader, you know, for that, that we keep that in mind as we build keep society and keep the greater good in mind as you continue to build.

Speaker A: Perfect. And I think that's a perfect place to wrap up. Click. So thank you so much for joining us today. Had a lot of fun chatting to you and yeah, I've learned a lot about sustainability in, uh, cloud. Thank you so much. Awesome.

Speaker B: Thank you, Joe. I appreciate it.

Speaker A: Beyond the Screen An Ionis Podcast. To find out more about Ionis and how we are the go to source for cutting edge solutions and web development, visit ionos.com and then make sure to search for Ionos in Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts or anywhere else podcasts are found. Don't forget to click subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. On, um, behalf of the team here at Ionos, thanks for listening.