IT Life: Giorgio Regni, Scality
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Silicon Staff, December 22, 2018, 8:04 am
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Scality chief technology officer Giorgio Regni talks about cloud apps, collaborative development and the surprising way he found to improve his smartphone's battery life
What is your role and who do you work for?
I am a co-founder and CTO of Scality, an object, file and cloud storage software company.
How long have you been in IT?
I've been working in IT for 14 years, since I graduated in 2003. Before joining Scality, I was co-founder and VP of Engineering at Bizanga, where we developed an anti-abuse software that protects hundreds of millions of mailboxes across the world.
What is your most interesting project to date?
Developing Zenko at Scality has been fascinating. Zenko is a new kind of product we call multi-cloud data controller. It is free and open source, and builds on our passion to give freedom and control to people who create value with data.
What is your biggest challenge at the moment?
I would say my biggest challenge is making our software as easy to use as possible and simplifying of the inherent complexities of storing data on very different private and public cloud storage platforms.
What technology were you working with ten years ago?
Ten years ago, I was at Bizanga working on building a global reputation and anti-abuse platform for email service providers, fighting spammers and viruses. It was all about making the best use of network resources and taking advantage of latest enhancement in the Linux kernel.
What is your favourite technology of all time?
Linux, closely followed by Docker. I'm big on Open Source technologies: being able to work in collaboration with people from all around the world with different background, educations, and inclinations builds some amazing tools and technologies.
Linux, because it's at the base of so much of what the technology world is working on and delivering, is my favourite. It proves the open source model, with more than 25 years of open source evolution built-into it. Docker is a close second, again, for the collaborative aspect of it. It provides a platform for sharing, and that introduces people to new ways of solving problems and building great tools.
How will the Internet of Things affect your organisation?
The Internet of Things is growing at an incredible rate: it is expected that by 2020 there will be 50 billion connected IoT devices. We formed Scality with the aim of contributing to solving the challenge of storing and analysing all of this data with flexible, dynamic and scalable software-defined object storage.
Looking forward, we will adapt our software to be deployed in edge configuration, close to the sensors and other IoT devices with a capability to feed post processed data into a larger central Scality storage system.
What smartphone do you use?
I use a One Plus 5 android phone with a custom ROM and a custom kernel that I compiled myself for longer battery life :).
What three apps could you not live without?
Evernote to organise myself, Google photos to keep track of all my photos, and Chrome for everything else.
What new technology are you most excited for a) your business and b) yourself?
For Scality, Kubernetes and the ability to run a full application stack anywhere is something we are excited about working on.
The Devops movement is converging towards independence of platforms and cloud-native applications must function on any cloud computing platform. I mean applications can be developed on a cloud platform, then deployed to different clouds where supporting software stacks will help them run at scale. This is changing the industry and it's very exciting.
Personally, deep learning and AI in general – this is what I play with on the weekend!
If you weren't doing the job you do now, what would you be doing?
Playing guitar in a band, touring everywhere. That said, I do often play my guitar with my colleagues at Scality!
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