Episodes

Calvin Hendryx-Parker, co-founder and CTO of Six Feet Up, takes the host chair for a week some are calling Black October: remote shell exploits across the PHP world, a certificate authority with crackable keys, a Brotli RCE in Python, and a second CI pipeline compromise at LiteLLM after a leaked key wasn't fully revoked. Keith Townsend asks whether these are developer problems or operator problems, and how you practice zero trust when the security updates themselves can't be trusted. Calvin make...

Calvin Hendryx-Parker, co-founder and CTO of Six Feet Up, is back with Keith Townsend to ask whether the AI bubble is bursting and who is left holding the bag. They start with Oracle's Stargate commitments and Keith's objection to funding that build-out with resources from its database and ERP customers, then get to the constraint underneath it all: power. Keith explains how colocation contracts went from floor space to power, why a rack now holds only a few AI servers, and what that means for o...

Calvin Hendryx-Parker, co-founder and CTO of Six Feet Up, joins Keith Townsend to ask a question CTOs should be asking now: who gave your AI agent that authority? They start with two recent stories, the reported AWS AgentCore case where an agent fetched IAM session credentials from the metadata server on a user's behalf, and a Codex CLI update that leaves a self-updating daemon running after you quit, restarting itself mid-turn when a new version lands. From there, enterprise persistent memory a...

Rob Lee, Chief Technology and Growth Officer at Everpure (formerly Pure Storage), is back on the show. Keith Townsend asks how a CTO tells a real compute shortage from a data problem dressed up as one. Rob's answer: stop chasing GPU utilization. Measure how long a task takes and how accurate the result is, and utilization follows. From there, data gravity and why agents working inside transactional flows pull compute toward the data, why AI pushes enterprises to reason across every silo at once ...

Episode 700, and a reboot. Keith Townsend welcomes new co-host Calvin Hendryx-Parker, CTO and co-founder of Six Feet Up, pairing an infrastructure view and a development view on the same CTO problems. First up: Jev, TypeSafe AI's System One classifier that returns typed answers in milliseconds for a fraction of a language model's cost, and what it means to hand a closed-weight third party 200,000 rows of your data. Then Qwen3.8 running locally, and the open-weight classifiers chasing Jev. Next w...

A replay of Layer2C Labs episode 001 on The CTO Advisor feed. The managed data plane is cheap and fast; the cost it hides is the chunking judgment it takes from you. Keith Townsend built a retrieval pipeline over thirteen years of Tech Field Day transcripts, about 237,000 segments, split between Amazon S3 Vectors and an NVIDIA DGX Spark on his desk, and traced where the decisions actually landed. Written by Keith Townsend and narrated by AI — the voice isn’t his and isn’t pretending to be. The f...

AI agents are good at producing outcomes. The harder question is whether they can produce the same outcome twice, through a process you can inspect, test, and trust. In this episode, Keith Townsend talks with Adam Jacobs, CEO of Swamp Club and founder of Chef, about deterministic automation in the age of AI agents. The [...]

Description: Keith sits down with Ryan Booth — former network automation specialist, Apstra alum, and now principal consultant at Blue Ridge Consulting — to trace the real career arc from infrastructure engineer to applied AI practitioner. They dig into the transferable skills that actually matter (hint: it's not the coding), why curiosity-driven entry points like [...]

At Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas, Keith sits down with returning guest Woon Jung, CTO of Clumio, to break down their new GCS backup launch — and why "replication" and "backup" are not the same thing. They dig into the real failure domains that catch GCP-native organizations off guard, the operational reality of multi-cloud [...]

Everyone says clean your data before you invest in AI. The problem is, your data is getting dirty faster than you can clean it. In this episode, Keith sits down with Joe Onisick, founder of UnicornIQ, to dig into why data hygiene is AI's most underestimated failure point — and why throwing more GPU power [...]

AI is changing the data center—but not always in the ways enterprises expect. In this episode, Keith Townsend is joined by Intel’s Lynn Comp for Part Two of their conversation, shifting the focus squarely to AI infrastructure realities. They explore why many AI workloads never justify GPUs, how CPU-based deployments often exceed real [...]

Episode Summary Enterprise leaders are facing two equally hard problems at the same time: deciding what to do next with virtualization in the post-VMware era, and figuring out how—or whether—to deploy AI infrastructure responsibly. In this episode of The CTO Advisor Podcast, Keith Townsend sits down with long-time industry peer and infrastructure expert [...]

Enterprise IT didn’t plan for this problem—but now it has to solve it. In this episode of The CTO Advisor Podcast, Keith Townsend sits down with Lynn Comp, Head of Data Center Market Readiness at Intel, for a candid, unsugarcoated conversation about how Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has fundamentally disrupted the enterprise infrastructure status quo. [...]

In this episode of The CTO Advisor Podcast, Keith Townsend sits down with Betsy Tong, founder of Authority Architect, to explore how seasoned professionals can transform decades of experience into thriving consulting businesses. Betsy shares her personal story of being laid off at 56 and realizing the traditional job market—dominated by keyword filters and age [...]

In this episode, Keith Townsend welcomes back Steven Dickens, founder of Hyperframe Research, for a candid conversation following VMware Explore 2025. The duo dives deep into the latest developments from VMware, focusing on the launch of VCF 9 and what it means for developers, customers, and the broader ecosystem. Key topics include: Steven’s impressions of [...]

📝 Show Notes: On this episode of the CTO Advisor Podcast, Keith sits down with independent analyst Brian Wang of Next Big Future to unpack one of the hottest debates in enterprise IT and AI research: the path to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and beyond to superintelligence. Brian brings his unique lens as a technologist [...]

In this special CTO Advisor Podcast episode, Keith Townsend sits down with Scott Robohn, founder of Tech Sales Craft and co-founder of the Network Automation Forum, for a timely conversation recorded live during GTC week in San Jose — but not at GTC. The duo dive deep into the evolution of network operations and why [...]

📄 Episode Summary / Show Notes: The AI infrastructure game is changing—fast. In this episode of The CTO Advisor Podcast, Keith Townsend sits down with Luke Norris, CEO of Kamiwaza, just steps from #NvidiaGTC, to unpack what planned obsolescence really means in a world of $100K GPUs with 18-month lifespans. 🔥 In this episode, we [...]

Episode Summary:In this episode of the CTO Advisor Podcast, Keith Townsend welcomes back Bryan Liles—a veteran developer and cloud expert—to discuss AI-assisted application development. The conversation covers how AI tools are transforming coding practices, from automating mundane tasks like converting data types and generating tests to speeding up complex problem-solving. Bryan shares his insights on [...]

In this episode, Keith Townsend is joined by Dion Hinchcliffe—VP and Practice Lead for The Futurum Group’s CIO practice—to explore the monumental impact of DeepSeek, a new large language model (LLM) that’s challenging AI industry norms. They discuss the astonishing claims surrounding DeepSeek’s minimal training costs, its potential to run on everyday hardware at ChatGPT-level [...]

In this episode of the CTO Advisor Podcast, recorded on December 18, 2024, Keith looks back on the major tech trends that are set to shape the landscape as we head into 2025. Drawing insights from recent tech events and vendor shows, the discussion centers on the evolution of AI from a standalone capability to [...]

After meeting at Kubecon, Keith gets in touch with Colin Murphy, a Senior Software Engineer at Adobe Systems, to discuss Web Assembly. They delve into how Adobe has employed Web Assembly to bring end-user applications to web browsers. Colin also discusses the promising aspects of server-side Web Assembly and highlights areas that need further development. [...]

Join Keith, Aeva Black (@aevavoom), and returning guest Ed Warnicke (@edwarnicke) as they dive into the world of GitBOM. It’s not a Git tool, nor is it exactly an SBOM, so how does it enhance software bill of materials and strengthen the security of your development lifecycle? Keith navigates the complexities of this project with [...]

In this episode of the CTO Advisor podcast, host Keith Townsend welcomes Delainy Dalton, a No-Code Developer in the healthcare insurance sector. Delainy shares her extraordinary journey from healthcare insurance sales and clinical care coordination to her current role as a no-code developer. She explains how her past experiences and analytical mindset have been crucial [...]