Charles Humble

Surrey

Freelance techie, podcaster, editor, author and consultant, 1/2 of ambient techno band Twofish. I'd rather be making music.

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Articles

AI Consumes Lots of Energy. Can It Ever Be Sustainable?

1 week ago | thenewstack.io | Charles Humble

As demand for AI surges, figuring out the performance of proprietary AI models is only half the battle. The other half: reckoning with how much energy AI demands. By 2030 the U.S. alone is set to consume more electricity for data centers than for the production of aluminum, steel, cement, chemicals and all other energy-intensive goods combined, according to a sweeping report released in April by the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Cycle Expands Beyond Kubernetes: Adds VMs, Bare Metal, and FaaS

2 weeks ago | thenewstack.io | Charles Humble

Disclosure: The author wrote this post on behalf of cycle.io. Cycle, the lowops Kubernetes alternative, has announced two new features that take it from cloud container orchestration to being a comprehensive compute platform for containers, virtual machines (VMs), and functions that you can run anywhere. Cycle combines two things: Platform orchestration and infrastructure management.
AI at the Edge: Federated Learning for Greater Performance

4 weeks ago | thenewstack.io | Charles Humble

The classical machine learning paradigm requires the aggregation of user data in a central location where data scientists can pre-process it, calculate features, tune models and evaluate performance. The advantages of this approach include being able to leverage high-performance hardware (such as GPUs), and the scope for a data science team to perform in-depth data analysis to improve model performance.
Fivetran Brings Data Lake Interoperability to Google Cloud

1 month ago | thenewstack.io | Charles Humble

Alongside data lake support for Microsoft Fabric, data integration vendor Fivetran expanded its Managed Data Lake Service to support Google’s Cloud Storage (GCS), following previous launches on AWS and Azure. The Fivetran Managed Data Lake Service, which the vendor launched last year, automatically converts data into open table formats, specifically Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake, and facilitates interoperability with popular query engines and metadata catalogs.
How to Choose the Right Cloud CPU for Your Workload

2 months ago | thenewstack.io | Charles Humble

When I first started as an enterprise developer in the mid 1990s, everything ran in our on-premises data centers, and procurement was slow. Purchasing servers, racking them and installing all the base software on them would take around three months, sometimes longer. A side effect was that when we were sizing a project to forecast how much hardware was needed, we would typically overprovision.
API Governance: Using Patterns From PayPal, Netflix and More

2 months ago | thenewstack.io | Charles Humble

API governance is not, I will admit, a topic that sets the pulse quickening. It might best be described as boring but important. Done well, it can help maintain consistency and promote reuse across APIs. It should also provide a mechanism by which both internal and external customers can provide feedback and request changes. These requests can then be assessed against other competing priorities so that decisions can be made about if, how and when to implement them.
Canonical Extends Kubernetes Distro Support to a Dozen Years

2 months ago | lxer.com | Steven Vaughan-Nichols |Rak Siva |Charles Humble |Sijie Guo

Programmers love the best and newest releases. Businesses? Not so much. They want stability. So it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise that Canonical, Ubuntu Linux‘s parent company, has unveiled its Kubernetes Long Term Support (LTS) offering, which provides an unprecedented 12 years of support. For example, the most recent Canonical Kubernetes release, 1.32, will be supported until 2037.
Letter: Bridge decision is shortsighted

2 months ago | columbian.com | Charles Humble

The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
Oreon Project Is a Kinder, Gentler Enterprise Linux Distribution

2 months ago | lxer.com | Jack Wallen |Rak Siva |Charles Humble |Sijie Guo

Have you ever wondered why more people don’t use the likes of AlmaLinux, CentOS Stream or Rocky Linux as a desktop operating system? After all, those distributions are rock solid and very secure. Doesn’t that sound like the makings for an ideal desktop OS? Nah. Okay, yeah, it does … but that doesn’t mean people are going to use it as such. Why? Complication.
Not My Father’s Middleware: How To Be Productive With Agentic AI

Feb 13, 2025 | thenewstack.io | Charles Humble

My father, Nick Humble, worked for IBM for most of his career. In the early 1990s, he worked on the launch team for a brand new piece of messaging-oriented middleware called IBM MQ Series (now called IBM MQ). Released in 1993, it was an instant hit. In the early 2000s, I worked with a team that used MQ Series as the foundation for implementing an internet banking system for a major UK High Street bank.