In recent years, the co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s live roving news desk, interviewed many of the most insightful and knowledgeable tech industry luminaries on-sight at various conferences and events—executives from David Meyer of Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. to Lew Tucker of Cisco Systems, Inc. to James Hamilton of Amazon.com, Inc.‘s Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Some of the most memorable interviews happened at events such as AWS Re:Invent, EMC World, Open Networking Summit, OpenStack Summit Atlanta, Red Hat Summit, VMworld and VTUG Winter Warmer.

For this series of 2014 Reflections, theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier, Dave Vellante, David Floyer, Jeff Kelly and Stu Miniman take a look back to remember their favorite theCUBE segments from the past year or so.

Miniman‘s favorite interviews included ones with James Hamilton, David Meyer, Lew Tucker, Solomon Hykes, John Cardente, Brad Anderson, Jim Whitehurst, Brian Gracely, Aaron Delp, John Troyer, Amy Lewis and Martin Casado. Check out the interviews in their entirety below (listed in no particular order).

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1. James Hamilton, VP and Distinguished Engineer, at Amazon Web Services, at AWS Re:Invent 2014

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James Hamilton, VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, spoke to Miniman and Furrier at AWS Re:Invent 2014. Here, Hamilton discusses how he thinks the cloud really is fundamentally different and how it is going to change the way the IT industry operates, his thoughts about the data center, the new enablers for the cloud-based data center (i.e., networking and databases), what is different about networking today, the rising costs of networking (relative to the rest of compute), customers’ needs for more networking bandwidth per compute today, and more.

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2. David Meyer, CTO and Chief Scientist at Brocade, at Open Networking Summit 2014

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David Meyer, CTO and Chief Scientist at Brocade, spoke to Miniman and Furrier at the Open Networking Summit 2014. Here, Meyer discusses how the network is really created today and points out what is different today compared to five years ago. He explains how OpenStack, Whitebox and the rest of the open-source community has changed his world view on how networking is being done—how one of the most powerful things about open source is the collaboration model. He discusses the inner workings of OpenDaylight, an open-source project, and how it has impacted the enterprise data center and the cloud.

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3. Lew Tucker, VP and CTO at Cisco, at OpenStack Summit Atlanta 2014

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Lew Tucker, VP and CTO at Cisco, spoke to Miniman and Furrier at OpenStack Summit Atlanta 2014. Here, Tucker discusses the strengths of the OpenStack community, how the cloud is one big distributed computer today, how Linux is now a first-class citizen of the enterprise, how infrastructure is cool now, the inner workings of what’s going on in OpenStack today, what is going to happen in open source going forward, and more.

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4. Solomon Hykes, Founder and CTO at Docker, Inc., at Red Hat Summit 2014

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Solomon Hykes, founder and CTO at Docker, spoke to Miniman and Furrier at the Red Hat Summit 2014. Here, Hykes discusses the company’s latest developments and their collaboration with Red Hat, Inc..

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5. John Cardente and Aiden O’Brien of EMC at EMC World 2014

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John Cardente, Distinguished Engineer in EMC‘s corporate CTO office, and Aiden O’Brien, Senior Director in EMC‘s Big Data Solutions department, spoke to Miniman at EMC World 2014. Here, Cardente and O’Brien discuss how a complete Big Data solution should encompass data, analytics and applications; how a Big Data solution needs to address a business challenge, the definition of a data lake and how it compares to storage area networks (SANs), the roles of the CIO/CXO in Big Data, and more.

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6. Brad Anderson, Corporate VP at Microsoft, at VTUG Winter Warmer 2014

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Brad Anderson, Corporate VP at Microsoft, spoke to Miniman and Vellante at VTUG Winter Warmer 2014. Here, Anderson discusses his company’s cloud and server strategy. As the VTUG event focused on the virtualization market broadening beyond VMware to the likes of Microsoft and Citrix, Vellante kicked off the interview with this topic. Anderson explains how Microsoft did a lot of innovation in storage that pioneered in Azure, then was brought to Windows Server. The key message, Anderson explains, is that Microsoft is operating and building a public cloud at scale, and that they back up their SLA financially. He said Microsoft focuses on ensuring consistency around private, public and hosted cloud to ensure customers are not locked into a cloud. They can move without adding any code at all.

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7. Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO of Red Hat, at Red Hat Summit 2014

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Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO of Red Hat, spoke to Miniman and Furrier at the Red Hat Summit 2014. Here, Whitehurst discusses open source evolution and its role in driving innovation. The birth and growth of web 2.0 companies, explains Whitehurst, are leading to the increased amount of code developed by the open-source community. He then comments on what’s next for the company, saying that “Red Hat really is becoming cloud.” He discusses innovation that’s happening across the U.S. in general, and then discusses Red Hat‘s subscription model. He adds a prediction about when he thinks OpenStack will generate significant revenue.

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8. Brian Gracely and Aaron Delp, co-founders of The Cloudcast, at OpenStack Summit Atlanta 2014

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Brian Gracely and Aaron Delp, co-founders of The Cloudcast, spoke to Miniman at OpenStack Summit Atlanta 2014. Here, Gracely and Delp discuss the state of cloud and how OpenStack fits into the whole discussion, how DevOps is being affected by OpenStack and open source, the technology behind OpenStack and how it could be a replacement for VMware or for Amazon (but how the only interesting thing is the economics involved), whether or not they think OpenStack has reached a level of maturity yet to be a strong player in the space, and more.

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9. John Troyer and Amy Lewis, both of the Geek Whisperers Podcast, at EMC World 2014

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John Troyer of TechReckoning and Amy Lewis of Cisco are both involved with the Geek Whisperers Podcast. They spoke to Miniman at EMC World 2014. Here, Troyer and Lewis discuss what’s going on in the tech industry with social media and community influencers, how the buying process and marketing have been affected, how bloggers have become communicators and technologists, how social media is a universal tool set, the importance of influencers and citizen (unpaid) analysts, the role of the traditional press and analysts, how to get deeper engagement from potential customers, and more.

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10. Martin Casado, CTO and networking general manager at VMware, at VMworld 2014

Martin Casado, CTO and networking general manager at VMware, spoke to Miniman and Furrier at VMworld 2014. Here, Casado discusses how developers have long dreamed of a world in which applications define their own infrastructure needs. But Casado takes a contrarian view saying that the app isn’t going to even care about the infrastructure in the long term because the infrastructure software layer will provide a “Utopian” data center service for the app. Developers have never liked to worry about infrastructure and in the future they won’t have to, Casado predicts.

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Photo of Lew Tucker courtesy of theCUBE

All videos are courtesy of SiliconANGLE