CloudFest USA Q&A With Syona Sarma

This week’s insider convo is with Syona Sarma, Senior Director, Head of Hardware Infrastructure at Cloudflare, a service provider increasing the security and performance of websites. Syona has been at Cloudflare for nearly three years now. Prior to joining Cloudflare, Syona worked at Intel, where she started her career in CPU design and held roles in hardware, product and business development.

In our back-and-forth, you can hear from Syona on what she views as the biggest evolutions in the hardware space, how AI hardware has become a major focus and even who she described as “the closest thing we have to a present day philosopher.”

Briefly introduce yourself to any members of our readership who may not know you yet!

I run Hardware engineering for Cloudflare, based in San Francisco. I lead a global team of managers and system engineers responsible for building infrastructure for Cloudflare’s foundational compute & storage services and rapidly expanding AI Inference products. I’m passionate about delivering innovative infrastructure solutions, and cultivating high-performing teams.

You’ve been at Cloudflare for nearly 3 years now and were at Intel for more than 5 years before that. What are the biggest changes in the hardware space over the past 8 years that you think it’s important to call attention to?

There are two major and somewhat opposing trends, the continued commoditization of hardware,  and the rise of custom built silicon to accelerate specific workloads. It’s reshaping how we think about performance, cost, and flexibility.

We just released our mainstage agenda for CloudFest USA, but I want to know what topic or topics are most front of mind for you in 2025?

AI hardware trends are definitely front and center for us right now. Especially focused on modular hardware architectures and the growing momentum around open source standards that impact efficiency of infrastructure deployment.

This will be your first CloudFest USA! What are you most looking forward to about CloudFest USA 2025 and its new home in Miami?

I always come away from these panels having learned something new, looking forward to the conversations and insights. Plus, I’ve never been to Miami, it sounds like a fun place to host!

If you could program your own fireside chat with one person currently working in the industry, who would it be and why?

Lex Fridman, he’s an AI researcher and a well known podcast host. He has really thoughtful, wide ranging conversations with some of the smartest people in science, technology, and just about every other field. I’d love to ask about his unique perspective of the world

If you could program your own fireside chat with any person, dead or alive, who isn’t currently in the industry, who would it be and why?

Sam Harris comes to mind, to me he’s the closest thing we have to a present day philosopher. I’m fascinated by his views on morality and consciousness, and I really appreciate his wry wit and ability to articulate complex ideas about life.