Measuring ROI – Jaret Chiles, DoiT

This is Textron TV. Hey guys. Thanks for the throw.

We're here with Jared child who's senior vice president for client services for do it do it. How do we say that? Jerry good question common question.

Yeah. All right, one way or the other as long as you call you, it's all good. Right?

So the first question though is What is going on with the cloud these days? We've been at it now for let's say more than a decade and you would think that we'd have a better handle on it than we do. But the return on investment seems a little bit cloudy people aren't quite sure if it's more expensive or less expensive and I'm sure that the answer that is the infamous depends.

But from your perspective, what are you hear from customers these days about their Cloud migrations and then the actual running of the workloads in the cloud after they get there. Absolutely. Good question.

Mike would definitely seen a lot of Trends over the last decade and so more since the clouds been coming along, you know the lot of push to go to it immediately new shiny try everything, you know Cloud first. It's a lot of reverse migrations people realizing that they did it wrong. They went too fast.

They didn't have a proper strategy. I think we've come around quite a bit but there's still a lot of opportunity to grow. There's a lot of companies that are different life cycles in their Cloud adoption how Cloud native they are but I would say by and large what we've seen is a lot of improvements in Cloud cost of taking an architecture putting into the cloud making sure using your resources properly.

I said that broadly everybody's doing that well, but there's still a lot more in terms of like being able to truly have a cloud-native application to really have more or scalable or cost-effective architectures and things like that, which is harder. It's one thing just to make sure that you've got the right application refactored in the cloud. It's nothing to essentially have to rewrite your application for the cloud.

So you're seeing varying degrees of that in different kind of cost optimization strategies that tie into there right now. It feels like we're coming off the quote unquote drunken sailor era of the cloud where we let developers just basically spin up and consume resources as they saw fit in the name of agility. So is there more adult supervision being brought to bear?

Yeah, I think certainly should be there's kind of a couple different ways that you think about it. A lot of times one of the big Promises of the cloud is that agility getting there quickly being able to try something to go procure all the infrastructure everything first? And that's very valid.

But what you see happen a lot is you go from that straight on to I have something successful and you prove the concept but you didn't really build all the optimization everything in the front right? You shouldn't have I mean, maybe maybe it doesn't make sense to spend all that time up front. You want to prove a business case to prove a service or something is going to work well for your business or your customers before you go invest that?

But I think that lag time people wait till they go. Oh look at my cost. Before they go back and start to start to go reevaluate if they really optimized or cost.

So that's that's a big a big part of it. As we kind of look at everything are we also seeing more Finance people get involved in this conversation. We hear a lot more about the term beenops and sometimes I scratch my head because we had capacity planning back in the day.

So what's different about this in the Cloud area? And what exactly do we do? We mean by Finance?

Yeah, it's good. I was actually gonna say phenolphthritis. It came out of your mouth.

So that's that's spot on you know, there's a lot of tools kind of the first wave of thinking about monitoring was is my application resilient. Do I have the fault tolerance? Do I know when something goes bump can it autohill?

It's all great. You know that that went to help prove that you can actually build more resilient applications in the cloud. But the next piece was understanding the cost controls.

This is where you see finop stacks and teams that really not only understand the architectures and resilience, but understand the different levers and the different things that are driving the cost. So these tools and this is kind of like the evolution of what we used to call CNP or Cloud management platforms are more heavily tuning towards. How do we enable the finance teams?

Or Cloud experts to have that responsibility. To understand what's going on in the cloud and that's a couple different things. It's not just resource utilization.

This is something that might be different to your point around understanding a capacity planning and things like that. It could be what are the workloads that are most effective for a cost savings plan that might be provided by a cloud provider reservedance and spot instances savings plans that's complex. It's more than just an understanding the utilization of your resources.

It's understanding the patterns that your applications may have that your work that you're a customer bases may need and how you can tune additional Financial levers with those types of things as well. Is that always going to be a manual task or can we start using the machines themselves to monitor the machines so that we can optimize the workload based on reserve and spot instances or whatever is available at the moment. It's getting there.

It's getting there. In fact, you know not to not the two do its horn too hard. We have a tool called flexig which does just that it helps automate identifying opportunities for savings plans.

And of course, there are tools out there that help do right sizing automatically and things like that. But again back to architectures, it's big part of it. Not every application can just have something out there really nearly changing resource sizes and things like that.

So you have to be designed in a way that enables these types of tools to work in a lot of cases and then some of the newer tools that we're seeing like Flex save in the market. Complement to them go help identify automation ways to to find Saving Solutions Beyond just utilization efficiencies. We hear about multi-cloud Computing all the time.

And is that just kind of an example of sprawl or people actually like comparing Cloud platforms and deciding, you know, which workload goes where based on cost in a traditional kind of sense. There's just, you know, some people like One Cloud versus another or some workload might run maybe. Yeah 2% faster on this Cloud than another Oh boy, Mike.

Do we have about an hour to go into this one? I've been several multi-cloud companies in Pure Play Cloud companies have been tracking this since the beginning almost a religious debate. It's I think that the original thought of multi-cloud is as it's it's changed a lot.

You know, just that like, oh you can put your application moving anywhere it cost Up Performance up whatever might be what we're really seeing. These days is most companies actually using multiple clouds, but it's driven by different things. I mean the one hand you could say you're sad applications as a Cloud solution and you haven't for structures Services a cloud providers your multi-cloud, but I think when you think of it just as primarily, you know, like gcpa of us as you're what you're seeing is best fit.

You may have a certain team or a certain business line that has skills that are related to certain cloud or an application that takes advantage of a feature on a certain Cloud that makes sense and different applications that make sense on different clouds. There's overhead in that you need now a diverse of skills or maybe more than one partner or maybe you have a partner that can help with more but you have have sprawled out kind of skill requirements to manage those and so you have to really evaluate I think having application Mobility between lots of different clouds that can be done and help customers do that. Um, but you need to really strong business case because it's not easy and it's often not not cheap, but I do think that there are some very good use cases for having certain applications on one or the other that's application specific.

But Underneath It All if you're a company full of AWS experts and you go drop your account your application on the on Google or Azure, you're gonna have a hard time, you know, so, I mean you think you do have to make always with your Cloud decisions do a thorough assessment of your capabilities and understand your gaps there first doesn't mean that you might not need to go retool your organization, but you really need to understand that before you go jump into those decisions. Speaking of that. It seems to me at least that every time you drop a workload on a different platform you increase the total cost of it.

You got to go get additional tools. You got to get additional Specialists. And do you think people are having a real understanding of the total cost of it every time they add a new Cloud platform or you know, maybe who knows one day might we get to this one magic tool that can manage them.

All. Is that ever gonna happen? every time we've seen a tool out there that presents that promise it seems to get scooped up and disappears pretty quick, but You know, it's it you bring up a really good point and that's the thing that you have to evaluate.

If you believe that there's a strong case for having applications running on different clouds. You need to understand your cost of ownership. That's one thing that a lot of when people they go and do their their tcos and things like that running apps in the clouds as they don't spend enough time thinking about that having led a lot of multi-cloud teams.

I can tell you there are some unicorns out there people that are highly effective on multiple clouds, but it's hard. There's not a lot of people like that out there. It's hard to scale that kind of expertise.

So I do believe that typically when you're running an application on more than one Cloud you're gonna have some increased operational overhead with that. Will it be more tools that make that easier? Yes, and there are some out there but often what you start to run into when you're leveraging and you know middleware tool that's helping solve some of those challenges for you.

You are sometimes pulling away some of the value of the clouds differentiate on you now have gone to some common denominator set of capabilities or for cloud launches a brand new feature. It may not be available in that tool yet for a while. So there's trade-offs and again, you just really have to look at what you're you're solving for as a business.

We also see people migrate workloads that might have been on one VM and then they move them to the cloud and then they're rehosted our refactored on another VM and then they don't run as well and especially if they're being accessed over a wide area network because the laws of physics have not been suspended and then we decide that we're going to rewrite all this stuff in quote unquote Cloud native Technologies, and we get kubernetes containers and serverless Frameworks. So lions and tigers and bears. Oh my um, do we have the skills to cope with all of that and manage that and is that kind of slowing down our migration and also overall just increasing our costs?

Yeah, we started we were talking about kind of the different phases of migrations different life cycles. I think this this kind of squarely falls back on it, right? I think in general in everybody's in different place in their own Journey.

We've gotten pretty good at an industry of taking something getting it to work in the cloud resilient, you know, breaking out some Services layers and optimizing it for the cloud maybe some performance trade-offs here there in some cases. It could improve a lot of performance. In other cases.

You might find some nuances where it hurts it. And you have to kind of tackle those cases and and figure out what's the best, you know dig into it figure out if it was on the wrong type of instance type again, we get back into like right sizing resources for cost but where the real value typically comes in. Is if you actually go through and we're not just talking about refactoring and breaking out services to put it in the cloud across more servers things like that resilience.

It may be should there be a serverless solution should there be is content? I mean, we have a lot of the same motions happen in containers are happening with early days of cloud people put in simple containers because they're reading all these articles about how great containers are if your use case Maybe not maybe not always but the hard thing right now is there's not a good tool out there. Not a good effort takes a lot of expertise to say if I invest all this time and money to go actually rebuild this application rewrite this application in a really cloud native way.

Am I going to get the return on that investment? Because it does take a lot of time to go do that. But you may not really be able to realize the full performance and cost efficiency is capable until you go through an exercise like that.

And that's kind of that that next phase or that that more modern Cloud native. If you will aspect of cloud adoption is not just being able to take something and make it resilient in the cloud and resource utilize. Well perform it.

Being able to really break it out into a service layer adopting things like service Technologies and so forth. It's not going to be right for every use case but being able to understand those use cases and being able to actually try and figure out is it worth the effort and that's that's really kind of where The golden egg is I think in a lot of cases and working with with really skilled Cloud experts that can take you there not because if there's tools that are gonna go magically produce that answer for you more or less because they've been there they've seen similar cases and can share their experiences. One way or another the ROI on that effort is going to be somewhat extended because it takes time and to build those applications.

So you may eventually see it but it's not going to happen overnight. So the question is do customers. A decade on have realistic expectations about what the clouds really all about or is this something that kind of discover after they get there and they go hey, how come nobody told me?

I think we're getting around to it more, you know, and I guess the first connotecture team. I was leading was over a decade ago and we were spending a lot of time telling people with the cloud is and how it works and things like that right now. I would say generally the biggest difference in the industry is most especially like in startups.

You have a lot more Cloud native starts. Most the ctOS have cios have Some Battle Scars are dealing with the cloud and they have some some perception of the strategy that they need. So I think there's a better understanding of the promise of the cloud and where the pitfalls lie, but that doesn't mean that they're easy to navigate.

It's still about having, you know, really strong partners that can that can help you through that. One of the more common strategies that we're seeing is back to that point. We're just making the ROI could be pushed way out.

It may not be that it makes sense to go invest all that time on the current application, but you may not be spending a lot of time anymore on developing and further building up that application as much as you're thinking about the full next revision or the next product that may someday Sunset the previous product and how you start off building that one the right way Cloud native. Um, that's a huge leg up for for cloud native startups to think that way right off the bat and something that companies that around and established and has has products have been the market for a while have to consider the risk of not just the time in our life petition to push out that way. But if you don't what's the threat that someone else might and how what's the risk to disrupting your product if they do or your business?

Speaking your risk do we actually consider the cost of securing all this stuff in the cloud or we kind of like think of that as an afterthought and then nobody does the math. you have to you know, it's you've seen so many different iterations and marketing tricks at different companies have around like we're security fits in the lifestyle. But the reality is it has to fit in every step it if you're not thinking about it up front.

If you're trying to bolt it on later typically more challenging and more expensive. I think the I think generally the Market's coming around to the fact that like the cloud can be highly secure. It could be more secure than traditional data centers and controls if it's done properly.

You know most times that we've seen in the industry any kind of breach. It's very rarely, you know, it's not that it came through the cloud provider. It was usually a poorly secured application or compromised credentials of a resource or something like that.

So it's really just making sure that you understand the security best practices as we kind of put all this together. Do you think that there's gonna be a backlash against the cloud you talked about? Some folks are repatriating applications or they getting better at slicing them up and maybe moving them to different platforms depending on what the data gravity of that application.

Looks like are we just getting smarter? I think we saw a lot of backlash. Um, we may not have seen the end of it all, you know, some of the economic pressures and things like that or making people reevaluate reevaluate their Cloud strategies, but I actually think in a lot of case those pressures may be accelerating, you know, the focus on making sure you have your environment optimized or refactored or protected appropriately more than set us back.

So I think that they will continue to move forward and continue to get smarter which may in some cases include situations where people realize that that they did something because they thought they should do it and it wasn't the right decision. So there may be some cases where people pull back but I think that's part of learning in the experience is understanding The Right Use cases the right application architectures. so the cloud All right, folks, you heard it here Julie resiliency all very important.

But in the age of the cloud, they're far from Priceless. Hey, Jared. Thanks for being on the show.

Thanks everybody. All right back to you guys in the studio.