The Last Great Cloud Transformation: Connectivity Cloud EP1

Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimmel from Techstrong, and welcome to our latest video series, the Last Great Cloud Transformation. You know, I was here in 2005 and six when cloud first kind of burst on the scene, and we talked about moving payloads, workloads, applications from data centers up to the cloud, or running clouds in data centers. And over the course of that 20 or so years now, almost 20 years, we've seen various migrations, transformations involving adopting cloud.

But we're at a, a juncture in time right now where macro factors have come in that are really pushing, pulling and changing what we can do and what business demands like never before. We, we, we've built this huge capacity at the core, if you will, of cloud, but we also have the edge, we have endpoints, we have people doing anything from anywhere. What's holding us back from going even faster further than we've ever gone before.

Basically, it's network and security, right? And our forensic, CloudFlare called this the connectivity cloud, right? Joining in that core edge central with a strong network and, and security connecting it all to do things better, faster than we ever did before with the advent of ai, gen, ai, and some of the other technologies available to us today.

This is now possible where it wasn't possible before, and that's why we say this is the last great cloud transformation that happened right here. We're gonna talk about it. We've got a great panel for today.

Let me introduce you to them And our, and our guest for today. First of all, is John in Gates? Did I get that right?

John In Gates? Close enough in Gates, yep. Yes, sir.

Okay. John, introduce yourself to the audience. Yeah, so I'm John.

Uh, I am field CTO at CloudFlare. I've been here for about three years, and my background has been in cloud computing and infrastructure and data centers for many years. I was, I got to know CloudFlare back in the early days when they were working with us at Rackspace.

I was CTO over at Rackspace. And, um, just saw the power of the CloudFlare platform firsthand for a lot of our customers. It was sort of like this magic capability that when you put it in front of their sites, it, like you were saying, it made things more reliable, more protected.

And, um, you know, many, many years later, I come back around after the pandemic and I see what cloudflare's up to, and I just really get excited about it. And so I joined the company, like I said, about three years ago. And in my role as a field CTO, I spent a lot of time doing events and conferences and customer engagements and even panels like this.

So I'm pleased to be here. I'm, I'm happy to be a part of this, uh, conversation. And I hope we have a great series with you on, on the, on, on this topic at hand.

Well, if we have you on a lot, it will be, it's funny, my background's in the hosting business too, right? com days. Uh, we were first a, a host and then became an A SP and mm-Hmm, uh, application service provider.

This was before there was a cloud, of course, right? Of course. So it was whole, it was a whole different game with Enron connectivity, ob beer.

Someday we could talk about it. But John, thanks for joining us. Also joining us is my partner and the compadre.

He's worked with me. We've worked together for about 25 years now, actually. Uh, he's our CTO here at Techstrong as well as CTA at RUM Research, uh, chief Technology Advisor there, my friend Mitchell Ashley.

Hey, Mitchell, welcome. Always love this topic. I'm so excited.

Cloud transformation and, and I'm convinced I'm not gonna have to pull any fiber or ethernet cable. This will be the best transformation ever. Yay.

Yeah, we, we just had this conversation the other day about Interlochen, right? And all the dark fiber that level three and back to your Rackspace, Rackspace days, John, right? Remember, there was a time where, where are we gonna do it?

All this data center capacity. Well, guess what? We don't have a lot of data center excess capacity these days.

You know, it seems that, uh, people are looking to move to the edge. And, and that's the kind of the kinds of stuff we're gonna be talking about, you know, for 20 years, 20 2005, about cloud first burst on the scene. And, and we've gone through, as I said in the opening, several transformation errors of what it means to move to the cloud.

You know, first it was, let's face it, first it was lift and shift, right? You, it was our friend, rich Morgan would call it cloud washing. We would take what we had in the data center at a rack circuit consultants, throw it up into a private cloud public.

It was just really AWS is the public cloud that, and voila, you're a, you're a cloud, right? You're in the cloud. Tell grandma how pictures are in the cloud.

I guess that was a cloud transformation, right? Um, but early, early on, we recognized that networking and security, you, you couldn't cloud wash those that easily. It just didn't translate.

It didn't that That's right. It like a dud. And, and so we've had to sometimes do unnatural acts even right?

To, to kind of fit five pounds or 10 pounds into a five pound bag and, and, you know, different form factors and different ways of faking it. Um, but nevertheless, right? Time marches aren't right.

Progress waits for a nomad. And, and we've seen people being very innovative in, in their transformation. But like every technology evolution revolution, there comes a point where you of diminishing returns.

You gotta try something. We've reached, you know, what we can do here in a reasonable way without really doing unnatural acts. I feel like we've come to that border again, we've come to that church, that boundary, if you will, that boundary layer where, look, the rules have changed.

The game is changing, and we need, we need new rules, new games, right? We, we need to think about it differently. John Cloudflare's a leader out here, right?

It used to be you just were a CDN, but you've gone way, they cloudflare's way, way beyond just CDN today, right? That's true. What do you, what do you see?

What do you think? Well, I had a lot of thoughts as you were talking there. I Couldn't, I'm sorry, But, uh, no, I, I I couldn't help.

But, uh, think back to the word cloud, and you know, you said pre-cloud, you know, you were an a SP, you were building applications that were delivered over the internet. It wasn't called the cloud then. It wasn't even called cloud when I was working hard at Rackspace, building websites and, you know, building up scale for companies that, uh, that needed that sort of level of infrastructure.

But the term cloud, if we trace it all the way back, it really goes back to how we used to represent networks on a, on a whiteboard. You know, we used to draw a picture of a cloud, and that was kind of the internet. And the internet was represented that way because it was this sort of great unknown, right?

We didn't know how it worked and how packets went from point A to point B. We just knew we connected into one side and the destination was the other side, right? And in the, in the middle, we had this nebulous thing.

And so that's where that term cloud came from, right? And so as we think about cloud computing, we moved applications. They kind of went first, right?

So that was your, uh, earliest days of the a SP business. Um, then Amazon had that great idea of, of, uh, building out infrastructure services. So compute cloud, storage, cloud, maybe database, cloud, all these other capabilities.

Then the, the software as a service vendors came into the picture and started using those tools to build out their own software and deliver it as a cloud service. But if you go back to that original, uh, problem, the network, right? The network was never made cloudy, right?

It was never cloudified. I don't know what the right term is, but it was never taken to the cloud in the same way that some of those other services were. And that's for a variety of reasons.

I mean, we can talk through that if you want to, but it's just, that's really where we are headed as a company at CloudFlare, is bringing the network and the security, because the security was also a disjointed element of this. I mean, there have been attempts to bring, uh, cloud type, um, uh, architecture to the network, but sometimes they were missing pieces like security. And so when we bring all of that together and we add in services that developers might use, we bring, you know, sort of, um, serverless compute or edge compute plus AI at the edge, those kinds of things start to transform into something completely different than what we have ever seen before, uh, when we, when we think about networks.

And so that's really, I think what, uh, I, uh, I guess the foundational thought behind a connectivity cloud is solving for all of those kinds of challenges. Now, John, as I think about you just listening to both of you and Alan, you know, back in the day building networks, I thought about building networks, right? Instead of building clouds, it was all about, good analogy might be an erector set.

Here's the pieces, you know, can I be A to B and B2C and C to C, you know, where's it all going? And I don't have a great path to get here, so let me fill that in with another provider. Let me put in my network here.

Let me figure out what security boxes I need to install. Well, then what do I do about my providers that I'm connecting to? It was a, a real construction project as I kind of think about it.

And today, what, what you're describing is, it's not just where you need to connect to and who you need to connect to. You're, that's kind of assumed, right? You're building a cloud, but it's also capabilities in the cloud, right?

Whether it's application protection or APIs or it's bot protection that you're preventing. Maybe you're, you're looking to, how do we, uh, block ourselves from the OAS top 10 there? There's all these different elements.

And, and now even developers, they're programming to the cloud, right? It's not this network thing sitting in the background that just connects us all together, right? And, and look, we need really the idea of, of not just connecting point A and point B, like I said before.

I mean, we need any, to any connectivity. We need to connect users and applications and devices, and I, uh, AI services, which usually are delivered via APIs. We need all of that to be connected and secured and made private and made reliable and made programmable.

Because we can't wait anymore for somebody to go rack and stack a piece of hardware in a data center like we used to do. We, that's just, you know, far, uh, too slow, right? For, for the modern era, we need that flexibility to be able to program that just like we would other cloud services.

And because of the fact that everything is going to expect an API, we're gonna need to have the responsiveness of an API and be able to bring things up and down, uh, you know, at, at a, at a moment's notice. And then again, the security, we can't leave that behind because security threats are everywhere. They're constant.

They're an ever present risk to anything that we want to do on, on top of the internet or on even on private networks. And so we need to be able to get some threat intel, some network intelligence. So we need to make sure that that's, um, integrated and unified and tightly, uh, connected with all the other capabilities.

You know, what I find fascinating though, guys, for all of the success we've had in previous cloud migrations, cloud trans transforming cloud transformations, there's always this sort of, there's always this sort of thing of, well, you know what, a majority of workloads still not on the cloud. We still have a ton of private data centers. It's not secure enough.

The network's not fast enough. We, we we're moving everything there. I need stuff to work on my phone.

I need stuff to work at the edge. I need, I need, I need, I need is what it comes down to, right? People always give them an edge, take a foot.

They always want more. And it, and so there's this feeling of to realize the full potential of the cloud. We need something else.

We need something more. We need this next great. Or maybe it's the last great transformation.

And, and we're also, you know, you can't mention any of this without talking about AI today as well, right? AI is a game changing. Do we need LLMs on the edge?

Do we need AI on our end devices? And does that have to talk to the AI back at the core? And that's gonna take a network and security, right?

It, you can't make wine before it's time, but now is the time to do this. Great last great transformation. That kind of a grand unification, if you will, bringing them all together.

CloudFlare is calling this the connectivity cloud. We've heard this term not knocked around the connectivity cloud. This last great cloud transformation.

John, I know you can talk about what it is, but Mitchell, I'm interested first from you, what you think about it. And then let's let John tell us what the real thought on it is. Yeah, We'll get, we'll get it from the real authority.

Yeah. You know, You know, it, it interesting. It seems like living in a network or world environment up to this point, it's always been about kind of building the highway of where traffic needs to go, how it needs to get there, how fast it needs to get there, the latency speeds, layering, layering on security on top of that.

And we're in an era now where the business doesn't really care about that. Matter of fact, they don't want to hear from us about, oh, we can't go there 'cause we, we have to order equipment and that's gotta show up on site and we have to have somebody go there and put that together for us, or we need to work with this provider. All of those kind of things seems the last, last great transformation is about anything, anywhere.

And it is a network of networks and a software environment that we're delivering this all across. And it's powered by software, it's fueled by software, meaning those are the capabilities that we can access through APIs or through services that come through a CloudFlare or the connectivity that's going between CloudFlare, my other providers that are part of this complex, uh, array of networks. Because you know what?

We just acquired a new company and now I've got a different topology than I had five minutes ago. I can't take six months to fold that in. I've gotta operate it tomorrow, and I have to respond quickly to what's going on in the business.

So for me, and I'll let you John, kind of describe more the meat of it, but the environment of what we need has changed drastically. And the expectations of us to deliver that have changed drastically as well. Yeah, for sure.

And you know, you, you guys have been talking about this and, and we, we've been talking about it as well as the last great cloud transformation. I'll say that again just because I twisted my words last great cloud transformation. And I used that term or that phrase the other day, and somebody asked me, why do you call it that?

And I said to them, well, it's not last in the sense of least important, like the last, but not least, you know, that sort of last, it was just in order of what has been transformed, it seems to have been put off to the end, right? And in some ways it should have been brought to the beginning. If you're going to move things out of your data center into somebody else's data center, you said the word highway, you better have a good highway to get to that destination.

You better have something that connects you. But we didn't build that first. We built that later, right?

And we've had to do sort of magic tricks to, to continue to make it work with VPNs and tunnels and cross connects inside of colos and all kinds of, you know, um, unnatural acts to get, to get to the point where we can actually get to those applications reliably. And as we saw during the pandemic, a lot of companies fell on their face when they put everybody in a work from home or a, a work from remote kind of environment because they didn't have that connectivity in place. They were still routing traffic through those racks and stacks of equipment.

And that just didn't make sense. So now I think people have woken up to the fact that there is so much going on. There's a need to start to think about the infrastructure that connects and protects and, and makes everything work together well.

And I think that's why we're finally seeing some movement. Also, the technology has evolved, frankly. You know, there were, there were things that were holding us back, um, just even, uh, enterprise, you know, enterprises themselves and the politics and the people inside of those organizations.

Sometimes they wanted to hold onto the gear, right? There are people that loved the whole, um, idea of logging into a network switch and configuring it and being the smartest person in the room when it came to doing that. And even that is starting to fall away.

Those people recognize even the, the most, uh, ardent of the, uh, the, the server huggers or the network device huggers or whatever you call them, have figured out that they, they need to elevate their game. They need to start to program these devices to be more agile. They need to take advantage of, of sort of the, the same concepts of DevOps and do sort of net DevOps, if you will.

Uh, and, and DevOps take, yep. So basically taking that approach and, um, and, and you know, that it's not new, but there are still companies that are stuck in, in what I'd say are the dark ages, right? And so, uh, we're, we're recognizing that there's a better way and, uh, and companies are embracing that today.

And it's for a variety of reasons. You know, sometimes it's to enable new applications like we're talking about with AI and, and, and new services like that. Sometimes it's for compliance reasons.

They need to, uh, be in a lot of different countries. And every one of those countries has a different patchwork of regulation and compliance. And the way you encrypt data, where you encrypt data, how you, uh, you know, move your security keys around.

All that stuff's very complicated, right? And, and the, uh, the, the, the, you know, I mentioned the VPN, the VPN really laid bare the, the problems of, you know, having one or two or three different places where you're onboarding users into your, into your cloud, um, network. It just doesn't work at the, at the way that world is, is moving around.

I've, you know, been traveling, uh, I see people working from home and, and different places all around the country. You have to have infrastructure that supports that end of it, as well as the, uh, sort of what lives in the data center and, and, and the cloud side of things as well. You know, once we move to the, to the cloud like that, the whole idea of making your network relying on like VPNs.

So think about this. I work from anywhere, I do everything from anywhere, anything, anywhere. But in order to do anything, I'm going to VPN back into my home land, which then goes back out to the cloud, and then I take information down from that cloud back to my homeland, then back out over the VPN to where, anywhere where I am.

Well, that's not anything from anywhere. That's just waste, right? A lot of, lot of round trips on the, on the network, right?

Latency. Latency. Yep.

And, and so it just look, anyone who's still doing that at this day in age, I, I, I feel sorry if I pity, but I pity the fool to quote Mr. T. But anyway, um, but it goes back to something I said earlier though too, is that you can't make wine before it's time.

We couldn't have this level of secure cloud networking, cloud ops, dev cloud ops, or DevNet ops, or whatever you want to call it. It's people processing technology. A the technology wasn't in place.

People were still hugging their being the idea of being in their own data center or in their own closet down the hall too much, right? Excuse me. And we didn't have the processes to, to, to think of it even now, right?

We, we talk about having stuff on the edge, like, so I, I just got my head around that, you know, maybe that big honking AWS or whoever data center has some good security and there's an awful lot of connectivity into it, but now you want me to move my data to the edge, right? And, and what's the connectivity there? What's the network like there?

How secure is that? Again, that's why we need this connectivity cloud idea. Mm-hmm, right?

That, that handles this connectivity and the secure, that modern manner running T three lines isn't, that's not cool no more, right? There was a time, John, I'm show when you were Rackspace, I don't remember T three lines 45 megabits a second. Wow.

5, no If T 3 5 45, right? You know, and my God, who's gonna need that much bandwidth? Well, that don't cut it, right?

You not in today's world. And it, and it wasn't secure then. So as we dive into this subject over the next weeks and months, I wanna talk really what is involved in securing, you know, what is security in the connectivity cloud error mean?

Yeah. What is connectivity in a connectivity cloud error mean, right? That's important to us.

Yeah. Well, let's talk about connectivity first and then we'll talk about the security later. Um, the connectivity, you know, with cloud, um, it's been the internet the whole time, right?

The internet has been the predominant way that most users access their cloud applications when they're roaming, right? It may be if they're in the office, they're not using the internet, but when they're anywhere else, by definition, if you're in a coffee shop or you're at home or somewhere else, you're using the internet. So the internet is the foundational underpinning of all this.

Um, the problem though is that the internet was never designed for all of this. It's never been a enterprise network. It's never had, um, you know, sort of SLAs around performance or latency.

Your upstream ISP makes decisions that are in their best interest, not your best interest. Uh, you know, you have a patchwork of different ISPs with all kinds of different technologies. It's kind of lucky, this whole thing, you know, it's amazing.

This whole thing works, right? The internet is just this amazing thing that, uh, has evolved in, in so many amazing ways over the years to work like it does, but yet it was never designed for what we're using it for. It never had security.

If you look back at the earliest RFCs of the internet, there was no real, uh, plan for security. It was kinda like, yeah, it's, you know, put it on the wire and, and let it go and, and, uh, hope for the best. So we had to over time layer in encryption and, and sort of more reliability into the, into the mix to make these things, um, you know, sort of ready for the applications that we were throwing at them.

And I think we're continuing to evolve what that, what that means. I mean, today people jump on a Zoom call like we're on, and they expect perfection or they want perfection. Um, they, they oftentimes don't get it because of the unpredictability of what's in between them and the other end of that, uh, connection.

So that's what we aim to fix in terms of connectivity is put, um, you know, sort of edge locations. We have like 330 different cities where we have edge computing infrastructure. CloudFlare runs that.

It's not in somebody else's cloud. It is our cloud, and it exists all over the world. And every one of those locations is an on-ramp to the CloudFlare network.

And in between those edge locations is a fiber backbone that we've built, um, over time. Some of it's, um, interconnects between, uh, you know, telcos and CloudFlare via peering arrangements, but other pieces of it, the really core important pieces are, are fiber that, that CloudFlare has, uh, built out over time with, um, with the help of other, you know, the providers that fiber providers, well, fiber providers. So we, uh, take that network and then improve the performance for our customers and for the data flowing across, we can be more, um, you know, active in terms of directing how traffic flows, and we can make decisions that ISPs don't either know to know to make or, or can't make.

And then the next question is, once you have that, um, connectivity sort of improved using Cloudflare's Edge as, and, and, and the, uh, the technology we use in between, then it's about security, right? And so we want to make sure that we're encrypting that traffic as soon as we possibly can near the edge, or we're, uh, applying a security policy near the end user so that they're not having to traverse the entire internet only to get to some data center where the firewalls or the zero trust platform exists, and then the security gets applied. We do that right out at the edge at all of our Edge locations.

And so we want to be able to connect users and devices and applications and anything that, anything anywhere, right? And, and those, uh, are, are increasingly, um, you know, just an array of things that, that are unpredictable because it's evolving constantly. You know, John, I think that that whole idea of redefining what connecting or connectivity is, I would submit to you that connectivity is the killer app.

I mean, we used to talk about the killer app is the thing that's gonna really demonstrate what this, what this new technology can do, do. And, and connectivity. It's about connecting everything, right?

Whether it's your iot device at home, it's your commercial IO OT device. It's a, we're opening a new store. We want to do a, um, you know, a a a quick popup business here and I've got 5G, but I need to get that where I'm, where my business and my customers are.

Um, it, it's connecting anything, whether it's an application through APIs, it's a new functional capability. It's a partner I need to connect. It's, um, an app that I'm building or maybe, uh, through a relationship now that I can combine what we offer and another organization can offer.

Like you're talking about with the, with the provider network that you connect with it, it is that connectivity. And then how do you lower the barrier to entry to be able to do that? 'cause if it's hard, it's gonna take a long time.

I mean, if it's, if it's complex, it's gonna take a long time. If you can simplify it, which is all, a lot of it is our great protocols that, you know, bounded and built a lot of the network, TBIP, et cetera. Um, but it seems to be that's what we really, when you say anything d anything anywhere, it's that connectivity killer app, right?

Yeah. You just absolutely mentioned something that's one of the, the most, um, common, uh, you know, I guess one of the most common problems we're trying to solve for customers is, is how do we bring up, um, new branch offices or how do we make, uh, new locations around the world productive more quickly? And, you know, if, if you can imagine a network that's no longer tied to a collection of physical boxes that need to be shipped out to a remote site, like there's no more, you know, uh, the, The hub and spoke, Right?

Right. There's no, that was, that was talk. Yeah.

It'll be a Cisco 2300 showing up at your site, winning, whatever that, right? I mean, the, the last job I had just prior to, to CloudFlare was building out these giant SD WAN networks for the large enterprises. And there we were having the SD WAN boxes shipped to our headquarters to configure them only to turn around and ship them back out via FedEx to the remote site so that they could plug it in.

And, you know, I know that's not how that was supposed to, to evolve, but that's what was happening for a lot of big companies. Um, they couldn't, they couldn't do it any other way. And that doesn't make sense in the world where you're trying to be more dynamic and, and, uh, you know, respond to the demand that's happening all around you and, uh, be more nimble and agile and, and take advantage of all the, the modern technology.

Um, and you know, the other problem we solve is the VPN, right? The, the modernizing, the VPN via zero trust and SASS e and using those edge compute sites as on-ramps into that SASS e network that is a, a very different security architecture than what's, you know, come before. And that is so much more efficient, so much more powerful, uh, and more dynamic, um, than, than, you know, sort of the alternatives.

It's just hard to resist it once you sort of understand what it can mean. And, and for a small company, it absolutely makes sense because you would never go and buy all that equipment and build out a data center. Um, you'd, you'd use the cloud, right?

And that is where most companies that are, you know, getting started would, would start. But now big companies are recognizing that it just doesn't make sense to try to manage sort of building out your own connectivity cloud. 'cause that's what people were doing.

They were piecing together their own small version of CloudFlare by having two or three or four VPN sites around the world where they were building out their own zero trust network by partnering with one of the other zero trust vendors and hoping that their cloud locations made sense for, for the business. And, you know, trying to stitch those two different vendors together and have the logs coming outta different ones that was a connectivity cloud, but it was a homegrown one. It was one that, that people were sort of building up themselves.

What we're trying to present is a unified vision for what this can mean at global scale, what it can mean when it works well together, when it comes out of the box with functionality that is already proven. I mean, we use it ourselves. We use it.

This was, this was born out of the need for CloudFlare to protect its own employees from the threats that we face every day, which are massive in scale and very sophisticated. And so, you know, it's, it, it came from there, but it is now operating out in, in the, in the, uh, in some of the largest enterprises. Some of the largest, um, you know, companies out there in the world are using this technology and it works.

And, and there's nothing more to say, but once you sort of get a taste of this, it, it's just irresistible because nobody wants to go back to that old world of buying and racking and building Lego bricks to get your network up and running. It just, it doesn't work for the modern era. No, but you know what?

You mentioned something, and I want to end on that. In order to do this and to do it well, you need a certain scale that very few organizations can bring to, to the problem, right? Sean, I don't know if you know off the top of your head, but I remember at one time something like 21 or 26% of all internet traffic traveled over CloudFlare.

Roughly 20% of websites are behind CloudFlare. The, and we protect, we protect those websites from the, the, uh, the attacks. Yeah.

Right? So you can't, you could try building your own connectivity cloud and uh, God bless you for doing so, but if you don't have that kind of scale, this, this is, you know, this is something that just almost by very nature, it requires that scale. You want to get good security, you wanna have good connectivity, you want to continue to build and protect and deploy.

You need that kind of scale. Guys, I think we've gotten this off to a terrific start. We're gonna dive deep on all of these little nooks and crannies we've hit on here, but we can, we can't do it all in one show.

John, thank you so much for coming on here and, and kicking this off with us. You've got an open invitation anytime you wanna come back on, you know, we'd love to have you here. Uh, well, thanks for having me when you come down here to Boker and do it in person with us too, Mitchell, as always, it's great to have you on, most of all for you folks watching this out there.

Thank you so much for sitting in on the inaugural, uh, premier edition of our next greatest series, the Last Great Cloud Transformation, and, um, stay tuned 'cause there's a lot more coming. Many thanks to CloudFlare for sponsoring and co-producing with us. This thanks to Jody Ashley, you're producing, uh, doing the behind the scenes production work that makes this possible.

Until next time, this is Alan Shimo. We're out.