TWiT: The Future of Tech in the Cloud

Transcript:

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- [Narrator] This is TWit event number six recorded March 5 2020. from WWT: The Future Of Tech In The Cloud. Today's event is brought to you by World Wide Technology. World Wide Technologies Advanced Technology Centers like no other testing and research lab with more than half a billion dollars of equipment, including solutions from key partners like HPE and Intel. And because it's virtual, you don't have to come here to St. Louis you can access it anywhere in the world 24 seven. To learn more about World Wide Technology, the Advanced Technology Centers become a member of their growing community go to wwt.com/twit.

- Hello, everybody, I'm Leo Laporte and we are at the WWT World Headquarters in St. Louis. What a beautiful facility this is, we've been taking a tour of the Advanced Technology Center that they've built here it's really a remarkable story. And we got to go in and touch the servers. It was a lot of fun. What we've done is we've assembled a panel of great experts here to talk about the future of tech in the cloud. And I'm gonna introduce our panel and then we can get going. Mike Dorosh is here, he's a Senior Director for Technology and Service Providers at the Gartner group. Mike, it's great to have you. He's the Pickle Expert, if you have any pickle questions. He's a Senior Research Analyst at Gartner Technology and Service Provider group covering Cloud Services in the Market Managed Services, and the intersection of IT services and cloud. He talks about Service Product Development, offering management startups, hybrid cloud, strategic outsourcing, cloud migration, deployment technologies, cloud management platforms, a business of technology and pickles. And beer.

- Mostly pickles.

- Mostly pickle some beer. It's great to have you Mike, thank you for coming out.

- Great to be here.

- To my left is Mary Jo Foley, who has some of the TWit listeners know is our host of Windows Weekly every Wednesday in our TWiT network, but she's also a much esteemed Technology Analyst for 30 years in a variety of publications. She blogs about Microsoft on ZDNet's, All About Microsoft blog at allaboutmicrosoft.com. And she once wrote a book, which she's pledged never do again.

- [Mary] Definitely.

- "Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era." Did it all come out the way you thought it would?

- Surprisingly, mostly.

- A lot of a cloud in there.

- A lot of cloudy things.

- And sitting to her left Alex Lindsey, most of you know Alex for many of our shows, he created MacBreak and his regular on MacBreak Weekly, our Macintosh show, but he's also kind of a genius of streaming and cloud production. He's Head of Production at 090 Media, live streaming services company. Maybe you don't know this, but his introduction to the cloud, was when he was working at Industrial Light Magic rendering shots for Episode One of Star Wars.

- [Alex] It was a local cloud. It was the first time we had introduction to 2000 processors and scheduling that in processing, you know, like you would you had to think in many of the same ways where you weren't working with your own local computer, you were working with a box or hosted box, somewhere else.

- He's actually managed over 2000 online events for companies like Facebook, Google and Salesforce, you left out the White House, but we'll just take that as... He's actually been down the back stairs in the White House. So first of all, you know, I'm gonna presume, how many of you that some of you are WWT employees, some of you are TWiT listeners, but for those of you who are enterprise companies, how many of you are already doing business in the cloud? Most of you, right? So anybody who has turned their back on the cloud? No, that would be nuts, right? Especially in this day of Coronavirus, the cloud is becoming more, you kinda glad you have some cloud infrastructure right about now. Lemme start with you, Mike, 'cause you've been you've been this is your business for a long, long time. Are there people who still say, Oh, I don't wanna be in the cloud it's not safe. I know it's not on-prem. People who are still turning their backs on the cloud.

- Yeah, strangely enough, in 2020, people still think cloud is one of these kind of scary thing.

- Really?

- The famous T-shirt, you know, "The Clouds Is Just Somebody Else's Computers." It's literally the truth. And, you know, what we're seeing is, you know, technologies adopted in waves, right. There's usually early adopters, there's mid range adopters. So we're probably in the third or fourth wave of adoption at this time, depending on my own account, But what's happened is I think the first time around, everybody tried to do it themselves. Right? And they learned some very bad lessons about leaving shares open and...

- People are still learning that

- Yeah, we're not changing admin passwords and things like that and I also think that there was in the early days, a fundamental misunderstanding. That this really wasn't all that different. I mean, yes, there was some differences. But we've been doing these things in data centers for years, it was just something that was completely under your control. So I think today, I mean, there's two big reasons I think customers are reluctant to go to the cloud, those that are that haven't at this point, the first of which is, you know, they believe that there's some sort of unique set of security, confidentiality, privacy and data that precludes them from doing so. And generally, these aren't even the very largest customers, these are small and middle sized companies. And then when you point out to them that, you know, there have been banks and governments now that are entirely running on top of the clouds. Right. I think that changes the mind. But the other one, I think, is just simply the age old problem in technology, which is technical debt. Right? So you think about the last 12, 15 years, right, go back to 2008. If you were in the industry in 2008, you had a great couple of weeks, and then the crash happened. And within a year you were laying off half of your company, if not more, I was at IBM at the time, and we laid off on half of my team. And I think what happened is that in the ensuing decade, we were understaffed and IT was changed from being a cost center to even a drag on profitability in a lot of cases, right? And nobody invested. Nobody invested in apps, nobody invested in infrastructure, you just kinda incrementally did what you had to do to keep things going. So fast forward a decade, and all of a sudden now IT is important, again, because of these little companies, you may have heard from Twitter, Facebook, Google changed the way we interact with the world, right. And now everybody's scrambling to use the technology as leverage in business. And so consequently, I think that the people that are on the back end of adoption, they are really reluctant, are the ones that have probably two to three years worth of work just to get to a point where they can migrate, right? Their apps are custom built apps that are 15 or 20 years old, that nobody's quite sure what happens when you turn off this little bit. If it'll ever come back on again, sometimes it's we have data, we have terabytes and terabytes of data that's no longer a problem. The problem is the terabytes of data are spread across 10 different silos, some of which are never gonna be able to be converted, because they're in some sort of proprietary format. So I think it's a lot of the reluctance now is we waited too long to get started. And the what we have to overcome you know, is just too much. The reality is for those companies, it's gonna happen. Every industry is got a couple of apps that everybody uses, you know, usually two or three vendors, all that stuff, those software business figured this out. If I don't have to install software everywhere, it's easier and cheaper and faster, and there's more value when I don't have to negotiate a contract every time I introduce a new version. So all these little kind of niche and industry software pieces that people run their business on that ran in data centers or ran in a closet down the hall are now going to cloud. And once that happens, your argument then becomes everything else gets dragged.

- You know, who's probably dragging these cloud holdouts long more than anybody else is Microsoft I mean, Microsoft won't let you buy office. Much longer that's not in the cloud, right?

- Sort of I mean, they're keeping the, as they call perpetual office alive because there are people who really still have a real need and a real desire to run it that way. But I feel like the way Microsoft's drags people along is they're strong. They've been a strong enterprise company on the software side.

- People trust them.

- They trust them, they're used to them, they know their products. And so when Microsoft comes to you and says, Hey, you know, you've been using Windows and Office and some of our other products locally, and you're on your own servers, but you know, we have this cloud thing. And we could run it for you even better than you can run it for yourself.

- [Leo] Right.

- And that's kind of their pitch. And it's really winning over a lot of enterprises who already have those sales relationships with Microsoft.

- People also probably feel a kinship to Microsoft, because they were such a desktop company for so long. And then comes along and it's suddenly a cloud company.

- [Mary] Right.

- And if you know it's almost like oh, well, they're doing it. Right. And as just winning big contracts like the Jedi contract.

- Yes, maybe.

- Maybe. The courts let them.

- I mean, they did win it, but we'll see if that gets overturned.

- But there is something to be said about the brand. I mean, you know, quite honestly, generations ago nobody got fired for buying from IBM. Made some very bad decisions buying from IBM. But then like any of the big technology companies, right, there was a relationship. I think Microsoft, surprisingly, has managed to hang on to its brand value in the buying from you for 40 years. Right. And more importantly, they've built on that brand value.

- Alex, you, of course, do a lot of business in the cloud, but you do the kinds of things you do are so mission critical and so scary and so stressful. But there's no way you could not do it in the cloud, right?

- And really over the time went from when I started doing live streaming, which is a lot of what I do now. To when I started doing it to now it went from we had a server somewhere that was doing the streaming, or we get a collection of servers, or we, you know, there was like a little bit of a something we had locally to you can't do it now. Like it's not possible because

- We used eight Mac minis. We call it streaming . And each one was going to a different end point now 'cause you were using elemental from Amazon Web Service, and it's going up to the cloud.

- And then and you know, even there, you know, we're working on a good example of that process. I mean, for instance, with live streaming, you can't really do live streaming on your own, even over AWS, on your own, you're gonna use the elemental cloud for that. And a lot of that has to do with peering. So there's agreements between the CDN's and all the providers. If you don't have that you're not gonna have first nation status and means you're not gonna be able to get it done. And so you really have to live inside of the cloud to get anything done and one example of what we're working on right now we have a high profile client in India. And he does talks for a lot of people and there's in 14 languages so they've got 14 people doing actually interpretation and then there's all these audio tracks now and he travels all over India talking,

- You could guess who this is, if you think about it.

- So he travels around and the problem you have is you're in all these, you're in smaller air you know venues and bigger venues and it's India. And you don't have necessarily great bandwidth.

- Right now, just completely unpredictable infrastructure probably right, you get somewhere,

- India has gotten better. In many of the cities, the bandwidth is actually really good. But because there's a lot of competition there right now. And so there if you if you have a relationship with the ISPs you usually have a pretty good bandwidth. But if I want to stream 14 languages to YouTube, and Facebook, and I want primary backup, that's 56 streams, you know, that I'm sending out in all those languages. That is I now need to request only half a gigabit of bandwidth or at the location to get all that data out. Or I can take all the audio tracks, I can stack them up on the video, I can send them all into the elemental

- Send one stream live.

- MediaConnect to MediaLive. One stream with all of the 'cause the audio is small, the video, but I'm only sending one video stream into the cloud, once it gets into the cloud, you just piece it all out and send it all to all the places it needs to go. And it costs you know, 350 a minute you know but it that would be a huge investment of hardware on site of infrastructure to do that kind of event effectively. And right now they're unable to do all of what they want, because they have that's what we're architecting to fix. But that's a great example of how you really using the cloud we're not you know, it's not all cloud, but we are getting our you know, we're doing the work that we need to do on the ground. And then we're getting into the cloud as soon as it makes sense. Using a what they call reliable UDP XE wrapper to get it up there and now we're able to distribute it everywhere relatively safely.

- But it's one of the reasons I think, you know, cloud has really exploded, right, because you couldn't have done this without the ubiquity of bandwidth. Period of understatement, right? I mean, let's face it. I mean, you know, 30 years ago in Chicago 128K ISDN line was only affordable by a trading house or a big company. Now, I've got 1000 times that coming into my household for 100 bucks a month.

- Yeah, T1 used to be a big deal. At 1.44 megabytes.

- You saw fractionals 'cause nobody could afford to buy But I mean, so I think the bandwidth thing has really changed the way we think about things and you know, we gotta talk about the plague right we're gonna talk about Coronavirus. Think about this guys.

- [Leo] Is COVID the plague? You really think that's politic.

- Well, you know what like I said earlier, here we are, you know, the plague in the 14th and 15th century, we're doing the same things. You know how they did they fix the plague in the 14th and 15th century, wash your hands and lock the door.

- [Leo] Hasn't changed much.

- Hasn't changed a bit has it? But here's the reality, though, right? Think about the economic impact if there wasn't this bandwidth.

- [Leo] That's right. Think about this, right? Think about, you know, I'm in Chicago, you know, I know this part of the country, think about the floods that happen in this part of the country every now and then 50 years ago, companies went bankrupt on the Mississippi, and disrupted supply chain and the ability to get to work. Now, unless you're in a hands on job, a job that has to physically touch something, you can work from anywhere.

- So you could Mary Jo, you could make the argument really at this point that the cloud is superior in almost every way to on-prem.

- You can make it except a couple cases. Like I just talked to somebody this week, who was, I won't name company names, but worked for a big security company in New York. And he was saying there was a job he was doing that his boss said to him, of course, you're gonna put it in one of the clouds, right? And he said when he priced it, he decided no,

- That was price.

- Price, right? We always just say, I see a lot of people assume like, well, it's gonna be more economical if you put something in the cloud. But that is not always the case. There are certain cases where that argument cannot be made. I also think you get to talk about the hybrid cloud argument as well, right? There are a lot of Microsoft customers I know as well as well as customers of other clouds, although they're kinda late comers to this Amazon and Google, whole hybrid cloud acknowledgement. But you know, there are people who if Microsoft didn't have Azure Stack, and didn't have a hybrid cloud story, I don't think they would be willing to kinda stick their toe in the water and ultimately try the cloud.

- But it's just a wedge, is it just a camel's nose? Or is it really something people need?

- Their use cases where you can say there I need as your stack, I need the hybrid environment. You know, Microsoft always uses the cruise ship example of that but there are a lot of other examples

- Is that why we get locked on a cruise ship 52 weeks.

- Off the coast.

- You know, stack and hybrid and these things I mean, so first of all, we view the cloud as everybody's a hybrid cloud. Because quite honestly, there's outliers on both ends, right? There's, probably about 2% of the total population of companies in cloud that are all in there tend to be smaller companies that were born in the last 10 years. And there's 2%, that will never go. But in the middle there, everybody has IT departments still, And there's stuff that just doesn't make sense, right? Whether it's economics, whether it's, you know, what, it's a 10 year old app, and it does what we needed to do. And you know, when we get around to finally getting rid of this app, we'll figure that out. Or it's something that because of what it is, we don't want out of our physical control.

- We were in this situation. We're doing heavy, big heavy video editing, right, and it's uploaded to the cloud and work on the cloud. But the fires in Northern California where we're located, shut us down, the power was out for almost a week. We couldn't do anything. And at that point, we start to look at a backup strategy on AWS to do that to do start doing a lot of what we do in the cloud, and now that the Coronavirus is coming to Northern California, we're glad we did because while we haven't ever implemented it, we now have that capability. But Alex you have a big global workforce. There are also issues with that there's bandwidth issues there's security issues. And what about splinternet? I mean, we're starting to see a situation a political situation that's gonna make it difficult to use in a truly international cloud.

- Definitely we have, we see issues where for instance, we stream events that people want to put into China. And that becomes a huge lift for us to figure out. What rights do we have, you know, what do we have to do with the government? Or how do we have to sort this out is it a trusted partner is there you know, there are definitely there's like the whole world and then there's China, Russia and a handful of other ones that become this logistical process to get any data in and out of them. And for the most part, we've been able to we deal with it on a case by case basis and for the rest, everything else runs relatively smoothly. But even now, with all the bandwidth, I have artists that we work with in Rwanda, and when we pass files, most of it can be when you just pass files back and forth online. But there'll be times when, if it's a lot of data, it's still faster to send, you know, is like the FedEx is still a really fast bandwidth, you can send terabytes of information in a couple days, it might take a long time to download that, you know, in Africa, so the, so you still end up moving. And there's still cases where we're moving drives to a large point that can upload that much data. If I've got 10 terabytes or 20 terabytes of data that needs to go up into the cloud. That becomes a different problem than if I.

- Would be faster to mail it.

- What is that we're saying?

- Everybody's looking like who the hell is gonna use this you know, what I mean, come on, we know how to do storage. No, no, no, no, the bandwidth of a FedEx truck is so much more reliable and better than the bandwidth of a network, right? And if you're moving a petabyte of data from your data center to AWS, you're not gonna send it over the wire. It's just not gonna happen.

- Well, and then the other thing, is that we look at stability usually when we're doing one of our events, we are using multiple connections with multiple providers. So we look for.

- Redundancy is important.

- Sorry redundancy.

- Redundancy. So we have from the moment it leaves my box, I want two Ethernet connections going into two entire subsystems to get out of the building that go to two services that go into two different CDNs that then you know and then there's a player at the very end. And that's my only, you know, single point of failure that it has to decide which one if I'm not getting bandwidth from this CDN, I'm now gonna switch to this one.

- That's actually a critical point that's specific to your needs, the redundancy because you're doing it live.

- But we see it all the time when we work with other firms.

- But I would imagine you might get a lot of situations how you use a cloud, it's gonna very much depend on how what you wanna do with it.

- Yeah, so there's not I mean, there are emerging patterns. We're seeing right about, you know, certain types of industries do things certain ways, certain types of applications require certain or need certain things. But, you know, fundamentally it's what we've been dealing with forever in IT and in data centers, right, which is, what are okay, you know, what are the wrecks? You know, how much how many processors? How much RAM? What kind of connection does it need? Does it need a 10 or 100 connection NIC card, right, those types of things, what kind of security right? And I would argue that, you know, security is no more difficult in the cloud, it's just different.

- Will you talk about hybrid IT teams where you have different needs

- Right? But it's the same

- But still IT.

- It's two sides of the same coin, if you will, it's just there's different shades on each side of the coin. But to the point about use cases, that's the one thing I think that we counsel customers on a regular basis is great. You're gonna empty out your data center, what's the order? And they come to us, you're gonna tell us right I'm like, Well, no, because you know, there's things go into it, which apps already are ready to be moved or can be moved right are technically able to be moved. What are the dependencies that that app has if it's standalone app easy, but if it's got 16 data sources it needs to connect to, that's probably not the first way of going to the cloud for you. Right? So we walk through all that and there's no magic bullet. It's the simple pragmatic decision making we've always made use case, practicality, cost, operational efficiency, those types of things. The other thing I would point out to your point about resiliency, redundancy and that type of stuff. Cloud does not alleviate your, responsibility to plan for that stuff. We learned a hard lesson, what three summers ago with the AWS US East outage, Where everybody just thought automatically, it would spin up somewhere else. And the problem was, is that if you didn't build just in the same way, if you didn't build a clustered windows SQL Server, it doesn't failover right. I think the thing is that the opportunity is to build redundancy and resiliency in the cloud era it's a lot easier. I don't wanna say order of magnitude easier 'cause there's a learning curve we still have, we're still in the middle of but I think it's easier because the way we think about applications and data and the way that the cloud architectures, availability zones and redundancies are already there, you just have to exploit them, you have to use them.

- [Leo] Go ahead Mary Jo.

- I can give you a very concrete example of this whole, maybe redundancy, maybe people are getting it right. So this week, a couple days ago, I was looking as I occasionally do at the Azure status page for fun,

- As one as one does.

- As one as one does. And also, when I looked in the entire US East region was red flags every single service in US East, right. So normally when that happens, my Twitter timeline lights up. And everyone's like Mary Jo Azure is down. What's going on? Can you call Microsoft? And so I started looking I'm like, why is no one complaining? Like I was looking for people to be complaining, and I saw a couple, but not many. And I found out like the reason was a lot of people it seem to have just failed over.

- We're paying to have the S3 replication, They fell over the service or forgot that the data is still in US East. But it was amazing. Because just a year ago, if that same scenario had happened, I know the reaction would have been very different. And I was even pinging people proactively who I knew had workloads in US East big ones, because that's one of Microsoft's biggest regions. And I said, you know, why aren't you all over Twitter on this? And they said, nothing looks like it's wrong.

- And the hard part is that those inner connected issues sometimes are not visible even to the folks that are building so you ended up we had an issue with an event to go back to my cloud experience, where most of the country went down, and it turned out somebody cut one fiber cable, but it just happened to the way it managed the relationship between two different databases, just shut the whole system down, you know, for a couple hours while they figured out, you know, and then and literally figured out was getting another fiber, you know, terminating the fiber or putting it back together so that then they could figure out the rerouting later and get it back working. But they didn't know that dependency was there. that's why the redundancy so important is that they didn't even think that would be a problem. They thought that they could just, it didn't seem like they weren't protecting the cable because they didn't think it was that important.

- That was the biggest lesson I think I took away from that outage that AWS had a couple summers ago. We talked to customers that are like, why am I down? I have nothing running in AWS. Oh, wait a minute, the thing that does tax calculations for my point of sales is sitting there. Or oh, because one of my vendors was lazy. They're doing transit across AWS zones networking as opposed to doing real networking.

- I think even as consumers, when AWS went down, we didn't know everything that we use, from Instagram to you know, Flickr is running on AWS and that was an interesting lesson even for end users. I want to take a little break because we have a couple of commercials but I, this is a great conversation. I wanna put a pin in that part. Talk about redundancy. And I also want to talk about since we're done with the future of the cloud, the future of bandwidth interdependency, hybrid cloud stuff like that, we got a great panel, Mary Jo Foley from Windows weekly and allaboutmicrosoft.com. Alex Lindsey for MacBreak Weekly and zero do you say 0900 or And Mike Dorosh from Gartner group. There's no way to say that wrong. Thank you for being here. We're here at World Wide Technology, which is an amazing did you guys get to go on a Mary Jo and I were doing the ATC tour. They let us into the Network Operation Center. The fans blowing they said don't touch anything. It's so cool what they put together and it really answers I think a question a lot of customers who are thinking about it will have about, well how do I get this stuff to work together? How do I get these interdependencies to be handled and that's what exactly the engineers at World Wide Tech do in the ATC. They spin up pilots proofs of concepts, they show how one piece of gear from a company like HP will integrate with another piece of gear. And that is really valuable both for them as you know, kind of setting these things up. But also a client can come to them saying well, I'm thinking about you know, connecting to Equinix through and how is that gonna work and they can demonstrate it they can show it half a billion dollars worth of equipment in there it's actually now they have a big sign that says though, ATC, but they told me that's one of the three buildings it's spread out. It's growing like crazy. Hundreds of OEMs all the key partners high tech heavyweights like Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Intel, little guys like Titanium and Equinix . It's just a fantastic place to try technology out. And here's the most amazing thing you can use it too and you can use it on the web, right now at wwt.com/twit. The ATC is an incubator for IT innovation you can schedule or do on-demand labs, things like HPEs InfoSight Lab along with hundreds of other labs that will show you they'll demonstrate they'll help you understand the newest advances in cloud based machine learning to provide global insights into the status and health of infrastructure in one location. You could see how this would be so useful in situations where something's down but what's going on? how come is not working? You can learn about products before you launch. And this lab is a service which they launched this past summer is a dedicated lab space within the ATC where you can do your own programmatic testing using all of this half billion dollar technology ecosystem WWT has already built. And it's virtual it means you don't have to come here to St. Louis although nice time of year to come here. It's getting a little springy. It's a little balmy, but you don't have to come here. You can go use the lab anywhere in the world 24/7, 'cause it's all online. This is an amazing platform. I want you to go there. It's not just the hands on labs, they have articles, they have case studies they have all the tools you need, and you don't have to pay anything for it. What I really admire about WWT is that as they have learned in these labs, about things, they've put this stuff online and made it available to anybody who could benefit from this. And that's a really huge contribution. It's an amazing company. We came out here last night had a meet up at the Trainwreck Saloon you were there, Alex. And people came up to me and said, you know, WWT is a great corporate citizen in St. Louis. We love them they just brought a MLS Major League Soccer Team, to St. Louis. It's pretty cool. I'm really pleased to be here. If you wanna know more about WWT, the ATC. If you wanna become part of the growing community go to wwt.com/twit, WWT World Wide Tech simplifies the complex wwt.com/twit delivering business and technology outcomes around the world. We thank you so much for hosting us here. For this conversation. I was thinking Mary Jo, as we were talking about this, we went from ISDN, fractional T1, to T1, to fiber. The next step, the cloud might even be above the clouds with satellite. That's what I'm most interested in, 'cause that means I could be anywhere in the world. Maybe, right? If I have a pizza box sized antenna I can get the cloud that's gonna change things dramatically.

- It will for sure I mean, It's crazy being a journalist covering this to watch how in one year, things change.

- I don't know how you keep up.

- I don't, but I do my best.

- You do a pretty good job.

- Now just the number of services at launch on all these clouds and how companies are evaluating like when you're trying to evaluate, should I be using AWS or Azure? Or should I use Google Cloud? And how do you evaluate that? Because a lot of them, it's almost a tit for tat these days, like when one of them introduces a new networking service, or a compute service or storage service. The other ones try to get out there, just as

- Competition is great.

- It's great.

- It's very competitive environment.

- So, you know, anytime Amazon announces something new, you're like, okay, 123 where's Microsoft?

- So are they similar? I mean, are they at parity with one another? Or is is Microsoft better? One thing? I guess the Pentagon thinks they are.

- Yeah, I guess I'm or somebody in the government does.

- Somebody thinks that.

- When I think about, how different ones have slightly different profiles, I always think there are certain identifiers that I associate with each of them. So in Amazon's case, I think, you know, they have a very good startup story. A lot of the startup companies go with AWS.

- It's been transformative.

- It has.

- I think startups today compared with startups 10 years ago, you kind of alluded to that to Mike. It's a different experience completely. You don't have to I remember my friend Kevin Rose, setting up a . And we're so excited we're installing our software now in Oink you don't do all that.

- [Mike] You need laptops.

- That's all you need. In a coffee shop, that has good coffee.

- Like coffee laptops and internet connection, right.

- But like Google, you know it like a lot of startups also go with Google Cloud. But Google seems to have more cred with a lot of people I talked to because of their open source roots. I mean, they were It's developers, developers, developers for Google.

- Pretty much right. And also AI, AI, AI.

- Right AI and data.

- TensorFlow is kina eating the world, right and machine learning.

- But you got it since they announced those TPUs. Microsoft said we could do that

- We should do this too.

- We can do that too.

- And Microsoft, I mean, they, like I said before, they have the enterprise brand, right. And so as as you said, a lot of people, it's bu y Microsoft, you can't go wrong, because we know them

- Is this just kind of branding or Is there really a genuine difference? Mike between these guys?

- I mean, in all honesty, I mean, we some of the purists that I work with at Gartner and the technical end of Gartner, you know, will tell you there are differences between these clouds. And there are I mean, they do the same things differently. Let's just be honest.

- We did an event with ThousandEyes. And it was really interesting to see, 'cause the interconnects are completely different. So you might, if you're going to China, that may not be the best one, I won't say names, but one might not be the best choice.

- Agreed. And, you know, I hesitate to say who's the best because again, it goes back to this idea. What do you wanna do?

- Right.

- Right. And we've discovered a couple things. So you know, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, to your point, Google's kind of the technologists dream. But the reality is, the IT Ops guy finds a lot of things that they have to do that are more hard to do, harder to do on Google than they could do on Amazon or Microsoft platforms, right? So we see a lot of people using Google for solutions. And I think that's actually one of Google's strengths

- 'Cause it compute is it really about compute?

- It's about compute with certain degree but it's about the AI and TensorFlow and machine learning stuff. It's about the Hadoop cluster that a data scientist

- Kubernetes.

- Does nothing about. Kubernetes.

- Someone has to say it.

- Well, Mike said Hadoop before you.

- Okay that's fair.

- so its fair now.

- My point being is that, you know, Google's a company that if you look at what they're really known for, they're known for packaging up these very complex technologies, ad tech, search tech, YouTube, right, you know, the media stuff they're doing. I read somewhere recently that if with all the bandwidth they sit on, they'd be the largest telco in the world. If you think about it, right. And you think about all the nodes, they have your for, you know, ad tech search tech, all that stuff. They were distributed networking, like Akamai, right. You know, they were Edge before that word really was right. Akamai invented Edge 20 years ago with CDN or more by by packaging CDN. But I mean, you know, you think about it, right. So I don't think there's a lot of people that look at Google as a data center replacer they look at Google for very specific things. And I think, you know, Anthos and the Kubernetes stuff and some of the low level things they're doing, and some of the open stuff they're doing is gonna drive the industry, they'll be the part supplier for the rest of the industry, right? Microsoft and AWS have taken a different approach. And that is, let's go after IT. Let's go after the Ops guys, let's go after the apps, guys. And I think, you know, one of the things that we've noticed in the last couple of years, talking to clients and service providers of clients that, you know, there was a time when the messaging around developer and build and all that, you know, we build things right, worked, and I think that was a really good set a messaging that everybody used, right. But in 2020. You know, most IT, people I know don't develop, they write scripts, and they integrate, and they operate. They don't write code, traditionally, and they don't develop apps or processes, right? They do different things. So I think the differences between the clouds is really about what your use cases are and what you want to do.

- And I think the danger there, yeah, is that the construct sometimes starts to constrain creativity. So I can do this thing with this cup. And so I just do a lot of things with that cup. Whereas a different shape might do something more powerful, And I think that a lot of times we've had issues where we built stuff into the cloud. And we get, you know, we have a product out, it's working. And the issue is now, we can't do this one thing, that we didn't think of before that process and it's limited at, you know, when we were doing it the old way we would reprogram it or if we had programmed it from scratch, but someone will start just clumping together premade things, I think the challenge that I've had, or in the past, is clumping together a piece in the middle of this giant thing, I don't know how it works on the inside, it's just a black box. And it's no longer executing what I needed to execute

- The complexity of these environments. And that's the thing that I think everybody misses is when you build these things in your data center, you buy technologies that you more or less hope work together.

- That's a bad plan

- Well but I mean, if it's the reality, right? I mean, no matter how much assurance you get, right, you're just you're all here.

- Except plug for the ATC here by the way.

- It's yeah, I mean, exactly right. And then that's why the ATC and labs are very important. And you know, in the post data center era, where do you run your lab now? So something like an ATC.

- Like the cloud.

- An aggregation point right is gonna be critical because these pieces, right, you gotta test. And I think there's a difference between somebody building their next gigantic world changing customer experience, and somebody looking to run 1000 instances of something from their data center, right. And there's different disciplines that are needed there. And the funny thing is, in the last year or two, we've noticed, clients come to us and say, well, if all things are equal, which ones you pick, I said, Just pick one because probably within a year or two, you're going to be doing business with at least one of the other two.

- Is that the solution a hybrid cloud?

- I believe it is. I think the reality is

- there're challenges too there though.

- Absolutely. There are challenges there. But I think There's a very interesting thing we overlook in this space. Five years ago, I would have said it was a nightmare, because there was all these different technologies, some of it old, some of it new. And there wasn't one player or two players that you could look at to rally around. But we got to give some credit to VMware. And what I mean by that is VMware has conservatively 80% of the hypervisor market, right, which is huge. So we can almost argue that 90 80% of the hybrid cloud market is the compute part of hybrid cloud and the management part of hybrid cloud is being driven by VMware technology in a lot of ways, right? I'd have to go back and look the market numbers, but the reality is, you know, it's a planning assumption. And one of the interesting things we've been hearing is one of the bigger biggest inhibitors to rapid cloud adoption is nobody has skills. Nobody has cloud skills. You can't buy them, you can't hire them. You can only train them and develop them. And if you think that.

- Is that cause it's so new,

- And I think there is... We've created a lot of specialization in IT. I'm a VMware hypervisor guy, versus I'm in compute IT guy. And I think that's the thing. I think we're now going back to a I don't wanna use the word generalists model, but we're going back to the general model.

- But if is being hybrid almost it means interdisciplinary,

- Interdisciplinary, right? And the silos have to begin to go away. You don't have a storage team, you have a hybrid operations team, right.

- Speaking to the future of the cloud, which we're supposedly talking about, although we really got a good roadmap of where we stand today. Microsoft's all in on containerization, is that kind of the next step from hypervisor and VM is to go to container, something more lightweight.

- So I have a very good friend of mine at one of these companies that pointed out a containers is a portable VM.

- It is.

- But it's lighter weight.

- It's lighter weight.

- And You're seeing a lot of diversity in the container world.

- Absolutely. And there has to be some level of standardization, consolidation that will come and I think the one thing that Kubernetes era is doing is forcing a little bit of that, right. Not enough but a little bit of that, but the reality is you know, containerization is both a abstraction that allows you to be multi cloud or hybrid cloud, right?

- I mean, it kind of commoditize the cloud, doesn't it?

- It does to a certain degree, except for the reality is that we still can't quite yet pick up a workload from one and plug it into the other without hitting it with a hammer a couple times, right, at least if not rewriting the underpinnings, right. But with that portability does is it does things like makes things like service level agreements around server availability, irrelevant.

- How so?

- Well, if I can instantiate a container, and it fails, and I can instantiate it again in 30 seconds and there was no interruption.

- As long as it's not 3 a.m.

- Well, there's no interruption. Did I meet or not meet? And in a world where things are designed, being purposely architected to fail and recover, what's the server availability mean? So you know, I think there's

- That's a really good thing to that's a really good thing.

- I think what hybrid is doing is forcing us to take a good hard look at what we keep from the old model. Both in ways we explain cloud but also the things that are still gonna be important to tie all this together, And the skills thing because nobody has them, but then there's not one tool to rule them all right, proverbially anymore. There's you know, you have AWS tools, you have Azure tools, you have Google tools, you have VMware Tools. And so, you know, opportunities for companies like VMware to become that. At least the basis of a tool stack for hybrid cloud makes it easier for customers to adopt.

- Is there almost an importance for as we look at developing talent? Is there almost a demand for a liberal arts of computing you know, where you're learning a little bit of everything you're not a VM specialist. You are a I understand how computing works or how networking works overall within any of these platforms. And then I'm gonna just kind of specialize.

- I think there's more of a generalist approach, we have to have well.

- But it also sounds like it's gonna lead to stratification of skills. So you're gonna have the generalist, and then you're gonna have the Kubernetes person, you're gonna have the big data person, you're going to have different skill sets.

- Yeah, I think you are, but I think I don't operate. I mean, I think there's two pieces of it. There's kinda a day to day operations where people are gonna have to be more generalist, you're gonna have smaller teams, the DevOps model is actually beginning to trickle into infrastructure operations right you know You're gonna have smaller teams that are trained in multiple disciplines. And you're gonna have a wrapper, not as deep as we used to in the siloed data center days of storage specialist, database specialists, Kubernetes specialists, security specialist, that when your Ops team hits, you know, 30 minutes and hasn't resolved the problem you're bringing in, you know, the next layer.

- One of the things that's driving this Mary Jo, is, we're doing things in the cloud, we couldn't do on-prem things like big data, where you have giant data sets and the things we're learning from those giant data sets are, I think, really changing what we can do, which is then driving adoption.

- For sure. I mean, that's why you see all the emphasis now on AI and IoT, right? Because it's all really about the data, cloud is really a data play, right? It's about storing your data, manipulating your data, presenting your data. And so, if we didn't have the cloud, none of those disciplines really would be anywhere near what they are right now.

- It all be siloed.

- It would. Or not even capable.

- Or we didn't even have it.

- How do you do machine learning without the cloud? I mean, you can't do this.

- Let's talk about ML and AI, 'cause that keeps coming up. When we have these cloud discussions. Why is it that we need the cloud? Is it because these giant data sets? is that what still driving them?

- I'd say largely because of this giant data sets. I mean, look at IoT, right? What are you doing with IoT, you're taking all this sensor input and storing it somewhere and then hopefully, at some point making sense of it.

- And those sensors are distributed globally,

- Edge the Intelligent cloud intelligent Edge someone said that

- I think such an Adela perhaps yes, yeah.

- But you know, the reality is, you know, I think that we're seeing all of this stuff, There's this weirdness with machine learning and AI, right, 'cause it's now beginning to drive labor out of IT. And what I mean by that is not costing people jobs, right? Because you still need somebody to put fingers on a keyboard, the machines aren't that good yet, and won't be for a long time. What they're doing is allowing us to get more out of the labor we have, which is really important when there's not enough labor and skills, right. But to your point about a a generalist approach you know, honestly, I get this question five times a day. Hey, do you know anybody? Do you know any data scientist with five years experience and three years of cloud experience? I said, no, but I got a unicorn egg. If you plant it, maybe in two years, you'll have a data scientist with that skill. They just don't exist and if they do exist, you're gonna pay much much money and the minute they work for you, the clock starts ticking on their next offer. So I think we're gonna have to think about where we get talent from and, you know, one of the interesting, untapped resources is all of those people that go to graduate school that they get degrees instead have a degree that require some level of statistics, because every single one of them now is doing all of their statistical research, not on the bad server that's been there for 20 years in the University Data Center, but on AWS or an Azure or on Google, So I have been kind of preaching this to some of the smaller service providers in places that have University towns, it's like no, don't go after the computer engineering and computer science, guys. I mean, they've already got job offers as a sophomore, Go after the sociology, masters or PhD that realizes he can make more money has to pay off his student loans. Go after them because we can teach you the rest of this, but I can't teach you the math and the science right. I can teach you how to provision a database in AWS can't teach you how to do the analysis or write the analysis you got to come with some skills. So I think there's a lot of I think we under estimate what's coming out of the universities, we look for degrees versus things inside of those degrees. But I think that there's, you know, machine learning and AI is getting to the point now where service providers are now beginning to talk about efficiencies that they're getting from it, right. So instead of just talking about how much something costs, a CIO wants to know, if I buy this from you, you know, tell me what the efficiencies are. So in my mind, you know, we're now gonna go back to the old outsourcing numbers, right? If you do this, we take two tenths of an ft off of every system administrator you have. So I've got 10 people, that's two bodies, I get back, right? I don't actually get the bodies but I get labor to go do something else, where I get cost efficiencies where I can go hire somebody else and I think that's gonna be a very interesting thing as we infuse more AI and machine learning into the industry.

- Are there businesses today that wouldn't exist without the cloud? Is it creating new category of business? Alex, you do a lot of work for Salesforce. They they live in the cloud, right?

- I think that there's, well, our business, my business wouldn't exist.

- You would exist.

- Social media would be lot harder.

- All of those things are there. And I think that it is. I find it interesting how it used to be, we would think about putting stuff on the cloud after we really structured it like we play with it on a local server and then we think about, Okay, I got that figured out. Now I'm gonna figure out how to replicate it into the cloud. Now, we've kind of gone another direction where I find myself experimenting in the cloud because it's cheaper so like, for instance, I do these really heavy process intensive calculations for photogrammetry we were talking about that earlier, but the it's, I can fill up any computer, any local computer at 100% for a couple days on one project, I throw 190 photos in, I wanna 3D model back go to work, and it just crushes the computer, my home iMac will literally just crash after three days. And I was told that you can't run a processor at maximum capacity for three days and expect to keep stay on, you know, and so what the easiest way to do that is to pay I can pay 20 grand to build a workstation or 50 grand to build a Mac Workstation or whatever. I can spend $20,000 to see if this is a good idea. Or I can spend $75 a day renting it out of the cloud. I can upload all my stuff and send it, send it put let it work for a week. Now I've dropped three or $400 and I know whether it works.

- I can make a minimal viable product in five minutes for five bucks and I can show it to clients.

- Well, it's amazing the web hosting business, right, which was what cloud was before cloud right? Is now almost entirely on AWS and Azure. There are still some people who have dedicated server hosting and stuff like that.

- But you've been asked to do it.

- Why would you? You do it, because that's what you've always done.

- There's another business that has been transformed by the cloud and that's gaming. It's very interesting to see this and sometimes I wonder, do you think Microsoft's doing X cloud, which is their streaming gaming service like Google Stadia, or Sony's PlayStation or you think they're doing it to show off Azure? Do you think it's a new business for them? Why is Microsoft doing that?

- I think a little of both, right.

- I know you love gaming so much.

- I love gaming.

- Is your favorite thing.

- It is. I game all day all night.

- We're being sarcastic here. She falls asleep during the podcast know it's the Xbox

- No, but I actually am intrigued by X cloud

- It's Azure.

- It's Azure underneath. And it's a really good proof point of what Microsoft can do in streaming. In fact, a lot of the technology they're using for X cloud came from work they did in the early days for virtual desktop. So it was that was kinda like when they were experimenting around. Could we stream games worldwide on any device? They're like, hey, you know, we get some technology for that it's called Virtual Desktop. Let's see what we can do with that.

- Do you think It'll happen with windows? That people will just stop put it on a hard drive anymore.

- Yeah, maybe one day, right.

- Why not. I know, I more and more things get connected to the cloud all the edge devices, including Windows PCs, which now count as edge. In fact, said recently, maybe we should rename windows edge, something.

- I do think when we start putting all of our data in the cloud, we get it, we start seeing some of the legal ramifications as well, because now the federal government has more places to subpoena than just you.

- Well that's a very good point.

- But what cloud has done is actually made it a little bit harder, because now I don't go on hunting expeditions and say, I know they're on one of these servers. I want a subpoena for the servers and this three racks right, and we're gonna do discovery based on Oh, and by the way, if you're not under investigation, you're screwed because I've got your data for the next six months, right. And there were some very famous incidents going back a decade about some heavy handed approaches there. Now, the problem is AWS looks good, fine, go look, see if you can tell me where it is. Because I think we know but you didn't write the subpoena in the right way. So I think there is something to be said about the legalities of data and all that. I think the problem is we've got I'm not anti-government, and I'm not trying to make it but we've got uninformed people writing rules, and laws that are more about protectionism than they are about

- But are you surprised I mean, even people who work in the field are always struggling with what I mean it's changing so fast. And the reality is, you know, I have a lot of friends and we all know people that you know, I won't do anything online bla bla bla bla bla, they don't know too much about me. Yeah. Do you go to a grocery store and use a loyalty card? Guess what?

- Well, you you go to a grocery store and use your credit card.

- They don't need the loyalty card,

- Pretty soon you go to the Amazon Go store.

- You don't need to use anything. They have cameras, they'll do it all for you.

- But the reality is, I think that our psychological view of data and privacy is much more severe than the actual experience in reality, right? I think we expect our personal data to be invalid, right, you know, locked behind Force fields and all these things and the reality is, you know, every one of us is guilty of having a Post-it Note with a password somewhere in our house. Right so I mean, you know, I argue we have this conversation daily with clients, clouds, not secure no got the same challenges you had in your data center,

- Or people ask me like, is this secure and I'm like, it's relatively secure, but it's not like the word secure is not really the right word. It is more secure or very secure.

- We've managed, all the risks that we know of

- Within reason.

- Within reason.

- I can tell you, you know, I can tell you I have a friend who's a red team. And he works for large companies hacking into there for work. And I said, do you ever get stopped? And he goes, No. And I said ever, never, never, I never get stopped. He goes, I just, it's just a matter how long it took to get in, and then I tell them what happened.

- Eventually you're gonna get in.

- And it's almost all social engineering. So that's the other thing is that as you as we start moving this stuff into the cloud, like one of the things that we really move towards is we built hashes for all of our passwords. We have, you know, like, we, like stop writing your own passwords, like that was the big thing was don't you know, let you know, put it into a company that's going to manage security, and that's gonna be is it totally secure maybe not, but is it? Is it more secure than you writing something on a password or can't remember the last one or your dog's name that like your dog's name right is can be socially engineered out of you know, like, what I mean by .

- Or if you're Paris Hilton just check her Instagram post.

- But the point is that right? Someone can research you, they can talk to people, they can figure out what those you know, all of those questions are.

- So it actually was just a few days ago is the 30th anniversary of the raid on Steve Jackson Games. I think that's what you're thought thinking about. And that was what started the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Secret Service, went to the premises, took the servers took everything. Are you better off in the cloud than that?

- Well, I mean, it's because your workloads are spread unless you're on a private road, which some customers do, and there's reasons to do those things. Your stuffs around Robin.

- And is Microsoft Google and Amazon better able to fight those kinds of subpoenas?

- Well, it unless you're gonna subpoena data center, no judge is gonna write a you know, right. It's not Microsoft's criminal activity. You know, so you know, so I think there is something to it, it goes back to, you know, one of the things one of the reasons in general we believe the cloud is as secure, if not slightly better, is one the level of anonymity you have, right? There's not a name on the server that says, you know, Joe servers, right, or your company servers, right. Like in some data centers. And it's only been in the last five years, you walk through data centers and, you know, in hosting centers the people don't, the names aren't on the cages anymore. But, you know, the reality is you know, that Steve Jackson's game thing was an overreach. I mean, it really was

- Absolutely.

- They went in and seized every servers

- They took a laser printers,

- right to everything,

- What data is on them I don't know.

- But what I think we're seeing is a couple of things. One of which is because these hyper scale providers, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, throw in IBM, Oracle, everybody else that's in this business takes their infrastructure security as serious as they possibly can. They've invested in the automation and the smarts and the other things to a level that no, IT department ever gonna be able to do. To your point they thought of the five things that nobody else has.

- They're under constant attack.

- For they themselves are so Microsoft and Amazon and Google know how to defend because they're defending themselves.

- The anonymity factor of the scale. Right is such so we equate this to this. I live in the city of Chicago, right. And you know, you live in a city, there's crime, right? I know, it doesn't happen in St. Louis. But in Chicago, we're a big city, right? So I equate this to customers. It's like, look, most of the incidents we've seen in the cloud we've not heard of one that has really been Amazon, Microsoft or Google's problem, right? It's been stupid human tricks. Somebody did something dumb in IT or forgot to change a password or it was five o'clock and we set up the admin account and didn't change the default and stupid application tricks, meaning we didn't really understand that this traffic was passed in the clear when we put it in the cloud. So right right, well, but again, to your point, when is it my data center. When it's not in my data center, different level of rigor I gotta have right so I think that there's that part of it right? So I equate this to this cat burger going down the house goes to the first backdoor jiggles it, the dog barks, he moves on to the second house, the light goes on, he moves on to the third house, nobody's only You can protect it, you can provide some level of there. But if you live in a big city, sooner or later your car your house is broken into, right? That different risk management than if somebody wants to attack you and hack you to your point. They're gonna kick in the front door. They're not going to care.

- Very big difference between targeted right and phishing.

- And we believe that if you know a criminal or state actor wants to kick in the front door of your data center and get after your stuff a damn thing you can do yeah, right. But the cat burglar, a lot of things you can do.

- And there's a lot more cat burglars than there are Feds. so far.

- Well, depends.

- Wanna take a little break. We're almost an hour in. If you guys have questions, if you put them on the cards, I hope you do pass them down towards the aisles here and we'll collect them so we give you a chance to get your questions answered. I really appreciate this panel it's really fantastic. Have Mike Dorosh from Gartner and Alex Lindsey from O9O, and Mary Jo Foley, our partner in crime from Windows Weekly. And of course, we thanks so much our sponsors here today, World Wide Technology, you're on the facilities, the people who are here they're studio audience know what a beautiful building this is. They built their world headquarters and outgrew it in five years, so they had to build another one. What's good though, is that old world headquarters now is home to the Advanced Technology Center. They've made good use of it over the last 10 years they've built just an amazing facility. For people like me who don't really understand what is World Wide Tech do they are one of the top technology solution providers in the world. They deliver Business and Technology outcomes to both large, private and public organizations around the globe do a lot of work with the government. They're in the business of digital transformation. And really if you're in business that's the business you're in these days is digital transformation. They support organizations in the process by helping them adapt, for instance, a multi cloud architecture. They stay with you every step of the way. Frankly, their businesses there's so many businesses now who use WWT who have WWT people on premises with them. I was looking at these facilities they have to build the infrastructure that they ship out instead of just sending you the parts and saying you put it together. They integrated all together they've developed a new form of they have carpenters on their team that build these crates, you got to see this Alex, they build these crates that are specifically designed to house assembled racks, which they then ship it's really amazing what WWT has done. Their consultants will sit down with customers. As you were talking about Mike, they'll start at the high level, formulate a vision and a strategy. Think about it from that level, because they know that these cloud investments only pay off when they align to your business goals. It starts, you know, the tech is the bottom layer, but the top layer is the most important layer. What are you trying to do? They do briefings, they do workshops, they help some of the world's largest organizations unravel the complexities of the cloud, unlocking business opportunities 'cause ultimately, that's what it's all about. If you're doing cloud migration, they do. They have an amazing team doing incredible app development. Panera, which is a local St. Louis. I didn't know that this started here in St. Louis, beautiful app that WWT did for them. They can create a secure landing zone in any cloud. They have DevOps to help you get those, you know, tricky things done with on demand labs at the ATC. They can give you access to tools for things like microservices cloud native development. Once you're up in the cloud WWT helps you with managing and optimizing it they know it's not an end point. The cloud is a continuum and needs continuous monitoring attention to detail. They're here to help you with that. It's not out the door Bye bye see it they are your partner. Whether your strategy calls for cloud native, hybrid cloud or on-prem resources, yes they do on-prem too with all this talk of the cloud. WWT works closely with Intel, Intel to optimize the latest cloud smart solutions based on Intel technology for security performance, agility as an example they feature Intel OPtane DC Persistent Memory, and other great Intel technologies, workload optimized to deliver affordable large capacity and data persistence. You wanna know more? Find out why organizations turn to WWT and stay with them year after year. Find out more at wwt.com/twit you've got a partner in the cloud. And if you create that my WWT account, you can access all those amazing resources at the Advanced Technology Center has to offer wwt.com/twit World Wide Technology delivering Business and Technology outcomes around the world. Did anybody have any questions? Laura? Op, here's another one. Good. before we get to the questions Is there anything we left out that you guys wanna talk about anything people should be considering? If they're making this move into the cloud.

- I think the biggest thing we've learned after five plus years of what I'll call mainstream cloud adoption is don't try to do it by yourself. I mean, honestly, I talk to clients every day that spend their entire migration budget, trying to get the first two or three apps to the cloud, by themselves. And like anything else, right. I recently did some renovations in our house, and I built a new office and all this stuff, and I'm not handy.

- You didn't chop down the tree.

- No, I didn't chop down the trees myself. But now I know this if I need a plumber, I call a plumber. So if you're migrating or going to the cloud or working in the cloud, go find a service provider or migration consultancy somebody to at least give you some advice. It doesn't mean you can't do it yourself, but be informed.

- And I would say for me, it's having a long term strategy. Knowing where you wanna go, you may not get there. And you don't need to build all of it at one time. But when you have that discussion with specialists say, oh, by the way, I am going to eventually wanna have a gym down here. And I eventually I want, you know, like as I build it, we may not use that right now. But I need you to know about it. Because if you start building all that infrastructure, you know, into it becomes hard. The more you more concrete you lay, the harder it's going to be

- Would you just don't start thinking about. Don't stop thinking about your business. That's what this is all about. It's not about the technology.

- The other thing too, it's not just having a strategy. It's constantly reevaluating that strategy based on what you've learned. Because it's not like you can plan for five years here.

- It's not you plan for five years if that's what you gonna do is just that you wanna.

- You have an idea of what the goal is.

- What has bitten us has been just doing today's project and not thinking about where we wanna be in five years, it didn't mean that we were gonna do a lot more. It just means we might put one little piece in or be ready for something or choose a certain platform because we know that's the direction that we may go now we're gonna change that direction all the time, but a lot of times that trajectory stays in a certain.

- So one of the interesting things just kinda wrap that idea up is, you know, in design thinking one of the methodologies is what's your outcome? And instead of having, you know, the word strategy, right, you know, so we use the word outcome, right? Because that's really just code for strategy that actually is practicality right? And I think that's the thing, you know, when you're thinking about a move to the cloud for anything, right? Whether It's your entire data center, or the next killer app, you're building, right? What is the outcome you're looking for? And right, once that outcome is being achieved, what's your next outcome? So these are projects, but there's, some things in every outcome that become foundational. Okay, we built the data platform. Now I can build five other apps. And there's five other outcomes and I think that's one of the things we need to start thinking about this it's not any four nines and RPOs of this and network availability. That is I need to dry 3 000 more transactions to my customer experience app that I just built. So what are all the things I need to do to do that.

- I'd say. If you're starting out in the cloud, or even already in the cloud, you should assume multi cloud is the norm, and not an aberration. And that sounds kinda basic. But you see all these announcements from these big vendors all the time saying, oh, Adobe, went Azure or somebody went Google, you know, one part of their business went there. Not the whole thing in spite of the press releases.

- So it's a mistake ,the case of the

- That's a weird thing right.

- I mean winner take, winner take all means in this case that they can subcontract people. So it's not Microsoft is going to do every single part of that contract by themself, right.

- But I don't think Microsoft's going across the street to Google and say, Hey, can you help us?

- Probably not yeah, but smaller vendors and specialty vendors, people who have skill sets, they don't have they probably will do that, hopefully.

- It's not gonna be the cloud provider that's gonna be parsed out it's gonna be all the SIs and application providers and .

- Yet they are the uber contractors in that case.

- But to your point, right, multi cloud. So you know, we've seen this over and over again, we're all in with AWS Oh, except for that bit marketing bought Google. Wait a minute, now I gotta run a data set out there. Oh, wait a minute, we're using Office 365. And now we have to run a compliance module on Azure to make sure you're right. Oh, wait a minute. Why don't we just start thinking about this, like we thought about the stuff in our data center, there was some stuff that ran on big Unix box some stuff that ran in Windows, and there was some stuff that ran on Linux and there was stuff we virtualized because it was able to get the density and there was stuff that we ran them.

- And yet Microsoft sells itself like the one stop shop.

- They all do.

- They all do.

- I guess they all do, they like to be, but you as a customer, you shouldn't do.

- Microsoft definitely done a better job, though about at least a level of plausible agnosticism towards hybrid right.

- lately they have. . That's a new a new from Microsoft.

- That's a new thing. The old thing was it works better together if you're all in .

- But i think that you know, they've realized that their clients were because they were catching up. They were, you know, literally, if you started with AWS, you were using Azure, if you started with Azure, you're using you would end up with AWS in some point too. I think what we're seeing there, though, is I think there's just an acknowledgement that no matter what everybody promises you about being all in IT guys and gals, and folks that are making decisions hedge their bets. There's also this thought about risk management corporate risk management, right, and as we're seeing right now, in this period we're in. I've had a couple conversations with CEOs that are really, really nervous about the fact that they're too big cloud providers are based in Seattle.

- That's interesting.

- And I say to them, well, they're not all in Seattle, And all the data centers aren't in Seattle. And oh, by the way, while there's a lot of people that work in those data centers, a lot of the stuff the teams that are building an engineering and operating them aren't necessarily sitting in the data center right.

- Sort of the whole point of this is that you are not in one place.

- Right exactly.

- Your provider isn't and you weren't.

- But the idea being that I think there is this idea around corporate risk management. And it's not so much. You know, the outage or whatever we've always dealt with that. But if something changes that I can no longer do business with you because your parent company got into my business or the government says I can't. Right, I have to have a plan. And that doesn't mean starting from zero with another provider because I basically.

- Good point.

- Screw up.

- So great questions from the audience. I'll start with this one. From an industry or vertical standpoint, is there one exemplar that has done cloud? The best somebody who you could look at and say these guys did it right. There's nobody without arrows in their back nobody.

- I mean, look, it depends on what we're talking about. You know, I can think about, some of the retail companies, right that created whole markets by creating the killer app on a mobile device, But the rest of IT is a disaster right. I can think about, you know, some of the board on the cloud companies that should be doing cloud. But when you really, you know, when you're, you know, two o'clock in the morning poking around in the developer console now pops up in their app, you know, there's a problem. So I would argue it's not doing cloud, right. It's doing technology, right. And, I think it's hard.

- Is there's somebody that, you know, that people point us where they really do that, right. They're not just cloud, but just technology. Now, we're all struck,

- We're in a weird in between paradigms phase where.

- How about Amazon would they be the best at this?

- No, you know, the fact it took them so long to do outposts, which is their hybrid cloud strategy. You know, for years, I would talk to Amazon and say, What about hyper cloud? They're like, no one's doing that.

- Or they were allergic to that.

- That's a fake flag.

- We own the cloud. Why would we want to work with anyone else?

- And just the idea that people might wanna have their data in Data Center in their own region, like a knot up in the public cloud. They had to keep denying that and denying that finally. All right, we're doing it. So I think they're not perfect.

- Nobody.

- Well, I mean, case in point, Amazon does a lot of things really well. And then it had a sign a partnership with VMware.

- Right.

- Interesting, right? Because they couldn't they had zero credibility outside of the four walls on AWS Data Center. So I mean, I think to the point, I just think we're in a, we're in a period of time, where better is probably the word but best is right, or still be, you know, as long way from being decided, let me put this way my data center is not on fire, I'm happy.

- And all of them are very good at like when we're talking about it was really shaving. I mean, the leader,

- But it's just been an industry like or a vertical that really seems so gone to the cloud.

- I will say we will remember that.

- Retail is.

- A majority of the data that's moving around is video. You know, it's moving around the internet.

- Is that true though?

- That's worked out pretty well.

- Thanks to .

- For median entertainment, right.

- But I think video itself that's like 60% of internet traffic. So that's turned out pretty well.

- Netflix doing the cloud well?

- Just look in the last year though all the streaming services that have launched, and now to the point where if anybody wants to form a startup to control my streaming services, so I can go to one place as opposed to having 17 apps, and having devices that don't have that app, because I forgot to download it. Please call me I'll be more than happy to Angel fund.

- Well, but a good example of the cloud, you know, kind of thwarting, you know, like, you know, something, or where you don't have as much control as you think so you look at Game of Thrones beyond the bad writing at the end.

- let's not look at Season Season eight,

- I'm only in season four what do you mean there's bad writing.

- You give up now.

- Anyway, so the, if you look at what happened, so one of the things that was interesting is that so the way that live streaming gets moved around, is that we write all these bits, and then we write a manifest. And the manifest says, you know, I got I got a 1080P I got a 720p I got it, you know, and the players like, Well, what do I need? And he's like, just take one of these, you know, and so, the manifest tells the player what you're allowed to have, right? Well, unbeknownst to most of us, I mean, I, the cable operators can manipulate the manifest as it's coming through, right? So you don't know like so HBO can start off with a beautiful image. And Comcast can say, you know, I don't really wanna pass that 17 meg 1080p through.

- So I'm gonna throttle.

- Well it's not really throttling, it's just literally taking it out of the list and taking it out of the menu,

- Comcast is a cable provider or as an ISP?

- As an ISP.

- So I'm using my Roku to watch HBO but I'm doing it through Comcast, they're changing what I can see.

- They're taking away something out of the menu. It's available and if you had a direct link, you could pull it, but even when my wife is looking at going why is this all you know, like dark. The dark was a creative or not a great creative decision.

- But I don't think the directors thought it was going to get crunched as much as it ended up being crunched.

- The problem really there is not knowing the medium you know that anybody that encodes video will tell you that blacks get annihilated Yeah, you know just the way that it's designed to protect the whites and throw away the blacks just you have to throw it something.

- So you just don't do a long night.

- It's all the wrong things all but the point is that the lesson there is really, that there are all of these stakeholders in your content that's moving around.

- You don't control it.

- You don't control it, but it's good to know it. So like when I go into an event

- This is historically the problem with the cable as just the internet service providers is they are a toll road to what beautiful thing you're doing there's still the last mile.

- But I go on a large event, I will know every place that my bits are going and I will have a point of contact of who I can call like you know, somebody's gonna get yelled at if I'm not getting what I need. and that's like...

- How about Apple, is Apple an exemplar.

- They've had their own issues, you know, they had iCloud is not ever been

- No Icloud a terrible wreck.

- I love and hate Itunes.

- Although I will say.

- I will be calling it this week Apple Music.

- But I will say that in the integration of devices, as a heavy Apple user, I will say that it's amazing that I can the little things I can copy something on my Mac and paste it on my phone. And you know, and I never think about that data like that. What I will say Apple's gotten right so far is that all my devices have all that data. They're all in there.

- What you don't have to think about is a lot of that data is going to the cloud and coming back down, right?

- Oh, absolutely. And it's doing it really quickly.

- It looks like it's local.

- It looks like it's local, but it's not and it's but what's fascinating about it is it's just they've mastered I think more than anyone else the fluidity right of that where you just it's completely invisible to you and you're just moving that data around without thinking about it and you feel kind of secure about it.

- Isn't that just of a walled garden.

- But the wall gardens are funny because it's interesting. We have the technology to do all this stuff. Now, right we have the technology to provide 4k broadcasts across the web, right? Except if you live in this little part of Northern California where there's a cable provider that doesn't want 4k delivering, right? Or I'm going to Canada next week for some business, hopefully you're still traveling, right? And if I cross the border and try to connect to Netflix on my ID in the US, I get a different menu. We can fix the technology parts of this. But the reason I'm hesitant to call out meeting entertainment is doing cloud well. They haven't fixed the underlying problem. Like why I can't watch the Cubs game when I'm in the yard on my phone or on the MLB app, even though I live in Chicago.

- Here's a great similar question. I'll move on because we got so many. Is there room for a disrupter to emerge that could unseat the incumbents, the three big three?

- Lemme say absolutely, there always is now will it happen?

- Do you think there's so much scale that those three have that you really are not gonna unseat them?

- I think there is potentially rationalization of this so we were watching some weird things happening in the European Union around.

- Partly that's 'cause this is so commoditized. That there isn't enough of a differentiator. It's Joe's cloud service can't do anything that these guys are already doing.

- I think on a straight up technology basis, nobody's gonna disrupt the Big three. But I think what's gonna happen is, this ugly nationalism that we're seeing everywhere now is gonna force people in parts of the world to bite the bullet pay, probably more than they should to be able to fit themselves into whatever legal frameworks they have to fit to.

- Are Amazon, Microsoft and Google in China, for instance, are they considered cloud providers in China?

- They are.

- Through other companies.

- Is it Baidu or somebody like that.

- They're usually a joint venture of a 51-49 joint venture and they're bound by certain models. And you know, the biggest challenges is if you're earning a penny of of revenue, everything's got originate in country, which really screwed the CDN business a couple of years ago. Because there are a lot of people are making a lot of money doing content distribution in China from outside of China. And literally within a year, I think we took, I don't know, a couple hundred calls literally from people that were getting notices from Akamai and other companies that you have to change the agreement. And so I think that these walls, these regulatory walls are actually going to be the biggest inhibitor to this. You know, it's not the technology, eventually the technology gets to at least interoperability if not a standard, right. But it's gonna be all of this regulation and protectionism that goes on.

- And a lot of times the leaders are obviously trying to protect their turf, right. But if you look at the explosion of something like TikTok, right, TikTok is I expressly allow you to take my audio and use it again. And if the media industry knew what they were doing, they would have dumped all their data in there. 15 seconds who cares? 15 seconds of my movie. 15 seconds of my song who cares? You can you can use 15 seconds, and they would have dumped it there and kept everyone addicted to their stuff. But what they did is they pulled back. And now you have you have a billion people self replicating. And they're in so they're making all their own content that is moving away, right?

- Or you have people who are becoming stars.

- Or people who are just making a funny 15 second thing, or they're making covers of songs like that are kind of an acoustic version. And you see them just replicating through

- We seen this before though remember when YouTube started, NBC was all over YouTube and they said, You should better stop that knock it off and they learn their lesson, because that was a mistake. Now Saturday Night Live. I don't even have to watch Saturday Night Live, I can watch it on YouTube.

- And you cannot market today without YouTube, without Twitter without those things.

- I would probably argue going back to one of the previous questions about the industry the only industry is really probably done cloud well is social media marketing.

- All right, negatives, and we got a number of questions. I'll start with random There was a lot of talk about benefits of the cloud, what detrimental impacts? Are we seeing as it societal and environmental employment? What are the environmental impact of the cloud?

- I think that is a short term and a long term. I think right now, the cloud is drawing a lot of power. And that is using oil. Like, let's be clear like that, as you know, it's burning up oil. Now I think that you're seeing more and more of the cloud infrastructure being I mean, a lot of these companies are worried on it.

- They could end up being leaders because there's such incentive to cut costs.

- All these solar things like Microsoft

- But I think that the clouds actually, because of the scale going back to the scale, if they get serious about sustainability, or actually even called sustainability, let's call it green positive, right. The impact on the just the aggregation of what they're doing at scale is gonna be a hell of a lot more powerful. Than 2 million data centres spread out across the world, or 2 00,000 writers

- And from a human impact, I think a lot of it is that we don't have schools that are preparing people for being useful in this society. So we're basically automating a bunch of skills out of the system, and not adding people in into what's needed. Almost all of these companies, the reason that Apple has a you can code is because they don't have enough coders, you know, like, you know, like that they're not doing it. I mean, they're doing it to be nice and everything else, but they know they can see a long term trajectory, that they are way short. I mean, and you know, when you hear someone, like, say that I'm unemployed, and I'm a coder, you're like, what happened?

- You must really bad.

- There's something there. I don't understand, you know, yeah.

- But I think there is beginning to be a recognition of that so, two, maybe three years ago, city of Chicago's Chicago School districts, decided that by 2022, or 2023, don't quote me on the exact date that you're gonna graduate from high school. You got to speak one foreign Language and show basic proficiency in one type of computer code.

- And I think that's good. But I think that like bridges schools are in this old, I mean, we haven't changed schools dramatically for a couple thousand years.

- We still teach math the same way we taught math, And it's because of the charter school movement. And because of the failure of local schools in California, a lot more online schooling, and I think there's a this is, I think what you were going with this is it, we can actually do a better job.

- If we get rid of we could be getting rid of grades, both K through 12. And, and A through F, if we, if we started leveling up. Like kids understand leveling up, right. you could not do that until you had big data, Like this is a big data play where you could use big data to help and you would know more about every student at every moment you know.

- But gives you know, related question, people are very concerned about privacy in the cloud. And big data is all well and good and yeah, government could use big data to make government work better, but government also can use big data to suppress its citizens, and it has some countries. And this question is about metadata tracking, but in general, does the cloud is it good for privacy or bad for privacy?

- I say someone does weekly all the time. I don't believe we have any privacy.

- It's over get over it.

- I don't think we're any more or less private. I would argue that, fundamentally humans,

- We gave it up.

- but big data sets give companies a much stronger incentive to collect as much as they can, because they can do so much more with it when it was in a siloed in my hard drive in my operation center, wasn't that useful telemetry, but going back to the Amazon Go store, that's not about that's not a grocery play. That's a data play is everything Amazon does is

- It's gonna be hard to avoid. And the reality is that we're more conscious to it. We haven't had a lot of privacy for a long time.

- Privacy is a modern concept. By the way, we all lived in this having a, there's a great piece on the internet I wish I could find it. The idea of a private bedroom is a relatively recent origin last few centuries, everybody slept in one big room together, because that's where the fireplace was. So privacy is a newer notion, really.

- And the NSA wasn't created in 2010. You know, it was created in 1946.

- It's the same thing when my European colleagues talk about, you know, not wanting to host stuff in the US because the US government spies on its citizens. And I'm like, Yeah, the French, the Germans, the Italians, the English nobody does this right.

- I feel like other governments are seeing a pot of gold. In fact, just there's now a bill, it's about to enter Congress that will basically break encryption that's happened in a number of countries across the world. I think governments see this big data, these clouds, storage, these cloud databases is a Gold mine.

- We have to remember also that we on the other side of that We have to remember that we, I work all over the world, I do a lot of work in Africa and in relatively remote parts of Asia. where I work in Africa, we have walls around every house, we have broken glass across those walls, we have paid security guards and dogs. And then we have, you know, and then at the cross, you know, crossings you see guys with, with heavy machine guns, right. That's what it looks like when you know, and the thing is that all that data that the government is using, we want to, we have to be careful of it, and we need to be worried about it. But we have to remember that the reason our life looks, the way it looks, is because of that data, you know, because they're scraping up. They're scooping up things that happen, and they don't want to talk to us about that because it is opportunity with the sidewalk project that Google's doing up in Toronto, the notion of and you've talked to me, we've talked a lot about what data could help you design a better city. Right? There's some benefit to it too,

- There are huge benefits to it.

- So is there a way to balance this?

- Yeah, I mean, I think there's there's a couple things, one of which is, you know, I have a lot of people in my life that because of what I do feel the need to harangue me on privacy. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm a face of an industry apparently. And, you know, and most of the time on my own time, I don't want to talk about being free, but you know, hey, whatever, right? But here's the reality. Most of these people asked a couple of simple questions, one of which is do you shred your mail.

- My wife actually, what do you mean? Well, you know, quite honestly, you know, I think the FBI is last statistic or something like 70% of identity theft is somebody pulling a piece of mail out of the garbage.

- So been immune your the issues,

- You're worried about big data? which is maybe 20% of your existence. Even if it's 50, but you're not doing fun stuff like

- We have a few minutes left. I don't want to end on this dystopian. Let's each of us talk about what the future of the cloud the positive benefits of cloud is gonna bring us.

- You should start. 'cause you're very positive person.

- I'm a positive So I guess I don't ever think about this question because I just assume the cloud would become a bigger and bigger part of my life and people's lives ahead of us. And I'm not afraid of that future. I feel like it's making my life better. I mean, yes, there are. There are issues like facial recognition that have to be regulated, and we have to come up with real policies to regulate these kind of ethical issues. Right, but I don't know I I'm not afraid of the future because I feel like the positives are going to outweigh the negatives, especially when I think about things like health care, right? Like I live in New York City. And I can tell you when you go to a doctor in New York City it's probably the same in many places, but there you would think your your medical records would be more automated and in the cloud, maybe but No, they aren't. And so I just can see nothing but upside to automating and improving the way that the cloud manages things like medical records, like education. I guess I'm a glass half full person. Or maybe more than half full, maybe awful. Yeah, I'm less afraid than optimistic about this. And I think the big vendors are going to get bigger, they'll still be a place for smaller vendors, because there are niches and verticals where those companies will need to be used and partner with the bigger vendors. So yeah I'm optimistic.

- Thank you. Alex.

- I think that there's a what I'm really interested in. I've seen a couple attempts at this, but I think that someone's going to figure out how to consumerize the the cloud experience and what I mean by is building very easy to use tools that an average person can use to build their own mini apps. Every time we bring this up to developers, they're like, well, there's always things you won't be able to do. Sure, there's always things you won't be able to do but there's a lot of things you can I programmed a radio station in 1990, with hyper card, you know, just dragging things and pulling them around and building something. And the thing is, I, you know, I figured out how to do that without any without really writing any code. And we're missing then, and there are so many things like right now i want i want to create something that turns on my hot tub and then emails me when it's ready and tells me what temperature it is. And you know, and it's a sensor and a thing and a thing and right now I'm you know, I'm using Arduino I'm dragging little nodes, take this data and pass it to these three nodes and then take these and pass them to these. And, there's so many things that I think an average user could use, if I could go up to the AWS or to Azure and have this little interface. I want you to go grab this data, that maybe I pay a penny for whatever. And I want you to pass it into this and do this calculation. And I want you pass simple things close to that. And I think you'd end up with an explosion, you know, of usage because people would be able to fix everyday problems that they have with computing, whether it's local or in the cloud. If it was just an easy interface they could throw together.

- I need the light switch to talk to the thermostat.

- Where there's things that are starting that direction, but it's not like I can just open up an interface and drag this in and then pump that and have it either show up there or send it to me in an email like every time you see this here I want you to do this here. It's close. It's still a little again, it's a little geeky,

- I would prefer our sponsors, Zapier. We've got sensors everywhere. We've got computing at the edge. But what we need is an API and an easy way to access that and it needs to be global and universal. But I tell you, if you ever go to the Home Automation Pavilion at CES and watch that tower of Babel. for more than a decade, you start to wonder, well, I wonder if we're ever going to get here, Mike is give us a positive way.

- So I believe in technology is empowering. Not as dystopian, not as limiting, right. And I think the interesting thing about cloud in this whole area we're in is a couple of things. The open data movement, right, and cities and things like that. So in Chicago, just about everything now is available within a legally mandated period of time online. And what that's done is it's created citizen, empowerment right? That allows somebody to go out and say, I wanna know how many times the police drew their gun in my neighborhood, I wanna know how many times the water company misbilled somebody, right. I want to know why the tax money that I'm paying for luxury tax is not worth being invested in the city. The other thing, I think and I think of a friend of mine I worked with many years ago in a startup back in the day, that after a great success decided to go back into his community in Inglewood in Chicago, one of the worst neighborhoods one of the most impoverished, you wanna talk about left behind neighborhoods that there is in the city, I mean, the schools pay bounties for teachers to come and teach there. All right. And five years ago, he was trying to 10 years ago, even he was trying to get people in that community to embrace technology that had barely money to live, let alone anything else right. And what he's told me his back then he used to fundraise, You know, go out pass the hat and do events and they'd have art fairs and rap offs and all these different things. They would pass the hat and go put the bite on the corporate sponsors, he called me a mic. And when he said he goes, you know, now when we're doing something in the community, we're gonna build an app so that kids can notify on an Android or a phone, that they're leaving school. And they're walking home. They don't have to have the phone, the parent has the phone. So at the school, they put the tablets in. And you click on your button. And there's this little app that runs up in Google's cloud. And the kid authenticates with the biometric thing. Where are you going? I'm leaving now I'm going home right. Don't have to buy the kid a phone. But something like that it costs him $75 a month to run that for that school cost them about 5000 to build everything which was donated, right? So that's my challenge to everybody here. Investing in our communities with technology isn't $100,000 in building a computer lab somewhere, it's taking these skills and this knowledge and these these resources that we use all day, and finding one life to change one problem to solve one piece of data that changes our view on our governments. In our communities in our cities, that's the power of what we do it's not about I mean, it is about driving revenue and creating the next best app and all this other stuff. But at the end of the day, we didn't figure out how to bang two rocks together to to make money, right? We bang two rocks together to build the next tool to build the fire to build the the knife or the hammer. And we got to start thinking about that again, and start investing not in these massive programs, but on a very personal level, in our communities and the community could be where you live or in a community of people that you're part and without doing that, we get the dystopian future that we all fear. That's why I think cloud is really it's leveled the playing field. It's allowed people with 50 bucks in their pocket to make a difference by using technology.

- Well said thank you, Mike. Mike Dorosh, Gartner group, Alex Lindsey O9O Media, Mary Jo Foley Windows Weekly and allaboutmicrosoft.com. What a great panel. I wanna thank you all for coming out braving the Coronavirus actually be face to face with other people. This has been a really great hour and a half. We're gonna make a podcast out of this. It'll appear at twit.tv/events probably later in the day, maybe Sunday. Okay, we're gonna really work on it. We're gonna polish it up.

- It's magic. It'll be in the cloud on Sunday. Thank you, everybody for being here. We really appreciate it. And thanks to World Wide Tech, for being great hosts. Bye Bye, everybody. Thank you.