IT Operations & Multi-Cloud Challenges

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hi, Prashant. Thank you so much for freeing up your time to speak with me. And I know you're super, super busy, so it's much appreciated. Thank you, Mike. Thanks for having me for this chat. So pleasure's all mine. Thank you. Fantastic. Before we get into the main topic and before we introduce the main topic, can you introduce the audience as to who you are, what you do, and how you might be the right person to speak to this topic? My name is Prashant Bhargava. I'm currently working as a solutions architect with Capgemini. My role mainly consists of helping clients to migrate their data onto the cloud of choice of their cloud. So I would help them either plan the strategy, run the migration for them, basically everything from planning to hand-holding to deployment, and even to certain teething issues. So that's what I do. Effectively, it's more of a cloud data architect type of a role. Before this, I used to work with a managed service provider, where we used to support, I think, about 30 to 40-odd clients at any given point in time. We also used to do hosted environments for a lot of SMEs. So in that role, I used to look after various DBA teams, so SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, MongoDB. And we used to basically look after clients' databases, so as I said, from small-scale clients to very large-scale, with some of them having more than 200 SQL Server servers running their applications. So that's my background. Before that, I used to be a developer, had a lot of experience integrating systems, running developments from, say, standalone systems to web systems, and even some applications for handheld devices. So that's who I am. Do you know what? No better person to speak about this, just listening to that. You must have seen it all with that range of customers that you're supporting. So we've got a-- it's not a presentation per se. But we do have a couple of slides. We're going to show the first slide. And wow, OK. Love the colors, Prashant. Yeah, while I was trying to select the background, I thought it best to use this one because initial idea was to have multiple clouds. But then it becomes mostly, that is what people will use. So I ended up using this mix of colors, which basically are representing clouds. Sp those are multiple clouds that you see over there. OK, OK. Well, anytime I see multiple clouds, they end up just being one giant cloud, and it's great. Yes. And I think that makes more sense. And even if you look at the small bubbles that are small clouds joining the big clouds, that is how usually a company starting off with one cloud environment and then ending up with multiple clouds is what is happening there. So somewhere recently-- or, in fact, probably about six months back, I read that in 2023, about 80% of the companies would end up using multi-cloud environment. But I guess as we move on-- have moved on and looking at big environments, enterprise-level architectures, you would see most of the people or most of the companies using multi clouds. In fact, not just two, three, you might end up looking at AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and even Oracle cloud offerings being used for the same customer. I'm surprised because-- well, two things you may not know is we commissioned research recently about the state of cloud adoption and modernization. And we just heard about some of those results. One of those results pinpointed on the number of cloud service providers that companies might use. Now, I thought it would top out at maybe 4. I mean, you mentioned four. But on that list, some companies have 7 or 8. Yeah, yeah. I didn't realize. I didn't know. And I would have thought that from a business perspective, it would make more sense to consolidate to one service provider. Yes, exactly. To reduce complexity. But what you're saying is multi-cloud is actually way more common than we can expect. Yes, yes. I think the reason we think the way we used to think is to have just one cloud, and one cloud would be the easiest way to go, which is true, which there's no doubt about it. But the reason people end up with multi-cloud is because if you remember, I said we used to-- in my previous role, we used to do offer hosted services. Now, we used to offer services which were basically financial packages for SMEs. And we used to host it for them. So basically, it was a PaaS environment. And for the end users, that application itself will become a cloud. All right. And then if they go with-- say, for example, Azure or AWS for any of their other requirements, they would become a multi-cloud company because they are using, say, for example, AWS for their desktop virtualization, whereas they are using my previous employer for their financial software. So there you go. Unknowingly, they are a multi-cloud customer. OK, well, that explains that data point. I genuinely thought it was-- I think it would be good if we just switch to our next slide here. I was going to say, it's like, what challenges are presented in a multi-cloud world? And-- [INTERPOSING VOICES] So as we can see, it says basically, what is a multi-cloud environment. So multi-cloud environment, as we would initially have thought, is not just when companies use all of these big hosting or cloud solutions at the same time. So it's not basically a company using Azure and AWS or Google Cloud Services at the same time. It's as simple as a company using maybe AWS and then using Google Drive to store their documents. So that's as simple as that. So if a company does that, it becomes a multi-cloud customer. So it is where an enterprise uses more than one cloud platform with at least two or more public clouds. So you don't have to use the full offering. You just have to use anything that a cloud service provider is offering. So as I said, most of the people use OneDrive and then end up using AWS for something else. So that's a multi-cloud environment. So as we can see, a person connecting to Salesforce-- now, Salesforce, they do offer a lot of other services. But prominently, they end up offering their Salesforce software, which many companies use for their hosted-- SaaS. It is hosted, yeah. So they might use that specific application from Salesforce, whereas if they have any Oracle financials, which sits very well with Oracle-- or, for example, if they-- even many people use Oracle Cloud also for their generous free allowances because Oracle is one of the cloud providers which allows you to use a quite beefy machine. I think it's about 4 gig RAM and quite a large disk space for free for almost forever. So if you are doing that, people use Oracle Cloud for that. Then people may use Azure or AWS for anything else that they need. So that's what a multi-cloud company is. It's not hosting-- it can also be, but it is not necessary for a company to use IaaS services from AWS and IaaS services from Google Cloud or Azure. So that's what multi-cloud is. Thank you so much for clearing that up. Genuinely, when I saw that data point from that survey, I genuinely thought it was the respondents having a little bit of uncertainty on the definition of the question. And you really helped clear that data point up. Thank you. Tell me, we're going to-- I think we've got two or three different challenges. Can we jump into the first one? Or is there anything you wanted to round out on? So let's have a look at this multi-cloud challenges. So obviously, one of the main reasons-- maybe not the topmost reason, as I think you pointed out from your survey-- is the cost. So people are not migrating to cloud just because of the cost, though it is one of the major influencers, I think. If it's not first, it definitely is the second one. So the cost transparency and optimization, obviously, that is something that is not that simple or that easily achieved because of number of reasons. First of all, your billing cycles are not the same. Second, I guess the pricing for the same kind of workload is different between the different clouds. And obviously, whatever you predict when you're moving to cloud, you're almost certain that you are going to have an increase as soon as you start using the cloud. So most of the finance departments will ask you to justify that increase or that variation in the cost. So doing all of this becomes a bit difficult and a challenging task as soon as you enter into a multi-cloud environment. So that's the first thing that takes the hit. Similarly, you have capacity and resource optimization. Again, if you have systems that are split across clouds, which I would say is not the best strategy when it comes to multi-cloud, but it does happen. So you would probably have an organization-wide policy of hosting databases, say, on Azure and maybe hosting applications on some other cloud provider. Then you might see a split. And this is just an example. So I'm not saying this is how usually it will happen. But you can find a number of scenarios where you end up with the split applications. And that is when it becomes very difficult in terms of capacity resources. I can see how that might happen. Mergers and acquisitions-- Yeah. That can happen. Yes. And it's not just capacity and resource optimization. I don't think it says on this diagram anywhere, but I can tell you it becomes very difficult to debug any connection issues, any performance issues, if the systems are sitting across multiple clouds. It's also not the same applications, because in most environments, you would see applications integrate with other applications. They would communicate with different applications and depend on other applications. It's also a good practice to have loosely connected applications so they don't start falling apart if one service stops responding. Critically independent, yeah. Yeah, but even if they are loosely coupled, you will still see issues. And it is a big challenge to debug across different clouds. It's a huge challenge, I imagine. Yeah, yeah. Also-- Can I ask, how often does that happen in your experience? Is it 1 in 10, 1 in 100 or-- That happens quite often. And it's a big challenge in terms of getting together people from both the cloud environments unless you happen to have a resource who is managing both and who is expert at both. And then to basically debug as to where is the bottleneck, because most of the time, you would end up saying cloud A saying the cloud B people are to the intermediate customer, that their service at their end, they don't see any issues, and hence it must be cloud B, or it must be some connectivity issues. So it's a big, big challenge. Also, as I was saying, it does not appear over here. But even identity management across clouds is a big challenge. Though you have multiple identity providers that work across cloud, making sure that they are in sync and-- say, for example, if a person changes the password, and there is a delay in sync, that causes a lot of issues as well. Why continuous configuration? Continuous configuration, what it means is, say, when you deploy a policy-- so across clouds, you would have automated policy deployment, which will then govern the configuration. The reason it is continuous is because if any of the configuration goes out of sync, then the policy kicks in to either fix or either ban or bar that system or solution from the cloud. So that's why continuous cloud automation. Why would it go out of sync? Why would it go out of sync? It is because-- Human interaction or-- No. It is it is something as simple as, for example, if I create a server and my server name has to fix-- it has to adhere to a certain naming convention. So let's say it cannot include hyphens. And if that is a mistake that goes unchecked and the server gets created, that will be automatically picked up by this continuous configuration automation. Good. That's even a security feature as well. Yeah, yeah. And obviously, provisioning, automation, and orchestration is also-- it's not so much of a challenge. But obviously, what you'll have to do is all cloud support infrastructure as a script. But the scripts, though they might look similar, after a certain level, the commands will be different. The options, parameters, they are different. So you will end up having three different versions of, say, create server scripts for three different cloud environments if you are using them for maybe IaaS or PaaS in one. So those-- I can absolutely see how that might happen in a very-- not even a complicated system, as in you want this for redundancy. Yeah. You can absolutely see how that might happen. But then the number of-- the sources of errors are multiplying. Yes. And what will also happen is you need-- the number of resources that you need for different clouds also goes up because one person is-- even if they are well-versed with, say, multiple clouds, inherently, every developer, every support guy has a bias towards a certain technology. And they are good into it, very good as compared to the other technology, which they are not so good. So what you'll have to do is you'll have to get or at least identify resources within your company, employees within your company, who are good at, say, cloud A. And then they're good at-- someone else who is good at cloud B, they need to be able to communicate and come up with the infrastructure as code scripts which achieve the same thing for cloud A and cloud B. And then-- Yeah, yeah, 100%, 100%. We have one more slide, Prashant. This is a surprise to me as well as everyone else. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, you basically asked me to talk about the challenges. But as with everything, this also has a flip side. So multi-cloud is not always bad. It does have its own-- its advantages. So obviously, I can try to-- so similarly, we have some advantages as well. And I think the first advantage I would like to highlight is this vendor lock-in. So as I said, we used to work for-- I used to work for this managed service provider. And a lot of instances where a customer is moving from a different managed service provider towards us. And it used to be such a challenging time to get any information out from their current service provider. They wouldn't let you connect. They wouldn't give out information on time or all the information that you requested. And-- It just drags everything down. Yes, it's not-- I wouldn't say all of them are like that, but most of the time. And you can see as to why they would do that, because it is not in their interest. They would rather use their time more productively for something else rather than-- Well, I got to say, I thought it was a governance thing. I thought that they may not have wanted to make changes, or I thought it might-- It is, it is, it is. It is, obviously, because if you go-- because let's say they are responsible for the system till the end of this month, 31st of-- October. And then you take over. Company B then takes over looking after your hardware or your systems. So they definitely would not want you to have full access to something where you can then go and, even by mistake, make a small change which might cause a P1 or an outage, because it is still their responsibility till 31st. So it is a very fine balance that you need to achieve and make the move or get the information you want. So I think cloud helps-- steps in there, and basically, it prevents a customer from a vendor lock-in. So if you have multiple cloud, your systems within multiple clouds, you can find it very easy to migrate from one cloud to the other. So if you have the know-how, then it is challenging, but it is doable. So it prevents you from completely relying on one single provider or one single cloud. So that is something easy. The second is obviously pricing. So most cloud companies are-- they want to be the market leader. And as soon as they know that you are using similar kind of service from a different cloud, they would come up with special pricing offers for you. And they would want to move everything onto a single cloud. And as it is, rather than having a monopoly of a single service provider, you have so many of them. So it is good for the customer. So it obviously drives the price down, the quality and the support up. And then it becomes a customer's market. So that is why having a multi-cloud environment is better. How can you take advantage of that? Now-- and, Prashant, we don't need to go through all of these. But on that particular one, how can you best take advantage of that? Because I imagine let's say you've got A and B, and you're using both services so that you don't have to keep doing migrations to take advantage of these pricings? But does that mean you throttle traffic to one, and then when the price changes to suit, you can throttle it back? Or how can you best take advantage of that? Right. Usually, if you look at businesses, they are also very keen on consolidating because there are certain prices that you can save on. But there are other prices that-- or other expenses-- for example, just the spokesperson that we were talking about or the resources we were talking about. So people are always looking at the ways to consolidate as much as possible. So the way I see it is you will not be looking at just keep switching between cloud providers. But you would want to consolidate your systems, at least application-wise, to one cloud provider. And you do that by taking advantage of a favorable offering from a certain cloud provider and moving all your systems that can exist on that cloud, and thus achieving some kind of financial benefit from it. You'll also end up achieving other savings, such as number of resources required to support that system. Or you can use those resources for supporting your other systems at the same time. But obviously, if there is a big savings to be made-- and nowadays, most of the cloud providers are also coming up with offerings that also cater in for the transfer cost. So the cost of migration would also be covered. Yeah, I've seen the free data migration, yeah. Yeah. So-- That's huge. That is a real-- or that basically is aimed at maximizing their market share. So if you come across or if a company comes across such an offer, then I don't think there is any reason for them to stick to, say, cloud A or cloud B. They can move their systems between them. So that is how they might end up saving on their running costs. Prashant, this has been absolutely eye-opening and insightful. And I have a newfound respect for folks that need to manage these services on a day-to-day basis. Like how to bring order to the chaos, it must be-- Yeah. Incredible. Yeah, I think it's-- we can also put it as, if you take more risks, you reap more benefits. So that's basically on-- it's not just only for pricing. It's also true for scalability. It's also true for security and risk management as well. Obviously, we spoke about DR options where you can have one same service running across two different clouds and increasing the availability for that service. Yeah. Yeah. Prashant, thank you so much. Before we finish, actually, I'll give you an opportunity. Is there any last words that you would offer the viewer? In terms of advantages or disadvantages? Any last words. I would say the era of just migrating to cloud is coming to an end. And it's basically the era of multi-cloud. And knowingly or unknowingly, most of the companies are multi-cloud as of now. And they should not hesitate-- or they should not kind of frown upon being a multi-cloud, but look at the ways to manage or to better manage multi-cloud deployments and take advantages of the multi-cloud system and progress ahead. Honestly, I'm surprised because I was expecting you to push towards consolidation. And you're saying embrace it. Embrace multi-cloud and the benefits-- Yeah, because consolidation can only get you to a certain level of saving. Also, consolidation, one has to be very careful in terms of-- I would just take up-- mostly people who consolidate databases to save on licensing costs. But at the same time, they will also spend a lot on making sure it's a high available environment because you don't want to consolidate-- don't put all your eggs in the same basket. Right, exactly. Redundancy, exactly. Yes. So you would end up spending on redundancy or making it highly available. And multi-cloud gives you a very good chance of achieving that high availability. Yeah. And you've given the viewers some guides to follow there. And if you're watching this and you want to know more, absolutely reach out to Prashant. He's fantastic and highly recommend speaking with him. OK. [MUSIC PLAYING]