Red Hat Podcast: Freedom of Choice

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Karl Culley (00:09):

Welcome to a Capgemini podcast on Cloud-Native transformation. I’m your host Karl Culley, and I’m delighted today to be joined by Jonathan Le Lous, Franz Meyer, and Lauren Nelson. And today we’re going to be talking about cloud native, multi-cloud, the importance of freedom and choice for the customer, and what’s on the horizon for cloud native. Okay, let’s jump in. I’ll ask my guests to introduce themselves and their roles. Could we start with Lauren, please?

Lauren E. Nelson (00:39):

Sure. Hi everybody, Lauren Nelson. I’m from Forrester Research. I’ve been at Forrester for 11 years and I get to spend my life researching and working with enterprises and cloud-service providers all over the world, every single day, on what their cloud strategy is, how it’s evolving, and what they see next. It’s a pleasure to be here and excited to have a good conversation about cloud native today.

Karl Culley (01:06):

It’s wonderful to have you on the podcast. And now perhaps Franz, could you introduce yourself and your role?

Franz Meyer (01:12):

Yeah, sure. Thank you. So I’m Franz Meyer. Despite a very German name, I’m French. I’m an old-timer from Red Hat. I started about 18 years, and I’ve been also a veteran from the software industry with probably close to 30 years in that industry. I’m in charge of the business development for Red Hat in Europe, Middle East, and Africa. And my objective is basically in the strategy and enterprise segments markets, I’m pushing all the Red Hat solutions with the publishers we have, obviously including the one with Capgemini.

Karl Culley (01:52):

Great. Well, welcome. And now Jonathan, please.

Jonathan Le Lous (01:56):

Hi, I’m Jonathan. I’m from France, too. I’m field CTO for Capgemini. I’m also the head of Cloud Native Infrastructure Center of Excellence. We created one years ago in Capgemini, and we are helping the number of customers and cloud migration on cloud native. I’ve been in this industry for 15 years, particularly in open source. I’m a pure open-source guy for years and now I’m working particularly with Red Hat on some projects.

Karl Culley (02:27):

Great. Well, it’s wonderful to have you on board, also. Well, I suppose a good place to start would be by defining what exactly a cloud native is and what is meant by cloud native. So, Lauren, please, could you kick us off?

Lauren E. Nelson (02:41):

Sure. So, cloud native: you hear the term a lot at conferences all over the industry and it seems to be a vague term. I think when it was officially defined was a couple of years ago after Re-invent and KubeCon, you saw folks kind of starting to get some clarity around what is it, and what the market has kind of come to pass as we’re defining it as a solution that was built from cloud, from the get go, a solution that is microservices based, it lives on containers, and it is built with the context of what you need for a cloud platform.

Franz Meyer (03:16):

Yeah, no, I think the definition is really good. The point of this that is important is…why it came and why it appears that way, is first of all because a new trend and new players came on the market, which [were] the cloud infrastructure providers and also all that is very linked with what we call the digital transformation of companies, which means basically their business much more through a digital model. And, obviously it means that they have to modernize and develop – much more rapidly – business applications that live and that they update on a very frequent basis. And for that, you need to change the paradigm of how the applications were made. So Cloud-Native applications basically has brought that, benefiting from these new infrastructure and capabilities, from those providers as well as the need for companies to address this digital digitalization.

Karl Culley (04:12):

Right. The need to be agile and with…more of a DevOps approach, I suppose. Jonathan?

Jonathan Le Lous (04:19):

Yeah, I think it’s, it’s really about, agile. I like to say it’s a 200% agile, one spoon of DevOps and one spoon of cloud. You know, mostly cloud native for me, it’s really, if you go back in the day when IWS starts this first Cloud-Native term, it’s really about how you knew you could deploy after two weeks of work, where you on the agile methodology meaning, for one sprint, what could you offer to your client? And this is could be useful, could be testable, and could be put in projections that they’re after. And this is for me, where is cloud native, basically it’s putting technology behind an agile approach.

Karl Culley (05:02):

Well, I suppose now we have a definition of cloud native for our listeners. The next question would be why cloud native? What are the benefits, and benefits of these sort of container-based environments. Maybe you can once again kick off with, Lauren?

Lauren E. Nelson (05:17):

Yeah, I think we had touched on that a little bit already, about the why, about what makes it different, what makes it unique. Part of what makes it different and makes it unique is that why, that value prop of what are you trying to achieve. And also, some of these terms, like microservices, have been around since the ’90s, they hadn’t really been used because there wasn’t really a use case in market where it was actually a practical scenario that we could actually benefit from. And today when we look at cloud native and what’s being done with elastic environments, with the cloud and the cultural change that we’re seeing in development organizations about a very iterative approach, the ability to do small changes to get a minimal viable product to market faster is kind of that full value prop. And then the last thing I’ll kind of touch on is, cloud native has also been used to refer to innovation at whole.

Lauren E. Nelson (06:15):

So, a lot of the Cloud-Native ecosystems that exist out there today are places where organizations go to innovate, where they see lots of different tools that integrate with each other, that foster this innovative culture. And I think that’s the other side of it, is kind of, when you say cloud native it, it is a context that things are being done differently.

Franz Meyer (06:38):

Yeah, we can, we can look at from two angles: a bottom up or a top down. Bottom up, it means that we want to basically see how now we can abstract the operation on the IT infrastructure. You know, we allow developer to have more agility and flexibility. And if you look at it from top down, and from a business standpoint, is how basically we can get the developers to develop almost on a daily basis or weekly basis, new features, new application in there to basically develop the business of, of the companies and with the, I would, say traditional or legacy models, the infrastructure was imposing too much restrictions for going that fast. And also with the traditional, I would say waterfall-type of a of model, where you have to develop everything and test, it was taking too long to bring new things and innovation into the business applications.

Karl Culley (07:39):

Yes. And I suppose agility equaling choice, right? And how to operate with, with different Cloud environments, with a multi-cloud approach perhaps.

Jonathan Le Lous (07:50):

Yeah. It’s also a good moments and a good motion for most of the company to make the change happen. You know, I think cloud native is an opportunity for particularly the big company to change and to make the change happen. I think we have been trained for a while moving some time on the job, start to modernize application and so on, and I think cloud native is really for them an opportunity to embrace really the change happening with the cloud. And I think that’s why you have a lot of traction in my way on the cloud edge from the companies [that was] not really there a few years ago.

Karl Culley (08:31):

As the majority of organizations already have a digital transformation strategy in place, or are in the process of implementing one, vast majorities see cloud as a critical component of their change strategies. Is the term “digital transformation” outdated because of what companies must do has always remained in the cloud?

Lauren E. Nelson (08:51):

I get this question a lot. So I was actually in a few sessions earlier this week where we, we said do we need to put a new wrapper on the term “digital transformation?” And where that stems from is it’s essentially transforming your technical debt, transforming the way your business operates in its industry to try and do things differently and to try and put a new spin on what we’ve previously called “IT transformation.”

Lauren E. Nelson (09:20):

We kind of put this digital term in front to talk about how a lot of things are going from a non-digitized world to a place where we’re trying to digitize and connect to be able to make smarter decisions, to use the power of the data that we have to be able to work faster, and the term is still very relevant for organizations. It’s still the same initiative that we’ve been working on for the last five or so years, but some organizations are trying to put a little bit more oomph in it, a little bit more resurgence in the initiative itself and looking at things like business acceleration, reviving the way that we go to market, and you’re seeing slightly different terms emerge, but a lot of organizations are saying “Do we need a new term for this or can we just use that overarching term?”

Lauren E. Nelson (10:09):

And then immediately get into more specificity about what particular endeavors that we’re going after. And cloud tends to fall at the bottom of that conversation because…it’s a series of enablement technologies. It’s not one technology. It’s not the change itself, but it’s the technology that enables you to change the way your development organization works.

Karl Culley (10:37):

Okay. So, let’s move on to talk about the increasing importance of choice in cloud native. Maybe you can start, Franz.

Franz Meyer (10:48):

Yeah, as I mentioned, I’m an old timer from Red Hat in the open-source industry, and obviously you have to understand exactly what means open source. And open source means obviously choice, because open source is a way of developing software in a different manner and that technology, that software, is freely available for anyone and it’s done in a collaborative community. It gives the people the choice that they’re using the technology and all the features the way they want. So, the same way in cloud, when you have something which is disruptive, it’s very important that you’re given the choice. So, when we’re talking about cloud native, it means that somehow also it gives the choice. It should be whatever infrastructure you would be able to run. So it can be on a private, on-premises environment and being bare metal or virtualization, virtualized machines, or even your private cloud, or it can be any kind of public Cloud that you want any place in the world that, that you have and any provider.

Franz Meyer (11:55):

So, that it enables you first of all to put in place this Cloud-Native approach for developing in a different manner, a different type of application, to enable your digital transformation. So choice is absolutely key.

Jonathan Le Lous (12:12):

I think today, one of the main goals of my clientele is really to be free from any kind of lock-in you’re going to have. And for example, [inaudible 00:12:25], we use to work on some technology and it’s really, really, really difficult to go and to move forward from some technology and the cost is really expensive. And today I think many a lesson was learned about that and people would like to go on non-lock-in technology where you can move easily from one provider to another, but also from one service provider to another. Try to be really a neutral platform, to have a neutral platform, to really starting to be free to create on your own different stacks.

Karl Culley (13:04):

Yeah. As you mentioned, the benefits of multi-cloud strategies, it’s obviously an incredibly complex subject and this complexity has Forresters’ infrastructure and operations leaders asking is the pain worth the gain? So, perhaps I can ask Lauren, is the pain worth the gain with multi-cloud strategies?

Lauren E. Nelson (13:23):

We get this, this pragmatism that pushes back on those statements in the market for organizations like Comcast, for a Home Depot, for organizations that are already well on their way, that have been working with open-source tooling and have developed a lot of their own app and developer services to get them moving fast. Sometimes, they have the benefit or the privilege of that freedom of choice. I talk to a lot of organizations that are not in that circumstance always, where they feel this organizational challenge, where it is so hard to get anything done internally that for them it’s a choice of “Do I transform digitally or do I do freedom of choice? Do I do this on multiple clouds? Do I not use app and developer services that could provide me value today because I want this freedom from lock-in?” And there is, they do acknowledge the vendor lock-in challenge.

Lauren E. Nelson (14:25):

There is a very real and a very emotional past that exists with vendor lock-in. and yet these guys say we are going to use app and developer services that lock us in, and we’re uncomfortable with it, it’s not our first choice, but in order to get anything done in our organization where it is so difficult to instill change, we need to choose lock-in. And for them they’re choosing a public-cloud platform. They’re using the app and developer services. If they felt they had a choice where those value-add services were available for them, where they did have that choice, they would choose not in a heartbeat.

Lauren E. Nelson (15:03):

But today, one of the realities of the market is, if you want application and developer services, you’re facing this choice, but every organization can have that freedom of choice and take advantage of that, that aspect of choice and multi-cloud. And I think I spent more time talking about choice as a value prop than I did multi-cloud, but I think that’s at the heart of that multi-cloud question is: “Do I get access to these value add services? Does creating a governance model, operational model, for two different clouds, slow me down if I try and not get locked into a platform that I use, so I can use multiple clouds, does it slow me down?” So I’ll just pose that there. I imagine Jonathan and friends have, have counters on each of those and have many client examples where they have successfully been able to do both.

Jonathan Le Lous (15:56):

No, I agree. I think on most of…I’m thinking about what are of my biggest, our biggest client (concern), is really, first, it’s moving and moving fast and moving forward. Try cloud native, and on the other hand, you have to deal with the fact you have legacy application and you have a past. You have also people, you have people look into the, in their current skill set around the whole database…or all mindsets, and you have to balance actions in real life to say, okay, we could have some part where we’re going to modernize and move fast, and we have to deal with another part where we have to really help people, not only technology but also help people, to start a new journey and to really change them to change and to embrace a new way of working.

Franz Meyer (16:45):

Giving the choice is a trade-off between a short term, I would say, easy benefit, and a longer-term larger benefit and that’s what it’ll basically I’ve seen very, very much. It’s a natural thing that a supplier or vendor is trying to retain and keep their customer for the benefit of their business as long as possible and for maximizing the revenue. It’s a natural thing for a company and it’s really the responsibility of the client to basically push back or make choices in consideration of that. And obviously, if you have a vendor in a position which is attractive at a certain time, that you have the easy choice to basically say, I just get trained on this technology and on this concept, I just like only one supplier, one vendor, and I just go all for it. The problem is first of all it may have a long-term financial impact and I would say that’s almost the best case you have.

Franz Meyer (17:54):

And the worst case is you also have a big problem on the innovative impact because that supplier may not remain the most competitive on the market, from a technological standpoint or innovative standpoint. So, you need to make sure basically you have somehow complexity to your choice at the beginning and you try to make it easy and faster, but you make that effort and because you give the freedom of choice for the future, you will benefit from the best of breed from what’s available on the market at the best price, with the best technology and best innovation.

Karl Culley (18:34):

Well, I suppose now that we’ve covered some of the concerns and the questions I’m asked by organizations considering going cloud native and also some of the benefits as we see it, it leaves us on quite naturally to talk about the biggest challenges faced by organizations after adopting a Cloud-Native approach.

Lauren E. Nelson (18:53):

There are certainly challenges as you start to explore new technologies, but for the most part what I see are people challenges, which are: How do we select the right individuals to lead this initiative? How do we make sure we have a leader internally that can speak to both our developer audiences and our operations office audiences, to create something that can actually scale, but something that doesn’t leave us exposed? There’s also a challenge I see on maintaining staff once trained. There is a shortage of skillsets in the market. Once somebody has powerful certifications and experience, they then are more valuable as an asset and they tend to be poached by a lot of the big public-cloud providers out there. So, I see a real challenge around on people. Jonathan, I know that you do a lot on center of excellence, so I’m sure you’ve got a lot on the people side as well.

Jonathan Le Lous (19:50):

Exactly. I think one of the biggest challenges I have today, it’s really, sincerely, I’ve been four years in open source, pure-play company, and today I’m in Capgemini. I mean, we in Capgemini, we have a lot of technology, we have lots of clients and the contexts is really people context, is really important today. Even in my team, I have people with a VMware background. I have people with Windows background, people used to work on infrastructure or hardware, and so I could say traditional way of thinking, and the biggest challenge I have today is to bring them in the new mindset to help them, to train them, to support them, to really help them to change. And also, what I like in this company is that you could scale, the capability to scale, and this is really a people journey. It’s really interesting.

Jonathan Le Lous (20:44):

I think it’s really an exciting moment for that, because it’s about choice for both the technology but it’s really about people. How are we going to need, we’re going to go on this digital age as we talking for so many years. It is really interesting to see even developers could have difficulties to move forward and to move on the cloud native, where we think of cloud native as the best…I could say, the best country or the best landscape for developers, but it’s not true. And sometimes developers really slow down the project and we try to avoid cloud native, to try to avoid to change our mindset, and to start thinking differently. And sometime it’s really about that. And that’s why if we agree, it’s sometimes a long journey, not only because of the maturity of the technology, the maturity of the choice, but mostly because of the maturity of people to embrace it.

Franz Meyer (21:41):

You have a product, you have process, and you have people. Product and technology, I would say, it’s complex but it’s quite easy and straightforward. We have plenty vendors, we are here for the doing that. You have processes and also you have obviously to rethink the way you’re doing things, your business, but also how you develop, and so on and so on. And then you have people, and the toughest one is around the people and, and it’s a natural thing. Human beings are naturally resistant to change. And here, clearly, we have to do things differently. It’s not that it’s better or more worse, or more difficult. It’s just different.

Karl Culley (22:27):

So, can we talk about how operations teams must disrupt the traditional infrastructure architecture strategies with infrastructure as code? And perhaps we could start by defining for our listeners exactly what infrastructure as code is.

Franz Meyer (22:42):

The thing is if you look at from a developer angle, because you want to be flexible, you want to develop new things, new features for your application that allows you to do business every day, and are your customers waiting for that every day, that you publish a new feature in your application or a new capabilities of business, and the problem is, how you mix that agility, that permanent agility, that is almost immediate and apply it to that infrastructure that should be rock solid. And infrastructure as a code mean basically that you try to basically make the two working together, that through the automation, through the choice of, I would say, technology you making, how you basically allow the developers to ignore the constraints of the infrastructure, which is super rock solid and running. That’s really the challenge I see from infrastructure as a code.

Lauren E. Nelson (23:46):

First, from a definition perspective, it’s very simple: it is infrastructure as code. So, instead of provisioning and managing infrastructure through physical hardware, configuration platforms, and tools, instead you are managing this system through machine-readable definition files. So, it’s all of those classic virtualization technologies that we’ve worked with in the past paired with automated tooling that allows you to do the complete provisioning and managing of resources through code. And I think when I think about the most difficult aspects of this, two things really come top of mind. One, our infrastructure professionals don’t always know how to code. So, I’ve seen so many different organizations adopt SDI technologies or try and tackle the IAC space, looking at some of the configuration-management tools out there, and they don’t have the basic skills to even use those technologies even though they’ve secured budget and they’ve technically bought them.

Lauren E. Nelson (24:45):

So, that’s one, is we need to teach our infrastructure professionals how to code and some of the fundamentals of automation in general. Second, I will highlight that, when we try and roll out things like a cloud initiative, at times we struggle again with this speed challenge of legacy skillsets and different priorities from those in the organization where some are incentivized to work fast and others are incentivized to do things with very little risk.

Lauren E. Nelson (25:16):

And with this we see these concepts like bi-modal IT and all of these different elements of how do we accelerate, how do we leap frog aspects of things that we see as more important, to jumpstart our transformation? And with that we see a lot of cloud initiatives starting off where, especially private cloud initiatives, where they focus on giving developer tools and fast stability provision, but without investments in SDI and the right infrastructure-as-code technologies, we struggle at being able to provide full day-two management of those systems and then also to scale those systems beyond a certain point. So, it’s hard to actually get that initiative off and running and focusing on the next thing, rather than just your first few projects.

Karl Culley (26:04):

So, we’ve come to the end of part one of this podcast on cloud native. Thank you very much for listening and be sure to tune in to part two, in which we’ll be talking about common misconceptions about cloud, the hottest DevOps trends, and the importance of open source, among other things. So, thank you very much for now, and goodbye.

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