The Rainmakers

Hi, everyone, and thank you for joining the first chapter of the Raymaker Striking Success to the Cloud. My name is Eveli Kwonig, and today with me is Lav Sveer from AllCloud. He's the founder and CTO of AllCloud, which is a global partner, one of the leading global partners of Amazon. Today's first session is going to discuss one of the main topics that is bothering and occupying the minds of many customers going to the cloud, multi cloud. Hi, Lav, thank you for joining me. Hi, Zev, good afternoon from Tel Aviv. I'm glad to be with you on your first call. I remember the first day we met, it was years ago at the beginning of the journey to the cloud. Yeah, I think we're at a much mature situation today in this ecosystem. Glad to be with you talking about multi cloud. I love this topic as you know, and yeah, let's dive into it. Sure. So I think the first and foremost, what is multi cloud? I am aware too many definitions. You are leaving the market. How do you see when your customers are discussing multi cloud, what actually do they mean? Oh, that's a very, very good question, I think. I mean, the basics is really what is really multi cloud? I mean, and I think there was a lot of confusion around it. Some customers see multi cloud as a combination of multiple SaaS applications like Salesforce, like three sixty five, like many of these that are available there, including the public cloud vendors like AWS, GCP, Azure. I think it's very confusing because it's very, very different from the operating point of view. So I think on our conversation today as being known as expert in the public cloud area, let's focus our conversation on what means multi cloud when you mean Azure, GCP, AWS, maybe Oracle and some others. So what does it mean for a customer to operate these multiple environments in parallel? Because it's very different from having multiple SaaS. So I think today let's focus on this area. Yes. So actually we're talking about leveraging infrastructure service, sometimes platform as a service in different public cloud domains. And the question is, are we talking about leveraging them simultaneously? Is it the same application that partially runs here, partially run there? Is it different domains within the customers? I don't know, the backend, the enterprise services, HR, etcetera, running in one and mission critical running in another? How do you see that? Well, so I think what I mostly see very often actually, I think is the hybrid. Before talking about multi cloud, I think the very common scenario actually is the hybrid situation. I mean, again, and I'm mostly looking at those large enterprises. They've started their journey and the business way, I know, many years ago. They have a heavy footprints in their data centers. And the first thing to talk about is hybrid, I think. No matter if it's an on prem environment, a colocation with some public cloud now, it doesn't really matter if it's on Amazon, Azure, anything. So I think the most common scenario I do see now, which is heavily used and expanding is the hybrid situation, is expanding their existing footprint into the cloud. Now, customers are indeed talking about operating on more than one cloud vendor, but it's very challenging. I think there are many issues there. Customers definitely has the interest to operate on multiple platforms. I think they are trying. The vendors are less supporting it, but definitely it's customer desire. And what we do with customers is really helping to be kind of properly onboarded. So multi cloud, yes, I think a lot of talking about it is starting to see its way first through hybrid and then starting to see customers considering this kind of multiple public cloud vendors approach. Okay, so let me get it right. So first I agree with you. We see we saw initially hybrid cloud, a combination of on premise and off premise, sometimes on premise private cloud in combination with a public cloud. And that said, deserve a full different chapter because we can speak about that a lot. It evolved to be an agenda of multi cloud, which I agree with you, multi cloud should be defined as a combination of using several public clouds. But what drove customers, what are the business rationales or what do they plan to achieve with the concept, even if they are not getting there? Why they are busy with that at all in your mind? Rightly or wrongly, are busy with what they are discussing that. So think it's an evolution. I think at the beginning I heard customers talking about the desire for multi cloud is first for commercial reasons. They wanted to be able to negotiate better pricing with a vendor. But I think this is kind of less now being the main drive for a multi cloud. So customer realize that if they stick to a vendor, I think they could get better price terms, specifically if they go on heavy and long term commitments. So I think this is kind of, it used to be a topic of discussion, but it's now less. More than that, I mean, customers wanted also to be able to potentially reduce the risk of running on a single vendor. Now, I think with the level of maturity and the resiliency that today's cloud vendors are offering. Again, I think this is kind of, I want it as a backup. It is less of the need and it's less of desire. I do emphasis on an area that I do see really true use of multicloud. I think this is what I see actually mostly is with the ISVs. There are a lot of ISVs who are delivering the technology as a SaaS from the cloud. For different reasons, they have and they are required by their customers to operate on a specific cloud vendor. Let's say you are providing certain services to Azure customers. Let's say you're providing certain services to AWS, to GCP. So very often you have to deliver your software, your technology or service within the cloud vendor. It could be commercial reasons, but as well as technology. I mean, a good example is if you live on Amazon and you do want to serve Amazon customers with your technology, is the best way is to run on Amazon for the reason that you want to have this in I mean, leverage the Amazon technologies for authentication, for networking, to provide those services in a secure way. So I see this kind of pattern happening in multiple cases. So if you need to sum it up, what multi cloud is, ISVs, I think are doing it the best that I've seen so far. I think enterprises still want it. It is still very, very hard, but let's see how this kind of discussion is going to evolve. The desire is there, implementation is not yet there. Yeah, so I think reiterating on few of the points you mentioned, I think that coming from that more traditional world, many enterprises used to have a multi vendor approach, not putting all the eggs in one basket, mainly for negotiation purpose. And when they move to the cloud, they automatically try to keep the same. I think that the other extreme for multi cloud is all in. And we are familiar with many companies that went all in to Amazon, lately we see also on into Azure or all in to Google. And naturally those approaches also bring lots of benefits. So there is no freelance, are pros and cons for each. And you alluded to the fact that when you get all in, so you get all the stack and the stack is usually better integrated. Also, one of the things is that you minimize cost of data because if you have multi cloud, the data that flows between also cost itself, very often customers forget that angle. Then lately you mentioned that ISVs are doing that better than big enterprises. I think that what ISVs are doing, and I'm part of Amdocs, is a big ISV. ISVs that has different customers that ask the solution to be deployed on different clouds, very often has to plan and has the roadmap for solution that are cloud agnostic. That not to be confused with multi cloud because cloud agnostic actually means that you could deploy on different clouds. While multi cloud means that you are simultaneously leveraging multi clouds, either on the same app, which is extremely rare and has lots of disadvantages or different chunks of your enterprise. As I mentioned earlier, you know, the HR is on Azure and mission critical is on Amazon and the big data is on Google, just as an example. Yes, I think, I mean, it's a good point because kind of to emphasize, I think the challenges, we do understand the potential value, but I think it's also fair to say that are quite a few challenges on the multi cloud. I think the first one of them is actually from a very, very basic thing is the human resources, the expertise. Today's platforms are super complex. They have, I mean, if you look at AWS, nearly two hundred services. I mean, it's a huge ecosystem. Now, in order to maintain the expertise, the knowledge within the company, to retain the people, to be very strong technically, if you don't focus on one platform, it's going to be very challenging. Even in one platform, it's very challenging, not to say. Already, absolutely. It's very challenging to be master on a single platform today. Now, if you need to be master on multiple platforms, it's probably not gonna happen. I mean, you either become, either you decide to go to be a generalist or a specialist. Most customers wanna be specialists. So I think the first and most important thing is the human factor, the knowledge. Yeah, skills core safety. Yeah. Yeah. Second, and this is what customers are challenging, to build a robust environment on multiple platforms. It doesn't happen. They mostly focus on one and try to do very good. Second, think, so let's assume you are really doing a good job on deploying whatever the foundation layer and you have the right teams to run multiple platforms. Now let's say you want to start doing workload mobility. I want to move this from one platform to another one. All right, so great. You're doing Kubernetes and you potentially can move it very quick. Now, what about the data? What about the databases? What about the storage? If you start to mobilize this storage and databases, it becomes very complex. So I think customers realize that workload mobility doesn't worth it. It won't do a very, very good deployment in one place, either whatever vendor you choose. I mean, GCP are good, Azure are good. I AWS is great. So I mean, it's fine. I think as we realize that workload mobility doesn't work it. It's super hard. If you don't design it from day one to be deployed in a multiple platform, it's going be super hard to do and normally nobody wants to do it. Correct, I tend to agree with you. Since you mentioned, if you don't design it for day one and you are a veteran and also an APN ambassador, what would be the key ingredients to consider, how to plan a solution to be multi cloud enabled? Well, cloud enabled, think, mean, you mentioned very nicely, very good, I mean, to be platform independent or basically to be able to deploy your workload on multiple platforms. So this is going to be relevant to use standard tools like Kubernetes, like generic queues, like generic cache mechanism. Use generic systems like when Postgres is generic, there are lots of common tools you can use across platforms. Let's assume this is one thing. But in order to run environment on simultaneous and multiple cloud platform, you really have to connect them. You have to share the data. You have to distribute the workload. A secret sauce, I think it's technologies that are really cross platform, but I would also say it's very expensive to maintain, to design, to operate. And my best recommendation, if you don't really need it, why would you do it? Think how can you leverage the platform you are very good with and today's platform offering the multiple regions, multiple wherever, lots of great tools to leverage on a global footprint rather than doing on a multi platform. Yeah, okay, makes sense. So maybe last but not least, both of us has some gray hair from cloud. Yeah, let's look forward. I mean, where do you see the future of multi cloud? Where is it heading to? Oh, wow, this is a good question. No, I need to be able to take the risk here. I mean, but It's recorded. Might take it. Yeah, it's recorded, exactly. May take me back to a few years ago that, I mean, I used to have a lot of maybe arguments around where is multi cloud heading. I still think that actually, and I do have some signals in the market today, that customers will be less talking around multi cloud and more of, okay, this is my primary platform. This is where I'm going to invest majority of my efforts on and less talking on multi cloud. So I do think that large enterprises either will build very silo approach over multi cloud or focus on a primary one. They'll all be in the combination. They're good. I mean, sometimes our needs to do multi, but it won't be equally balanced with a dream of workload mobility from here to there. And when I wake up, I decide to launch this No live migrations, you say, between clouds. Maybe you could, but again, what's about the data? I mean, it's likely still far. And because customers take cloud super serious today and considering every kind of workload to be deployed on the cloud, I think they will still be focusing on mainly primary cloud vendor and maybe some satellite around. I would take the risk and believe that in the next five years, this is what we're going to see. Majority on focusing on cloud. As said, you are recorded and you are saying that the future of the cloud, of the multi cloud is not so much multi cloud, which is fair enough. I would like to thank you a lot for joining me today for the first session of the Rainmakers Striking Success in Cloud. I would like to thank the audience for staying with us. In our next chapters, we will cover many other domains, including cloud security and AIOps and FinOps and cloud procurement and many more. Thank you, Lav, and thanks to the audience and all the best. Go cloud. Thank My pleasure. Thank you. Good day. Thank you.