THE DOPPLER

Our guest on the podcast this week is Jonathon Hensley, CEO at Emerge Interactive.

We discuss how Jonathan built Emerge Interactive from a technology advisory services company in 1998 and evolved it to a full service digital experience company. They are focused on how to make the most use of technology for clients. To this day, they offer advisory services to come in and help enterprises develop a digital roadmap and product plan and determine how they'll invest in that over the next 5-10 years. They also do a lot of user experience work. They help clients develop a solution and either implement it or hand it off to an internal team to build. Building the company and launching any career in technology takes a lot of hard work and long hours. At the beginning, it takes doing a lot of work for free to break in, from speaking gigs to advising companies. It's important to always keep up with trends and read the news because awareness is everything. You should be constantly learning. When you are passionate about something like technology, learning is not work and becomes part of everything you do.

How do you keep organizations on track with what they need instead of chasing trends and new buzzwords? We discuss avoiding buzzword bingo so enterprises can focus on what performance you are trying to enable with technology and what outcome enterprises are looking for with each effort. Compatibility and maintainability are also crucial to consider when looking at implementing new technologies in an enterprise. Enterprises need to peel back layers to understand what the life cycle is to this technology and what needs to be done.

Our guests on the podcast this week are Lynda Stadtmueller, Vice President, Cloud Services at Frost & Sullivan and Kelly Ireland, Founder and CEO at CB Technologies.

We discuss why hybrid cloud and change management are still important for companies in the second decade of modern cloud. With the exception of some startups born in the cloud, many enterprises never accepted the fact that the cloud would replace the data center. Organizations feel this is not an "or" discussion, it's an "and" discussion. They know things need to be on the public cloud, and they need their own on-premises data center as well. Therefore, enterprises sift through their workloads and data to determine what makes sense to migrate to public cloud and what makes sense to keep on private cloud. CTP has found that 30-40% of workloads are not economically viable to move to the public cloud. Organizations can build net new applications on the cloud, but they shouldn't move everything. For this reason, hybrid cloud will continue to be a strong focus for enterprises in the future.

Businesses are now technology dependent. Every aspect of how a business operates is becoming technology-based. The technology allows a new way for enterprises to innovate and with that, a need for IT organizations to transform. Separate from the need to understand what the cloud is and how to optimize it, these IT teams must also draw on new skill sets professionally. IT organizations are struggling with how to become a customer service-oriented organization to internal line of business clients. 53% of companies are concerned about the changing roles of IT employees. There is a lot of change management that is required that has nothing to do with the technology, but more to do with how it's delivered to the business.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Brian Gracely, Director of Product Strategy at Red Hat.

Brian discusses a small bank in Ohio and how they have a business use-case for Kubernetes. Because Kubernetes was built to manage Google-sized technology, it is surprising that there is a reason to apply it to a small brick and mortar bank just starting with web and mobile. What they noticed in the switch is that because customers get paid on Fridays and are more likely to check if they got paid on their personal mobile device, as soon as they launched mobile their Friday traffic soared. For just one fifth of business days, Fridays received ten times the amount of traffic as any other day. This unexpected spiky traffic pattern was a great use-case for Kubernetes. Kubernetes was built to deal with problems like that, even at small businesses.

We also look at the state of the big three orchestration engines: Kubernetes, Mesos, and Swarm. Kubernetes and Mesos began as internal projects from larger companies. Mesos began in 2014 as a container scheduler Twitter was using to manage its own containers. They released it as open-source, so a community began to form around that. It focused on big data elements because of their applications to Twitter. To this day, Mesos is still preferred to run big data applications compared to the other two. Kubernetes began as Google's Borg technology, used internally then released open-source. It was focused on the 80/20 type of use-cases such as batch use-cases and container use-cases. What happens when open-source solutions are released is that the community flocks to one and Kubernetes won more of the community than any solution. With a strong community, Kubernetes is better suited to work with many different types of applications. Last, Docker came out with Swarm to compete in the market. They keep things as simple as possible to get a few containers clustered together. Swarm has evolved to work mostly around Docker's data center products. Tracking this industry over time reveals how containers have evolved to having use-cases in enterprises of all sizes.

We discuss trends in so far in 2017 in cloud computing, DevOps, IoT, and Machine Learning. Enterprises constantly hear about the latest trends. Sometimes the industry moves too fast for them to keep up with. They still worry about moving from one system to another and starting basic cloud practices. Cloud is not core to their businesses yet. At some point, these large enterprises need to optimize the changes they have already made instead of always worrying about the next trend. They need to get better at scale to ensure their business will grow.

One interesting trend has been the changing landscape of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the more modern microservices. Lori wrote a blogpost in 2008 on the exaggerated death of SOA. In revisiting the post recently, she concludes that SOA is alive. The industry now focuses on microservices, which are action-oriented. Actions like logging out, logging in, checking statuses, purchasing, checking carts are now standard. These services link together to make experiences for users. Perhaps a better descriptor of SOA today is event-driven service architecture. Revisiting thought leadership from 2008 has shown how far the industry has come and how far it will go in the next 10 years.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Tatiana Lavrentieva, Cloud Solutions Architect at Cloud Technology Partners.

We discuss how Microsoft Azure is catching up with AWS. It seems to become more compelling each year with new services like Azure Stack and Azure Container Service. In 2016, AWS grew at the same pace as the market, but Microsoft Azure grew much faster. Microsoft launched Azure 5-6 years after AWS, so AWS has an enormous lead. Now, Microsoft Azure is at least competitive with AWS in every area. This allows the two to compete over pricing. Enterprises do not automatically choose AWS anymore. They now research what the right cloud is for the organization. Many organizations are also embracing multi-cloud strategies. This means using feature capabilities of multiple public clouds for different pieces of the enterprise. For instance, it saves money to run Microsoft services on Azure, so that is often a feature that gets separated in cloud strategy.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Mike Bainbridge, digital technologist, speaker, and cloud expert. We discuss digital innovation and the disruptive business models that rely on it. Digital disruption comes up a lot today when thinking about the startups that challenge the way things have always been done. AirBnB and Uber are technology companies at their core, not transportation and hospitality companies. We look at AI and how it will affect jobs of the future. Last, we discuss vendor lock-in and when it can be a good idea to go all in on one vendor.

We discuss the foundational traits of serverless computing, including scaling and provisioning, cost precision, high availabilty and more. We also look at what Mike considers to be the main benefits of serverless, from costs based upon specific usage to faster time to market. Enterprises can now build entirely new products in hours or days because so much of the inherent complexity has now been commoditized by the vendors.

We also look at how large enterprises can get started down the serverless path. Once your organization is consuming some amount of public cloud, it's easy to get your feet wet slowly. It's low commitment and low cost to try the technology out in areas of your ecosystem that aren't mission critical. Enterprises that want to leverage serverless technology should embrace visibility and monitoring, autonomy and automation.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Austen Collins, Founder at Serverless.

We discuss Austen's early bet on serverless computing from the first time he saw AWS Lambda. Serverless, even in the early days, has many benefits. It is microservice-based, event-driven, requires no administration, and has a compelling "pay-per-execution" pricing model.

Serverless was launched as an application framework. The problem with serverless computing today is that if you want to build a sophisticated system on this type of service, you're dealing with lots of independent units of deployment. One application is a combination of many Lambda functions. Dealing with this all-together, not to mention the event-driven computing, can be chaotic. Serverless offers a simple file that can define a serverless application. The framework provisions all the infrastructure for you and the app is up in seconds.

We are still in the early phases of serverless computing and the trend is still yet to be defined. It's impressive how fast the cloud providers are moving with serverless computing and building new features around it. Adoption from enterprises has also been fast. The challenges of serverless computing are that there are a lot of changes at once for an organization to adopt it, and this often requires cultural shifts as well. Serverless computing requires a new way of thinking for enterprises, which is a challenge. But the for enterprises who embrace it, the gains are worth it.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Adam Jacob, CTO at Chef.

We discuss the changing face of large enterprises when innovating with technology. The technology we see in big web companies from Facebook, Google, and Amazon is absolutely going to be used to reinvent how large enterprises function. But large enterprises do not need to transform into tech companies like Google to be successful. More likely the opposite is the case. Enterprises need to realize that they already are a great source of innovation and that with a focus on customers and on technology they can lead the way to success. It does not have to look exactly like Google for large enterprises to be innovative.

Figuring out what you want it to feel like is the hardest part for large enterprises. If you're a traditional tire company, for instance, you know the tire industry but you don't know what it feels like to be a technology company that moves quickly and safely. So how do you get the people inside the tire company to know what it feels like to move fast? How they can apply that to tires? Knowing how the business works is incredibly important and these enterprises know their markets better than anyone. The trick is to teach them how to use technology to enhance the business they already know.

Chef is a company built around automation. It began with infrastructure automation and has now added other products. Chef found bottlenecks at security and compliance, which led to InSpec. InSpec allows you to include compliance within code so you can continuously test and ensure you are compliant with standards. Another new Chef product is Habitat for application automation. Habitat acts as a smart supervisor who can build and release the application and manage it as well.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Joe Kinsella, CTO and Founder at CloudHealth.

We discuss the founding story of CloudHealth, testing ideas to find the right problem to solve. We look at how Joe took the company from idea through finding early customers and fundraising. Joe made sure early on not to get attached to ideas, but to define key hypotheses and converge to the real opportunities through testing. As he became more confident in what he was building, he began to write more of the code for it. We look at why successful entrepreneurs need to be willing to embrace contrary opinions.

CloudHealth does cloud service management. They deliver a SaaS-based single pane of glass, single pane of governance for managing the full life-cycle of applications and infrastructure across public and private clouds. They currently have four products: Amazon, Azure, Google, and a Data Center product. Each provides integrated reporting, recommendations, and active policy management. The policy management does not just monitor changes that deviate from your internal policies, but drives active changes to your environments to keep them in compliance. It works like a control plane that sits on top of everything you use to manage different environments.

A typical management suite in the cloud consists of 10-12 different tools as well as multiple different cloud environments. CloudHealth allows you to configure them all in the platform, they collect all the information that resides in those different integrations of cloud environments, and bring it back into one console in terms of what the data means and how it interacts. CloudHealth then provides integrated reporting, integrated recommendations, and active policy recommendations. With a click of a button, you can determine what it would take to integrate different tools and what provisioning the integration requires. This makes managing the cloud much more streamlined and cost-efficient.