>> fly from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering Google Club next nineteen, right Tio by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to San Francisco, everybody. You watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. And we're here at the new improved Mosconi Center covering Google next twenty nineteen. I'm Dave along with my co hosts. Two minutes to get to see you. Russell Warming is here. He's the head of infrastructure at AutoTrader UK. Russell, Thanks for coming on the Cube. You very welcome. AUTOTRADER uk not to be confused with the U. S. Not a lot of you guys. They're separate cos >> yet completely separate. So way operate the largest automotive marketplace in the UK something like the sixteenth busiest website in the UK around fifty five million cross platform visits each month on average. Probably about five hundred thousand vehicles that were advertising out. Tio consumers >> are traitors. Awesome website If your eyes are second biggest purchase typically behind the home and and so Stew was asking you earlier if you if digital transformation meant anything to you and you said Well, we kind of went through a ten years ago yet, and it's kind of true You guys were like born in the Internet company would talk about >> that. So our heritage is that we've been around for forty forty years. We started producing magazines back in nineteen seventy seven. And then in ninety six, we would launched our first website on DH. We've basically just migrated those revenues from our print business online. And then about two thousand thirteen. We stop printing magazines all together. So we're truly digital business now, >> and people talk about digital transformation oftentimes in the context of data. So maybe talk about some of the things that you're doing in your business, some of the challenges that you face, where data fits in and we'Ll really get into it. >> Okay, so I'm we've got a couple of areas where we've been on premise for our data centers. Wave had that strategy for probably about fifteen years, and we've started to reach limits in terms of how we manage capacity within their on what we found is using cloud services as really enables so unlock capabilities, particularly around things like data on their. More recently, when we're thinking about using Cuban eaters and SDO, we've been able to take advantage of things like some of the security features, mutual tear less and service discovery. >> All right, so they also bring us inside your organization a little bit. You're head of infrastructure? Yeah. What does that mean to your business today? >> So way basically run the platform that runs auto trader dot co dot uk on were responsible for making sure that's available twenty four seven three six five So way. Want to make sure that we're able to give our internal customers the ability to release new applications new features as quickly as they want, but also that we're ensuring that our consumers are retailers get a great experience that it's fast performance secure. >> Yeah, and it could give us tease out a little bit, just kind of the scope, how many people you have and how do you balance the stuff that kind of is under your purview and the stuff that you manage that is outside of your four walls. >> So there's about twenty five people within the team. There's probably about ten people building the infrastructure and about fifteen people that are responsible for monitor in it. So we're not a big organization in terms of operations in infrastructure on. We have to work very closely with our product squads because we manage some elements of it. But we're dependent on them managing other elements as well. So we're trying to unlock platform capabilities so that we've got consistency that we're trying to provide those those capabilities rather than going off on finding something else. >> You've got infrastructure on Prem and you've got infrastructure in the cloud to cloud services, right? Yes. So oftentimes those aren't the same. But talk about your situation and you're on a journey, I presume. >> Way started about forty months ago, building out our cloud services on DH. Probably in the last four months, we've really started accelerating that that migration plan of applications moving it up into into Google Cloud on DH. Our ambition is to get that done in eighteen months because the complexity of managing multiple environments is something that we want to try and avoid. Minimize that. >> So is the aspiration to go all in >> waiting absolutely way. We've taken a view that for services that we can we'll take money services and then everything else will be cloud first >> believe I heard you say Cooper Netease is in the mix now. Can you explain where that fits? How you're using it? >> So that see, that's the platform that we're using. Teo. Build out all our applications in the clouds so that that's that's That's a lot of important >> air using any communities in your data center today? No, not all from a cloud. That's the platform layer that using the >> public? Absolutely so when we talked about should we use Cuban? It is way did discussed. Should we do it on Prem or do it in the cloud? And we just figured that we didn't want the overhead of managing it ourselves on prime, we thought it be better just to take it as a service almost and manage up in the cloud. >> Most of the shows we go too many of them, anyway. It's too, and I and the Cube they talk about multi cloud, and we often say multi cloud as a function of multi vendor. But certainly way heard today from Google. A multi cloud. What's your cloud strategy? Because there there's another camp that says, Well, if you do, multi cloud is more complex, it's less secure, it's more expensive. Are you trying to be kind of unit cloud or is that horses for courses? >> So we're three clouds today. So our data platforms, it's partly in G C P. But then partly in another cloud provider on then we're also for our enterprise applications were using another cloud provided because it makes sense to do so. So we want to use the right cloud for the right applications. I think that most of our customer facing applications will end up in G C. P. But some of the back end services my end up in of the cloud provide us >> Okay, so it's strategic fit based on the application? Absolutely. So what is the wheelhouse of of of? Of Google, in your view, from a customer's perspective. >> Um, so the fact that Cuban eighties was developed by Google is a really strong play there. It gives you confidence that they know Teo to look after it. Things like SDO have made a massive difference to our organization as well. We part of the reason why we've ended up using GDP was based on using SDO, and that was around solving a specific problem that we had so that those of the sort to to solve areas that we focused on. >> Just when you look at you know, you've got that hybrid, multi cloud environment that we find is pretty much the standard today. Can you speak a little bit of the management layer? How you look at that, you know, Is it good enough today? And what what? What could the industry do to make it even better? >> It's good enough for our needs. I think that the challenge that you've always got is data ingress and egress between between clouds as you want to move data or query data, making sure that you could do that in a secure way. That's probably the biggest challenge that you'd have on also around the cost of doing so. Those you know, those are probably the bigger challenges >> in the challenges. The cost in time of moving data is its security or the above. Maybe you could dig into that little bit. >> It's probably a little bit of all the above. If I'm honest, I think you could do so much to security plight. Private VP ends Between Between the cloud providers It's I guess that's the time and actually moving some of that data between the clouds is that there's a challenge, and then they cost. Like I say, it's difficult to predict how much it might cost you two to move some of that >> big challenges and from a business perspective that a driving your technology strategy, obviously you want consumers coming to your site. You want to make that as rich as possible for them. You've gotta monetization strategy as well. But you talk a little bit about the business drivers that are affecting your technology. >> Okay, so consumer demand is constantly changing. Technology is massively disrupting how people think about search for cars. We can see that there's a demanding in the in the marketplace for people just to be ableto choose it, choose a car on DH, have that customizing delivered. They want tohave complexity around how they look for finance on their cars. They want all that sort of taken away. They don't wanna have to turn up tio a car showroom and then go through the same conversation that live with salesperson that they've just gone through online. They want that journey to be seamless, so there's some challenges that the industry facing trying to do that where we're trying to help our retailers, providing those services that customers want. So to be able to understand what the part ex valuation is on their car before they turned up to the dealership and know that it's going to get honored because they've got to trust in it so they can understand what, what making spend on a monthly faith on what cars are available. So we're trying to change what we provide to our consumers on also to support our retailers. Manage that changes well, >> Russell thinks a really great point. You make way. No many industries, and especially your industry, is changing really fast. So what are those stresses and strains mean to the infrastructure team in Oak and maybe talk a little bit about the relationship of kind of business? Tow it how that's changed in the last few years. >> So probably over the last ten years, it has always been seen as the sort of the blocker in terms of making sure that new products and features become become available quickly on our role is really to make sure that we're providing the infrastructure at the right time for people so that they can basically just dial it in when they need it. So if they want to release a new application, they don't need to come and speak to somebody in ops to stop provisional server. They just create a pipeline, deploy their application and then the service provisioned at the same time. On we do things like checking for a Wasp Bonham abilities at the same time and making sure that the application and the infrastructure is working hand in hand. So we've taken a lot of that dependency away from people, sort of with handoff points and everything. >> You're a business that has obviously transformed over the years. I think you said you started in the sixties seventies seventies is a publisher basically, paper printing presses and the like. Nineteen ninety six is when you went online. Is that right? So that early days pretty much of the Internet. So the heart, uh, and so you've proven that you could transform forward thinking. I'm wondering what the conversation might be like inside the company about things like autonomous vehicles. Is there a day that comes where owning your own vehicle is the exception rather than the norm? What implications that might have for your business. It's very hard to predict, obviously, But are you having those kind of conversations? You have other lines of business that you're launching toe >> say you're absolutely right. Those those things are area of concern on wave people, constantly looking at new and emerging changes in threats across the whole industry. On DH, they are absolutely looking at how that might impact our business. What we're actually seeing, though, through research that we've done is people still aspire to own car. So car ownership is still something that people want to want to look at with regards to the second part of your question. We are ultimately focus, that is, that's where we are. We don't operate outside of the UK and Ireland. We absolutely focus on our core on making sure that the services that we offer around that really support our customers need, whether that be consumer or retailer. >> Well, it's interesting that the auto industry really has it been wildly disrupted. I mean, you certainly see Tesla and people talk about autonomous vehicles, but still, the big car makers, they're still doing quite well. They dominate the market so and so it's going to take some time, you know, and there's some skeptics out there, but it's very interesting to see how you guys evolve, what other opportunities you go after. I want to ask you. So Google next is coming to tow London in November. How important is it for you? As somebody is based in the UK tohave, Google have local events like that? I mean obviously a traveling a far distance to come to this event. How important is that to you as a customer? >> It's important for us to be able Teo, get more people involved in the conversation. There's obviously a cost on time effort in terms of coming out tio something here. But it's in The scale of this is enormous in comparison to what we see in the UK, but it just means that having that presence in the U. K. Means that we can just get more of our engineers in front of the right people tohave a better conversation, understand more about what's coming and how we might be able to use that within our business >> things that so you just sort of near early on in your cloud journey. But knowing what you know, and you get it early on, I think you might do differently if you had a mulligan, you want to do over again our advice you give to your colleagues and piers. >> So I think the big thing that we found is modest modernizing applications Before you start moving them into the cloud, I think there is a tendency, Probably way we're in the in the cloud, probably about nine years ten years ago and we bought those workloads back on prime. And the reason why we did that is because we didn't treat them differently way manage those instances in the same way that we managed on prime, which is completely do a wrong way to do it, in my opinion. So we needed to change our mind set in terms of how we manage the infrastructure. You need to make sure that you re architect your applications, that you are taking advantage off the features and functionalities things like auto scaling, that you plan for failure. All those things that you typically control on Prem. You have to think about differently in the clouds. >> We will talk about this a lots to changing, the operator >> said that the long pole in the tent is, you know, modernized those applications. Any change? Migrations is really tough. So but do you have a time for him? How long would take you to get to that? All in that you're planning on >> eighteen months, Cesar, that's >> not just a lift, Did Shift >> S O. That is a modernization. But the approach that we've taken and is to try and give the people the confidence and courage really to go at it is we've picked ofsome easier applications. So this journey about being cloud native, we started six or seven years ago, and we've started getting people building their applications on our private cloud. And those ones have been really easy to move on to the public cloud and some of the applications that I've been a little bit trickier that I've been on our short traditional virtual ization platform. We're trying to pick those off in parallel, so you do one that's really easier one that's a bit harder. So you give people confidence and then you're trying to solve some tricky problems alongside it, and I think that just incrementally gives you more confidence that you're moving in the right direction. >> Right straight. Just like skiing on the then the blacks. And they go into the greens and they're making your moves. >> Just just a little bit. A little bit harder each time you got it, but yeah. >> Russell, thanks so much for coming in. The queue was great. Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you for watching. We'll be right back from Google next in San Francisco.