John Savill, Microsoft | Cloud City Live 2021
(upbeat music) >> Thanks so much, and we're back here live. Live, I love saying that, at cloud city, at Mobile World Congress. Barcelona at the Fira. It's just been crazy here all week. We've been going wall to wall coverage. Am really excited to have John Savill here, as a principal cloud solutions architect at Microsoft. John, welcome to Barcelona, man. Come on in the cube. >> Oh yeah, thank you for having me. I'm not quite getting that Barcelona vibe here, but seems great. >> Well, you were just tell you look great. You just did an iron man up in Idaho, so awesome. Congratulations on completing that and many more in your future, I'm sure. You have a really interesting background. You know, in addition to your amazing cardiovascular capabilities. As a cloud architect, you've got a long history, 20 plus year history, you know, digging in at Microsoft. In your spare time you write books on architecture and you've got a great YouTube channel, a lot of subscribers. Tell us a little bit about that. >> Yeah, so it really started out 25 years ago. I was playing around with windows and technology and I just tried to share information. So I created a website artifact.com and I wrote magazine articles. And then people asked me to write some books and it's really evolved from there. And the most recent thing is actually the YouTube and I really enjoy doing the videos. It's a lot more rapid in terms of creating the content and sharing it, whereas the book takes six months. You'd write the book and then with technology moving as fast as it is, especially the cloud, you write a book on the cloud and then it's published and it's out on date. And so now this ability to create the content and get it to people a few minutes later, it's just phenomenal. So it's my hobby and my passion. And it's the best of both worlds for me. >> I love a CICD of books. Okay, Let's get into it. We've been talking all week about and actually drawing a lot of parallels with the traditional enterprise IT business and what's happening in Telco In one stop I just talking about the shifts in responsibilities for architects and the organizational roles, when you go from, you know, on-prem, everything's inside of a virtual machine, when you go to the cloud, there's a lot more optionality. As you just pointed out, things are a lot faster. What have you seen in your experience what's different? What should we be thinking about? >> Yeah, so exactly, as you said, it on premise really everything is a virtual machine. It's an OS that you have to manage, like the thing about the patching, the security, the policy. And then I have to put things inside this virtual machine, but that's my unit of work. Some coming to the site and look at containers on premises. And then they struggle with managing one even orchestrator. So I'm managing Kuberneters and ITs and there's work there. When you move to the cloud, you have all these other types of service. You think about serverless kind of at an end of a spectrum where, hey, I just have some code. I want to run based on some event, maybe a schedule, maybe a web hook, some trigger, some event happens. And I only pay for when it's doing work. But what I care about is my code or my focus is this is my code. I don't care about any of the other stuff that makes it work. I just can focus on my code, but you still have the options. I can do containers. I can do virtual machines if that's what I want to do. But my responsibility can really laser focus just on the business value. Generally as a company, I don't really care about managing an OS or patching, I want to see what differentiates my business from someone else. And when I moved to the cloud, I can shift my focus to just that business value and let the cloud vendor take care of the responsibility of keeping the things running, enables me to shift and just focus on value, which is key. >> And as a cloud vendor, that allows you to price by consumption in a very transparent way, and as a customer, now I know what I'm paying for and I can align that investment as you were just pointing out with the business value. >> Oh, absolutely. Right, so again, on premises, we have bits of equipment. We have this server, with memory and CPU, and generally we have different usage. We have peaks and we have lows. We have the same bit of hardware I'm paying for all of the time, we have disaster recovery. I'm paying for that all of the time. If I have customers all over the world, well, speed of light is speed of light. I have to wrap boxes all over the world in the cloud. I can have services dynamically scale based on the need, based on the work coming in. I can scale the amount of resource% I have available to meet that. So I'm optimizing my costs to only pay for what I actually need at any given moment. And of course we have regions all over the world. So suddenly now I can be super close to my customers. So its right, it completely changes how the companies can think about spending the money to only spend what they have to spend on what they want to spend it on. >> Yeah so the last decade clearly the aha moment for enterprise tech, just in terms of really understanding those benefits. And we saw it, you know, it actually first hit right around the financial crisis. When you know, all the CFOs said, "hey, shift your CapEx to OPEX immediately. And then we came out of that downturn and people said, "hey, this stuff, this cloud stuff actually is really good. Let's start to really change our business models around it." And, and there's a lot of relevance for Telco here. And you've talked about cloud as a, a flat layer, three network, what do you mean by that? >> Yes, if you think about on premises, you have bits of wire. Now that might be copper wire, it might be fiber, but you have these bits of wire that connects stuff. And I can think about connecting different bits of staff, to different network cards to enable me to separate systems and how they can communicate to each other and segregate. So that's how I've always thought about on premise is that why I separate stuff. A little bits of wire connecting different bits of network card. Well in the cloud, you don't have that. It's all software defined networking. If I think about a construct where I put my resources like a virtual network, it's just an IP of the layer three network there are no bits of wire. I can plug into different places. There are no different physical network cards. So we have to shift our thinking, and it can be very difficult. If I'm used to being an on-prem network admin, I'm used to the idea of the lines and cables and multiple nicks with different bits of copper plugged into them. When I go to the cloud, I have to shift that and think it is this flat layer three network. And when I want to segment things, now it's software defined networking walls, networks security groups, maybe botched appliances that can inspect the traffic. But it's a huge shift in thinking to how we now segregate and control how that networking actually functions. And of course, if you then want to extend that to hybrid connectivity, well, how does that then map to why my on-prem network? And I want to extend that to make it completely seamless into the cloud. >> Yeah, I don't want to come back to that, but I want to ask you about some of the organizational roles. 'Cause you've been at this for a couple of decades. So you've seen, you know, you remember the days of when you know, the expertise in managing a LAN a report was, you know, highly valued. It's not anymore. And so your colleagues, your peers in the industry, the architects that are your customers, they have to reinvent themselves. And that that's really now beginning to happen in Telco. So I wonder if you could talk about your thoughts, how you're thinking about cloud in telecom. >> Yeah, so I think what's happening is you still need skills. What shifts is, what is the type of skills you talked about LANs and managing storage. Well, you don't manage LANs anymore, but in the cloud, there's different types of storage service. There's different performance characteristics. IOPS throughput capacity. So we have to shift how we actually think about those skillings so I still need to architect accordingly. It's only to make sure I have the right characteristics, that it's just a different unit of work. I'm working with different tools now. And I think from a kind of telco perspective, they're really looking now, well, how can we leverage the cloud, Telcos in particular, have a huge pressure around very low latency. They have to be close to their customers. They deliver critical services. You can think about emergency services. They have to have super high availability. That's when you start moving to the cloud, they can now embrace the fact that well cloud has these various constructs like different physical structures within independent power calling communications. They have different regions, so I can be close my customers and kind of replicate between them. Through the Telco, you have to kind of firstly think about, well, okay, I still need to adhere to all of these core requirements. That quality of service, giving my customers a great experience, but now we have these different tools available in how we can actually deliver that. I think also a big shift is from a security perspective. I think especially Telcos love the idea of the network. The network is the be all and end all of security. When you start using the cloud network is still super important, but identity becomes this huge factor as well, because now I don't have this moat around my physical box. That copper wire doesn't have this disconnect. I'm in the cloud as so now we think about, well, how does the identity play into actually securing our resources? Because now we're going to have all these different cloud services that are going to talk to each other. We need to do that in a secure way. So the identity becomes this much bigger part of my architecture networks still super important, but now identity bumps up there as well. And I think that that's a key thing for Telcos is that there's a shift there. >> Yeah, well on speaking of shifts, a big conversation and Theme CubeCon this year was the shift left with security and designing security in. And really when you think about infrastructure as code, the programmable network, and you combine that with the cloud, I mean, Microsoft has gone through the greatest transformation of any tech company in the history of tech. And it did so with a cloud first mentality. And now you see that cloud expanding. It's clearly on prem you're bringing that you're connecting those, but now the edge. 5g networks and the it's very, you know, super exciting, you know, new compute architectures and new programming models. So this you're essentially building this abstraction layer that developers can really take advantage of having consistency across all those physical locations, really hiding the underlying complexity. I wonder if you could comment on that. >> Not, exactly. You're a 100% correct. So right Azure was a cloud service. So we had this cloud and we had services operating in that cloud, app services, data services, machine learning but you still have requirements for on-premises components. You talk about the edge. Well, hey, I may be, I'm using a private wireless network. I have my RAD, I have the core kind of packet switching components. Well, I still want things on premises then I need compute, I need workers running on my edge, close to where the data's being generated IOT sensors. What Azure has is yes, it has the public cloud services. Then it has things like Azure like edge, Azure stack hub, Azure like HCI that let me actually have things on premises in different form factors. But the can now run consistently like Azure services. I can manage them through Azure services, policy, security constructs, identity constructs, and then with things like if I have Kubernetes any kind of Kubernetes CNCF-compliant, I can actually now sync Azure arc, manage it through the cloud and I can deploy SQL manage instance, Postgres hyper-scale, machine learning, app services, serverless functions now running on-prem. So as a developer, as an architect, I create my solution, but now I can run it in the cloud, I can run it on premises. I don't have to make that conscious decision and do things differently. If my requirements change, I can move or do hybrid. So it really is a game changer. The customer gets the choice. I can leverage these technologies. I can write code and architect solutions and then run it where makes the most sense for me. >> Yeah, and we just got a couple of minutes here, just as we saw new applications emerge in the cloud, we're going to see new applications emerge at the edge. The developers will win the edge, I've said it many times. I'll give you the last thoughts, John. >> No, I just think it's a, it's an amazing, exciting time. I mean, you talked about kind of the whole shift left more and more companies are moving into kind of the whole infrastructures code and the dev ops models. And now we see security embedded all the way at the start of our pipeline. But I really just think this is the time now as a customer, as a Telco, you do have this fantastic set of capabilities available to you in the cloud, but you're always going to have, I think that on-premise is component as well. So you don't have to compromise. I don't have to say, well, I'd love to use this service, but wow, I had this anchor or I had this requirement on prem. I can use the same services. You have that complete choice. You can operate in the same way, the same pipelines, the same dev ops, the same security and one where it makes the most sense for you. I mean, it's a fantastic time. >> Well, John, thanks so much for virtually coming into Barcelona. We've got this great hybrid event, good luck in your career and in your Ironman competitions, all the best to you. Thank you. >> Thank you for having me, the pleasure. >> It's been our pleasure. So we're here, live at the, the Fira in Barcelona. We're in Cloud City. I'll tell you, I'll set it up. It's not like jammed packed where you can't move, you know, good thing we're in, still in the COVID, but it's like the post isolation economy here, but we're really excited to be sharing with you. We're going to go back to the studio to Adam Burns right now.
SUMMARY :
Come on in the cube. Oh yeah, thank you for having me. You know, in addition to your amazing and I really enjoy doing the videos. and the organizational roles, I don't care about any of the other stuff that allows you to price I can scale the amount of resource% And we saw it, you know, Well in the cloud, you don't have that. of the organizational roles. Through the Telco, you And really when you think I don't have to make emerge in the cloud, I don't have to say, well, all the best to you. the studio to Adam Burns
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