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00:00:01
Rackspace Private Cloud webinar - Building Resilience Into Your Cloud Infrastructure
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Building Resilience Into Your Cloud Infrastructure
- i. Ed Kerr, Head of Product, Software and Services, Rackspace Technologies
- ii. Kevin Carter, Director of Product for Open Source Infrastructure, Rackspace Technologies
- iii. Josh Garner, Product Architect, Rackspace Technologies
- iv. Justin Augat, VP Marketing
Recent industry disruptions have highlighted a critical question: Is your cloud infrastructure truly resilient when it matters most? Join Rackspace cloud experts as we explore strategic approaches to workload placement, examining how organizations can optimize private cloud architecture to ensure mission-critical applications deliver predictable performance, enhanced security, and operational reliability. Learn how leading companies are leveraging private and hybrid cloud solutions to achieve true business continuity—even when industry-wide disruptions affect other providers.
Transcript
Introduction and Speaker Overview
00:00:01
Solve Rackspace
Justin Auggott, good day everyone and thanks for joining our webinar today, my name is justin August. Justin Auggott, look after private cloud marketing here at rack space and i'm joined by three subject matter experts that also happen to be my colleagues so welcome to ed kerr head of products software and services.
00:00:19
Solve Rackspace
Kevin Carter, Director of Product Management for Open Source Infrastructure, and Josh Garner, Product Architecture for our Rackspace Private Cloud. Welcome, gentlemen, and great to see you guys.
00:00:30
Solve Rackspace
Freeform webinar today. We're going to go through a bunch of different questions and just feel free to round robin or speak up you know any any at any point. We've entitled it.
00:00:39
Ed Kerr
Yeah, thanks for having us.
00:00:40
Solve Rackspace
Yeah, you got it. I'm excited. This is a lot of things that we have to to chat on today.
Webinar Topics and Statistics
00:00:46
Solve Rackspace
so Bounds, You know we've decided to call this webinar building resilience into your cloud infrastructure and so today what I love to talk about are a few things number one current events specifically the major public outage that we had experienced this week.
00:01:05
Solve Rackspace
What happened, why does it matter. Second, I'd like to talk about how customers should view operational resilience sort of in light of those recent events, right? And then finally, you know, how are customers leveraging from your experience working with customers?
00:01:21
Solve Rackspace
How are your customers leveraging hybrid cloud technologies? And let's define hybrid cloud here as public and private clouds working together seamlessly, you know, ultimately to improve resilience.
00:01:33
Solve Rackspace
and doing so for mission critical workloads that may need a combination of security and compliance and performance, cost optimization, etc. So that's what I'd love to talk about today.
00:01:46
Solve Rackspace
Before we start, love to do sort of the why we're here. So there's a few stats that I found actually you know using using chat, GPT, to get some information about what does the world think about hybrid strategies, right? And so I found Gartner expects that 90% of organizations expect to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy through 2027. So you know this is a real this is a real strategy that customers are putting in place, public, private, on-prem, a number of different technologies working together. Again, work workload optimization, workload placement optimization,
00:02:23
Solve Rackspace
Dr. David Kahneman, 68% of those organizations were absolutely looking at security compliance and resilience as the leading benefit that they were looking for. David Kahneman, The advantage of you know, through that through those strategies and then half of all the respondents in this survey we're looking for greater control over the resources which you know again, as we know. David Kahneman, is possible when you have a when you have a private or an on premises solution so let's start with.
00:02:53
Solve Rackspace
Very high level question.
Defining and Building Resilience in Cloud Infrastructure
00:02:55
Solve Rackspace
Let's do a definition if we can. yeah know We're talking about resilience today. We're talking about building it within a cloud infrastructure, within a cloud strategy. What do we mean by resilience?
00:03:05
Ed Kerr
Yeah, I'm happy to jump in because I think historically, and if you really wanted to look at this simply, you would say it's uptime, but it's not just uptime for the context or purposes of today's conversation.
00:03:16
Ed Kerr
Because resilience is really about designing infrastructure that can withstand disruption without business impact. And so when you look at events like the AWS event that occurred a couple days ago where DNS servers were causing ultimately customers to unable be unable to deploy their workloads or at least run those workloads, we have to ask the question, was there some strategy, architectural, technical, operational, et cetera, that those customers could have taken to failover gracefully into some other solution as an example, or to maybe even place those workloads
00:03:46
Ed Kerr
in a different place altogether so they were a better fit, such that they didn't have all their eggs in one basket. So when we talk about resilience, we're talking about that diversification of architecture, technical engineering, and of course, operational procedures.
00:04:02
Solve Rackspace
That's good. That's good. And I i think that's is spot on for what you know we all experienced the last couple days. Even my kids said, hey, we read about this AWS outage. you know From their perspective, they were probably talking about Snapchat and Roblox and Minecraft you know having having either an outage or having some downtime or seeing some alerts.
00:04:24
Solve Rackspace
What would you say you know from from that perspective and what are you guys hearing today Our customers now as a result of that saying, look, you know the public cloud has great benefits, but I think I need to diversify a little bit within these other technologies.
Real-World Challenges and Cloud Outage Discussions
00:04:41
Solve Rackspace
What would you say the single biggest takeaway is, you know, that, you know, customers and, you know, large organizations should really be thinking about now in terms of cloud risk? What are the things that they overlook?
00:04:54
Kevin Carter
It's hard to say what they're overlooking because a lot of people are really focused head down on on what they're doing, their core mission, their core application, and how they're delivering it. I think the the incident that we're seeing today is is just a call.
00:05:07
Kevin Carter
I won't even say it's a wake-up call, but it's a recognition that these general purpose publicly available multi-tenant infrastructures that are out there, and AWS, Google, Rackspace, Azure, etc.,
00:05:15
Josh Garner
Thank you.
00:05:18
Kevin Carter
right They're all going to have their their issues, their outages, their their problems. They're going to be things that come up from time to time because you do not control the infrastructure or the supply chain for what the the the systems that you're running.
00:05:31
Kevin Carter
And so I think it is a good call out for private cloud ecosystems because you do control all those features and functionality and you can control the narrative. And when you are you know experiencing those different outages or different capabilities or or hits in your overall systems or or platform, where you can use public infrastructure to burst, to solve a problem, and then repatriate when you're done, or vice versa.
00:05:54
Kevin Carter
And you can create an ecosystem that is, in a word, anti-fragile.
00:05:57
Solve Rackspace
you.
00:05:58
Kevin Carter
right Now, if you are building everything in a single cloud platform, you should be looking at building it across their multiple availability zones.
00:06:04
Josh Garner
Okay.
00:06:07
Kevin Carter
And I think that is a wake up call that a lot of customers are are running into. I mean, from an impact, right yeah you mentioned your you know your children now having an impact on Roblox and things like that you know in terms of cloud impact. But i was i was in Toronto the other other day and I couldn't check into my flight because the Delta app was down.
00:06:24
Kevin Carter
and it was it was And it was done done. Like I could not check in. Now, did I have a full 24 hours and was I in in full panic mode? No, that was fine. But that that is real world impact that you know people are relying on.
Exploring Private and Hybrid Cloud Strategies
00:06:38
Kevin Carter
I believe Elon Musk on Twitter pointed out that Signal had a prolonged period of outage during the exact same time as AWS. And that once again kind of highlights, you know here's a decentralized messaging system that is having a negative impact due to a cloud event.
00:06:55
Kevin Carter
A cloud event that is, you know for lack of a better term, not not special, right? I mean, that there are, these are, like I said, as I started, they general purpose, publicly available, multi-tenant infrastructures, and they are going to have issues from time to time.
00:07:09
Kevin Carter
and and And you kind of have to plan for you know those those different events. from and And you either diversify across the platform or you diversify between platforms.
00:07:19
Kevin Carter
That's where I would leave it.
00:07:19
Solve Rackspace
So I think that's i think it's a really good point. And so let me let me bring it back around because one of the things that I had said earlier that I read was you know that the Gartner report saying that 90% of customers are considering hybrid cloud for this reason, for reliability, for performance reasons.
00:07:27
Josh Garner
Thank
00:07:36
Solve Rackspace
But to your point, This isn't the first and it won't be the last. It's it might be a wake up call for something, but it's probably a stark reminder for others.
00:07:45
Kevin Carter
and So it's definitely remind I mean, there's a joke right in the industry is like, you know, why is there an outage?
00:07:45
Solve Rackspace
And so.
00:07:50
Kevin Carter
And why is it always US s East? Right. But the but and that's, it's not I mean, that's as as lighthearted as that is, as I'm trying to actually make that it is just a reminder that infrastructure is is a is fallible.
00:08:04
Solve Rackspace
Yeah, so I think we're in a a new place now where we can talk about concentrated risk and the need for diversification. You know, when we talk about hybrid cloud, it is because public cloud serves benefits for certain application requirements, business requirements, but not all.
00:08:23
Solve Rackspace
Private cloud, same, is, you know, suited for certain types of mission critical applications, but,
00:08:30
Solve Rackspace
So one of the things that I know that we've been getting question on is, you know, what is this idea of repatriation?
00:08:30
Kevin Carter
Agreed.
00:08:39
Solve Rackspace
from the cloud, moving you know workloads back from a public cloud to a private or hosted private cloud environment. Obviously, here at Rackspace, we have public cloud services and we have private cloud services. So we are absolutely right in the middle and you know providing that unbiased view. But for customers that are saying, look, yeah, I think that I need to diversify this particular application out of the public cloud back into a private environment so I have more control you know, what is this idea? how does this fit into a modern enterprise structure?
00:09:12
Josh Garner
Yeah, i I think in my role, I talk to a lot of customers. And what we're telling customers today is you don't really have to choose private cloud or public cloud. It's all about a hybrid approach.
00:09:24
Josh Garner
There's not one enterprise today that doesn't have some form of a workload in a private cloud of some kind. I think what customers are learning now is which workloads play best in which areas, right?
00:09:37
Josh Garner
Like if you have a very bursty application and you're looking to make feature changes very rapidly, there's great public cloud tools there.
00:09:47
Solve Rackspace
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:09:49
Josh Garner
But if your application, you need a ton of very heavy compute, like some of the new AI workloads that we're seeing now, the private cloud gives you more predictable costs that you're not seeing in the public cloud. It also gives you the ability to be a little bit more compliant. You know exactly where your data is and you know exactly what it's being used for. it There's a real trade-off that we start to talk about with customers.
00:10:11
Solve Rackspace
Thank you.
00:10:15
Josh Garner
And it's really about where do you need to be the most agile? Where do you need to be in the most control of your application? And that's where we're really seeing that conversation. And it's not a one size fits all for even a single company.
00:10:28
Josh Garner
It's really, it comes down to an application and your application footprints.
00:10:33
Solve Rackspace
That's good. No, that's that's that's that makes sense.
00:10:36
Solve Rackspace
So you brought up some good technical jargon there that I love but bursting, et cetera. So I want to like talk a little bit more about that from a techie perspective. Josh, if you've got you know architectural operational trade-offs right when choosing a private cloud versus staying fully in a public cloud, or Kevin or Ed, any of you guys can answer this question.
00:10:58
Solve Rackspace
you know What should companies ask themselves as they as they evaluate?
00:11:05
Josh Garner
Yeah, i I think one thing that I like to over with every customer because what is what does your workload pattern look like is one conversation that we have.
00:11:10
Solve Rackspace
Hmm. Hmm.
00:11:13
Josh Garner
Do you get really busy one time of the year, right? Is open enrollment just the craziest time for your business? Maybe it's the holiday season. Is that a crazy time where you need, maybe you see 15, 20, 30, 40, 100 times the web traffic that you usually see.
00:11:30
Josh Garner
That's where our private cloud or public cloud friends excuse me do amazing things because you have the ability to spin up workloads very quickly, but then you can turn them off. as soon as you don't need them, right? Like that's a real superpower that the public cloud has.
00:11:45
Josh Garner
But along with that superpower comes responsibility, like all great powers do, right? And if you don't keep track of that, if that workload actually doesn't go away,
00:11:56
Josh Garner
then you're at a point where all of a sudden your price goes up quite dramatically. Like your costs have a tendency to balloon out of control. And that's where the private cloud really, really shines. And I look at that as a stable workload, right? So bursty is whenever it changes.
00:12:14
Josh Garner
Maybe you have like, again, you have very busy different business seasons, right? But if that workload is staying all the time, maybe it's an AI workload and that AI workload is constantly training and chugging.
00:12:26
Josh Garner
And you know that that's going to be constantly training and chugging on your data all the time because you're making changes to the data all the time. That's a great use for for private cloud.
00:12:37
Josh Garner
So that's kind of how I look at bursty versus a stable or a stagnant workload.
00:12:42
Ed Kerr
And I just want to add to that, if you don't mind, which is to say that it's not just, that is absolutely correct, but it's not, the story doesn't just end there because if I'm a customer who has say like a simple two-tier application, I could actually get some of that scalability on a private cloud as well.
00:12:58
Josh Garner
yeah
00:12:58
Ed Kerr
In fact, I might be exposing myself to risk by sending that into the public cloud for all of the reasons Josh gave earlier, which is that my application isn't designed take advantage of this rapid descale and scale.
00:13:08
Josh Garner
Yeah.
00:13:11
Ed Kerr
Now, if I have a really well-built microservices application built on Kubernetes and it's fully built to take advantage of those things, then absolutely, you have great governance. Then, yeah, you could save a boatload of money by switching to Geico, right? Like, that all makes complete sense.
00:13:24
Ed Kerr
So think there's also an understanding of you have to build your application with something in mind
00:13:29
Josh Garner
yeah
00:13:30
Ed Kerr
And depending on the architectural decisions you make at the application level, you need to be aware when you select where those workloads live. That is literally the workload-aware message, right? It's like know what your workload is, where it belongs, what are the characteristics that it lends itself well to, and then find a product that you can buy off the shelf that gives you that.
00:13:49
Ed Kerr
One quick example. When everybody talks about AI, AI is a really awesome and powerful tool, no question. But it also quadruples and quintuples your the attack vectors, like prompt injection, all these other things. like You have so much to worry about when you do deploy an AI workload that if you can, at the front end, at the top of the workflow, control the infrastructure in a really private way, you can kind of eliminate from a cascading effect, like downstream, a lot of these problems start to go away or at least get mitigated.
Strategizing Workload Placement and Risk Management
00:14:20
Ed Kerr
And so there are a lot of different things to think about when you're designing your application that will then inform what public or private clouds you should be thinking of.
00:14:30
Kevin Carter
add to that is right. Like when I'm talking to customers, right, we we come with the the the question, right? What is your organization's maximum you know tolerance for impact due to infrastructure failure?
00:14:40
Kevin Carter
And how well does that align with you know their overall investment in capacity and scaling, right? And those are a lot of words that it actually kind of can draw fear, but also draw you know developers in. Like, it is it a two-tier application? Are you building out these constraints? or Do you have the constraints or capabilities to to secure your application and are you confident in those that capabilities and then the other part of that too is can you scale right sometimes you're building out an application and you have you know uh you know caviar dreams on a beer budget right where you're you're coming together and you're you're going to take over the world but you're starting from one machine and the as and the the
00:15:06
Josh Garner
Thank you.
00:15:17
Josh Garner
yeah
00:15:19
Kevin Carter
the, just the idea of having to be able to keep all of the data that you're producing, reproducing, creating, transmitting, you know, et cetera, now spread out across two machines.
00:15:30
Kevin Carter
That's, you know, that, that, that is at an infinite scale problem. Now you're, you know, the answer to the question is obviously it's a load balancer and you're like, but it's also, you know a distributed backend, right? And now you have a database and then is that a three tier application?
00:15:42
Kevin Carter
Is that a three node database? Is that on H8 block storage? Are you creating snapshots? Is you have recovery? What's your RTO RPO? And do you have the ability to recover in a different region? Like, so all of a sudden these things just become, you know, infinitely more complex.
00:15:55
Kevin Carter
And so back to that initial question, what's your maximum, you know, toler, how much risk can you tolerate when you're building out your application?
00:16:01
Ed Kerr
And then weigh that and weigh that against the cost of unavailability. So if I have to do all of these things and it only costs me a penny to be unavailable to go down, then I probably don't do the things.
00:16:05
Kevin Carter
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:16:10
Kevin Carter
Just don't do the things.
00:16:11
Ed Kerr
But if it costs me a billion dollars a second, I absolutely do all the things.
00:16:12
Josh Garner
Yep.
00:16:15
Kevin Carter
You totally do the things.
00:16:15
Ed Kerr
So yeah.
00:16:16
Josh Garner
Yep.
00:16:16
Kevin Carter
you you
00:16:17
Ed Kerr
Yeah.
00:16:17
Josh Garner
Yep.
00:16:17
Kevin Carter
Yes, you do not be the you know the banks that were down to the recent outage, right?
00:16:21
Kevin Carter
You build out the the the capability to recover from those outages.
00:16:22
Ed Kerr
yeah
00:16:27
Kevin Carter
Anyways.
00:16:27
Solve Rackspace
I've got a question for you guys then in that case, and we've heard this and we've seen this, not a hybrid strategy, but, oh, I've got a multi-cloud strategy.
00:16:38
Solve Rackspace
So I've got two different types of clouds. What are the nuances there that customers should consider? it It is technically diversification, but again,
00:16:49
Ed Kerr
right
00:16:51
Solve Rackspace
you know If I'm buying two different two different stocks that are within the same industry in the same size in the tech sector or whatever, like is that really diversification? So multi-cloud, what what's what's the message we have around the nuances around multi-cloud and as it relates to a diversified cloud strategy?
00:17:09
Ed Kerr
I would say, go ahead, Kevin.
00:17:09
Kevin Carter
hi
00:17:11
Kevin Carter
Go ahead so ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Now I'll follow on.
00:17:13
Ed Kerr
right, I'll start.
00:17:14
Kevin Carter
Yeah.
00:17:14
Ed Kerr
So I think it has to go back to resilience. And we have to maybe break that down into smaller chunks, because there's one way to think about a a resilient strategy is to say, well, am I geographically resilient?
00:17:24
Ed Kerr
Like, i.e., do I have a data center in Europe and a data center in the US?
00:17:25
Solve Rackspace
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:17:27
Ed Kerr
So if a meteor hits one, the other one's working. That's fine. That is good. That is a great thing. But there's also control plane diversification. There's architectural diversification. there's all sorts of levels of diversity that are important.
00:17:40
Ed Kerr
So when we go back to your question about what does it mean to be multi-cloud, some people certainly will look at that and say, oh, yeah, I'll just sprinkle this across like three or four hyperscalers and call it a day.
00:17:50
Ed Kerr
But that's like storing all of your valuables in different safes, but on the same burning building. It's like, at the end of the day, all the safes are going down. Instead, what you want is you want another safe in another building.
00:17:50
Josh Garner
Thank you.
00:18:03
Ed Kerr
And so that level of diversification requires a bit more nuance than just, is it in a different safe? We need to decide, do we have the geographical distinctness? do we have the architectural diversity?
00:18:14
Ed Kerr
Do we have the control plane diversification strategies in place? All of these things matter when you're thinking about that.
00:18:21
Solve Rackspace
Yeah, i think I think that's true. and in So geographic, diversification, you know technology diversification, delivery diversification, honestly, and in even you know physical media diversification in some cases.
00:18:36
Solve Rackspace
Right. So now this is great. This is great. I want to pull it back to AI. Obviously, AI is, you know, so it's what's driving us, it's driving our future in tech.
00:18:44
Josh Garner
Thank you.
00:18:45
Solve Rackspace
How would you say the case, and this is for anybody, how would you say the case for hosted private cloud and or repatriation from a public cloud environment really is strengthened with AI-driven activities.
00:19:02
Kevin Carter
I would actually say that it harkens back to what Ed has talked about just a little bit ago, right? And that is the ability to control cost, control blast radius, can keep you you know things in check, right? yeah A little in new, well, we'll call them different ways on a private cloud. And that's where it really shines.
00:19:18
Kevin Carter
Now, I think you also are getting into the fact that you actually own the hardware, you own the accelerators, and you can do different things with them, maybe in ways that are not necessarily prescribed by a hyperscaler's workflow, right? You can design the workflow that better suits your application because the private cloud capability is able to to to run those workloads a little bit better.
00:19:39
Kevin Carter
But yeah you're owning the hardware, you're owning the ecosystem. And so you're going to get a lot more value out of it at the expense of more upfront cost. And so, yeah, you're coming in, you buy a bunch of you know h one hundred style GPUs or MI300 GPUs and you put them into work
00:19:47
Josh Garner
Thank
00:19:55
Kevin Carter
and new and exciting ways planning out that you're going to keep these things working and working hard over a longer period of time. So you get more value out of it over a longer period of time. That would be my two second pitch of why private cloud makes a lot of sense and when it comes to AI.
00:20:13
Kevin Carter
And then when it comes to you know that hybrid solution, right, is you run your your your data collection, your web heads, your front ends on your hyperscalers.
00:20:14
Solve Rackspace
makes sense.
00:20:21
Kevin Carter
You bring everything back into your your private cloud ecosystem to do your batch workloads. And then you put you you yeah present that you know sane data set back to your customers using those front end heads where it is because you know more easily burstable.
00:20:36
Josh Garner
Thank you.
00:20:37
Ed Kerr
Yeah, I wasn't sure, by the way, what that hand raising thing would do.
00:20:39
Kevin Carter
Yeah, yeah.
00:20:39
Ed Kerr
So, i yeah, hey it worked.
00:20:40
Kevin Carter
I saw it. I saw it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:20:42
Josh Garner
good
00:20:42
Ed Kerr
I figured it's a great way to not step on each other's toes while we're dancing here. look Look, I think AI is a really fascinating conversation because I think today what we're seeing in the market is that 95% AI pocs are failing.
00:20:55
Ed Kerr
And if you ask yourself, why is that happening? It's not a lack of intelligence. Like, ChatGPT, for all of its flaws, you could say it's, you know, code is AI slop, all that. It's still better than everybody coming out of college today.
00:21:09
Ed Kerr
It may not be better than the best of the best humans, There is still an advantage there, but there is not an intelligence problem. If you're willing to hire someone fresh out of college, then you should be willing to trust ChatGPT as a co-pilot or Cloud Code as a co-pilot.
00:21:09
Solve Rackspace
Mm-hmm.
00:21:22
Ed Kerr
And so if it's not intelligence that's the problem, then what is it? Why do these POCs fail? Well, it's because people don't adopt them. Like, so you build this powerful tool and nobody knows how to use it in a compliant and secure way.
00:21:33
Ed Kerr
You've got this situation where you're now deploying it, say, in your student apps or something for a school. Well, what about COPPA compliance? What about FERPA compliance? Are we meeting those things? What about if it's healthcare?
00:21:44
Ed Kerr
Is it HIPAA compliant? Is it high trust? Right? Like all of these questions and people are terrified.
00:21:47
Josh Garner
Thank you.
00:21:48
Ed Kerr
Like, can I put this information in there? Can I put that information in there? And so when you go back to private cloud, again, you can kind of get ahead of some of those questions. You can make sure that the architecture from the get-go are these things.
00:22:02
Ed Kerr
You can basically tell people, don't worry about what information you put in there because it's all intra. It's all inside of our company. It never goes to the cloud beast outside and gets fed back into the ecosystem.
00:22:13
Ed Kerr
It always stays in our four walls. And so when you talk about what does private cloud do in the AI space, I think it does what it does in any other space. It gives you an opportunity to control your workloads and mitigate those risk factors.
00:22:27
Ed Kerr
But just like AI is creating all sorts of problems with the electrical grid and all that, it's enhancing existing problems. it's also going to enhance these problems. And so if you need to get ahead of them, private cloud is a way to do that.
00:22:41
Josh Garner
Thank you.
00:22:42
Solve Rackspace
That's good. That's good. So we are at about 20 minutes or so here. And what I want to start doing is let's give some thoughts on how we make these these
Assessing Workloads and Governance in Cloud Strategies
00:22:58
Solve Rackspace
things practical. How do we make our suggestions here and you know these this these recommendations practical? So for any of you guys want to answer this question as a start, one of them I do want to talk about ed is going to be around the governance because i think that's important.
00:23:13
Solve Rackspace
But first, what would be practical like in terms of organizational steps that they might take to do that workload assessment to understand, okay, I had an outage.
00:23:14
Josh Garner
Thank
00:23:27
Solve Rackspace
I've got all my apps here. like What do I do next to decide whether or not some of them may need to be repatriated? you know How do I create that diversification? How do I do that without having to uh refactor everything how do i do that with the a minimal amount of you know time and or engineering resources
00:23:46
Josh Garner
Yeah, this is a great question and a question that we get a lot. The first place that I think I always like to start with a customer is you need to understand what you're running, what your work like, what you're running, what your workloads are doing, and what the impact to your business is for each and every one of those workloads, right? So start with a really good inventory.
00:24:08
Josh Garner
And you want to make sure that you rank all of those. What happens whenever this application goes down? and Maybe this inventory app isn't that important, but maybe our payroll application, this is, this went down, that we couldn't run payroll on Friday.
00:24:22
Josh Garner
This is horrible for not only like our business, but for our employees, right? Or maybe this application causes, causes,
00:24:33
Josh Garner
causes reputational damage if it goes down, right?
00:24:34
Solve Rackspace
Mm-hmm.
00:24:35
Josh Garner
Those are the things that you really have to take into account. And then work your way, work your way down from there. Always test. So once you do that, make sure that you test your plan. So you build your plan, you map your dependencies, and then plot your repatriation, right? Which one can't go down?
00:24:54
Josh Garner
Which one's okay if it goes down? And then go from there.
00:25:00
Solve Rackspace
That's perfect. Now that's good.
00:25:03
Solve Rackspace
Ed, you were talking a little bit about governance, right? So let's put it governance, metrics, reporting, you know, that you might have in place to ensure that when the board comes to you and says, we have this outage, have you started to diversify cloud diversification or even, you know, starting to move, you know, workloads around, you You know how do you, what types of governance do would you put in place? what what What types of things would you recommend so that you could report back up and say, yeah, we're we're we're doing it we're measuring it.
00:25:33
Ed Kerr
First, I would tell the board that it's not redundancy for its own sake. It's got to be resilience by design. like We need to be identifying what ought to go, not just doing it because there's a mandate.
00:25:45
Ed Kerr
In fact, I would argue that's why we're largely in this problem to begin with, because at some point in recent past, there was some cloud mandate that said 100% of all things need to go to the cloud no matter what. So 100% of things don't need to go back to private cloud, to be clear.
00:25:58
Solve Rackspace
right
00:25:58
Solve Rackspace
Right.
00:25:58
Ed Kerr
I would personally love it because, hey, bias here, right?
00:25:58
Josh Garner
Yeah.
00:26:01
Ed Kerr
But I'm trying to give sound advice. And so what I would do is I would first take the advice that Josh gave. I would map out my inventory and I'd say, this workload needs to go here.
00:26:11
Ed Kerr
This workload needs to go there. And I would basically say, okay, the reason I want this workload to go here is because these metrics will be improved. This is a hypothesis I have. I think I'm going to have less security attacks. I think I'm going to have higher uptime.
00:26:25
Ed Kerr
I think I'm going to save money when I go to the cloud because I've built it with Kubernetes, have all of these theories, these hypotheses, repatriate or pat or move to the cloud, one workload of that, test it, see what happens.
00:26:34
Josh Garner
Okay.
00:26:38
Ed Kerr
Do you actually save money? Do you actually experience the kinds of uptimes that your SLAs and SLOs require of you? And I think that is kind of the practical, here's the governance, here's how you test it.
00:26:50
Ed Kerr
Because if you were to take everything and move it in and just see what happens there, like what what would you do if you found out that like it was more expensive? Would you remigrate the next week? Like, could you afford that as a business?
00:27:02
Ed Kerr
You're kind of stuck, right? Like there's some amount of sunk cost there that you have to respect that would keep you in place. And so it's really important to do these things in these smaller steps, test out those hypotheses, and then kind of go from there. So to answer your question more directly, you would identify application by application.
00:27:18
Ed Kerr
What are the things, the business outcomes you're trying to accomplish that could be? things like uptime, that could be cost reduction, that could be performance that you're trying to achieve, that could be all sorts of things, right?
00:27:29
Ed Kerr
And then measure those in a POC. And I think that is where you start. And then once you get there, implement one of the numerous solutions out there, like cloud health, etc, that all allow you to track your spend, your infrastructure uptime, all that kind of stuff.
00:27:35
Josh Garner
Thank
00:27:45
Ed Kerr
And you can over time, make sure that you're putting things in the right place, being workload aware.
00:27:50
Solve Rackspace
Good, good, good. No, that's great. I feel like we're at the era of why here. In other words, yes, we moved our apps to the cloud, to public cloud, because yes, there's proven cost advantages.
00:28:03
Solve Rackspace
but now we're at this place where there's these other David Price- considerations and so we've all evolved and so now the the era of why says well, why am I, why am I do I continue to do it this way if if I know that there could be this problem can I reduce that risk.
00:28:18
Solve Rackspace
Price- Can I improve some of these metrics you know that are so important to mind to my board
00:28:21
Josh Garner
you.
00:28:23
Solve Rackspace
David Price- One more question for you guys and then we'll wrap and then we'll look forward to the next webinar we do here, but.
00:28:30
Ed Kerr
You want to do lightning round on this one? Each of us give a quick answer.
00:28:32
Solve Rackspace
you tell Yeah, no, not a lightning.
00:28:34
Josh Garner
Thanks.
00:28:35
Solve Rackspace
I mean, maybe a little bit of a lightning
Future of Cloud Infrastructure and Closing Remarks
00:28:36
Solve Rackspace
round here. So three year vision, right? So, you know, this, this issue
00:28:42
Solve Rackspace
not an if and it's a when right and so three year vision for how customers might structure their infrastructure in light of outages, but also then in light of, you know, the benefits that clearly come from a public cloud and then benefits that may clearly come from a private cloud, you know, so it's, it isn't just about outages, you you know, it's, or resilience, it's about many different moving parts and how would you then, you know, view the enterprise of the future
00:29:11
Solve Rackspace
building infrastructure to support all these different moving parts.
00:29:16
Ed Kerr
I will say that I don't think that the future conversation will be public versus private.
00:29:21
Ed Kerr
I think it'll be a what's your intent around your hybrid strategy.
00:29:21
Solve Rackspace
Mm-hmm.
00:29:21
Josh Garner
Thank you.
00:29:25
Ed Kerr
So it's hybrid by design or hybrid by intent, whatever you want to call it. I think the public cloud remains the innovation space.
00:29:32
Ed Kerr
I think private cloud continues to be the reliability core that people depend on. I think the winners and losers in that particular worldview are the people who can figure out how do I get the advantages of X while I get the advantages of Y with this other workload.
00:29:32
Solve Rackspace
Mm-hmm.
00:29:48
Ed Kerr
And so how can I make it irrelevant which cloud that I'm i'm in and the networking all works? How can I make it irrelevant from a cost perspective that my data goes off somewhere else and I don't get destroyed by egress fees or things like that? How can I mitigate those risks?
00:30:03
Ed Kerr
I think the people like Rackspace who are in this space vying for this business, that's exactly what we need to answer for these customers. because hybrid isn't some magical bullet. It's its own set of problems.
00:30:14
Ed Kerr
It's got its own set of issues. And cut companies like Rackspace or even enterprises who are trying to solve this on their own, they've got to figure out how to solve those problems. And I think if you're asking me who's the winner in the future market, it'll be the companies who can do that seamlessly.
00:30:28
Solve Rackspace
Yeah, that makes sense. And I i fully agree with that. Absolutely. That there is no hybrid panacea. you know Hybrid will introduce new new opportunities, certainly, but also new challenges that can be managed. And yes, you've got to find the right vendor that takes that you know fanatical view, customer first view.
00:30:49
Solve Rackspace
Guys, This has been great. love this. I'm hoping this is the first of of many webinars, but I want to thank you all for your time today.
00:30:57
Solve Rackspace
and we'll see you on the next one.
00:30:59
Ed Kerr
Thanks, everyone.
00:30:59
Kevin Carter
Thanks all.
00:31:00
Kevin Carter
Cheers.
00:31:00
Josh Garner
Thanks.