Cloud Migration: Lessons Learned and Best Practices

to you know really look at how people are spending whereas before let's just say over the past couple of years everyone was ready to kind of invest they knew the cloud was growing they knew that it was Secure they knew that there was good reasons and economic behind it and now it's like we have to combine all of those things and get real business value out of those Investments and then we have to take on you know this highly technical you know push across uh this large pin wheel of uh AI companies that are out there both in the large providers as well as startups

in other areas uh to figure out how we're going to get you know maximum uh outcomes from any one of these Investments and it starts with having everything ready you know across your core infrastructure again as an infrastructure engineering you know person uh I look at it as there's a lot of stages and stages of success to this and if you haven't cross Milestone one which is being you know ready and then available then you're not quite there yet think was mind-blowing to me is watching the scale I mean it used to be interesting when people would move 2,000 servers and now they're moving a

million million and a half servers and having committed spends of 10 50 hundred million dollars on cloud infrastructure it's it's gr so much oh yeah we're going to have some anecdotes on some of the the pitfalls and successes of that throughout today but um the the the basics don't change the there's still qualified foundations good architectures and good reasons to kind of follow the path that works for uh a lot of major Enterprises out there and kind of excited to share some of those learnings in best practices today okay if you don't mind maybe we should backtrack just a little bit and do like introduce

you okay so call in tell us who you are what are you doing at ciq and what qualifies you to do such amazing oh gosh uh well long story short I've worked uh there's not a cloud that I haven't worked with or for or built things with um I started in networking engineering um both in physical and the digital back when before that was really cool and uh I've worked at Azure I've worked at oci worked at Google Cloud I've built data centers for Amazon and at ciq um I'm here to help build our Cloud business and our Cloud products to you know at scale

help our customers and the massive fleets that zay's talking about uh be fully optimized in the cloud so they can free up that money towards bigger and better projects um it's a pretty simple game and uh we've been growing I've been here gosh I guess almost a year now um it's been really fun to be a part of that story with so many huge customers and public sector agencies out there and seeing them have you know real outcomes um um both in cost savings both in security and performance and uh yeah thrilled I mean it's been so much fun and our story transcends all Cloud

providers and all workloads so it's very unique for you know a company like ours to have that type of opportunity and impact K it's already been a year since we were in Reno and I met you for the first time before you started actually I believe wasn't it yeah awesome it's awesome well yeah it's good to have you back too zann I have missed you so you're out that week and then and then last week you and I'll be going away again here for the next couple of weeks after this so oh you are okay okay well I'll be solo writing well um Colin it's

always a pleasure to have you on and it's always exciting to hear about all the work that you are doing I mean cloud is like a total mystery to me but in in my mind I kind of I bring it down to somewhere there is a giant building with a lot of computers in it and we just call call it the cloud I mean I always try to speak in analogies so like uh people that know me will hear me say I like turning on blinking lights in cold dark rooms um I've said that a lot um but you're not that far off and so

the way I look at it is you're you're running and leasing computing power from a very large data center or multiple data centers and the cost economics of doing so versus investing your own Hardware are unparalleled um between that and then going up the side layers there's other million reasons uh for you know both third party software first party software there's a million good things that can happen from that but it's also it's a big Monumental change for a lot of companies especially in regulated environments pure Industries those types of things and um not everything I'm going to say is going to be relevant to

you know each unique customer that's out there on their own Journey but I will say that in most cases uh some of the best practices we'll walk through today are invaluable for a lot of good reasons both uh in in cost management uh Cloud optimization uh which has a lot of derivatives to a lot of different people but we're going to talk through here's what fups here here's what cloud fups actually is and here's kind of how we can help you accelerate that so it's gonna be a lot of fun today looking forward to it that's aw should I pull up the sides we I

don't think so yeah I know we need to talk about a giveaway backpack but I want to do that at the end actually I want to kind of like you know what I mean changeing the vibe man all right there's me and Zane we do stuff here at ciq and Rose you know we're rocking and rolling you know I like the photos um so start first with you know um there there's a lot of research uh Beyond this and at the end of of this presentation there's a million analyst reports they're all free of charge you just have to sign up for them and get

the download uh there's a lot of good uh industry analyst uh reports that have come out over the past six months uh especially through the wave of AI Integrations and what that's uh driven for Cloud optimization but let's just talk through some Basics so from left to right most customers Cloud costs are way over budget uh secondly they're they're past what they had already forecasted even for the past quarter going into q1 uh for 24 right now Beyond like 20% is is a common number to look at um there's a lot of reasons for that between uh idle resources or what we call zombie resources

things that haven't been fully optimized they've already migrated there and then sheld or are just continue to operate and consume which essentially customers are paying for or on the the far end they haven't even accounted for the licensing and support costs for those environments so it's not just running you know computers in the cloud um you're running software there you're uh taking advantage of support contracts either direct from the provider or from you know outfits like ourselves that are there to help and as your environment grows your bill grows as well and so in some cases it's a race against the CL clock in other

cases it's you haven't done a full assessment or taken inventory of this and so anything unmeasured unfortunately in this case continues to grow and so are you still seeing this as surprising to people whenever they get these bills and it's 72% higher than it are they surprised or do they kind of anticipate this now you know I think that it's expected that the more things that you put on the cloud that you're going to expect cost to increase I don't think that there's ever been a real advantage to saying it's going to be cheaper or uh in more efficient I would say it is more

cost effective for those that follow a lot of the best practices that we're looking at what is surprising is some of the customers and and Zen you've seen this you know every day this week and certainly most of this year um most of our customers are multicloud and so they're trying to optimize and take inventory and assess their cost across multiple environments across very large fleets and they're on premise as well as the teams that are managing all these things and it's not always gelled you know that well together across organizations across business groups or anything like that and so what I always look at

first is you know how do you have a finop strategy around this okay let's take a look at it what are the you know what are the measurements and goals of each of these Investments that you've made and I do treat these more as Investments and then what's the outcomes you're getting from them and then that all leads into you know the the level of innovation that they're able to do and Innovation can mean a lot of different things it can mean AI development integration but in many cases right now getting the you know the first runs on you know base base runners on and

run scor is actually going to be through optimizing your environments where they are today and then figure out the best path to migrate those to the cloud if they're not there already or how to take advantage of the economics like I talked about uh once they get there and so there's a lot of reasons to go through those things but yeah so these these four I mean these are the four I pulled directly from these reports you can see the Source material below please read all of those the IDC uh verus one and flexera reports are kind of industry standards um I think we've got

at least 20 of these analyst reports at the end that you can click on and sign up for and and get those downloaded so then where do we kind of get started here so what I always try and talk with everyone about um is again best practices right so Lessons Learned I've I've seen there's a lot of horror stories I could I can share that I won't put out into the universe but I'll say that 's a lot of areas where there's good to it's good to be cautious and to have a uh a good founded founded perspective as you're moving things to the cloud

and one of the areas that um I try to kind of leave a a relatively big impact when I was at Google was building our migration program so before what we saw was customers uh all over the place uh every part of the the world as well as every industry and they were doing things in a bespoke fashion so they didn't have a whole holistic process or methodology to follow from where do I start what are my migration waves what tools are available for me to and recommendations for me to follow what does a a well architected framework even look like for the specific workloads

that I'm targeting at moving and then once I'm there how do I optimize is it all server lists and containers is it right sizing of my environments all the things I'm talking about had it been put into kind of a singular focus and so starting in gosh I guess it's 2024 now time flies uh about four years ago uh I started putting together the migration program at Google Cloud thrilled with the team that's uh that's taking it over it's uh wonderful to see the investment Google's making here uh between St Stephen orbon and the rest of the team uh that fundamentally are using all the

best practices all the brain uh Power that they have there as well as the partner Community uh and putting this in place for a a lot of good reasons for their customers and as he see on the left side uh this is a brand new IDC report that just came out about just the the the the customer outcomes of Migra into Google Cloud these are real worlder examples based on a very large sample size of some of the outcomes so we're looking at Cost reduction we're looking at more efficient infrastructure management obviously that Roi number sticks out that's the best case so we're going to

go through now is how do you get there right so not everyone's going to have that experience but these are tangible numbers that people can look at and say okay I want that to be me do I have a process in place to kind of Follow that and the good news is there is and so I love showing this chart um and I'm not going to walk through the whole flywheel effect but what I'll say is there is obviously reasons to get your teams in line to have a a a outstanding business case with all of your leadership and then disseminate that across the groups

and get kind of Center Mass and so this uh flywheel we actually started with a much more basic version a couple of years ago and it's evolved into this and there's a lot of best practices and a lot of great materials and a lot of great team members and partners that can help support this through every step uh of that evaluation in business planning and what it's kind of culminated in is kind of these five kind of key pillars and so I I put the hint not just tech there for a lot of good reasons mostly because infrastructure itself is essentially a commodity we've kind

of joked about that in our industry for a long time and even through the rise of Ai and consumption of gpus and everything else that's not really going to change you're going to see different chips and silicon come out over time but the fact is if you don't have founded uh business practices from left to right across this chart where you're taking measurables you've got a central team that's managing the operation um you've got a good inventory you know you know where your stuff is you know what state it's in you know what uh What uh the network and storage and compute structures are you

know what the uh database and application dependencies are and then beyond that that as you go through that journey to move to your your chosen preferred cloud provider you've got a business plan like you know what the outcomes are going to be and you know when you're going to hit delays and so you're running this more like a product team with a a set road map with milestones and there's measurable outcomes from that and then the last piece I'll say is when I look through a lot of this what the the hardest part for a lot of customers and you know Zan tell me if

you've heard this most of it's cultural right A couple of years ago we were trying to dispel the myth or belief that cloud was not nearly as secure not nearly as performant as doing it yourself and own your own data center I think largely as we look at you know Cloud spending has two to 3x uh had a bit of a plateau over 2022 to 2023 but now it's back up again the numbers are insane right so I think that that that myth has been fully dispelled and now it becomes a okay how do I get there faster how do I get there how do

I have the impact spe larger right I certainly don't hear those conversations as much anymore it seems like with everybody building around how to secure your environment it was something that people didn't really think about as much and maybe the tools weren't there not all that long ago but now it seems like the the focus has been put on it from the hypervisor the hyperscalers that yeah never even comes up as a as a concern yeah and I think a lot of what we saw before was kind of a prove it model right so we had to come out from a cloud provider background we

had to come out with a lot of U proof of concept models we had to let customers try before they buy we had to have a lot of technical founded architectures and solutions that were ready made you know think of things like like VMware uh sap uh Oracle database um all the third party applications in those EOS ecosystems Windows based workes Etc where customers had to really touch it and feel it and actually make sure that the race car was running the lap times that we said it would and then in other industries that it was as secure if not even more secure otherwise they

had no reason to move so it was like it either needs to be as performant or better needs to be as secure preferably better and then the cost uh you know both in the process of migrating and then also in operating uh needed to have you know real um Financial benefits over time and so you're looking at a big difference between you know amortization schedules of hardware and data centers and you know personnel management and energy costs and those types of things to now simply you know what does my cloud contract look like and my my Personnel doesn't change that much uh and how do

I get the most out of it and so again there's a lot of great information uh Beyond just what's uh on these uh five slides both with uh the Google ramp program uh Amazon map uh azure's amp program as well uh for our Microsoft customers as well even oracles where there's whole teams dedicated to making sure that you have a worldclass experience as you go through these but as a company to all all of our customers listening and partners listening these five principles still really stand out as like kind of the the core Center of of how to get this done right so let's get

into kind of the the basics here in terms of some of the pitfalls and things that I've seen that have led to you know nonoptimized environments that are still operating and incurring you know excessive cost or fees for a lot of customers so I put these ones in red for a lot of good reasons and again this is specific to to Google but the best practices here don't change regardless of which cloud provider you're looking at so when we form an assessment and each cloud provider has their own tools well they'll take an inventory both of what you have at the cloud provider as well

as what you have on Prem it's not hard to tell where you may or may not have idle resources that are uh either slated for deprecation or if those applications are Legacy and they still need to run that they can be right sized and I'll get to right sizing in a second but we'll look at CPU utilization we'll look at memory utilization and we'll look at the application and database dependencies and so there are crawlers uh that each company has to then isolate these specific things and then determine how they can be more performant or deprecated like I said and that's a that's a decision

that each customer will have to make as they look through those from an industry analyst I think this actually came from Gartner just that piece alone can usually decrease Cloud commitments by 5% just that alone so whether you're talking about a thousand VM Fleet or a 10,000 VM Fleet 5% can be a pretty big number and that's over time and that's not just recognized in year one that could be you know a pretty big uh Pitfall and I've actually seen that as high as 35% where a customer had uh moved things over over time and their their migration schedule uh went a little extra long

and they moved it like for like and didn't realize that or nor one actually worked them walked them through kind of the new compute instances that had come out realizing that they could take this pretty massive sprawl and actually segregate it down to you know smaller faster boxes and that alone save them quite a bit of money which leads me to right sizing and the number one question I get on this is you know what is the difference between pre and post appointment well it's it's pretty simple when we look at depending on the the dependencies again uh for your on-premise workloads and what you

already have operating in the cloud if we're trying to move you now um you're already doing a lot of that work and so as you deploy it into the cloud it actually may make a lot more sense uh to actually do that uh before you're actually as you're as you're migrating or as you're actually moving those workloads but then a lot of the customers you know zann that you and I talk to uh are already there and they're saying our bills are 30% higher than they should be what can I do about this and so we look at it through two lenses either through uh

license and support and cost management or we look at it as infrastructure uh cost management and so rice sizing post deployment since they're already there is traditionally a little bit harder um but you actually can still get quite a bit of savings out of that and so in both cases it's not necessarily that you're going to be end up spending more you're going to get a more stable and efficient workload out of it and your environment costs overall over time are going to go down and so there's a lot of great tools that uh can make those recommendations so an example being if you're at

Google and you're on n1's it might make sense to move to the n2s uh if you're using the maximum throughput of the n2s it might make sense to start looking at some of the new instances that'll be launched here in well I guess it's February 29th in about six weeks there'll be more news to come on that that we'll we'll have at Google next uh on April 9th so then we look at all right how to maximize your commits so let's forget infrastructure for a second and say all right what can I do right right now just by what I'm already using today and say

okay if I know I'm going to use this over time and I'm not going to change the environment too much what can the financial team actually do to get us a better deal and so that's where committed use discounts or things like spot VMS or reserved instances uh comes into play where you can say hey I'm running x amount of this thing why don't I just Reserve those or buy them on Demand right now and that way I actually can get a better deal on those and so you're lock in for you know let's say set amount of VMS or VM instance types over time

that you're going to get a better deal on them so that's one area then the second area that we look at and this is where those stages of success come in between migrating and Readiness uh to modernizing to making things both automated or more cost efficient the smartest customers I think that we work with today have already gone through kind of those first three they know the dependencies of their workloads and they know what the the performance uh needs both at the network and compute layer are and so they're able to tr to transition to spot VMS and actually maximize the uh the cost performance

so with those they're actually saying I don't need a performance SLA I can actually make do with off-the-shelf no performance SLA but a better price usually spot VMS are about 72 is percent less uh and their committed use discounts may not even get close to that but they're able to take those and then uh swap out VMS you know on the Fly and some of those uh have had very big uh cost savings as part of their commits and I think we've seen that in in a lot of key Industries specifically in in financial uh banking uh Insurance uh healthc care even um there's a

lot of very smart customers that have figure out how to use those effectively so that's a a big Spiel on cloud optimization and infrastructure and and commit management there's a lot of areas to uh to Cloud optimization so who at the Google team is the one that a customer would talk to say they're you know is there a difference between like a current customer versus a perspective customer like is there like they call ciq Colin dude hook it up I don't know what to do yeah so we will definitely help with that so we're in the business of making sure that you're optim your environment

is is optimized for for Google Cloud for for Amazon for for any of your your cloud preferred Cloud providers out there and who our superheroes are and should be in the same breath as a customer is not just your FSR or FSM on your on your sales teams but the uh your your customer engineer uh or solution Architects those people are worth their weight and goal and that should be who is on speed dial with any of your Cloud teams uh at any cloud provider because they will help you uh both review assess and design uh what needs to happen uh for any of those

workload types and they're they're genuinely in incentivized as well to do that exact thing uh and then second to that and and not second that like it comes second to that first party situation with the cloud provider um your preferred uh system integrator or MSP or or preferred partner you know really should have a big voice in this too especially if they're part of you know managing your commit uh or in an MSP Dynamic they're actually managing your spend uh directly as well and so whenever I say those things I'm not actually talking about actually quote unquote saving money I actually think of it more

as springing up your Cloud commit to go towards the next wave of of products the next wave of migrations the next wave of modernization or obviously uh AI development as well and so those technical teams at the cloud providers or at your uh your preferred partner uh are are critical to to a lot of this and and we're we're fortunate to be in both of those hemispheres uh for the customer as well great question no so um I'm putting put these six up because whenever I ask a customer you know what are your priorities when we talk about Cloud optimization or migration and you'll hear

different things you'll hear oh I need to manage my cost that's always number one it's been number one for eight years in a row according to flexera and other industry reports right so okay we got costs that's fine then we look at at workload performance or Fleet performance or or whatever it might be and that's usually a close second and security is right up there either number two or number three and then these other three when it comes to availability is what I mean by reliability um or innovation we want to you know obviously invest in Ai and figure out how we can you know

what either transactional or analytical workloads we have that are prime candidates for this well again if you haven't solved for the first two or three you're not quite there yet um and you can do this All In in you know one fill swoop but uh that's in some cases if you're not focusing on reliability and security that might not be the best way to do that and then last is people so you have to have a culture that's ready to adapt and uh be agile enough to develop these types of scenarios and willing to put in the time and also have the expertise and so

you really need to invest in the the technical abilities of those teams or trust in you know the the technical groups that your your cloud provider or within your partner team and so what I like to say is that there isn't a hierarchy between these six in fact they're all important they're all equally important in a lot of good respects and I think that gets missed in a lot of the the dialogues that we have with a lot of customers and so that's why I like talking about fostering a fofs culture because it transcends just the it transcends the infrastructure the applications you know the

cloud commitments Etc you really need to look at this as a life cycle and so there needs to be Investments across the team there needs to be processes put in place there needs to be health checks and checks and balances in a lot of areas and again it all starts with having you know a very well-qualified business case that you're investing this as a group and and across the company or across multiple teams uh to achieve a expected outcome and a lot of the migrations that we've worked on where I've seen things go sideways uh it's usually not a technical issue it's usually that the

the business case did not justify the amount of spend that was involved either in the Professional Services piece or the cloud investment piece and or the teams themselves were not simply ready uh to accept the amount of new work uh created by this or that things went so well that uh that they had to create new work thereafter to then work on the next wave of migrations or uh cloud optimizations and so again another flywheel here is once you're through kind of the the core tenants that I've walked through on those pillars there is a life cycle for this it's never one and done it's

a constant Evolution and it's a constant journey and so when you put these things in motion and you complete kind of the first first wave or the second or the third you're right back where you started so in in Amazon speak it's always day one there's always a new uh problem to solve a new uh challenge to meet and if you're not constantly looking at that Evolution across uh your your either Cloud Investments your on premise your applications your fleets Etc then you're missing a big opportunity to make things better and so that's kind of one of the overwhelming messages I always like to walk

a number customers through as we go through this and there's there's advantages and disadvantages across every aspect of this um and so there's really good information to help support a lot of these things again I'm going share a lot of the white papers that're off the end of this and they're all readily available to be downloaded but um this is this is probably one of the most important slides throughout all of this is to look at as you know a complete life cycle in Evolution for every customer I mean Zane how many times have you seen that right like it comes up every day every

day one of the questions I had for you Colin yeah especially when it comes to Cloud you can kind of architect your way around any problem right so when you're looking at uh reliability it's always one of the people who started architecting applications to cross uh availability zones and something that can be more optimize they can make sure if one goes down it stays up you can over optimize to the point where your cost is higher if you try to overdo it versus the actual business outcome or the business goal so yeah are people paying attention to that or do we have the swing where

it used to be nobody did it then we started doing way too much of it are we finding our way back to the Middle where we're actually looking at what is the business really require from this app and we don't necessarily have to have that multizone multicloud per application I think there's a lot of examples of that actually so um we've seen that um you know in terms of uh trying to think of an easy one load balancers um where you know uh over architecting the front end of a lot of applications then leads to spiraling costs and things that come through as traditional traffic

may not always present themselves that way and actually it ends up being a security vulnerability but was the environment reliable yes it was and then they end up looking at the wrong uh problem you know related to their their cloud architectures and and there's a balance in a trade-off right and so you know if we think through like the past 20 years of our industry from Big chips to small chips from Big Data Centers to small data centers now we're back to very very large data centers and very very large chips again you know that that endless cycle that continues to happen um I would

always just go back to you know is the glass half full or is it half empty or is it two times too big from an engineering perspective and so whatever is usually the simplest answer you know the the best idea wins based on Merit there and as long as it's it's balanced within you know both the org structure the workload structure and then the technical facets to support it it's probably the right way to do it but yeah there's a lot of customers I've seen that have way overthought a lot of things or uh didn't ask the right questions and simply didn't know that there

were better ways of doing things that there was tools for this that they didn't need to do a complete assessment on their own and have their team go heads down for a week or multiple weeks when you know a simple tool would have done this in 24 hours or less right like there's even areas of that that they get overlooked pretty often learn what you don't know yeah and so on the on the the structure of tools you know kind of my following those kind of Five Pillars and kind of the the best practices when we look at you know regardless of which Cloud you're

you're you're working with regardless of how much you have on premise today or how much you've already invested in the cloud things can always be better and so um you know establishing a cloud fops group even a small team um you'll see advantages and uh you'll see good outcomes and positive benefits from that um there are multiple tools within both your infrastructure Investments as well as within your commit structure that you can use again I walked through a couple of those details today between um committed use discounts spot instances um or Reserve instances Etc where you can get you know maximum uh price performance out

of the the Investments you're already making um within Cloud billing um there's a lot of good reasons to to set uh resourcing and so again another another area I look at a lot of customers not fully leveraging they'll see this giant bill but they won't they won't have asset taking or resource taking uh across what is being provisioned for what purposes and so they're just saying oh it's increased 20 or 30% you know month over month or quarter over quarter and not realizing it's actually just this one development team over here that's consuming or over consuming you know against uh their their Cloud Investment Portfolio

and so that's where keeping score really becomes you know pretty important um one of the areas that we'll talk about uh you know near the end of this is going to be uh Cloud Market places um most customers haven't fully utilized this and I'd say that that is a hot bed for how to maximize both your Cloud Investments as well as your existing uh software Investments as well um we're we're guilty is charge we actually have all of our Solutions on cloud Market places today for a lot of good reasons number one being it allows you to burn down your existing Cloud commitments uh two

we can give you uh a lot of price advantages and pass the cost savings on and then three it's it's an almost immediate so it's a clickthrough we can do private offers and we can essentially give you as good if not better terms uh with your preferred cloud provider through the marketplace because you're incentivized on your Cloud commit and so is the sales team and so are we and so it gives to everyone you know kind of a win-win scenario there um that works you know with a lot of advantages to it and again the last piece is is that culture aspect it's very hard

it's the arguably the hardest part infrastructure is not the problem anymore um but establishing a cloud fups culture will will yield a lot of benefits so can I can I um ask you to clarify a point that you made sure um so you said something about one of the biggest problems that you see is people not understanding companies not really understanding um not getting the feedback from their Cloud environment on where spend is going who's doing what how is this happening what is going on so like is there a solution for that like what yeah so there's uh there's custom labels and then there's asset

taking and custom billing reports so if you're sitting at the top let's say I'm like a CFO or CTO whoever is actually managing the full Cloud Investment Portfolio I'm gonna isolate this down to one cloud provider it gets even more arduous when we add like a second or a third which a lot of our customers are in so essentially you want to go from the ground out so you want to actually take U from a technical standpoint you want to take either your project or tenant or uh resource IDs and actually assign them labels based on which team is using those resources or what application

or workload is being identified for that specific purpose and so what you'll end up with is this very large hierarchy and map all the way down uh that says okay now I can take just this one segment of my my business or line of business applications or whatever it might be and that's isolated to this one group and then assign an owner and then same thing all the way through uh your entire Investment Portfolio so that way you have you know in basic terms I've got my development and testing operations over here and I've got my production environments over here and then I can look

at okay this is what this one group is using month over a month and let's let's take a a basic area if someone massively overused uses month over month it's not a blame game it's actually what happened there does that mean that like let's say our end of year bash reporting for our financials spiked because of you know Thanksgiving or the holiday break was that expected was it expected to go that percentage up um or did we simply you know absolutely crush it as a company and these are good problems to have and let's see how we can optimize the environments to better load balance

all that new traffic and all those new uh that compute that we need to use for that and so again if you're not keeping score and you're not using asset taking and then custom billing reports to set those up for each of those teams it'd be very hard to hold any of those teams accountable or to be able to even look at you know across your entire real estate uh and Investments um you know where those issues occur so how how is it that a company ends up in a situation where they're not doing that you'd be surprised um yeah I mean I I I

forget the exact term but I think um there was a report not too long ago that like the average life expectancy of most uh Enterprise or Fortune 1000 cios is under three years so you're inheriting a portfolio uh and trying to take an investment um analysis of someone else's work prior to you joining or your mid-flight or you're actually in the middle of doing this type of migration and nothing I'm talking about is Trivial there's very few scripts that can automate a lot of this uh in some areas is it is a manual process and it but it's a it's a worthwhile undertaking for a

lot of good reasons that I mentioned before where you can get those types of reports and then you can have monthly syncs with your teams and say hey here's here's where we're at so and so's on this we're investing here we expect our Cloud spend to go up X percent because you know we're piloting this new uh workload over here or we expect this much more traffic on you know our Core Business applications over here whatever it might be and so for a lot of uh good reasons which again goes back to nailing the basics keeping score turns out to be one of the the

fastest paths to success for a lot of customers of any size right now and it's not just infrastructure too so one of the pieces that we're going to talk about in a second is licensing right that was one of the first main points that um it's not just your Cloud bill at the end of the day there there's a lot of reasons to have a full inventory of your licensing uh and contract structures like are they co- terminous uh what are the terms on those how much are you using there there's a lot of things to look at there awesome so let's Dive Right In

All right so who who is our biggest customer who's our biggest partner well I've got this little thing shining up behind me right I I came from Google cloud and I'm th so thrilled to continue to talk about this amazing partnership um we've been working with Google for a long time back when I had my uh my Google badge and everything else and we custom make Rocky Linux for Google Cloud uh across all Industries and workload types and um it's been really exciting to work with the team both in the product and Engineering Group as well as the sales teams because there are so many

customers that are using a lot of the best practices I've walked through earlier and putting them into motion and then finding that having an optimized you know specific image to their workload on Google cloud has a lot of advantages and we'll share some of those today um we've effectively provided kind of three options here and and these are pretty simple you've got you know base uh Rocky Linux you know driven by the community that's freely available and ready to go so it's great for testing for compatibility sake and and using kind of the latest uh minor and major releases that are out there where we

fit in and where contract uh where Google brings ciq in as a partner is then optimizing those instances uh for specific BM shapes and types and so what that gets you is all the inherent benefits uh of using Rocky already but then you know that you're getting a streamlined image uh specific to that and so we're actually launching that across multiple Cloud providers uh obviously we've got Amazon on the logo or AWS logo on here as well um that'll continue to transcend to essentially all major hyperscalers uh because we're finding that there's a massive amount of demand and appetite for this and when it comes

to fine-tuning things specific to your security or performance requirements uh that's where our engineered for Enterprise our Enterprise Linux platform comes in that's available on all Cloud marketplaces right now so you get 247 support you get uh bespoke images unique to your environment structure so again all the things I walked about talked about earlier from technical issues right sizing um reserved instance environments Etc we'll fine tune for those and actually uh make them unique to to your requirements and specifications so what are those outcomes from that though like how do we actually make this better for everybody well you you still get uh you know

the highest level of security and compliance out there I don't know how many know this but ciq is effectively you know kind of the certification entity for a lot of the federal and Industry regulations and security requirements that are out there uh I think of like fips and you know other Federal srgs and things like that um we've got on staff some of the best Rocky Linux Engineers on the planet shout out to that whole team thank you guys for all the amazing work that you do every day um and we put it all uh through the hyperscalers uh at a cost that is effectively

affordable but also maximum performance and maximum security so there's not there's a lot of good reasons to look at it especially once you've gone through that inventory and you may or may not understand exactly how much just your operating system is costing you right now and right now in our industry you know Zan I've heard some news recently that there's going to be some some price changes eminently this quarter or within the next let's say 30 or 60 days as well as Centos you know going end of life in June but customers I think are going to be are going to get shocked sicker shocked

with some of the excessive amount of pricing changes are going to happen for things are already operating on premise or in the cloud they are shocked I started I started getting some phone calls yesterday as some people that it started to get some surprising increases very unexpected you know I didn't actually put that together in my brain until you just said it I was like oh yeah yeah but then when you just said and the end of life for sent of is also coming up here pretty quick so if you're on Cento 7 we Rocky has been designed again we can we can do a

whole another webinar just on that story right but Rocky Linux should be at the top of your list for a lot of good reasons right Beyond just the obvious of of you know the successor to Centos the foundation and everything else the fact is if you're accustomed to customizing your own environment using this both on premise or for your HPC nodes or whatever it might be there's a lot of good reasons to take a look rocking and if you're going to run those in the cloud that's where we fit in that we've already done that work for you and you have those optimized images again

those are free of charge those are sitting on the cloud providers today and they're already custom built uh day one for all the new instance types that are coming out there and we're thrilled to to partner with Google and the other Cloud providers there's gonna be a lot of news coming out over the next couple of months but back to Brass tax what does that mean from a financial perspective these numbers might be low in fact we've actually seen even higher cost savings than this so where does that come from so we deploy and build regularly with each of the cloud teams and optimize for

those instance types so on the very front end you're going to get a more performant image on the back side of that it's also if you look at just the licensing and support for your operating system or the infrastructure tools you use to manage your fleets which we also provide um you're going to save a lot of money and that money can then then be freed up towards the other departmental level Investments that you're trying to create specifically AI or anything else along those lines and so I think a lot of people miss that where they look at it just the cost of doing business

or the cost of operations in reality is like this is this is not insignificant um there's customers that we've worked with uh across Cloud providers that are able to save north of 10% on their commits just by switching to Rocky just by using the images that we were creating every day and the stuff that we have on Marketplace and again um when you need more fine-tuning when you need better performance that can be both workload performance or that could be boot time uh optimization uh for those with giant fleets there's customers where us saving them one second or two or three seconds on boot time

alone per VM when they have 10,000 plus uh VMS and deployed or they're using billions of cores every year that one second makes a giant difference in fact it's usually measured out to you know at least 5,000 per VM per year or uh even north of 10,000 depending on you know how performant how many uh what their specific architecture looks like and so just in those scenarios alone there's a lot of cost savings that we can provide just for the environments you're running today so Zane why don't you walk us through so I got real excited this week because I I learned a little bit

more about what we can do with the sender as a specific speically as an inventory tool Centos migration and then how to optimize with for cloud fleets yeah absolutely so one of the things that we've coming from a Consulting life in the background you always have to assess kind of what you have and it's always really really challenging there's a lot of tools out there that can kind of tell you here's what you have and we can possibly move this workload I mean they give you the what five different levels of easy to up to hard and kind of show you the the way to

get to it when it comes to actually execution that's when when things get challenging and it's really difficult to see did I build this thing that's equivalent or in a state that is comparable to what the other one was so what we've done with a sender and another product called Ledger is being able to actually go in and scrape your inventory of what you currently have and then give you a baseline for what that looks like if you migrate that over to Rocky so we can show you package by package service by service user by user dis Space by dis space exactly what it has

versus what it needs to do on another another machine and we can actually create those playbooks to go build that machine exactly like your old one so moving from Centos 7 to Rocky 8 and nine making sure that the packages are there that you had on the old machine and then migrating data we can do it all and we can we can make that an automated thing that kind of just becomes a click button so for those listening right so this is not meant to be an intrusive inspection into your inventory and workloads at all what it actually is saying is okay uh some of

the customers there's a split right there's your windows-based workloads over here your Linux based workloads over here and then specifically trying to Target let's say Centos 7 or even six whatever might be right and even when you've done high-end module or package customizations specifically what this tool will do is actually give us those entire readouts and then actually say okay here is both the operating system configuration and here is the compute configuration here's the CP utilization over time the memory utilization over time and here's how it can be ported over and upgraded to Rocky Linux it's one of the fastest easiest ways that uh and

one of the most valuable tools I think in our Arsenal and it's a good complement to the migration programs I've talked about before so each each cloud provider in guilty is charged with Strat Zone at Google Cloud where I flew to Chicago met with my friend Carl and the team over there shout out to those guys they're amazing that tool and all the other tools out there will help you get a complete inventory and and ass assessment of all of your assets between applications and databases where this tool comes in is taking that to the next level and then saying all right what is the

specific compute shapes and sizes that we should be using for this and then specific to the licensing support and operating system configurations which are going to be end of life or in the case of real we can do the same thing there and actually how to convert those over to Rocky and all you have to do today is uh go to our website sign up for an assessment and you'll hear from Zayn or myself or someone from our team and we'll get you started and we can do this very very quickly so I know there's five steps here but really we get from one to

three you know in a hurry it's it's not that difficult um so great Tool uh any other pieces that we're missing on that ones in because like this got me really really fired up this week no I think that's a great place to start it's one of those it's interesting to see because you actually get a visualization I mean you can look side by side and get the green light that these things are are in sync and ready to go or the red light here's what's missing here's the things you got to think about so it's I wish I had this a long time ago doing Cloud migrations it would have made my life a lot easier thousand per thousand per.

I mean there there's so many stories I can think of between you know missing database dependencies uh Network latency cross region tra like this is one of those ones I wish we had in in the quiver for a very long time but here it is it's ready to go so I mentioned that I was going to give everyone a lot of access to analyst reports and white papers here they are so uh there's a whole plethora of these from uh leading names and uh amazing teams out there that have done great work so don't take all the numbers we've put up here lightly those are

all coming from foundational research from massive Sur from cios and CTO across the planet uh to get a lot of those insights and so these are some of the best ones that I've seen out there secondly is the howtos all right we walk through a bunch of areas we walked through the five pillars of migration we walk through Cloud fin Ops where do I get started how do I get more informed how do I start getting my team set up for this here's where those tools reside and these are all specific to Google Cloud because you just love working with Google they've done a great

job and they've got great information so shout out to their teams and uh the product Marketing Group and the product teams that put a lot of the stuff together so here back to Rose's question I do have a couple pieces on taging here uh on resource uh resource allocations and uh custom billing reports uh to get you started there we also have some of the tools uh for right sizing and right sizing recommendations uh on there as well as well as a few customers that have kind of taken that Journey as well so feel free to use all all of those and we'll make sure

this has uh Public Access uh and lastly just thanks everyone for the time um this is a kind of a Consolidated version uh of a lot of these best practices uh more than happy to walk through you know anyone through each of these steps um with any cloud provider but you know these are founded uh based on you know a lot of examples that we've seen and a lot of customers that we're working with right now and a lot of partners that are ready to help you know alongside us to to help get you there so get started today start with the the cultural piece

first uh take an assessment also of the tools at your disposal between Cloud providers or uh from your partners and let us know what we can do to help uh I have yet to see an environment that we can't help optimize and I have yet to see a customer or a workload that we can't help customers save money with uh by making it either more secure or more performant or both and really uh that's the whole story Cloud optimization is hard it's a long-going journey it's an evolution it's something you got to do all the time and uh we're happy to be you know a

big part of that for a lot of good reasons for a lot of good customers thank you Callen and before Rose starts talking about the backpack we are going to be at next so please well I mean schedule time reach out to us let us know you're going to be there stop by the booth we're going to be there at a booth we'll have uh access to conference room so we can go have private conversations about whatever you guys want to talk to so yeah we will be everywhere Google next uh there's going to be a lot of product releases a lot of major announcements

coming out you kind of already seeing the marketing machine get turned up uh our booth I think is it's either number is it number 230 or 203 I forget anyway that's a good question one of the two anyway we will be there come find us uh we're there to represent all things Rocky and ciq and we'll be talking a lot about Centos migration uh with a lot customers yes so excited to see everyone in a couple weeks that's awesome Booth 231 there we go 231 yes there we go I was looking I was like I can't actually see I'm gonna show you guys this all

right I want to present right now so here share screen I'm doing it guys uh gonna ask restart her browser it's gonna happen EAS with two how do I how do I know which one I want to oh my gosh see they're making this so bad entire screen this one okay I'm doing it guys guys doing it there you go okay awesome so this is where we're going to be so 231 is right there so you just walk in see I drew you like a little path boom Booth we are right there okay wonderful we are very excited and if you guys want to like

actually schedule a meeting with anyone um on our team that's going to be there there's going to be several of us feel free to reach out to us at c iq.com um you go anywhere and fill anything out and it's going to come to me so uh you know just let me let me know who you are and who you want to meet with and we we'll set that up for you of course very excited about that um and Colin thank you so much for coming out and sharing all this awesomeness with us optimizing on uh clouds it's um very exciting time for us internally

as well as we kind of have um spent a little bit more time in the HPC area so it's like really nice to kind of Branch out and do some different things all right you guys so here on YouTube if you're watching on YouTube hello and thank you so much thanks for watching we are I think at like 921 subscribers so we're getting there we're chugging right along we are almost to 1,000 subscribers and once we get there we are giving away a limited edition carart Rocky Linux backpack that you can see right here it is in all of its glory and Beauty it is

very exciting okay so of course we're like well you know when that happens we'll be live we get that 1,000 we're going to do a shout out to whoever it is we're going to email you we're going to tag you we're going to send it to you it's going to be amazing then know Rose we are not eligible to win I know we we're gonna also gonna have some pretty killer swag at our booth at next too by the way so that's true I have throwing that one out there yet yes so definitely come by plus we're g to be in Vegas so like that's

just fun it's gonna be awesome all righty well call thank you man is always an absolute pleasure to hang out with you and hear all the good work that you are doing and I'm so glad that you got okay you guys I just have to like totally call him out right now when he came on uh I think actually you weren't quite there yet Zane but he came on and he was talking he was like guys I just got back from vacation I feel so refreshed and free and all of you guys look stressed out I don't even did he say stressed out I think

it was something else but I think he was to me and just no I I still I have that Aloha glow a little bit you know good but you know good for you you know what work hard play hard but also rest hard right like that that is an important piece of all of it so I'm glad that you got to rest Colin thank you yeah I I'm paying for it now I've got I'm a solo dad this week with my two kids so I'm I'm I'm playing all the jobs this week good time man good time awesome all right you guys well thank you

so much for being here we'll see you next time same time same place see everyone [Music] bye