About Amiram Shachar
With cloud spend analytics and recommendations just as our starting point, Spot actively optimizes AWS,
Azure and Google Cloud deployments with SLA-backed availability, fully automated infrastructure management and up to 90% cost reduction.
With Spot, cloud consumers can effortlessly and affordably scale any workload, from
stateful, single instances, to cloud-native clusters made up of thousands of nodes.
Are you wondering what the heck is all this talk about multi cloud? Are you thinking about going multi cloud but want to select it for the right reasons? if so you’re going to want to stick around! I’m talking with public cloud leaders and experts around Multi Cloud and asking is it really worth it?
Everyone, my name is Jon Myer and this is The Daily Show!
The definition of multi cloud is when enterprises or companies are utilizing multiple public cloud providers and their services. Earlier this week, we spoke with the CEO and co-founder of Bellefleur Technologies, and she had some interesting point of views, which includes this quote. “Multi cloud isn’t about what I think it means, but it starts with the customer”. What do they think and working backwards talk about customer obsessed.
Our companies talking to the internal customer, their most valuable resources employees from the bottom up approach and not the top down. OK, folks, rounding out our week of Multi Cloud is a good friend of mine, general manager and VP of Spot by NetApp, Amiram!
Amiram, welcome to the show again, buddy.
Guest: Amiram
Thank you, Jon. Always a pleasure being here with you.
Host: Jon
Real quick, would you give the audience a little bit about yourself before we get to our topic of Multi Cloud?
Guest: Amiram
I’m here, I’m here founder and CEO of ScotRail and now I lead the spot by up business unit, everything, cloud automation optimization, that’s what we do.
Host: Jon
What is your definition of multi cloud and is it worth it or not?
Guest: Amiram
You said multi what?? Multi cloud?? I don’t think there is a multi cloud.
Host: Jon
What?! wait wait a second! What do you mean?
Guest: Amiram
I mean. I think I’ve spoken to thousands of organizations in the last five years, I’ve not seen almost even one customer needing something that we always want to aspire or think about as a multi cloud. Nobody runs their application on two different clouds. Nobody does it. Nobody wants to move between clouds because it’s cheaper. Nobody wants to move between clouds because it’s like Expedia or moving between hotels or booking different car rental companies.
Multiple clouds is I can use it of us because my team uses too. But I use Google for bakeware and usually you would see a very. Important distinction, a very clear distinction between the type of applications that run across these clouds. So, for example, if you have a community that you would choose a cloud running, you’re not going to run your cluster across. It’s not going to work networking security wise, data wise, just not going to work.
Guest: Amiram
So that’s my statement about multicloud people would use multiple clouds for use different technologies that other clouds don’t have. So you might use virtual desktops and azure because you have windows servers and you might use BlackBerry on Google because it’s a great service and you’re going to use these because this is where you build most of your applications. So this is multicloud to me.
Host: Jon
So you threw me a curveball right away. I love it! That’s actually something that hasn’t been brought up. And but one of the things you did touch on is using multiple cloud providers for the right reasons, not for the wrong reasons, for their unique services that they offer. You just mentioned that Google for machine learning windows for us. You’ve you’ve kind of touched on those aspects. Well, your conversations with companies and enterprises, are they using multiple clouds?
Are there are a lot of them using multiple clouds or are they just centering on one provider?
Guest: Amiram
So for the majority, and when I say majority is over 90 percent of the customers I speak with that use multiple clouds, they are usually centered, gravitated on one cloud and they’re like they’ll be centered on, for example, eight of us, like 90 percent of their span will be eight of us, and then about 10 percent will be coming from other providers because of different services that they want to use. I think this is how we operate at Spot and this is how NetApp operates.
We usually have one big agreement with one cloud provider and then much smaller agreements with other cloud providers for different services that we run with them. That’s what I see across the majority of customers.
Host: Jon
Now, you mentioned spend the majority of their spend on one cloud provider. I’m going to have to touch on that subject a little bit only because Spen does come into play a little bit. Now, are people companies selecting one major cloud provider or multiple providers to get the best bang for the buck volume discount or just because of their services? I want them to make sure that they selected for the right reason. Let’s touch on spend.
Guest: Amiram
So no doubt that the more volume you have, the better rates you’ll get from the players, but also sometimes because there is an issue which is always good for the market. So. You know, if you run on two different clouds so you can always compare and you can always raise them to get to a better rate, but I think that still customers, they have so many workloads and if they want to get more for their money, they’ll put more pressure on one class so they can get more benefits from that.
So that’s what I see normally. But I think the good thing about having multiple clouds is that if something goes sideways, if you’re not happy with your cloud provider, so you always have options. And I think this is what’s really good. I think five years ago that was not the case. Right now, there is way more options, more option ability for customers. And it’s just great to see that for spend, for security, for high availability.
Guest: Amiram
But definitely still spend is very central to get. More volume discounts.
Host: Jon
So here’s a question for you when you’re talking you’re talking about Spen, but when I go into a customer and they say, hey, listen, I’m thinking about multiple clouds, what do you ask them? Why, or are you trying to really find out their main reason, or are you just suggesting, well, there are services. I mean, how do you approach this subject? How do you approach what is the best for the customer?
Guest: Amiram
So. You always need to think about what’s your problem first before you think about a solution. So sometimes customers have problems, it can only be solved with specific types of technologies. And sometimes there is a service at Google that answers this and sometimes there is only a service for any of us. It answers their problem. So it really led by the problems and challenges its customers are having every day. Second, you see lots of companies acquire different companies, and when you acquire, you just you’re inheriting some legacy stuff and you’re creating stuff that other people did.
Guest: Amiram
So sometimes you can see a company that is very much centered on Cloud A, but they acquired a company that isn’t there. And B, in most cases, you see consolidation because they want to consolidate billing, they want to consolidate discount and so on. But that’s the main reason. So you have problems and you can solve them with different services or you’re just getting into corporate situations where you have to use different files.
Host: Jon
You also touched on a couple of things we mentioned in a previous about acquiring a company that’s using a different cloud provider and now you have to adapt or you have to incorporate that into it. Now you’re running a multiple cloud. So basically you didn’t pick the environment, you didn’t pick out. So you either have to adapt or convert. And in most cases, they adapt. They integrate into it. My question with regards to having multiple cloud providers, isn’t that a strain on the internal customers, the resources, your employees?
Host: Jon
I mean, now you have to learn to three cloud providers and their technology. What is the approach? I mean, can we ultimately I mean, isn’t that really the skill set of the employees?
Guest: Amiram
Yeah, I see three different clouds, three different languages. You need to learn new language when you’re interacting with a new class or babble for that.
Guest: Amiram
And, you know, the thing is, I think that the virus actually enjoying the fact that they have a unique language, unique language with their own unique products, with their own unique features, with their own unique different connectors between services and stuff. So then when you want to switch, it’s you actually need to learn a new thing. And it’s not only about a class, it’s it’s even about the you know, the headcount you need to put to work.
Guest: Amiram
The people need to understand that. So I think this is action in favor of the cloud providers. And the more we have products that the generalizing and making things very much seamless across stuff like communities, it’s much easier for organizations to make decisions to to move between cloud. But Reality says shows that customers choosing more managed services rather than self managed stuff. And when they choose managed services like manage database, it’s really hard to go back from it. And it’s really hard to move cloud, especially if you’re using proprietary managed service that is not compatible with any different API that you can pour through a different cloud.
Guest: Amiram
So providers and providers doing a really good job in creating their own languages, inside the copyright, inside their cloud. So it’s going to be kind of difficult to.
Host: Jon
Isn’t that creating, like, what, a vendor lock scenario, because you’re utilizing managed services, which is hard to move out of your creating your own language means your own skill set to do it. Does that create a cloud vendor lock?
Guest: Amiram
I don’t think Vindolanda is a bad thing. I don’t think if you like the on the first person to say that actually vendor lock back then where they locked you into billions of dollars in licensing versus now you’re not the first.
Guest: Amiram
I don’t think the vendor lock is a bad thing as long as the vendor is great and transparent and innovative and moving fast. And it’s all about us, the customer, which I think we see the cloud provider. It’s very much like this. I’m just saying, when people talk about multi cloud, they need to know that there is nothing there is no multichannel.
Host: Jon
That’s multiple cloud providers there, multiple providers and services. I like that you definitely provided a unique perspective on it. The first the first guest I’ve had on that said, sorry, there’s no such thing as multicolored. By the way, I did define it. There is a Google definition on multi cloud, but I had a joke a little bit about it. So, you know, I’ve got to touch on just a couple more things. I know we’re running out of time, but really, is there any piece of advice that you would give a company that is thinking about going to multiple cloud providers?
Host: Jon
What is the one thing that you would sit down and say? Think about this first or what are you doing, and then let them let it resonate with them.
Guest: Amiram
I think that companies need to like they need to centrally managed manage the decision making of which service to use. So the CTO or whoever is making the tech decisions should not let this thing be distributed. And every team can just pick whatever service they want, whatever database they want, whatever. So I think there should be standards, how people building applications and people deploying software, how people choosing services. And I think. Tech companies need to be very much aware of that and very disciplined about that, because there is a very thin line between being organized on a cloud and being really disorganized and just all over the place.
Guest: Amiram
So that would be my two cents.
Host: Jon
We were talking about before a bottom up approach and not a top down approach. What I’m thinking is a bottom up approach, meaning that your internal customers, your employees are deciding on the services that they would like to utilize. But the top down from that would be that the CEO said, let’s make a standard of those services that we’re using. He’s not dictating what services dictating the standard of services, meaning it’s a collaborative effort to standardize a multiple cloud provision environment for their application.
Guest: Amiram
100%. We’re putting hundreds, if not thousands of man hours in building pipelines and building platforms for manage compute, for putting security processes in place, for understanding how to optimize stuff. And all the organization needs to benefit from that. And if we’re spending this money, spending the cycles, and then we’re finding ourselves just being really geeks on how to deploy staff. So the company is just I know an awesome product called Ocean CD for those pipelines, by the way.
Guest: Amiram
So I had to do a little plug in for it. I am working on a video or demo around it. My last mark here is you mentioned about having Cooper. Nettie’s is like one unique language for all multiple cloud environments. I think there needs to be a tool that could talk to all cloud environments in their native language and that tool kind of interpret it. So I can just say, hey, deploy out my three tier architecture in US or Azure with this one click, let it do its thing.
Guest: Amiram
I actually think there are a couple, but just yeah I, I wish there was a service to just let you run in the cloud in every deploy your container on some ocean of containers that you can just deploy them and we’ll just work for you. Right.
Host: Jon
Yes. Yes. I love that little subliminal part. That’s awesome! All right, everybody, remember, if you like what you see, don’t forget the hit that like subscribe your notification. We have more awesome content around there. I’m running and I are going to do another one in the coming weeks around cost optimization. But is it really cost optimization? There’s other benefits to run. So make sure you like and subscribe. Thank you so much for joining me on the show.
Host: Jon
And once again, I really appreciate it. Enjoy yourself and have a good one.
Guest: Amiram
Right on, man. Thank you.
Host: Jon
Thank you.