Microsoft’s New CEO: Satya Nadella

Microsoft has moved from being a follower in the cloud space five years ago to being a leader in the space and credit should be given to Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO.  Satya drove the Cloud Team at Microsoft and now drives the entire company further down the vision of a cloud computing Microsoft. 

I attended Satya’s presentation at the Microsoft partner conference yesterday and although he does not have the presence of Steve Ballmer, he does have a plan and it is working.   The news today that Microsoft will be reducing staff by 18,000 because of duplicate roles since the acquisition of Nokia is a distraction and not the story of what is going on at Microsoft.   Nokia acquisition may prove to be a bad decision or possibly brilliant but it doesn’t really matter that much for the overall success of Microsoft as a cloud provider. 

Microsoft is gaining ground with the Surface 3 and this one device may become the number one computing device.   Office 365 is leading the way for email and desktop apps leaving Google Apps in the dust.  Microsoft Azure cloud server platform is coming on strong and is the leading competitor to Amazon AWS. 

Microsoft is able to deliver cloud applications and servers at a lower cost than the traditional model.  Microsoft realizes this and Satya is leading an aggressive campaign to move customers to the Microsoft Cloud with the help of their partners like Nortec.  Satya Nadella will continue to use this strategy building Microsoft into a larger stronger company.

"Experience Migrating to the Cloud" Presentation by Kevin Griffin of Harvard Business Publishing

I attended an interesting presentation by Ken Griffin chronicling his migration of IT operations at Harvard Business Publishing to the Cloud.   Here are his lessons learned:

1.       "Without a plan, there can be no victory."  Understand and categorize your applications: Easy to move - do it;  Hard to move not critical, legacy -  kill or replace. 

2.      Identity and Access management in cloud solutions adds to the security challenges - need identity layer.  Enterprise Access Management as a Service – Okta.  Rolling out to cloud was a bit to easy!  IaaS in AWS was best fit for Harvard Business Publishing.  Custom apps migration strategy and decommission sun setting apps.  Train IT operations staff and build net new.

3.      SysAdmin requirements in the cloud really are different from traditional.  Need scripting skills, Dev Opps people and don't really need SAN skills etc.

4.      People is the hurdle.  Get excited about it!  AWS Architect is a high value skill!

5.      Excitement only lasts so long – Technical details:

a.      Make use of AWS free services.

b.      Include compliance requirements early - limit scope

c.      Use VPC Automate security auditing

d.      Get your alerts to become notifications

e.      Plan your instances to evaporate

f.       Don't store sensitive data on the ephemeral drives

g.      Make use of all available zones

h.      Control costs with reserved and spot instances

i.       Tags, Tags, Tags, and decide on a naming convention early

 

6.      Reduce the hump - the longer you are in hybrid mode the more resources and money you need.

 
Invest only in new world!


Source:  Ken Griffin, Director IT Services and Operations, Harvard Business Publishing

Hybrid Cloud - Bernard Golden

I attended Bernard Golden’s presentation on Hybrid Cloud: Myth and Realities.  Hybrid Cloud is and will continue to be the most common Cloud implementation.  There will be some companies that are 100% cloud, especially newer and smaller organizations and some companies that have no cloud but these will be fewer and fewer.

Each day AWS adds enough computing to power one whole Amazon.com circa 2003, when it was 5 Billion dollars in business.  Estimated to be $20 B in hosting by 2016.  Mr. Golden pointed out that we have seen this shift before and uses Henry Ford as an example.  In 1908 the Model –T was introduced. In 1913 the assembly line implemented.  From 1913 to 1920 the price of the Ford Model-T dropped 75% and Ford gained 75% of the auto market share!

 IT will be significantly larger in next 10 years!  New applications will be introduced and there will be challenges on how to implement and improve.  The biggest issue is legacy.

Questions to consider regarding building up your data center or moving to Cloud:

Can you build and operate world class data center?
What do you do with existing apps?
What is your scale plan?
How can you manage security?
Can you carry utilization risk?
Do you know your economics?

Bernard Golden described three scenarios for IT in Cloud:

1. Cloud/Legacy Mix in Data Center
         Agile development and traditional operations
          "Avoids Big Bang" requirement
          Not as disruptive
          No need to retrofit existing apps

Key questions

       Where do agile apps go?
        Reducing costs in IT infrastructure
        Need to build cloud operations capability
Probability :  50% Short Term, 15% Long Term

 2. Mild Hybrid

          Legacy data center, CSP for cloud apps
          Avoids Cloud ops requirements
          No need to retrofit legacy apps

Key questions:

          What about high cost existing infrastructure?
          What about shadow IT?
Probability: 50% Long Term

 3.  Maximum Hybrid

           Legacy Data Center Squeeze
           Service provider / SaaS forward strategy
           Shrinks high cost infrastructure
           Redirects budget to business objects

 

Key questions:

           Cultural resistance
           Managing infrastructure not assets
Probability: 30% Long Term

Action Items:

Recognize critical IT role in today's business.  
Understand the urgency for your future.  
Recognize the sea change in IT economics.  
Analyze application portfolio and look for application "life events."
Be prepared for process, policy, and skill changes.  
Be prepared for internal resistance.
Determine your cloud scenario going forward.

Netflix Architect Adrian Cockroft at InformationWeek Conference

While attending InformationWeek Conference I had the pleasure of attending Adrian Cockroft's, presentation on his pioneering experience as the Netflix Cloud Architect.  Adrian Cockroft's primary motivator was speed wins in the marketplace.  He also points out that Netflix growth rate was very dramatic and without using a cloud strategy it would have been much more challenging to scale at the rate Netfllix grew.  Netflix strategy was all in on the cloud and this is much easier to do now then back then.  Some recall outages during Netflix growth but Mr. Cockroft points out that datacenter kept breaking Netflix not the cloud and that 80% of outages were data center. Netflix is now made up of 600 micro services so the parts can fail without failing entire system - highly available design

 

What learned at Netflix:

1. How fast can we move -Speed wins in the marketplace
2. Remove friction from product development
3. High trust, low process, no hand-offs between teams
4. Freedom and responsibility culture
5. Don't do your own undifferentiated heavy lifting
6. Use simple patterns automated by tools
7. Deploy as micro services to separate concerns into bounded contexts

Peoples reaction

2009 - "You guys are crazy"

2010 - "What Netflix is doing won't work"

2011 - "It only works for "Unicorns" like Netflix

2012 - "We would like to do that but we can't"

 
Read:
The Phoenix Project
Lean Enterprise

Adrian Cockroft made a very compelling argument that cloud infrastructure and Software as a Service is the future.  Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others will continue to compete for hosting and the prices will continue to decrease as they did recently. Moving IT operation onto the cloud will be more and more compelling and easier to accomplish. 

Source: InformationWeek Conference, Adrian Cockroft's Presentation