Discussing the Latest Cloud Trends with Cloud Comrade Co-founder Andy Waroma

Highlights from this episode include: 

• Key market drivers that are causing Cloud Comrade’s clients to containerize applications — including the role that the global pandemic is playing.  
• The pitfalls of approaching cloud migration with a cost-first strategy, and why Andy doesn’t believe in this approach. 
• Common misconceptions that can arise when comparing cloud TCO to on-premise infrastructure.
• How today’s enterprises tend to view cloud computing versus cloud-native. Andy also mentions a key requirement that companies have to have when integrating cloud services.
• Andy’s thoughts on build versus buy when integrating cloud services at the enterprise level.
• Why cloud migration is a relatively safe undertaking for companies because it’s easy to correct mistakes.
• Why businesses need to re-think AI and to be more realistic in terms of what can actually be automated. 
• Andy’s must-have engineering tool, which may surprise you.

Links:

• Cloud Comrade LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cloud-comrade/
• Follow Andy on Twitter: @andywaroma
• Connect with Andy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyw/

Transcript

Emily: Hi everyone. I’m Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product’s value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn’t talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I’m hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join me.

Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and today I'm here with Andy Waroma. Andy, I just wanted to start with having you introduce yourself.

Andy: Yeah, hi. Thanks, Emily for having me on your podcast. My name is Andy Waroma, and I'm based in Singapore, but originally from Finland. I've been [unintelligible] in Singapore for about 20 years, and for 11 years I spent with a company called SAP focusing on business software applications. And then more recently, about six years ago, I co-founded together with my ex-colleague from SAP, a company called Cloud Comrade, and we have been running Cloud Comrade now for six years and Cloud Comrade focuses on two things: number one, on cloud migrations; and number two, on cloud managed services across the Southeast Asia region.

Emily: What kind of things do you help companies understand when you're helping with cloud migrations? Is this like, like, a lift and shift? To what extent are you helping them change the architecture of their applications?

Andy: Good question. So, typically, if you look at the Southeast Asian market, we are probably anywhere between one to two years behind that of the US market. And I always like to say that the benefit that we have in Southeast Asia is that we have a time machine at our disposal. So, whatever has happened in the US in the past 18 months or so it's going to be happening also in Singapore and Southeast Asia. And for the first three to four years of this business, we saw a lot of lift and shift migrations, but more recently, we have been asked to go and containerize applications to microservices, revamp applications from monolithic approach to a much more flexible and cloud-native approach, and we just see those requirements increasing as companies understand what kind of innovation they can do on different cloud platforms.

Emily: And what do you think is driving, for your clients, this desire to containerize applications?

Andy: Well, if you asked me three months ago, I probably would have said it's about innovation, and business advantage, and getting ahead in the market, and investing in the future. Now, with the global pandemic situation, I would say that most companies are looking at two things: they're looking at cost savings, and they are also looking at automation. And I think cost savings is quite obvious; most companies need to know how they can reduce on their IT expenditure, how they can move from CAPEX to OPEX, how they can be targeting their resources up and down depending on the business demand what they have. And at the same time, they're also not looking to hire a lot of new people into their internal IT organization. So, therefore, most of our customers want to see their applications to be as automated as possible. And of course, microservices, CI/CD pipelines, and everything else helps them to achieve that somewhat. But first and foremost, of course, it's about all services that Cloud provides in general. And then once they have been moving some of those applications and getting positive experiences, that's where we typically see the phase two kicking in, going into cloud-native microservices, containers, Kubernetes, Docker, and so forth.

Emily: And do you think when companies are going into this, thinking, “Oh, I'm going to really reduce my costs.” Do you think they're generally successful?

Andy: I don't think in a way that they think they are. So, especially if I'm looking at the Southeast Asian markets: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, and perhaps other countries like Vietnam, Myanmar, and Cambodia, it’s a very cost-conscious market, and I always, also like to say that when we go into a meeting, the first question that we get from the customers, “How much?” It is not even what are we going to be delivering, but how much it's going to cost them. That's the first gate of assessment. So, it's very much of an on-premise versus clouds comparison in the beginning.

And I think if companies go in with that type of a mindset, that's not necessarily the winning strategy for them. What they will come to know after a while is that, for example, setting up disaster recovery systems on an on-premise environment, especially when a separate location is extremely expensive, and doing something like that on the Cloud is going to be very cost-efficient. And that's when they start seeing cost savings. But typically, what they will start seeing on Cloud is a process cost-saving, so how they can do things faster, quicker, and be more flexible in terms of responding to end-user demands.

Emily: At the beginning of the process, how much do you think your customers generally understand about how different the cost structure is going to be?

Andy: So, we have more than 200 customers, and we have done more than 500 projects over the six years, and there's a vast range of customers. We have done work with companies with a few people; we have done companies with Fortune 10 organizations, and everything in between, in all kinds of different industries: manufacturing, finance, insurance, public sector, industrial level things, nonprofits, research organizations. So, we can't really say that each customer are same. There are customers who are very sophisticated and they know exactly what they want when going to a cloud platform, but then there are, of course, many other customers who need to be advised much more in the beginning, and that’s where we typically...