Exploring 8x8’s Cloud Native Journey with Chief Product Officer Dejan Deklich

Emily and Dejan cover the following points:

• 8x8’s journey to a leading cloud technology provider.
• Why 8x8 decided to migrate to Kubernetes, a move that gave them the flexibility to run workloads wherever they want.
• Dejan’s thoughts on the Kubernetes migration, and how it’s helped the company improve its operations. For example, Kubernetes has helped 8x8 migrate away from several legacy systems.
• The biggest challenges and surprises that the 8x8 team experienced during their migration journey, such as getting engineering teams to embrace a culture built around monitoring, observability, and documentation.
• How 8x8 has avoided “feature bloat” and maintained a product that performs at a high level, while staying true to the features that are important for its core customer base. 
• The strategy of obtaining buy-in from stakeholders and fellow executives by focusing on business problems, instead of technical issues. This included cost, velocity of innovation, global scale, and so on.
• How 8x8’s cloud-native architecture has made it faster and easier to scale. 

Transcript

Announcer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.

Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm Emily Omier, and I am talking with Dejan Deklich, from 8x8.

Dejan: So, I'm the Chief Product Officer at 8x8. To give you an idea, 8x8 is now 16 or 1700 employees worldwide, 450 million in revenue, give or take, offices all over the world, customers all over the world. I'm responsible for all product management, engineering, QA, project management operations for all the products worldwide for 8x8.

Emily: Can you give me a little bit of an idea of 8x8’s history in the Cloud?

Dejan: So, 8x8 has been around, probably, a lot longer than most companies you're talking about. We've been public 30 years, give or take. We have been in the business of communication and collaboration since early 2000s. As you can imagine, we have gone through so many different tech stacks, architectures, and so on, that it is pretty amazing. 

We have, in the last several years, done a massive cleanup and rebuild of our software stack. We rebuilt pretty much all of the mobile apps, desktop apps, web apps. We rebuilt the platform starting with billing and provisioning all the way down to how the voice traverses the world. So, it's been a incredible couple of years, incredible journey where I would argue we have gone from the early versions of hosted service to early versions of Cloud, maybe 10 years ago, and we are now what I would like to call a proper cloud technology company. And it's been a very interesting, difficult journey. We learned a lot. We messed up a lot of things, then we learned some more than they did it correctly.

Emily: When you first moved to Kubernetes, and the modern public cloud, what was the rationale? What were their business reasons?

Dejan: Those multiple steps there. We moved to public cloud I don't know, five, six, seven years ago. We ran a lot of things in Amazon. And to be fair, we still also have data centers around the world. So, let me explain quickly what we actually running because I think it's important. So, we have, I think 16 data centers around the world, and then we run in pretty much every region of Amazon, we use Google Cloud extensively, and we have now shifted a lot of workloads to Oracle Cloud. At the same time, business is threatening me with Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud as something that might be coming our way in the next couple of quarters. So, data centers are there because on the networking layer, the Cloud does not yet give us what we need for the realtime voice and video transmission. 

We actually are the best voice provider in the industry. We have proven that, and that's where your milliseconds really matter, therefore networking still sits in data centers. As soon as the backbone can be moved into Amazon, and we are told that could happen in the next three to four years, we will move likely everything to the Cloud. So, what we have generally in the Cloud are different applications, and the reason for that is simply the velocity of deploying and scaling them. 

So, what matters to us is, on one hand, the global reach: we have customers in 150 countries around the world. We have to have data centers close to the customers. And the applications need to be as close to the customer as possible, therefore all the different regions of Amazon, and Google, and whatnot. So, as you can imagine, managing all of that, monitoring all of that is a non-trivial exercise. 

So, we moved to Kubernetes, in large reason, simply because it is one underlying framework that allows us to run workloads wherever we want. So, to give you an idea, we launched a video meetings product to compete with Zoom. We had, on launch, a couple of hundred thousand users, nothing really. And then, this COVID-19 happened, and within a period of weeks, we now hit 15 million users. The only way you can scale a system like that is if you have a properly built underlying architecture, everything horizontally scalable. 

I was blown away, everything really worked. People were super busy, but by having proper cloud architecture, we were able to actually scale, and fulfill the demand that we have seen worldwide. Now, the nice thing is, as you put more and more workloads on top of Kubernetes, you can shift them between clouds as you want, or data centers as you want. And I think that's number one reason why we went with Kubernetes. 

I love Amazon, I love Google, and nothing makes me happier than writing them a million-dollar checks, but I also want to be able to move the workloads wherever I can run them cheaply. And, to me, that's very important. I don't have unlimited budget; I have to be able to play the game and get the most compute and the most bandwidth for the lowest cost that I can, and Kubernetes lets me do that.

Emily: And would you say that Kubernetes was a technical decision or a business decision or both?

Dejan: That's a good question. I think normally, the way we operate at 8x8, you start with the business problem. The business problem was we don't want to be locked into one cloud. We want to be able to run wherever we want to run, and on top of that, we have customers in Europe who are not very friendly towards Amazon, and want us to run on other clouds. And then, we took a peek: what can we do? What's the fastest and easiest way to do it? Turned out it was Kubernetes, so that's the way we went.

Emily: What did the move to Kubernetes, what was it like? What were some of the surprises?

Dejan: It was very interesting. It is still very interesting. So, on one hand, the good thing was we have already broken the monoliths in the past God knows how many years, into services. But to get things running properly in Kubernetes, you have to go a bit deeper, you actually have to really clean up your code, and so on, and so on. So, one thing that I thought was incredibly useful was this allowed us to, for the first time in 8x8 history, create a proper template for a service where all yo...