Application Modernization - What's Possible with Google Cloud Assessment Tools?
Transcript
(light music) >> I'm Bobby Allen, Google Cloud. Keith Townsend has allowed me to take the whiteboard out for a test drive, but the light board out for a test drive. So, a couple things I want to give to you today that may help you in your transformation journey. So people often ask me, Bobby how do IT decision makers decide to move forward in that? And I want to give you a very simple diagram that's informed by many years of doing cloud computing startups and now being at Google Cloud for the past year or so.
And I believe that decision makers typically like to operate at the intersection of these three circles. So one is what's technically feasible? So technical feasibility, what's the art of the possible? What are the things that I should consider? The second one is what I call financial feasibility. How much is this going to cost me? And then the third one is what I call execution feasibility. Please excuse my writing. This is a little bit harder on the whiteboard than Keith makes a look on Twitter.
But I would argue that decision makers want to be right here in the intersection of those circles. Talk to me about what's possible, talk to me about how much it is and then Bobby can you actually do number three? The things that you say are possible. And so this is where an IT decision maker wants to sit. Right in the middle of all these three things. Is the juice worth the squeeze? Can you do it? And is it a compelling enough vision for me to sell to some other people?
Now this diagram kind of informs the way that Google thinks about transformation. I'm going to draw a different diagram on this side that shows how we help people have conversations around modernization. So think of this box as your customer environment. And what we've done is we've introduced a tool called NFit or fit assessment tool that assesses part of a customer environment, but it doesn't assess everything. And so this is the scope of Nfit which really is typically a virtualized environment. Think your VMware environment.
Over here would be things like Solaris. This would be things like bare metal. This would be things like mainframe. Just do MF that's the abbreviation. So all of these things are out of scope for Nfit. So you've got your customer environment. You have Nfit in terms of which you can assess the show which VM based applications applications can move to containers or servers. And then inside of Nfit you've got three different servers. And I'll explain what these are.
This circle is what we call M2C. These are things that you've assessed in your environment that can automatically move from VMs to containers or servers and there's tooling that we have that can automatically do this. The other apps that you're going to assess in the data center that need to stay on VMs, we call this moving to VMs or migrating to VMs. But then there are other things that are going to be going to do an abbreviation here for advisory thinking. This is consulting.
So you have your scope of your whole environment for which you want to look at for modernization. You have Nfit which is Google's fitness assessment tool seeing which can be, what things can be modernized. And then when you look at that there's some things that can be containerized automatically with our tooling. There's some things that are going to go to VMs with our tooling. And then there's some things that have to be advisory or traditional consultants. What do I mean by that?
Everything that you want to modernize cannot be automatically done. Some things have to be people. You have to look at code. You have to talk to people. You have to understand requirements. Now the goal is that over time we can automatically assess even more. So this box will get bigger, right. We can assess more and more in the environment. Maybe one day a Solaris, a bare metal, mainframe. More than just a virtualized environment. And over time, this bubble will get bigger and this bubble will get smaller.
Meaning there's going to be more that we can automatically modernize and there's going to be less that we have to rely on maintenance consultant for. So what's my point? When you make a case to decision makers make sure you're compelling in terms of the tech, the money and what's possible. And when you want to assess the possibilities make sure you set expectations that everything in the environment may not be able to be assessed and everything may not be able to be automagically, right, am I making up a word there.
Automagically modernized. This is what we're shooting for. Recognize how small this box is compared to the entire environment. There's a vision that this is going to get bigger but today everything cannot be automatic and modernizing the environment. This is why you need to bring in people to do an assessment. Bring in partners, talk to Google Cloud, talk to analysts like Keith Townsend, to understand how much your environment can fit in this box today versus what needs to stay on VMs and go to consultants.
I'm Bobby Allen. This is your short CTO dose on the light board. Stay with Keith for more valuable information about what's happening in the industry and more ways to modernize your applications. Thank you.
