AWS re:Invent 2020 - CaaS - Confusion as a Service?
Transcript
>> Hey, how's it going? It's Keith Townsend, Principal of The CTO Advisor. You're watching another CTO Dose. And even though AWS Reinvent was virtual, we could not not have our favorite cloud economist on the line. You guys have commented on his wisdom and kind of his analogs. He's a minister. His second job is to cloud economist, he's primarily a minister. So he's, he's always coming up with these cool analogies. Bobby Allen title yet to be determined. >> Yet to be determined.
Yeah, maybe we'll get to that later on in this session. But yeah, thank you for having me back, Keith. Love the program. Love what you and Melissa are building over there, The CTO Advisor, very appreciative that you have me back on. >> So let's jump into it. This is our annual kind of AWS jam. Last year, it was either last year, or year before, you compared AWS to Uber. >> Mm-hmm. >> And that analogy really went well, and people understood it, they embraced it.
This year, >> Mm-hmm? >> what's the theme that you're walking away from three weeks of content for AWS Reinvent? >> Yeah, and I have to apologize to your listeners, Keith, cause I'm going to do a poor job of summarizing three weeks and tons of keynotes and 133 announcements. But the theme for me, Keith, this year, was cloud grows up. Cloud grows up. Because I feel like we saw the maturation of Amazon embracing things like hybrid cloud. Embracing things. So let me step back.
I've been hard on a lot of the cloud providers before, Keith, rolling out what I considered to be CaaS, but not containers as a service, confusion as a service. (chuckles) Because they're throwing so many different things at people. what I believe they did this year, Keith, again, along that theme of cloud grows up, I believe they effectively rolled out chaperone as a service, right? And so I've got a teen and a tween, Keith, so this is close to my heart. And I've said before on some of our friends, cloud, to me, is at best a teenager that just learned how to drive.
And so what we're finding is Amazon is not just throwing stuff at us. They're throwing help and guardrails and boundaries and curfews at us. So they're giving us someone that could ride with us on the cloud journey. Cause I believe cloud is an operating model and a journey not a place or destination. They're giving us help, and a lot. If you look at, to me, the thread that ran through a lot of the announcements is, we've got to help you not just build but operate.
>> So Amazon, to that point I can see where you say cloud grown up. Amazon to this point, this is a observation that I've seen over the past three weeks is that Jeff Bezos in kind of his day one keynote represented the total addressable market for Amazon Web Services as all of IT, and the cloud part of it is only like four or six percent of the market today. But there's all this other stuff. And what I read that as, is that Amazon, up to this point, has been very opportunistic in what they've gone after.
" >> Uh-huh. >> And what they've gone after, what they've started to go after, is kind of the messy part. So you get to a point of a business where it's super easy to represent growth from a percentage perspective, but you get to a point where, yeah, we've kind of gone out and we've shaken all the trees and we've kind of letting the stuff fall out. Now we got to go out and actually harvest. And we have to come with technologies and techniques, kind of like fracking and oil.
They're in that fracking part of the business where they actually have to get their hands dirty. >> They do. I think you nailed it, Keith. I mean, they have gone after a lot of the low hanging fruit. They've got the developers have been excited, the builders have been excited. But when you really want to go after those mature moneymaking enterprise workloads, you got to deal with the messy stuff. The physical servers, the mainframes, the IBM's. Like, you got to go after those other things that are not just kind of clean virtualized type things.
And I think what we're seeing is, number one, they got to go after the harder stuff. But number two, Keith, I would argue the definition of success has changed. And I'm going to use a marriage analogy for this, right? I always talk to my teams about the fact that, especially when you're working in the world of cloud and startups and things like that, the goal is not to just be married. The goal is to not be sleeping on the couch. (chuckles) And I think what Amazon is doing now is they're saying it's not just about getting the cloud, but it's about being productive in cloud and operating in cloud.
Because I think what they're seeing is you can't have 10 customers that come to Amazon and eight are complaining about their bills, or screaming that they've spent too much. Because they're going to hit a plateau in terms of what people are willing to move to the cloud. And that's where I think a lot of this ability to kind of help and come alongside is to say, "Look okay? We don't want to just get your money. " And let me pull back, Keith, cause I think I want to throw this out for your users.
This is one thing that I'm seeing, in cloud and in life, Keith, we are struggling with how to differentiate better versus different. Better versus different. Do I need to do the same thing and tweak it, or do I need to wipe the slate clean and try something different? So for example, do my wife and I need to drive two more fuel efficient cars because we care about the environment, or do we only need one car now, because we don't need to drive as much?
And I think what's happening is when people look at all the different options that are coming out, again 133 announcements, Keith, in three weeks! 33 in Jassy's keynote itself. This is where I think people are stuck. " And this is what I've said before on social media. The way you choose is more important than what you choose. Because if you don't have a way to choose every other option is just going to overwhelm you and may cause you to prematurely abandon something that might've worked.
So, cloud, Keith, has shortened the amount of time between options, right? Before we might get a refresh, what, once every few years? Then it was once a year. " >> So I like your thoughts on two parts of that equation. I was on another kind of Amazon rap service, or rap session, and one of the walkaways that I came away with, one walkaway was: Amazon is now the new old HPE. Or the new old HP. You remember the old HP where you looked at all the bits, bands and pieces that they had, and you're like, "Man, that's a lot of Lego.
"I can build whatever I want. " >> Yup. >> And HP kind of like, "Oh, you know what? " >> Yeah. They just give you the building blocks, and then you have to figure it. >> And they were too big to surface up solutions, and HPE realized that they sell to a market where you have to give them a start. You have to start them somewhere. I have to get you to the 80%, and giving me S3 buckets is not the 80%.
That's, now it's 10%, 20% of the solution. The entire solution is what Andy Jassy was talking about, where 80% is Amazon getting into the call center business and delivering call center services, which is built on these building blocks. >> Yup. >> The other thing that I would like kind of you to riff on is this before the start of AWS Reinvent I haven't did a post AWS Reinvent inventory, but 185 services in their catalog. >> Uh-huh. >> The enterprise has gotten to the point where we can't get flash, not flash storage, we can't get flash based applications, Adobe flash based applications, off or out of our environment.
(chuckles) >> Yeah. >> Because we have to support these legacy applications. Amazon is getting to an age where me as a consumer I'm appreciative that this same service that I've used the past 10 years is still here. But 185 services. >> Yeah. >> How long can they maintain that at scale? >> So I'm in Charlotte, for your listeners that don't know, that's a banking town. And they would say too big to fail. I would say Amazon is too big to choose.
There are too many different options, or too many different things. And folks are just, folks are struggling, Keith. So again, great observation with the building blocks. Amazon absolutely went more towards solutions, right? Call centers, IoT, supply chains or cold chains for like moving things through the whole supply chain that have to be cold and refrigerated and all that. Like they're rolling out entire solutions because the building blocks are not good enough. But I think what's also interesting when we look at this whole thing is just...
Let me pull back, Keith. My thesis for 2020 has been technology's the easy part, data and behavior are the hard parts. >> Mm. >> Data and behavior, change in the behavior, change in the culture, is what's tough. And what I think Amazon, and a lot of enterprises, are realizing is my people can adopt the tech before they can catch up to the culture and the behavior change. And that's why we've gotten a lot of the messes that we've had, because we're taking old behavior to a new place with all these different options, this buffet of 180+ services, and we're getting overwhelmed.
So, not too big to fail, but too big to choose. And what ends up happening is, the reality, Keith, the problem is not the tech, right? And so I often talk to customers about three types of debt around this kind of problem. " And so there's a level where I'm getting so many options that I have no idea what I want for dinner. When everything is an option, right? I don't know what I want for dinner. I don't know what I want to eat.
And Amazon is saying we can cook whatever you want, but part of it, Keith, I think I need a meal kit now because there are too many different, the whole recipe book is there. It's too much to choose from. >> Yeah, my son's girlfriend bought me a cocktail book last year for Christmas. Amazing, it's a couple of hundred pages. I don't know if it's like a couple of hundred pages, but it feels like a couple of hundred pages! >> Uh-huh.
>> It's just too many options. So, you know, I kind of go to instead of, I thought I'd try all these new drinks? But instead of trying these new drinks, I kind of just go to the drinks already knew that there's a set recipe for it. >> Yup. >> And that's more or less, it's not just IT. This is just human nature. When you go to a restaurant that has a huge menu, The Cheesecake Factory, and you ended up spending a half an hour choosing what to eat.
And for those of you that's international, The Cheesecake Factory is this over the top casual dining restaurant that has like a 30 page menu. I might be exaggerating, but I'm not. >> You're not. >> And it's just overwhelming to decide what you want to have for dinner that night. >> Mm-hmm. >> So I guess the question that I want to ask you, Bobby, in closing, is what do enterprises do? Like where do I start? When I'm talking about, and I hate to use the term digital transformation, but as IT folk, we're charged with changing the technology in the way that supports the business.
>> Yes. >> If we, at this point, if you haven't already brought into cloud is the answer to all your challenges, then you're probably one, listening to this episode. And two, you're probably overwhelmed because where do you start? Like, how do I start to untangle this? >> So I would say I don't know that there's one answer to rule them all, but this is what I'll say. Cloud is not a magician, cloud is an amplifier. Cloud makes you more of what you already are.
And so people often use the gym analogy for cloud. I'm going to use the weights analogy for cloud. If you think of cloud is weights at the gym, if you apply weights to good form you're going to get stronger. If you apply weights to bad form you're going to hurt yourself. And so I would say don't start with the tech, start with, again, the problem you're trying to solve. And again, am I looking for better or different? So I'm going to go back to The Cheesecake Factory thing real quickly, Keith.
What I do when I travel, I get salmon almost everywhere I go. I'm a fish guy, right? >> Mm-hmm. >> If you're a Longhorn or Cheesecake, I do fish. I do salmon typically all the time. " Boy, that Chilean sea bass, ooh, oh my goodness! (laughs) That wasn't a better type of salmon, that was something different. And so what was cool was, sometimes different is just a little bit adjacent to what we're used to and I can try that and experiment with low risk.
And then I'm like, yeah, this is, if they have the sea bass, the salmon is now second tier. And I guess my point in all this is, again, start with what you want and what you're trying to accomplish. And I'll leave the audience with this question, Keith, what does better actually mean to you? If you can't define what better means, how are you going to decide which of these options may help you get there? >> So Bobby, with that, with options, where are you working now?
>> So here's what I'll say, Keith. So for the friends of the program, I, you know, crazy enough, I decided to transition in the middle of a pandemic at the end of the year. And what I'll say is we're going to come back and talk about that in January. I have decided to transition. I'm riding off into the sunset to do some different things. We may even put some things out there for the community. Did I go to a cloud provider?
Did I go to do my own thing? Did I go to an SI? Did I go to a vendor, or to an enterprise? Come back after Christmas, after everybody has a merry Christmas and a happy new year, come back on the program and check out where I landed and I'll tell you why. >> Wow, you know what? I love that. On that, we'll leave it with the cliffhanger. Visit us in the new year. I don't know if this is going to be the last episode of The CTO Advisor/CTO Dose on the new year.
I really do hope you're enjoying the new website. That has been a labor. I want to say is a labor of love, it's been a labor. We are absolutely proud of it, check it out. com. Subscribe to all the things. Have a Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and a great new year. Catch you soon.
