Cloud Repatriation - What's Real with Oracle's Jeff Eberhard
Transcript
(dramatic music) >> Welcome back to "The CTO Advisor Studio" coverage of Oracle Cloud World 2022. I have with me Jeff Eberhard, Senior Director of Cloud Engineering at Oracle. Jeff, it's been, we've followed each other on Twitter for years now, right? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> And this is our first time meeting each other. And unfortunately, I'm going to go right at you. >> That's what we're here for. So first off, you were at the VMware User Group Conference, User Con in Chicago.
I hate that I missed you there. It's a great gathering of practitioners looking to do amazing things with technology as they move forward and learning not just about on-premises stuff with which they're probably the utmost experts, probably the utmost expert in on-premises cloud community, VMware user group community, great for that, but I want to flip the conversation. >> Jeff: Okay. >> I've spent a lot of time today talking to Oracle customers about that journey to the cloud. >> Jeff: Okay. >> What we haven't talked about is this journey from the cloud to hybrid.
Now, I'm not going to pretend that there's this mash move from the public cloud to the private data center and folks are repatriating workloads. But if I do the basic math, I know people who started their career in 2012 or later, just never touched the data center. >> Jeff: Yeah. >> And we're in the world where the math is just the math. If I have a application that was built in the cloud or migrated to the cloud at one point and I've started my career in the data center and my CIO tells me I need to move to a hybrid cloud model and I've never touched a private data center, where do I start that journey?
Or is that even a realistic view? Am I making this up? >> No, no. " And at certain scales it absolutely does, right? At other scales, it doesn't. If you're a 100 million employee company, you're probably going to build your own data centers and you're going to make it run and you're going to be fine. But if you're smaller than that, there are definitely applications that are going to fit better in the cloud, there are other applications that are going to fit better data on-premises, and there's going to be some that are across multiple clouds.
But the thing that, you know, your CIO's telling you, "Hey, I want you to look about maybe bringing things back on-premises," what you have to realize is if you started your career in 2012 and you've never touched a data center, you haven't ever gotten to hug the hardware, right? If you don't have the blinking lights that have been yours- >> If you've never cut your finger on a rack, if you only have a point of reference of what that is, you're in trouble. >> You're going to be in a lot of trouble because there's a lot of architectural decisions that have to be made all the way from power and cooling, all the way up to the actual infrastructure that you're running things on.
And so if you get asked to do that, you're going to spend months, if not years, unless you have a really good partner to work with to try and build that out. Or there are offerings, right, and obviously we're chatting today, where we can take the hardware layer off of you, but provide what your CIO may be asking for. Maybe they grew up in the VMware era, right? The 1999 to 2012, everything was on-premises, everything was using VMware, and they think that might be the way to go.
Well, we'll take care of all the basics for you and hand you a VMware infrastructure that if you know what to do with it, you can run. You don't worry about the hardware anymore, you don't worry about the data centers, the power, the cooling, the maintenance, the downtime. All you worry about is what applications am I going to run on there? >> So we're not going to review this. I'll reference the videos below, but we talked to Prophecy, OCVS and OCI customer.
We talked to Deloitte with talks to the wide range of customers across the industry, and they've done the math. If you have enough workload density, these VMware Cloud solutions work financially compared to colo or building your own data center, et cetera. And to your point, you don't have to worry about the hardware bits and pieces in the design. But I'm going to push back a little bit. >> Okay. >> And say, but if I was born in the cloud, I've never used a V center.
>> Yeah. >> Am I still stretching the concept of what cloud is too far? What is that learning curve if I'm going from, you know, whether it's Oracle Cloud, AWS control plane, these different cloud control planes, and I need to go to this data center, V center type control plane? Am I going to rock this? >> It could be hard, right? I'll admit, the learning, there's a lot of things that you can learn. And you mentioned across the different control planes within each individual cloud, As you know, setting up a network on each cloud can be a little bit different.
But if you take VMware and you deploy it and you uplevel that by one level, you can get a common control plane across all of the clouds. And if you have that common control plane across all of the clouds, now is it something that you can learn? Yeah, VMware has a ton of training. There's a lot of free resources online. They could probably watch half of of your videos over the past few years and learn enough to be able to manage it, right?
With what you've done with the CTOAHI, right? >> You've built that, you've done that, you've played with it. But if you can come to a common denominator, and VMware really has been the common denominator for on-premises for two decades plus, what VMware's trying to do now is migrate themselves to the cloud and become that multi-cloud common denominator. With OCVS we give you a lot of control over that. Some of the other clouds take away a little bit of the control in favor of maybe a little bit easier of a deployment.
But what you have to realize is you, that individual practitioner may not, you may have been born in the cloud, so to speak, but I bet you 75, 80, 90% of your coworkers were in that VMware days. And this is a good opportunity for you to be able to expand your abilities, and it's a great opportunity for your coworkers to be able to expand their abilities into the cloud as well. >> So, I see a lot of advantages to this and I think I want to go two different ways.
I want to go from a geopolitical and geographic perspective. >> Sure. >> The other one is technical and cloud native, 'cause your role has been expanded over the past few months to include cloud native. As I'm thinking about the ever growing landscape, I have, you know, let's be honest, I have my Azure control plane, I have my OCI control plane, I have my VMware control plane. And now I've tried to avoid it, but I have my Kubernetes and cloud native control plane.
>> Yeah. >> How should I be thinking about that overall governance model when I think about my approach to cloud? Should I be thinking about abstracting this all with OCVS and VMware? Should I be thinking about native services where I can get native services? If I can default, where should I default? >> Customers are going to be working (clears throat), excuse me. You were at HashiConf two weeks ago, right? HashiConf has a lot of tools to help try and abstract some of those control planes from the cloud-native perspective.
VMware has a lot of things that can help, again, abstract that from the cloud native perspective. So from an overall governance thing, honestly, as a company you have to make the decision what am I willing to deal with? Some companies are going to say, "I only want one or two cloud providers. We're going to get to know them very well. We're going to build out tools and partner with other companies to get the right sets of tools to be able to run it," and they're going to do just fine.
Other companies are truly going to pick where is the best place to run my application for what I'm doing. And so if I'm a big Microsoft customer, I may run it all in Azure. I'm a big Oracle customer, I'm going to run all of my Oracle applications in Oracle. I may have had my folks that started in the cloud 12 years ago running everything on AWS. And does that require more work? Yes, but can it help bring down your overall costs of ownership?
Can it help make your applications, your users, the people that use whatever it is you're building happier? Probably. You have to understand how much you're willing to deal with. >> So let's talk about friction. >> Sure. >> When it comes to geography and this idea that if I adopt a Oracle Cloud VMware solution or some other VMware solution that this magically solves my data center problems. S. I can make those selections. If I have to go back, back to a VMware type solution, how do I make that move?
Because again, it gives me pause to think, okay, I have to think about what physical storage array I'm going to use, where that storage array is going to be physically hosted, the networking interconnect between it, the speed of connectivity, egress, et cetera. And if I have to worry about colo, whether that colo has the power or cooling, et cetera, for me to meet the application needs, and I have to do the legal ease to host the data there. Does VMware Cloud solutions solve that problem, that geopolitical problem for me?
>> It can. So Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is available in 40 regions worldwide right now. We're on six of the seven continents. We don't have anything in Antarctic yet, but maybe one day, right? We have more opening. And by having so many locations, it gives you the opportunity to choose where you want to go. But there's something that may come up, right? Maybe we're not in a location that you want to be. And so if that happens to be the case, but you still don't want to have to figure out all of that data center side of things, Oracle offers something called Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer.
We can actually build an Oracle region wherever you want it. >> So we could have an Oracle region next to The CTO Advisor, a hybrid infrastructure. They decent (indistinct)- >> With enough money, absolutely, right? That's the thing. We'll put the racks there. >> Keith: They'll need to find a nice sponsor. (both laugh) >> We'll put the racks, we'll put the servers, we'll manage it. We'll manage the entire environment for you, and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is what we call a a primary solution on Oracle Cloud.
Which means when a new region opens, we are available. And so I bring that up because you mentioned a lot of cloud providers have multiple regions. I would challenge you to look at our competitors and see if their equivalent of Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is available in all their regions. Not only is it not, but in a lot of cases, in fact all of the cases, you have different pricing in every region that you go to. So as someone who's trying to build an infrastructure, you need some predictability in what the costs are going to be, because if you build everything in us-east-1 and you extrapolate from that, that's what it's going to cost to build it out worldwide.
If you're not on Oracle Cloud infrastructure, you're going to be wrong. And you can be wrong to a very bad level where it's going to cost you a lot more money to put it in Asia or Africa or South America. With OCVS, Not only are we everywhere, but we cost the same amount in every single one of our regions. So you can actually plan what you're going to do. And if your business changes and you need, we have a customer that was in the UK, and due to Brexit, they had to leave.
Well, they had to create a European equivalent of it then. But the time to get that cola facility, get their licensing, get global deployment rights, order hardware, unfortunately it's still a problem at times to get hardware, that was going to take them upwards of eight months and that was going to put them past when they needed to be in Europe. They called us up, and literally over the weekend we spun up an OCVS environment for them. They migrated their European workloads out of the UK and they were up and running.
You can't do that in the non-cloud world. >> So two years after me publishing the CTO via the hybrid infrastructure report on the different VMware Cloud solutions, I still get pushback from the VMUG Community, that community that is used to building by hand and artisanally deploying solutions. I looked at a tweet this morning and they say, you know what? The VMC type of ecosystem is just the VMware Cloud GUI, or the vSphere GUI in the public cloud. >> Right. >> Let's talk to a audience that's near and dear to our heart.
How is some of that community missing the point? >> So VMware has done a really good job on telling their multi-cloud story, right? If you go to, I came from VMware. If you go to VMware and they tell their multi-cloud story, every cloud is the same. You run that common control plane. And to a point, that is true. The big difference though is with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution you can run kind of that high level architecture, but for the people that are the ones that are digging in they want to make changes, you're working with third party software providers, you've created your own PowerShell scripts, you've done all of this stuff, and those other clouds, they don't work without some pretty major modifications.
With OCVS, we're running just VMware. It's pure vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and HCX. What's that mean for you? If you're one of those ones that's doing your own magic there, you do it the exact same way you would do it on-premises. You don't have to actually make changes. And so for those kind of people that are saying, "Well, VMware is just the VMware GUI in the cloud," in a lot of cases, that's true. In our case, it can be or you can can customize it to your heart's content.
We had one customer take NSX out. They didn't see a value in it. And so they had the the choice, right? And that's one of the things about what we're trying to provide, is we want to provide choice. If you want to use NSX, great. If you don't, remove it. We provide vSAN, but if you need block storage or file storage because you're doing second tier, third tier storage, and archiving, great. We can attach those into it as well.
You really want to use your third party backup or DR Provider that isn't supported in the other clouds. Guess what, if it's supported on VMware, it's going to be supported on us. And that's the key because customers don't want to make those changes if they don't have to. >> Yeah, Jeff. I talked to a Oracle engineer the other day and they were talking to one of the ISVs. " I'm like, wait, no, this is not just the cloud, this is just vSphere.
If it's certified to the work in vSphere it will work on this. And I think you hit on the thing that I want to close out on, which is choice. This is not a environment where we can say there's four or five different solutions for the entire industry. I think eight, nine, 10 years ago we could probably have said that, that most customers fit in four to five buckets. We're talking about dozens of buckets. The need for engineering and financial flexibility is huge.
There was a time maybe back when I started The CTO Advisor where I could say I've seen about every enterprise IT data center configuration that needed to be seen. In the days of hybrid infrastructure that's simply not possible within one practice, let alone one person. If you're questioning the value of any of these solutions that these cloud providers and OEMs are coming out with, I can guarantee you that there's a audience for it. The industry has shifted. How do you get your arms around it?
Well, one, you can consume CTO Advisor content. We try and talk about all of it. But two, you need to get out into the community. If you can't make it out to Oracle Cloud world, go to a VMUG event, go to a Kubernetes meet up. Go talk to other industry players and understand how they're solving these complex problems. If you don't think cloud repatriation is happening, you're probably not talking to enough people. It is happening, not enough to stop the juggernaut that is cloud growth, but it is definitely happening and you need to be prepared for it.
com. If you don't buy what I'm selling, I'm more than willing to have the conversation with you @ctoadvisor on Twitter. DMs are open. Talk to you next episode of "The CTO Advisor Studio" at Oracle Cloud World 2022.
