AWS re:Invent wrap with Solarwinds - CTO Advisor 70

Machine-generated from the episode audio and not hand-corrected, so names and technical terms may be imperfect. The audio is authoritative.

We're coming to you from Las Vegas, AWS re-invent. I have the SolarWinds geek team with me. I'm just gonna call you guys the geek team. I have the head geek and the head geek and the headiest geek, that's what I'm gonna call it. So we'll go around and introduce everyone. Patrick, sorry to start with you. Yeah, so Patrick Hubbard, I've been at SolarWinds now for coming up on 12 years at this point. And I started as a developer and kind of came to enterprise and now back to software actuation and reminding people that there is a way to have some better weekends by using automation and kind of helping people.

There's no weekends in IT, that doesn't happen, even with automation. And then Tom. Thomas LaRock, also head geek with Patrick and I've been at SolarWinds technically seven years. But I've been program analyst, database administrator, kind of a little bit of everything, how IT goes as a sysadmin. And these days, yeah, I get to be a head geek and it's just wonderful. And then Kong. Yes, thanks for having us on by the way, Keith. Kong Yang, SolarWinds head geek, been at SolarWinds three years.

In there before that, office of the CTO with the big four and did consulting, did evangelism, practice lead at a startup that got bought and then joined these two fellows and been smiling ever since. I love, so for disclosure, SolarWinds has sponsored CTO advisor content in the past. This is not a sponsored podcast, just a conversation about the show and what we've seen. This is my first re-invent. My team. Okay, and Kong? Fifth. Fifth, oh my goodness. Patrick?

Third. So developer background, third one. What brought you to re-invent? Because you're a traditional infrastructure guy, right? So yeah, I started out, so servers, hardware, right? Then went virtualization, evangelism. But then when I started with the startup, I'll practice leader, right? So that was my first taste of re-invent and I've been addicted since because the energy, the amount of money that's come in to this event is insane, right? It is insane. So 42, a few numbers, 42,000 people, 18 billion dollar runway with a 40% CAGR.

So year-over-year growth. They're expecting the business to grow at 40%. So the first thing I want to get out the way, I mean, we all see each other. Patrick, my first time meeting you in person. I follow you on Twitter. But this is, we normally meet each other at VMworld. That's right. And this is quite different than VMworld. VMworld has inclusion, but this is quite, I remarked that you could spend two days on the expo floor by itself.

The number of solutions and partners on the show floor, just amazing. SolarWinds had a booth on the show floor. Any of you guys worked the booth? Not technically, but we hung out there quite a bit. Any great conversations? Yeah, I spent a lot of time there. I mean, it always is, right? Because this show, I mean, you're right. It is an energy machine. I mean, it is intentionally, AWS does it for a reason. When you go back to its first year in New York, the whole point was to get influencers, sort of people who would be the technical leaders excited about it.

But now, to your point, it's a commodity. So you have that crossover between traditional enterprise, traditional on-prem. Now they've got multiple clouds. AWS is typically one of several lenders that they're working with, but they're here as much because half of their team has already made the transition or is, what we said, what, two years ago, we'd say, most CIOs would say, sometime by 2017, we'll have 10% of our workloads. And now you look at surveys and it's more like 50% of enterprise has 25% of workloads.

So the deployment is always accelerated. And so they are torn in that conversation between I still got all of my on-prem, but now I've got cloud, and now I'm dealing with containers, and now I'm dealing with orchestration and a bunch of other technologies that they weren't even thinking about. Like if you went to VMware, VMworld three years ago, orchestration wouldn't have been the top conversation. For a little while, it was SDN, and this year, it was mostly orchestration. Yeah, so let's talk a little bit SolarWinds, a little bit.

Not too much, a little bit. SolarWinds is in a unique position. You guys, kind of your range of customers range all the way from the smallest of businesses. So if you have IT at all, then SolarWinds is at an entry point where there's a product for you there that scales all the way up. So AWS re-invented kind of that same geography of customer. And that's a great point. We scale with our customers. So from the one-person shop all the way until the global, the G5 companies, right?

Because we're fundamental in the problems that we address for our customer base, and that's monitoring across the entire whole stack. So that's why we can touch the one-person shop and still bring a lot of value for those enterprises in there. So I love, I lied, we're gonna talk about SolarWinds a bit. Because you guys, I invited you guys over for the conversation for a reason. And that is, you guys are traditional IT, in a sense. You still have customers who.

Deep roots in traditional IT. Yeah, so you're not traditional IT present. You have roots in traditional IT here. So as an organization, you've had to make the transition from, okay, I'm helping people who are maintaining their own infrastructure, to helping people maintain their environment in the cloud. And then people in between, that have a foot in both worlds. Something that we kind of call hybrid IT. I did a e-book for SolarWinds on hybrid IT. Talk to us about that journey, and take me through a typical customer journey, who goes from, you know what, all of my stuff is on-prem, to, oh my god, I just got a P1 ticket, because S3 failed, and I had no idea that we had stuff in S3.

So, LaRock, you haven't spoken. Well, no, I haven't. I was gonna, I mean, Patrick probably knows more about the journey, but I can speak to that company thing, I think. And here's, to me, it's all about, when did you make your entry point? So, if you're a company who made an entry point, and you tried to, you didn't think of yourself as an early adopter, but maybe you were, you were probably in that set of people that tried to get stuff into the cloud and failed.

Right. Yeah, and so now you maybe have a little negative feeling about the cloud, so you're still a little hesitant to it. But if you weren't that early adopter, if you came in that next wave, after the early adopters' failures, and you learned from that, you probably had a little bit more success. And if you're a company that has really just started, then cloud is something you've already known. There's a really good chance that, even though you might not think you're cloud, but you are, you're using O365.

Or like you said, somebody spun up something in S3, and it suddenly became mission critical, and you knew nothing about it. Yeah, I think Pat Gelsinger at the last Real World said that their survey, average customer had eight different cloud partners. Yeah. Not products. No. But eight different cloud partners. Yeah. So, as we're transitioning to kind of this, IT is the gatekeeper of technology, and we're creating service catalogs, and we're divvying out like porridge, IT and technology capability to the enterprise, to the enterprise being able to consume it directly, and then get into a situation where they find, oh wait, hold on, I can't do this by myself.

I need IT's help. What types, what is the help? What is the number one thing that IT departments are coming back and asking for? So, on that point, I found it funny. In Warner's keynote today, right? He talked about change management, right? And how builders, or developers as they, you know, builders as AWS calls them, that's gonna be their challenge, and AWS is gonna help them with change management. And my first thought was CMDB. Ops folks already have it, so welcome back.

Yeah, I interviewed BMC on, I think they even mentioned BMC on the stage, but I had BMC as an interview, and one of the first things they talked about is discovery. Like, you gotta know what you have before you can do anything. Yep, yep, and you know, so to that point, I think having a conversation, how do you break that? It's the same way IT pros break issues that they run into, and that's breaking down silos. And you gotta cut across all those stacks.

It's just that some of these stacks are owned by different providers, and they're outside your org, and you have to negotiate those pieces. Sometimes the only leverage you got are terms and conditions and SLAs that you can, you know, leverage against. Yeah, you can't, you don't have the same ops. Like, in the data center, if Tom came to you and said, Keith, I'm not getting enough, my reads are just too slow, I can go in there and pop in some more disks, and magically, faster, more IOPS, more reads.

And there's that other thing, too, where I think sometimes developers will sort of criticize ops for saying, well, you're always telling me it's too complicated, or you're too inflexible and you can't be agile. But it's sort of that new and shiny versus old thought, right? And so now we're seeing cloud implementations that are old enough, that have been around long enough, that, you know, that thing where, even when the developer comes by and taps you on the shoulder when you're in ops and says, hey, how's it going?

Two years later, no, that doesn't happen. And that doesn't happen. So now you're seeing a lot more integration also between what were atomic standalone projects that were maybe sponsored by CXO, sort of like almost CEO-blessed rogue IT, right? And so now, they're integrating more and more systems, and to your point, a lot of them are disparate, multi-cloud, and discovering that, oh, well, as a developer, I have a set of requirements and an expectation of scope and overall circumference of the complexity of this application, and now it's beginning to grow out, and ops has a lot of rich experience with dealing with what does an app look like three years, five years, 10 years out, with multiple layers of integration that were never planned at the time that those were created, and that's something that developers can actually learn from, and we're finding a lot of times that the developers will come to ops and say, hey, we'd like for you to help us.

So it's a little bit less adversarial than it maybe has been a couple of years ago. So let's switch over to announcements. What were the announcements from the show, or not even just announcements, what was either announcements or experiences that were the highlight of the show for you guys? I'll tell you right now, when Verner today spent 10, 15 minutes talking about security being a shared responsibility across everybody, and it has to be your number one thing, everything you do, you should be thinking, is this secure first?

To me was, I just, thank you, thank you, thank you, because I feel security has always come second to functionality. And the business- Just leave the S3 buckets open to everyone to read. Like you were just saying, though, you were talking about the rogue IT, I mean, the business and the end users don't care what magic happens. They don't care how you got the job done. And if it's a mess back there, we're the ones that usually have to clean up the mess, but they don't care.

I used to tell my service providers, I don't care if you have 30 people in the background typing code to deliver the change that I put in, that I don't care, I just want the result. That functionality and that business driver always has trumped security traditionally, but with every passing day, week, month, with every breach that comes up, and with every breach that's handled incredibly poorly. Breaches are an opportunity for you to shine in how you handle it and take responsibility, or for you to completely bury your company in how you handle it and shed responsibility.

So for him to- I mean, Amazon's a huge market. For him to stand in front of that market and say security should be a focus was a great message to send. I'm hoping it gets received. Patrick, what about you? Well, to kind of dovetail on that, it's interesting, the first real wake up there was deciding that enterprise needs machine learning for dummies, right? This is too complicated. Practitioners don't know what to do with it, so we're gonna simplify that, but as a metaphor for getting people to adopt managed services in general, right?

And I think there were a couple of different presentations where it basically showed before and after, build it yourself, or use managed services version of it. And one of the things that I'm really excited about, and especially from a security perspective, is that there is, whether it's traditional monitoring, or it's telemetry, or to Porter's point about, we were just talking about building out your innovation architecture. Most companies don't even have an area where they have telemetry, where you can even programmatically look at the data and the processes that you're executing, are you actually delighting users or not?

But there's an opportunity with all of this that cloud presents to get people to think about injecting security at the design level, instead of the way we normally do it, which is, first you buy or build the app, then you find infrastructure to run it on, and then maybe you've got a little bit of budget left for monitoring, and then way down at the end, there's security. And instead, making the statement that everyone is a security engineer, that we're moving too fast, to finally move that forward, is fundamental to IT continuing, because sooner or later we get a point where we cannot continue to accelerate, we cannot move fast, because the risk to the business, the real business, where it's not regulatory compliance, or something else that's insecure, but losing a billion dollars of corporate value as a result of a security mistake, that eventually will force innovation speed to hit a plateau.

So secure is a big deal, what do we got? So I have a different take. Okay. You know, security is important, but mine's less on the technical announcements, the feature set announcements that came, because there were plenty to go through. But my most poignant moment was during Warner's keynote, the fact that we had so many distinguished email engineers come to the stage and own it. I mean, from Nora Jones, to Abby Fuller, to the young lady who was, I forget her name, the senior engineer from Amazon who did the demo, where Warner ordered two pizzas and a beer in there.

They were distinguished, skilled, and they articulated complexities simply. And it was fabulously done by, that was the biggest spike to me, because usually conferences will say, oh, women in tech, you know. Yeah, and then they'll show out somebody from marketing. Yep. Which, I'm a marketer, so I don't mind that, but there are examples of women that do. It's just like, hey, this is an SVP or a general manager, and, okay. I love the way that he threw the challenge there, right?

Because in his typical Warner fashion, they came out, all the demos were amazing, and he made the statement, which is, you know, some people say it's hard to find female rock stars in technology. I didn't have any problem with that. Right? Which is, you shouldn't either. You should be looking. We as an industry should be looking. Yeah, I would love to see that same diversity and racial diversity as well. There are plenty of talented, humans are pretty amazing people, and no matter where they're from, what gender, they are pretty smart.

So, I love, I missed that part of the keynote. Unfortunately, I was talking to a bunch of students, and I think that's the thing that I found most interesting about the show. With 42,000 attendees, anywhere from 42,000 to 45,000 are the numbers that I've heard, is that all of these people aren't necessarily IT. And they're not even necessarily developers. They are people looking to build stuff and get technologies solved. What I've said in the past, and I think this show has started to materialize it, is IT is going to get to the point where a IT staff is no longer needed.

It is, I don't need a, when you look at, and I think that's Amazon's goal. Jazzy got on stage and said that they don't build technologies because they are cool. They build technologies because they solve problems. And at the end of the day, if you make the technology as simple as possible, which is not an easy thing to do. You guys are in the business of creating technology and software. It is not easy to make it simple to use. That's just the reality today.

Amazon is pushing the envelope and making software, not just software, but infrastructure. When I first spun up my first VPC in AWS, I'm thinking, oh my God, this would have took me six months to build. From provisioning, I mean from procurement to provisioning to QA and deployment and configuration. I did it in a matter of minutes. And I think that is the thing that I didn't expect is to see so many business users at the conference who I interviewed that had nothing to do with technology in general.

They just, they were builders. They consumed these services. They don't know what it took to build a serverless Aurora. Don't even care. They just want to consume the database. So you talked earlier about there being a difference between VMworld and Riva. And so you just basically articulated exactly what the difference is. You call it builders, however you want to call it. So first of all, Amazon's really an online bookstore that has now grown into being an infrastructure.

I know, I was at an event that was run by an online bookstore. It had 42,000 people here. We went to the profitable part of the company. Right, it's just that they are an infrastructure conference. Look at everything they offer. They started with books and now they're doing storage and everything else and all the services that come with it. And it's a wonderful ecosystem that they have built in 20 plus years. It's an amazing thing. So an event like VMworld is really for the people that are using VMworld technology.

And there's, what do they get? 10, 15,000 people at their event. It's still a sizable event. Yeah, let's say it's 23,000. Right, it's not. But even with 23,000, 42,000 people. Right. Almost twice that number. They're in, it's all walks of IT life. It's a crossover of the people that are doing virtualization and the people that need the orchestration and the people that just want to write the business logic. So yeah, you get a big net, right?

You cast a big net for an event like this. See, this whole myth piece, I just wanted to add to Tom's piece there. You had asked why it resonates with a lot of folks, right? It resonates with a lot of industries from retail to fintech and so forth because AWS has reduced it to the most common denominator, made it easy to self-service the services that they provide, right? And they're going towards the goal of providing services that are frictionless to consume, which means that we may be high-tech and our colleagues and friends in industry, they're building wonderful widgets with this technology, but your dominoes, your pizza huts, they're building the mobile app so that they can get consumers to eat more pizza.

Well, if they leverage the tools that, the services that AWS provides them, their path to getting that app out has shortened because they don't have to do what you talked about, procure, buy, provision, and they set up all those pieces, they can set up functions. Yeah, they just want to deal, they just want to solve business problems. So with that, we'll wrap up. I would love to have talked to you guys about the role of monitoring in all of that. There was a theme on the show floor of the expo floor.

The big boofs were from the monitoring companies, and that is something to definitely dive into. But until then, if people want to find out more about what SolarWinds is doing and what you guys are doing individually, where can they find you online, Patrick? com is a great place to start. com, you can check that out. com, and then we're gonna all over the world. com. The lower third. com. We're four years into that now. com has some of our industry talks with some of our industry fans, so you won't, you'll get to hear from folks like Data Chip, Karen Lopez, Stephen Posket.

Oh, you said Data Chip, I'm like, Karen, you've changed, but okay, now I understand. Okay, okay. All right, and Twitter handles? Perfect Geek. Single Rockstar. Kong Yang. And I'm at CTO Advisor on Twitter. You can find this and other great content. com, and I'll probably end up publishing this as a podcast, because we went a little long. And that's okay, it's gonna be a great conversation. All right, talk to you guys next CTO Dose. Thank you.