 with this benefit of cloud native. Thank you for coming to our panel. It is a pleasure to have everyone here. I'm going to allow each of you to introduce yourself. My name is Simon Forster and I'm a technical architect and engineer. I'm a freelancer in financial services in the city of London. And I also serve as a CNCF ambassador. Hello, my name is Annalisa Genaro. I take care of marketing and communication for SparkFabric, a tech company focused on cloud native applications and customer development in Italy. And I'm a KCDI organizer. I'm engaged in the working group of Glossary for the Italian team. I'm a CNCF ambassador and I'm part of the Cartographus Working Group. And I'm Danielle Cook. I am a CNCF ambassador. I am a co-organizer of the Cartographus Working Group and I work at a company called AppCD which provides generative infrastructure from code. We'll just jump right into the questions now that you've introduced yourself. So when we're talking about the quality of cloud native and the profitability of cloud native, how do you convince a business to realize that that is a benefit to them? So the business benefits of cloud native are super, super vital and important. And we have created the cloud native maturity model a few years ago as part of this Cartographus Working Group where we were looking at what technology do people have to get to onboard? What policies are they looking at? What process, like what are the people need to do? And so we created the maturity model in 2021 and kind of evolved it over the last two years and realized in the last, you know, in 2023 that we weren't focusing enough about the business value. And I think we as an industry know that there's been a lot of cloud redundancies or, you know, people redundancies. There's companies that have been going out of business but yet we need to make sure that everyone understands that cloud native is really important and it's helping driving business goals at companies. So we put down to this model, we're here because we are very passionate about communicating these business values and getting everybody and technologists being able to communicate why the tech you're using and adopting will drive business goals. So Annalisa, I wanted to address this question to you. In regard to maturity models, how does that work? I just don't really have a concept of how that works. Could you explain that for us? The cloud native maturity model is a sort of, let's say roadmap and assessment tool. It's organized according to four pillars which are people, process, policy and technology and it identifies five stages of the evolution. So somehow it gives an idea of where the company is at a certain moment of the journey and let's say it helps understanding what are the next steps to be taken and let's say that it has different target audiences. Let's say it's for everyone, to be honest. It was designed as a comprehensive resource for those who are interested in adopting cloud native technologies and processes from engineering practitioners to any kind of managers. So it addresses to anyone regardless of their role and expertise. Let's mention C-suite executives, technology executives, development teams, operations teams and any kind of business stakeholders like project managers, product managers, but even academic and research communities or students. So somehow it needs to be accessible and relevant for many different audiences, for many different people, personas, whether they are beginners or advanced experts, whether they are tech or non-tech people. It's a kind of space where different players of the organization need to play the same game to make the cloud transformation successful. Sometimes we need someone to be an ambassador, to be a bridge between the business interests and the technological interests of the engineering team, for example. So I'm thinking that I would like to ask Simon to respond to how that works and in terms of being a technical person, how do you convince business people that it will benefit them? How do you work together and bridge that gap between the technical people and the financial folks? Thank you, that's a really good question. So the first thing I do whenever I have to discuss the value or the business value of the cloud native computing I'm doing is first off. It's often very easy for me as an engineer or as an architect to identify areas where maybe I can save some money. I can do things such as change my mode and my node types. I can adjust the amount of capacity I'm allocating. I can set limits. I have many techniques at my disposal. The challenge is that I need to go and be able to say, well, when I do this, this frees up our resources and our financial resources to be able to go and invest in other areas for this application. It can either go back into the application's solution design, such as expanding resilience or scalability, or it can go into additional development, or it can go into other areas. Annalisa mentioned the key areas of process and policy as well. CICD is an excellent example of a process that we can further invest in as well. That's just a couple of easy points there. When we speak about cost, now, Danielle, you're speaking from the business perspective and tell us about how we justify cost. Well, I think a lot of us have been walking around the show floor seeing a lot of vendors out there talking about cost optimization and what we need to do, and obviously there's conversations around right sizing. But that isn't necessarily, in the maturity model, how we talk about cost, because we're talking about it in terms of when you start out on your cloud-native journey, you're not necessarily going to save money. You are gonna actually be spending a lot of money, running your traditional environments, and then starting on your cloud-native environments, and we talk about when you get to level three that you're in the messy middle, and that messy middle is you're spending a lot of money, and it's not great. And so if you've communicated the value of cloud-native to your business as a cost-cutting exercise, you're probably not gonna get very far. Versus if you're talking about it in terms of we need to meet customer demand, we need to be able to, and I know Booth say it too, ship applications faster. Well, what are you doing that's gonna allow that? And hey, we have a cost implication that that's gonna be, and we're gonna talk about how that cost implication is not gonna be great for a while, but then it's gonna, the reward's going to end up there eventually. Thank you. A similar experience that I could relate, for example, the team that I work with, when the project initially began, we had to hire a lot of architects and engineers, and the cost seemed to increase rapidly and exponentially. Convincing the business folks, the financial people that this was a good idea was very challenging. So in the future, and you said the messy middle, how does the process look and does it become more cost-effective as you go? And from, again, the bridging between the technical perspective versus the business perspective. Annalisa, how do you respond to that idea? Well, we just heard that translating the benefits of clownative to the business can be challenging. So we might take some steps to bridge the gap. First of all, understand the clownative maturity model. That's the first steps, seems trivial, but you should get familiarized with it. Then you have to speak the right language, which means we should avoid to dive directly into a technical jargon, and we need to try to paint a picture that is at a higher level somehow. We need to use language that resonates with business goals. So if you want to speak, if you need to speak about speed and agility, probably it's better if you talk about quicker time to market or the adaptability to the change and the fast-changing customer needs. If you need to talk about cost efficiency, then probably, as Danielle just mentioned, don't talk about cost reduction, which is not true, but talk about an optimization of spending. So tell the business that they will spend their money better, the organization will spend the money better on further initiatives, for example, on distributing the money to other initiatives and projects. If you talk about resilience and availability, probably you should highlight the impact on the business, highlight the results like minimizing the downtime and ensuring business continuity so that you don't crash if you have a peak of traffic. And this is something that business, of course, understand much better than any other technicality. Don't use technology from the beginning. Just start from a higher, wider scenario and then dive later if needed. But the most important thing we find, this is really the most important thing, is to align technical goals to business goals. Lately, we all know that non-tech people, so C-suite levels, C-suite members should be more and more tech savvy. I'm a marketer, marketer doesn't care about technology, cares about results, about how to use technology. What is the benefit to use that kind of technology? But we need to be more aware of what technology means. On the other hand, tech teams should be, should raise their awareness about the business goals. So we should encourage tech people to think beyond codes and infrastructure. So they should ask themselves questions like, how can our cloud-native processes, technology could enhance customer satisfaction and trust? And how can our solutions help grow the revenue or the cost reduction? So it's something that helps in bridging the gap between non-tech and tech people because otherwise people are not engaged enough, they don't understand why they should take some decisions, the business and tech teams, of course. I see what Annalisa just explained was very clear about how business and technology, the different sides of the business can work together to make it a successful transition and what technical people know and what business people know sometimes doesn't overlap a lot. So I'm wondering also when you translate and transition rather to cloud-native, it seems so hard. Danielle, can you maybe address how to make it not so hard to make everyone understand how it could go more smoothly? Well, I think from a business point of view, we are looking at customer retention rates. We're looking at our annual recurring revenue. We're looking at EBITDA and customer acquisition costs or CAC. What are our sales? What are our profit margins? And so as technologists, we need to learn that language because we can have better-informed conversations when we're saying, here's why this open-source tool that I'm using and why I need to go to KubeCon and figure out how to use it better is gonna actually make a difference when it comes to improving customer satisfaction rates or, you know, and that helps drive our ARR. And if we can all speak that language, we will do a much better job of being able to align with that. I think, you know, ideally, the business would understand our language that we're using, but frankly, you know, some people still struggles to say Kubernetes, so it's that. Yes, indeed, absolutely. That's true. I wanted to ask you to, Danielle, as follow-up. When you were talking previously, it would be nice to have a few examples of how Cloud Native can help solve some obvious business issues. Could you share a few examples with us? Yeah, so in the Cloud Native maturity model, we do provide some specific examples. So one that I mentioned, just customer satisfaction rates. So as an example, you know, a B2C company, so a business-to-consumer company, has a bunch of data coming into the company that they need to get to their end users. Well, why do they have to do that? You know, customer satisfaction rates, we need to retain them, we need to make sure they're happy. So that is, you know, the main business goal. What that means is, hey, if we adopt Cloud Native technologies, if we containerize, if we all the things that Simon would say would do, you know, we can actually release more features faster, we can make sure that the data is in the consumer's hands faster. So if we look at it from, what is the customer retention rate? What is the customer satisfaction measurement? So like a net promoter score, and we know that language, so we can again align with, we will increase your net promoter score by delivering this data this much faster, which means we're gonna use this more expensive cloud that is closer to our end users in this region. And that's how we need to start thinking about things from the top down. Simon, do you have other examples that you could share with us? Yeah, certainly. When I think through the situations that I find myself involved in and cost discussions, first off, there's three key stakeholders that I need to be thinking about and taking into account. First one, if I think of three people, I've got my CTO, I've got my Chief Financial Officer, and I've got my CISO, my Chief Information Security Officer. They're really helpful and useful people, and here's why. So when I carry out a solution design for a cloud application, I have to think about not only the business functionality it's offering, it might be an HPC grid, it might be a market data system, for example. So I've got a whole pile of business functionality that I've got to work through. I also have to be thinking very carefully about the non-functional requirements of that solution design. I need to be thinking about my availability, I need to be thinking about my resilience, I need to be thinking about my DR. I also need to be thinking about the cross-cutting theme of security. Is there client data located within that? And then I also then have to think about, obviously, how much it's gonna cost. Now, the important thing is, for me, is that when I start to involve my, or get into the areas of finance and also security, as well as technology and infrastructure and application, once I start talking about non-functional stuff, then I can start to really demonstrate what cloud can do. Mila, you provided an example at the beginning, you asked about starting up a project at Inception, in the costs that are absorbed there. And part of the answer to that question is, what's the counterfactual? What's my alternative? Do I get another data center? Do I go and fill it with racks? Do I procure servers? Do I procure switches? And we're just talking about infrastructure here, and we're not even getting onto the topic of storage. So do I cable all of that up and what are the lead times on that? Okay. Now, to do that in a distributed manner is incredibly expensive. Now, when I deploy an application using a, for example, a cloud service provider, I've got the ability to live up to any regulatory requirements, for example, around is it in the EU, do I have GDPR to worry about? Alternatively, I can decide to place it in a cheaper location. I can absorb the loss of a zone or even entire region and potentially keep my business running. Now, there's investment involved in that, but let's think about the effect of downtime. If I hadn't done that, if I cannot withstand that shock to my business, if I'm out of the markets for an hour, what is the financial cost and the risk that I face? And then just talking on that security topic as well. When I use something like easy examples in Kubernetes are network policies. I can do things within Kubernetes with network policies that are very, very difficult or more complex or take longer to implement within traditional infrastructure. The other thing too, I can take advantage of Falco, for example, a great CNCF project to get more insight into what's running. So taking into account the non-functional requirements and the role of the CISO, the security role within my organization is really important. And suddenly those costs that I might be facing with say cloud costs don't necessarily seem so bad when I consider the advantages and the availability that it gives me because there is nothing that will cause me more stress than downtime when I really, really don't need that. So come back to, so make sure that your CISO and your financial officer are involved from the beginning as well as your technology department and rely on those people with infrastructure and platform experience as much as the developers. Our developers are busy enough as well, by the way. We rely on them all the time. So hopefully, thank you. Thank you, Simon. I see that you're on the cartographos working group, Annalisa, how did you get involved and what is your involvement? What does it entail if you could give us a little explanation of what you do in that working group? Not much. No, to be honest, I joined the group a couple of years ago and I was very new to this industry. So I needed to find a place where to begin to educate myself. And I joined the working group of the cartographos because at that time in my company we were structuring a collaborative journey to offer to our customers. And I needed to understand more about it. I needed to understand how to express the business value and I needed a benchmark somehow. So that was the best way to begin with. I began for business reasons but I stayed because of the people. These fantastic people that are always very collaborative and welcoming but also because people is one of the mentioned pillars of the clownative material model. And this as a humanist, a non-tech person struck me because Italo Calvino said, wrote that innovation is faster than our capability to adapt to it. Which means that probably the flame, the engine of everything lies in the people. And as we said, the more the people are involved, the more they're engaged, the more they're informed, the more you get closer to success also for in a clown transformation process. Then this was really interesting and relevant for people like me that were, they have no technical background to understand that anyone can contribute somehow. So everyone can find a way to help this community, whatever their skills are. We need to promote the model, we need to enhance it. We need to make it more comprehensive and diverse, let's say so. So if you come from a large organization or a small startup, whether you are a beginner or an advanced person, advanced expert, then anyone can do something and join the working group. I said that's why I stay. We're gonna wrap up here soon, but before we do, I just wanted to add one thing. We've been talking about the difference between the business perspective and the technological perspective. And I've observed that sometimes that's a very challenging road to navigate. So in terms of the technologists, how do we emphasize and what words do we use to do so? The business, the culture, the different ways we can communicate it and meet the business goals by doing so. I understand that those of us who are technical need to understand more about how the business is structured, how it works, what the limitations, what the challenges are. But it'd be nice for everyone in the company to have a common language to speak about it. And it's incumbent upon many of us to start to be that bridge between the different perspectives. And in a cloud native transformation that we've already talked about when moving over to that, when we're in the middle of that, making sure that the business people continue to understand it's a marathon and not a sprint. And of course that's my view, but the benefit, I would like everyone in the room to be able to take it home with them and be able to articulate what the benefit of this transition would even be. Does anyone wanna comment on that? So I think what I would encourage all of you to do in your daily work is when you're asked to do something to ask the question, so what does this impact have on our business? And you know, obviously not any nasty way, but in an understanding way because the more you're gonna understand, oh, this has an impact on our business this way, it will give you more purpose, but it will also give you that language. And I think that is the first step. And if your boss and then their boss has to explain that, everyone's gonna get better. Yep, I would also, again, from the technical side, I have to keep consistently educating people and letting them know. For example, we pay as we go when we use cloud services. Yes, there are commitment discounts, but we pay as we go. The great thing is, is that we don't have to go and buy all of those servers upfront in the way that we traditionally did. So I can strike fear into people's hearts by saying we can do a better job of preventing downtime and reducing risk. That's a great thing to communicate to a business. And then secondly, when they get sick of shock, we have to remind them, you're paying as you're going, this is operating expenditure. For us technical people, it's really important for us to learn the difference between capital expenditure, is boring, I know, and operating expenditure. Do we buy the server upfront for three years, or do we pay as we go? And when we consistently remind people of that, that can be a real help as well. So as a technologist, sadly, I have to learn a little bit about bookkeeping, not too much. Secondly, I have to keep communicating. You will be surprised, I'm consistently surprised that things I take for granted, other people don't know my basic assumptions, other people aren't aware of those things. So don't feel free to remind people. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and your expertise. It's a very interesting topic. I appreciate you all being involved today. And thank you to the audience for being here. And we also have on the screen now information about the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Working Group. We are, as a group, our goal is to provide pathways into open source and cloud native for deaf and hard of hearing people to contribute and also to serve as a resource for people to discuss accessibility today. We have CNCF provided interpreters, which is tremendous. We thank you for that. And we thank you for listening to our presentation. And this is how Deaf people clap. I might make a final plug because Catherine is here with us. So I could make sure I could do it. If you're interested in more topics around cloud native after this event, we run a virtual meetup called Q-Crash with lots of technical talks and whatnot. It's coming up in April. So it's something you can do virtually from your home in case you're interested. This would be us talking about an event at an event.