 From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders around the globe, these are Cloud Native Insights. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, the host of Cloud Native Insights, and we talk about Cloud Native. We're talking about how do I take advantage of the agility and innovation in cloud and the ecosystem out there? And a big question is, if I'm a company that's not born in the cloud or if I'm a person that's not steeped in the knowledge of leveraging and using all of these wonderful tools out there, how do I get there to help us dig into the people and company moving to cloud and taking use of these technologies? Happy to welcome to the program, Forest Brazil. He is a senior manager with A Cloud Guru. It's his official title, but he is the cloud bard, as many people know, in a bard, of course, an oral transition. He creates poems. He sings. He's got a book coming out to illustrate the cloud. And really great to be able to talk to you for us. Thanks so much for joining us. Hey, it's great to be on the show, Steve. Thanks for having me. All right. So Forest, if you could, just share a little bit about your background. So you joined A Cloud Guru relatively recently. I'd seen some of the cartoons and videos you've done in the past. You've got kind of a Renaissance man look at. You're not just a tech guy. As I said, you do have some of those musical pursuits also. So I'd love to hear a little of your background. Yeah. So I've been an engineer for a long time. I've been an engineer, been a manager of engineers, a consultant, and that's from startups ranging all the way up to the Fortune 50. So I've seen a lot of enterprises and other companies at various stages of their cloud journey from just trying to figure out how to get to the cloud out of the data center all the way to being very cloud native, as you were saying in your intro, figuring out how to build directly on cloud services. I'm very passionate about that. Very passionate about helping people figure out how to take that next step, not to be a stalker to get into a state where they are, but to figure out how to get, as I say, up the serverless ladder to that next stage of cloud native adoption. And I've realized that a lot of these technologies and a lot of these concepts, these practices are very abstract. And sometimes what helps the most is to put that in a format that people can engage with. And so I draw and I sometimes sing and I write all sorts of things just to try to help people understand. Even though these technologies and practices, these ideas are abstract, they don't have to be difficult. Everybody's got some intuitive understanding of why a doctor exists or why a lawyer exists. It's a little bit harder to get your head around, why does a cloud architect exist? What do they build? And that's what I try to do with things like the book that you read a lot of cloud that's coming out in just a couple of months. All right, so I love that. Helping companies understand these things because for so many years, it was like, oh, well, we need to mandate for the cloud. Cloud, cloud, cloud. When I started this, cloud is not a destination. There is how do I really take advantage of cloud? And there was one post that you wrote talking about lift and shift. And it was one of those things that we've seen for years. There's arguments of, you know, is lift and shift good? If it's bad? And of course, the reality is sometimes lifted shift is needed, but it is step one of what you need to do because if you're not taking advantage of the cloud, there reaches a certain point that you say, oh my gosh, maybe I'm not taking advantage of it. Maybe the cost don't make sense. And therefore we scramble and we pull things back and we celebrate repatriation, which to my mind was always, oh geez, we kind of didn't understand it, we failed and then we kind of went back to doing what we didn't want to do. So walk us through if you could. We've even got an illustration of yours that we'll talk about, but you know, give us, you know, what is the proper way that people should think about lift and shift? Yeah, exactly. And to be clear, I'm not dissing lift and shift as a concept. It's very necessary in a lot of cases and you can reel off a bunch of reasons why lift and shift would be an important stepping stone in a cloud journey. And of course that could be just, you know, I've got to get out of the data center, right? Because my lease is expiring or, you know, my servers are haunted and the whole thing is on fire. I've talked to people who, you know, have firework stored in their data center literally that they're afraid are going to go off, right? The roof is leaking. It's time to get out of there and just get to someplace that's professionally managed. You could be using a lift and shift migration almost as like a financial engineering tactic to go from a CAPEX to an OPEX model, right? And tie what you're doing a little bit more closely to what you're spending. There's several other reasons that you might choose to have lift and shift is that first stage you might want just to get your feet wet a little bit in cloud. You know, you might not have the confidence or the expertise in house to build on fully cloud native services right now. You've got to go in and get your ops teams hands on right with the technologies and with the tooling so that they understand a little better how to get you to that next step. But the really, really key thing is lift and shift is a phase you've got to get through that you've got to keep innovating and a lot of people don't realize that they think they can go to the cloud pick up their servers run them pretty much as they did in the data center. They can stop there and they're going to get long-term benefits from cloud and over time that gets less and less true because as I say, once you move that first VM into EC2 or whatever the case may be you've started a shot clock on your chances for success in the cloud. That clock is ticking because your initial benefits are very front loaded. You're potentially getting some initial cost wins as you're hopefully matching your usage a little bit better to what you're spending on infrastructure, right? You're potentially getting some time to learn and plan for version two of your cloud infrastructure but the longer you stay in that lift and shift state some dangers are going to start compounding because in the absence of a true cloud native strategy your teams your ops teams your governance teams if you have those right they're going to continue to do things the way they did it in the data center because they don't have true SRE they don't have true automation they're going to build manual slow error prone processes that are going to drag down your time to value your MTTR all those operational metrics that you look at you're going to see those cost wins actually start to evaporate because you're still running that legacy model if you can't effectively charge back spend to different units inside of your business you realize you're not getting that value you thought you were running because you're running the cloud like a data center and let's be honest, that's super expensive and then unfortunately over time and usually you start hitting this threshold 18 months, two years out your best people the experts who were bringing you to the cloud in the first place they get disillusioned because they're not seeing the continued forward motion that they've been led to believe was going to happen and so they start moving on you get brain drain and now you've created this new legacy swamp of poor procedures and practices the very thing that you were hoping to avoid and so at that point the negative side effects of the lift and shift have overwhelmed the benefits you thought you were going to get that's when your lift and shift shot clock has expired and that's what you want to avoid by continuing to innovate and continuing to refactor towards a true cloud native deployment Yeah, well, again, I thought that the visual was excellent and it's so good to explain what is the journey we're going through what are the decision points you might look through some of these and say oh, well, these three definitely apply to my business some of the others I might not be concerned about but I can take that and apply it to what I'm doing so that's the company side of things Forrest, you're an AWS serverless hero and also in your day job your company helps people with the training so let's talk about people when it comes to how do we get involved one of the things I loved about the serverless community from the early times that I met it was it seemed that the bar to enter was relatively low so many of these things is like ah, well, do I have the basic skillsets? Do I understand how to get there? How do I actually get to where I need to be? And that's so many people are hesitant to start that journey because it just seems so daunting so what are you seeing out there? You know, give us the landscape of 2020 as to, you know, how we move forward and I know you've got a project you've been doing called the cloud resume challenge so, you know, definitely talk a little bit about that too Yeah, for sure. So look, even going beyond 2020 I think the numbers I've heard we're looking at potentially 100 million software developers being added to the workforce over the course of the next decade and change that's a lot of people who are going to have to interact with these services who are going to have to build and create value on top of cloud infrastructure and so there's a huge need for us to continue to create abstractions and to create guided, you know, best practices and principles that will help people get where they need to be with as little unnecessary work as possible and really that's a lot of what underlay the serverless community and the ideas behind that I've been involved in serverless for a long time going back to when I was, you know, building on serverless inside of large companies early on in that revolution and I've carried that forward now with my work as an AWS serverless hero even the work that I'm doing at a cloud guru and really the barred entry as you mentioned is so low because you're cutting out a lot of things that we're seeing is sort of gatekeeping mechanisms in the past, you know, oh, if you haven't learned this underlying, you know, protocol or whatever then you don't qualify as a real developer serverless turns out on its head and says, no, I'm providing you with abstractions that you're going to be able to build on top of and you're going to be able to focus so much more of your energy on things that actually provide value for the business and yeah, that kind of started as a very leading edge early adopter thing but we're seeing more and more even large enterprises we're seeing that start to click and they're realizing, you know, wherever I can wherever I'm not potentially constrained by legacy practices or other code bases, I do want to explore, you know seeing how quickly I can turn a prototype around how quickly I can A, B, C, D, E, F, G test something if you will by spinning up these low cost prototypes in the cloud, right on infrastructure that's just costing me fractions of a cent to run there's some really, really compelling avenues that even larger businesses can explore but taking it back to the individual for a second think about, you know, I'm in the middle of a global pandemic, okay and potentially I'm looking for a career switch now more than ever, I'm thinking, you know, I'd like to get into development, I'd like to get into IT and it's so close to me now you look at these services out there like Netlify, which you and I were talking about before the break, right and talking about how easy those technologies make it for someone to get out there and actually do web development but you still need someone to kind of step alongside you and say, you know, these are the things you need to care about these are things that might be irrelevant there's an explosion almost like an infodemic if you will of information out there makes it really hard for folks who are trying to actually skill up and who are trying to make that transition into tech and into code that's what a cloud guru does, of course which is the company I work for we've got about 2.2 million learners on our platform right now that we're helping to skill up and take that step toward the modern tech skills that they need to succeed the cloud resume challenge which you mentioned is something I've been doing kind of on the side and that's a project-based approach that complements a lot of the additional training that I was talking about where we say, you know, I'm going to give you a project that's going to have some sort of spec-based steps to it so you're going to create a resume but it's going to be deployed, you know, in the cloud you're going to have to do some source control some CICD, some, you know, all these other things that are going to be built into a basic DevOps competency you're going to have to go away and do some Googling and open some tabs in order to figure this out on your own because the project doesn't tell you exactly how to do it so you actually wind up with some kind of some pain there's some failure involved there and that of course is what makes the learning stick and so we've got people working on this on every continent now we've had many people that have completed it we've seen people get interviewed we've seen people get hired coming out of a totally non-tech background so that's really exciting and, you know, those stories aren't going to be unusual moving forward we're going to see more and more of this and really that's what these cloud abstracted technologies have allowed us to do probably it wouldn't be possible to do something like the cloud resume challenge 20 years ago the barrier to entry with, you know, even just procuring the infrastructure you'd need to be successful in a reasonable amount of time you know, was not accessible to everybody but now we're there those services are at your fingertips you just need a little bit of guidance a little bit of curation to get you down the right path Well, yeah, it was actually, you know, what excited me when I first met the ACG team was the bar to entry was so low in previous decades you talk about, you know, how much time and how much money I needed to spend just to get some of these courses even if they were online and it was just order of magnitudes easier and, you know, built for that cloud environment that I can start, I can pause I have learning resources and it's been really impressive to watch the expansion of the team there I'm curious when you look at, you know, certifications out there when you look at the need for jobs out there if I'm not, you know, if I'm in the tech industry what are some of the things that you think that people should be learning, moving forward to where would you recommend people start looking there? Yeah, absolutely so I think one thing a lot of people miss is, you know, it's a good idea to get started with technologies that are new if you're new because let's be real you can't ask for five years of experience in a technology that's only been around for 18 months so it's really smart to major on something and get good at something that not a lot of people are good at yet and you say, well, how do I know that technology is going to take off and succeed? Well, the fact of the matter is even if that specific technology doesn't you still have a much greater understanding of the problem space and you'll be right at the cutting edge ready to jump in on, you know, whatever the next thing is so I always recommend that people look at things like serverless and the managed services that are coming out get really good at automating, you know, services on the major cloud providers pick AWS, Azure, GCP, right? And just make that your thing don't specialize in in too niche of an area, you know, especially if you're very new but especially pick a cloud provider get good at working with the basic services you'll find that that sets you apart more than for example, I don't know going after a certification that's been around for 20 years that tons and tons of people in the job market have, right? That doesn't necessarily set you apart as much as some of these modern skills do so I definitely recommend that. Yeah, it's funny for us actually, I laugh a little bit. You mentioned that you've been doing serverless for a long time and I'm like, well, okay I remember sitting in the audience at AWS re-invent when Lambda was unveiled I think it was re-invent 2014. So, you know, there's nobody out there that's been, oh, I've been doing this for a decade. We always love when there's job applications out there and say, oh, okay, you know, I want 10 years of a technology that's been around for five years. But yeah, maybe there's one other cartoon that you brought along talking about the difference between cloud translation and cloud fluency. Maybe just walk through that difference and especially people that have been in the industry for a while. How do we make sure that we're actually embracing and understanding and moving to that cloud world not just, you know, cloudwashing? Yeah, that's a good word. You know, something that struck me I think a bit of an epiphany that I had around the time that I started an A Cloud Guru and keep in mind, I'm coming out of years of having worked with these large organizations and try to help them figure out how to migrate to cloud. And what I had seen is there's a lot of these kind of central cloud teams, if you will, that get established right at the beginning of an organization's cloud adoption. And that's a well-known pattern. You know, this cloud center of excellence, if you will, that people establish. A lot of times those are small teams. You take your best cloud people and you say, okay, you define the standards and the processes that are going to get us to cloud and they do that and then they're shocked when nobody adopts the standards, right? And the migration sort of stalls and they're not having the impact that they expected to have. And what turns out is going on is just having that small group of people that understands cloud surrounded by this huge legacy diaspora of legacy, you know, product and engineering teams that don't speak the language of cloud, if you will. It means that anytime you want to innovate or anytime you want to make a move, you've got to go through this process of translation. You've got to go to those legacy teams who are saying, what's an EC2 instance again? You know, how do you spell S3? I thought that I wanted to log into the AWS console but this access and secret key isn't going into my password box, right? You know, they have that low level of competency and so you're constantly having to explain everything. You're going back and forth and that of course leads to kind of less sophisticated architectures. It leads to poorer outcomes and it takes you much longer to get where you want to go. That's that process of cloud translation. That's an anti-pattern. So instead of that, what we try to advocate for is what we call cloud fluency. Just like with any other language, you want your entire organization as much as possible to speak the language of cloud at some baseline level. We do that through a couple of things. Of course, obviously through training and certification, cloud certifications can be a great proxy to measure how well your organization's cloud competency is improving. But also through taking those cloud experts, those central experts that previously were kind of in their ivory tower doing their own thing and embed them as much as you can in a roving fashion with these legacy product teams and help them to improve, right? Sort of teach them to fish so that you're not putting all the weight on that central team to be the only experts because that doesn't scale. Those people are going to burn out. They're going to get overwhelmed with support tickets. We see that over and over again. So you want to empower those teams and we want to actually talk a little bit less about a cloud center of excellence sometimes and a little more about a cloud center of enablement, where we want to instead of knowing the most about cloud, we want to show the most about cloud to those other teams. That's a sustainable pattern for success. That's what we try to do through a cloud guru and that's what I try to advocate for individually wherever I can because I've seen people burnt out. I don't want that to happen. Yeah, for those of us that have been through a few of these waves here, it's something that you need to actually be involved in embracing these technologies. You don't have a center for internet usage anymore. Think about everybody now for the most part has used the internet, understands some of the pieces. It needs to be the same way when it comes to cloud. It just becomes the underlying substrate and brings forward the innovation and agility that people are looking for. All right, Forrest, last thing we talked about. You've got a book coming out a little bit later this year, the read aloud cloud. Give us the quick thing. Love, it's visual, it's very accessible and definitely looking forward to hearing about that. Yes, yes, exciting. So it'll be out in September from Wiley and basically you've seen a couple of the cartoons over the course of this time here, but I've been drawing for a long time, trying to help people get a sense for what the cloud is in a way that they can understand and get a grasp on. And so what the read aloud cloud is, it's the history and practice of cloud computing and it takes you from the mainframe days through artificial intelligence and along the way we talk about the basics of cloud architecture. We talk about security. We talk about resilience and all those important things, but it's written and drawn in a way that can be accessible even to a non-technical person. So the person who's never been able to understand what it is that you do and I include, you know, potentially your CEO in that conversation, right? This is a book you can hand to them that you can put on your desk. It'll give you a chuckle, but I think there's actually some really strong ability for you to gain actually a concrete visual understanding, those really abstract terminologies that float around with cloud. Again, what we're doing is not necessarily complicated. It's just really abstract. It's really arcane. So let's put it in a format where we can get our heads around and hopefully have a good laugh while we're doing it. That's what the read aloud cloud is and you can check that out wherever books are sold. All right, we're forced Brazil. Thank you so much for joining us. Real pleasure talking with you. And absolutely, we need to make sure that cloud becomes as ubiquitous as computers and the internet have before us. Really pleasure chatting with you. Thanks so much for joining. Awesome. Thanks so much, dude. It's great to be here. All right, and I'm Stu Miniman. Looking forward to hearing more about your cloud native insights.