 Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of ADIB as re-invent 2021 executive summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We had a great segment here on the modernization where we're bringing in the success with Amazon Web Services Vodafone Digital in the UK. An example of modern engineering examples using Amazon in the cloud, looking at where cloud native has actually changed in the game like two great guests, Ben Connolly, head of digital engineering Vodafone UK and Maynard Williams Managing Director at Centure. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on theCUBE and sharing the story. Thanks John, appreciate the invite. So I got to ask you guys, one of the main themes that we've been covering all year and even pre-pandemic, we saw the cloud native wave coming pretty hard. Containers, great for modernization, sets the table. You're seeing things like Kubernetes and now serverless changing the game on all aspects of how modernization is happening. And everyone's talking about, you know, application modernization, shift left, all great for business, but you have to kind of take care of things under the covers a little bit, the infrastructure, making sure the engineering teams are all set. So this has been a top topic. This is kind of what you guys are doing. Can you guys explain to me the needs that Vodafone has that brought about this transformation? Yeah, sure. So we've been on this transformation for around four years, but you're absolutely right. The pandemic has been a real catalyst for all kinds of organizations like us around the world. So we were really driving a digital first agenda for quite a long time. And that came as you just said, John, it really did start with the cloud hosted and then moving and realizing the difference between that and become native to the cloud and really leveraging the services like AWS in order to really drive pace and the outcomes that were needed for the business. We've seen a huge change of the last, purely over the last 18 months really, our daily traffic these days as it was on our highest ever, like an iPhone launch day, for example, before the pandemic is daily traffic these days. And so that scalability and flexibility and that leveraging those services has been absolutely fundamental to supporting the changing needs and expectations of our customers. You know, back in the old days, Maynard, you know, it's, oh yeah, Black Friday, surge, you need the cloud to scale up and be flexible, agile, elastic. You know, the scale is definitely now table stakes. And if you're not dealing with scale in some sort of either SRE fashion or whatever, you really ain't going to be behind the curve. But the next level that's being discussed is, how do you leverage the scale for not just customer experience and business value? But we're talking about system architecture, kind of thinking this kind of system design is now a big part of it. Can you talk about how this kind of threads together because we all talk about consumer experience, customer experience, CX, but now there's a new systems mindset out there. Can you kind of share your vision on that? Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that stands out for me is if I look at digital, we've designed it to a point where scale is just, as you say, it's the table stakes. An iPhone launch was something that two years ago needed to be planned and thought about, and it's now absolutely routine. We think about the business side of it, but a big increase in scale really is seamless. But if I look at the full stack, we're still connected into some of the older backend systems where in production, they're on-prem. Actually, test is on AWS now, which is a big step forward, but we've got to manage scaling in a way that translates from backend systems that are on-prem and therefore we can't elastically scale through to the front end where we have to be able to scale up very seamlessly and balancing that across with an architecture that supports that level of scale and makes it so seamless on something like, as you say, iPhone launches or Black Friday or any product coming out, is actually key to the way we've architected it. So are you saying that essentially AWS combined with Vodafone worked on this solution that was more of a cloud-native solution? Is that the innovation here? Can you just summarize and unpack a little bit of what is the innovation? What problems did you solve together with the centrators and Vodafone? What was the core challenge? Yeah, I think the core is actually, how do you get to the point where scaling is seamless, where you can move from being on the cloud to cloud native as Ben just touched on? Well, at the same time, you're actually connected into an enterprise estate where the production systems are all on-prem and don't have that ability to scale in the same fashion. So you can't, for example, push huge load into an on-prem backend system and simply expect it to scale in the same fashion. So between our three organizations, architecting something that is robust, scales reusable and takes away a load of pieces that actually were quite complex two years ago and turns them into just routine has been a big step forward. Ben, I want to get your reaction to this because you're on the front line saying, hey, be more agile, the boss is saying, be agile, do, shift left, take that hill. It's easier said than done. Talk about what goes on when you have to implement. And the stakes involved, again, there's always the old way, new way. Can you just kind of give us some color on what's going on, what's your perspective? Sure, yeah. And as Maynard just said, the real benefits and the story behind this was the ability to launch an iPhone, for example, as a non-event for Vodafone. It previously was weeks and months of preparation and design and testing and confidence building. And now it really is, it just happens. And we watch things scale and then down again gracefully and really do celebrate the level up, if you like, the leveling up of us as an organization, allowing our commercial colleagues to launch propositions or to launch campaigns without needing us to be involved anymore, because they're confident, we're all confident that things will flex like that. But you're absolutely right, that the changes and the demands of us as a team, but also the expectations of our stakeholders have been changing for quite a long time now. And we're really excited now to be able to meet them by leveraging the services that we're discussing it. Yeah, so the guys launch the iPhone, no big deal, routine, hit the pub, everyone's happy. Have a good time. Indeed, yeah, definitely, yeah. Let's get into the solution, how it works. Talk about what's going on in the covers. How does this all work? Can you take us through what's the state of the art of the solution? Sure, well, as you mentioned earlier, we're very much inclined to serverless these days. So we rolled out Fargate a few about, it started about 18 months ago and that really has freed us up into all kinds of scalability measures, but also really about reusing and applying this across much more than just the engineering or the digital part of Vodafone where we began. So that's been a really big part of our agenda. And that's informed all kinds of things, the ability to scale and flex like that and the architecture beneath us and the containerization and orchestration that goes along with that has really enabled us to flex that ability, to reuse it across other areas. And because of that now, it's driven our hiring policy, our tooling and technical, our procedural approaches and all now leverages that ability to move a pace and to be able to scale, not just in infrastructure or ability to serve customers, but in ability to deliver for the business commercially as well. And this is all now informed on our direction, I think, as an organization. It's interesting you mentioned Fargate, then a trigger of events happens. People get excited, opens up new doors of opportunities. There's a chain reaction from that. Talk about the impact to the staff and the operations because it's motivating at some level, you get new things happening, but you're actually making things go better and faster, cheaper. Yeah, well, the impact is one, because we're on a journey at Vodafone of this transformation, really becoming a technology business first and foremost, rather than a telco classically, like our competitors, we're able to really drive cultural change as well. So the impact on our people is a really, it's been particularly engaging one. We've also been part of a real recruitment drive. We've just announced 7,000 new roles joining our team across Europe. And these are engineering roles, driving more of the same behaviors and principles of a modern software engineering business like ours. And that really is fueled by our ability to experiment and try, but become cloud native and employ these services in the way that they're designed to be. Maynard, I'd like to get your take on this and shift to a topic around what this all means. If you zoom out, you say, okay, with the pandemic, it's become a mobile virtual hybrid now world around work, play, all those lines are kind of blurring. It's not as clean as it used to be. Oh, the network segmented over here, this is over here, at least legacy systems were built around the notion of things were nicely segmented. Now you have this whole kind of mashup, if you will, of how you just want to work, right? There's mobilization is a huge thing. So access, identity, these are things that we're all kind of set up nicely before the pandemic or at least, you know, not as stable, maybe not scalable, but what's your take on this? What's the big picture? What's all happening? I think, I mean, the pandemic has accelerated a set of changes that were already happening anyway. And I'd say the other part of this is under the covers, a lot of the work's been done has been to create the microservices that stitch together to produce those journeys that, you know, run in the containers and so on. That opens up an only channel future that starts to move away from saying, actually, businesses are organized around the environment in which they're serving. Is it a retail store? Is it online? Is it digital and so on? And actually into much more of a space where you're building the best journeys and those journeys can and are served through digital or through a call center or through a store and so on. And that makes a huge difference because the focus on improving the customer's experience has been enormous. And I think that's one of the other parts that come out of the whole cloud native setup and the ability to experiment has been iteratively and endlessly improving the experience for the customer. And that's a massive step forward. So we can talk about the fact that we deploy a huge number of times more frequently than we did even a year ago. Or that, you know, our quality is improved by a massive percentage and so on. But I think the thing that's really interesting is the improvement in the experience and the endless improvement and iteration of that because we can make lots and lots of small changes and do every day. That's a big step forward. You know, what's interesting, Ben, I'd like to get your reaction on this. And if you don't mind, just add a little quick color to this. This is just another example of reports that we've been talking with folks on where it's not about just re-platforming to the cloud. It's refactoring the business with the engineering, the modernization. And so there's two things that go on. One, you see the efficiencies, new doors open up, new things are happening, people are getting excited, good, some good morale boasts, things are becoming clearer. But then there's actually new business value being created or new propositions, engineering propositions. Can you share from a digital standpoint because this seems to be the new role of the digital person, whether it's engineering or on the business side, make things run faster, cheaper, better, and then create new opportunities, new propositions. What's your reaction? Yeah, it's fundamentally around pace of delivery. Being able to, as Maynard says, moving from a world two or three years ago where we were deploying once every two or three months. This is a website once every two or three months, you know, it's where we were. And to now it's happening all the time every day. It's a skill that we've given us as an organization that we couldn't have leveraged before. And what we're able to do with that now is experiment our way and iterate our way to new value streams, as you say. But also trial and error, what we already know or expect to be true with our customers much, much more easily and much, much more frequently. Very little barrier to production or friction between us and the customer these days. And the almost instant response and feedback we get from customers, we learn constantly because of that. And it's become much less of a stab in the dark with large business cases. Will they work? Won't they work to now much more experimental and iterative way, both to the propositions we know about but also to the experiments and unknowns in our future that also are now unlocked for us. As a great point you mentioned about the whole timing of the old way, months, weeks, just for website stuff, Maynard. And if you guys can share this new world order it's actually pretty exciting but also daunting if you're not like in the water, so to speak, right? So some people are actually putting their toe in the water, they're experimenting, but it's a game changer. I mean, the significant step up of value, what's your advice about solutions? And they're not easy. I mean, you just got to get your hands around the center. You guys have been doing a lot more of these projects just seeing more and more of these kind of partnerships and the value is there. Can you guys share your opinion and advice to folks out there watching saying, how do I do this? And is it going to be worth it? Is that bridge to the future there? I mean, I think there's a mechanical piece. How do I enable this? And we could talk about DevOps and moving to cloud native and actually some of the process side of as an organization, how do I get really comfortable with deploying very frequently and it being low risk and routine and so on. The other part for me, which we sort of haven't touched on is as much as we talk about experimentation, it's about the data and the analytics and the knowledge that we create out of that. So the small changes we're making are highly scientific. And when we think about actually understanding how we're optimizing experiences, that's all about a whole set of data points that I'm putting it. And so I'll say two parts. It's the journey we've been on here is about enablement. It's about moving the architecture. It's about moving the ways of working. So that a lot of things that were hard or required thinking about two years ago are now quite routine. But the other part of it is understanding the data and having the analytics capability and being able to make a very scientific experiment where you can see the result in the data. Ben, what's your reaction advice to folks watching as they modernize exciting, challenging? It's a lot of hard work, but what's the end game? All of those things. Yes, I'd say it's more than anything, it's a necessity these days. We have to embark on this journey and it is daunting. And of course, a lot of large organizations like ours, we're successful for doing things in a particular way and have built up a lot of protection mechanisms for making sure we protect that. So to come at it from a new angle is obviously daunting and it's very challenging as well. There is an immune system in all of our organizations. It is real and we will all deal with it. But the real success behind, I think the reasons behind a lot of our success is by being able to quickly prove value, to quickly prove that outcomes are deliverable and achievable and then to build on those and iterate on it. And as I said, it's about being able to move at pace. For us in Vodafone, it's about leveraging our scale. We're a huge organization and we're now coming together as one to really make sure that we do just lean on that scale more than we have done. But really about iterating as I said and finding things that work, keep doing it, finding things that hold you back and get rid of them as quickly as you can is what I would say for us. It's interesting you mentioned the scale. The thing about the cloud is when I hear the common pattern is it takes advantage of the strengths of your environment. So every environment is a little bit different but you guys have the scale. I have to ask you while you're here, what are some of the anecdotal comments that kind of you hear from folks that make you happy about the results? Are they saying, hey man, I'm not even seeing this anymore or wow, this is faster, what's some of the sound bites that you guys take as proof points of the success of this project? Yeah, I'd say it's mainly in our, there's two things I would say. The ability to rely less on IT delivery if you like. So empowering our commercial business to make changes for themselves in a safe and secure manner. So providing these self-service capabilities, we've started to see a real pace about our commercial business as well as our technology business. But also the time it takes to get things out is probably one of the biggest really tangible results and outcomes for us at the moment. Just the sheer amount of things we can release to production in such a short space of time really does bring to life our ability to now trial and error, to AB test, canary deploy, things like that. It's really, it's been a real superpower for our transformation I think. Yeah, I was kind of kidding about having time to go to the pub but in reality it's free time. Freeing up people from doing those tasks that were slower if they had value. Yeah, but as you mentioned, John, it really is much more than a technical journey. This is a cultural one as well for a lot of organizations. And by being more connected, by being more connected to the outcomes or the value that you add into production, it really does drive a new culture and engagement across our teams. You know, six months between rising line of code and seeing it in production, I have no sense of ownership or pride in what I've done there. But if I can deploy code and immediately see an impact, good or bad, then I really do feel connected to the outcomes and the value that I'm driving to the business and to our customers. So it really is a great cultural journey as well. Yeah, I remember Andy Jassy last year when he was the CEO of AWS on the stage and talked about that dynamic of the teamwork, people rowing in the right direction, feeling part of it. This is a cultural shift on how companies do business. I know a century I've covered probably a dozen or so killer projects that have just been awesomely new and kind of different but successful built on the cloud. So a lot of replatforming and refactoring. You're in the front lines working with companies at Accenture. What's the pattern that you see that's happening right now? What's your view of the current market? I mean, I think there's a huge shift to this. This journey to has been put in the mood from being on the cloud to being cloud native. I'm really getting that value. There's a kind of almost example I see. There's a light bulb moment where ownership of what you've put in production means that you move away from a model of we change code because either the business tell us to because they have a functional requirement or because something's broken. And we get into the model of that I want to improve the thing that I feel ownership of that's live and you suddenly see how much difference that makes to the experience of it, the quality of it, the stability all of those things improving. And so if you look more generally that cultural shift is an evolution that organizations go through. And it starts with actually delivering in a more agile way at some large scale. You see agility moving up into kind of business agility and starting to affect things like budgeting cycles and the kind of corporate functions if you like that tend to sit around supporting pieces of delivery. And there's a lot more of that happening at the moment aligned with more organizations pushing into being properly cloud native and transforming rather than the kind of first wave which was the shift onto the cloud. Now it's actually let's really leverage what we've got with the cloud. Yeah. And you guys essentially have been riding on the wave of AWS and the cloud for many, many years. We've been covering it. Ben, great success story. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, head of digital engineering, Vodafone UK. Great example of modern engineering at work using AWS in Europe. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing your story. Mainer, thank you for also coming on and the work you're doing at Ascension and AWS. Thank you. Thanks, John, great to be here. Okay, it's theCUBE coverage of AWS re-invent 2021 executive summit. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.