Episode Summary

iland Cloud Technologist Brian Knudtson is joined by guests Chris Williams, Gina Rosenthal, and Tim Antonowicz for a conversation about the compatibility of cloud with an on-premises infrastructure. They cover the different ways clouds provide data resiliency, the pros and cons of t-shirt sizing VMs, and the beauty of compromise.

Panel

Cloud Conversations

Topic 1

[03:05] As customers consider architecting and managing cloud-based applications and data availability, what do they need to know about availability that may be different between VMware-based and hyperscaler cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure?

Topic 2

[08:55] Some cloud providers only offer T-shirt sizing of VMs; a good thing or a bad thing?

Topic 3

[19:13] Moving to or between clouds could require VM conversion. How much of an impact could this have on customers during a migration or DR failover event? Should this factor into their choice between IaaS providers?

Cloud Bites

[07:09] “A lot of times we forget that all this architecting and determining where the risks are is dependent on what the application is.” – Gina Rosenthal

[10:00] “Of course they’re going to give us t-shirt sizing. That’s what you get when you’re not wanting to deal with the hardware, you give up control of that. I’m not sure it’s a good or a bad thing — it’s just a thing.” -Gina Rosenthal

[11:50] “T-shirt sizes — I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It follows the old 80/20 rule. I want to be able to cover 80 percent of the market … you’re going to sacrifice some loads out of the t-shirt, but you’re going to cover most of them.” -Tim Antonowicz

[14:09] “Let’s be clear, the t-shirt sizes in cloud are enormous. You can fit a gnat and you can fit an elephant. There are so many different sizes of t-shirts that you’re probably going to fall into one of them.” – Chris Williams

[19:52] “Compatibility is really important when you consider migrations.” – Tim Antonowicz

[24:13] “You’ll never hear me say it’s cheaper to run things in cloud. That’s not true. What I’m saying is that from an overhead and knowledge perspective of what you need to know in the cloud, it can be easier. And potentially financially easier as well if you refactor along with your migration.” – Chris Williams

[24:43] “A lot of what I do when I’m moving customers into the cloud or setting up a hybrid environment or anything that’s touching the cloud is education. I spend my first week with my customer just teaching them about the cloud.” -Chris Williams

[25:51] “It’s in everyone’s best interests to work together. There are things that are happening now that would’ve been really impossible to happen five year ago.” -Gina Rosenthal