Episode Summary

iland Cloud Technologist Brian Knudtson is joined by guests Joe Houghes, Lauren Malhoit, and Jim Millard for a conversation about what customers are — or should be — looking for when it comes to support from their cloud providers. They discuss the low expectations for support with hyperscalers, how important it is to think ahead, and the balance between warts and cherries.

Panel

Cloud Conversations

Topic 1

 [02:19] Companies like AWS and Azure are successful with minimal support provided. When are customers looking for strong support vs. approaching their providers as black boxes that will give them very little assistance?

Topic 2

[07:58] Perceptions sometimes change after the initial move. Lauren, have customers moved away from AWS or Azure because of lack of support or away from a VMware-based provider because they find they don’t need it or it didn’t differentiate from the hyperscalers?

Topic 3

[18:59] How important are one-time on-boarding services to the cloud experience customers have in the cloud and are customers selecting based on these services?

Cloud Bites

[01:13] “My idea of support in the cloud is there’s not just one kind. There are several kinds. One of them is classic break-fix, another one is how-to-use-our-stuff-correctly, i.e. optimization, and a third kind, which is getting-stuff-done.” — Jim Millard

[01:37] “I have low expectations for support in the public cloud.” — Lauren Malhoit

[02:04] “It comes down to what is your expectation? Do you want to be wild west and run anything and everything to consume services? Or, are you looking for hand holding? There are levels of support for both of those, but you’ve got to set your own expectations.” — Joe Houghes

[06:03] “My thoughts are primarily the big three public clouds when it comes to AWS, Azure, and GCP when I’m talking about customers that kind of have a low expectation of support other than just enablement of the platform. That provider is really just there to provide the infrastructure and to Jim’s point, as long as things work properly there shouldn’t be a whole lot of support that’s necessarily required beyond that.” — Joe Houghes 

[07:36] I believe that unless you’re still dabbling and not getting more than your toes wet, the voting with your wallet is more challenging. Once you have major inroads in to a given platform it’s kind of hard to pick up and leave.” — Jim Millard

[10:05] “Whatever that requirement is they selected that particular cloud provider and everything else by preference goes there. There aren’t many people that I run into that are running in all three clouds — public clouds, majors — as well as on prem. They all pretty much want to stick with one and live with the warts that come with the cherry on top.” — Jim Millard

[14:29] “Enterprise multi-cloud is not just about paying for a bunch of cloud resources. It’s really about having the right resources for the right workloads.” — Lauren Malhoit

[15:08] “TL;DR I’m not seeing a bunch of people pull out because of lack of support. I just think it’s too hard once you’re in.” — Lauren Malhoit

[15:21] “I have yet to work with a customer that wanted to pull out of either private hosted cloud or the public cloud because of a support issue. It’s always come down to the consumption costs.” — Jim Millard

[17:18] “You really just don’t want to build a data center in the cloud.” — Joe Houghes

[17:31] “A lot of folks also don’t even know that they have the ability to actually look at some of those consumption metrics throughout the month instead of just setting up monthly billing reports so they can actually see things as they’re being consumed live.” — Joe Houghes

[19:45] “The onboarding experience itself needs to be smooth, it needs to show what those initial ROIs were made out for the first couple of months.” — Jim Millard