What is driving cloud adoption in your organization?
Sort by:
Not only did you have to have your database sized to the maximum performance that you'll ever see, you had to have two of them as well as high availability software of some sort, because you know it is going to fall over at some point.
Many of the application utilization models are perfect examples of why cloud should be adopted. In fact, without cloud, many of the applications we enjoy today wouldn't exist. It lowered the barrier so that those applications could exist and could be used or used at a price that was cost effective.
It would be very challenging for us to afford our production infrastructure if we had to build it on-premise. For example, we have a game where they run an event once a week where we double the performance of the database server. If we had to purchase double the capacity for just a few hours a week it wouldn't have been cost effective. Having all of our game infrastructure in the cloud is critical for Glu’s success.
I'm trying to evolve us away from the on-prem mindset in multiple areas and cloud is definitely one of them. One of the things about UCLA is that people have been there for a long time, and in organizations like that a lot of this is just ingrained in their DNA. If you've only done things in one way and nobody showed you that there's a different way to do it, it's hard to make that leap.
So, part of it is leading people through to say, "Hey, there's another way to do this." And, "Oh. By the way, you don't have to do on-prem anymore, I can just have you spin something quickly and go have you do something.” That's a lot more value-add for the business. So, we're very much so on the beginning of our journey, but we have a plan and we have a vision. We're not just going to lift and shift everything overnight, but we'll do it logically, over time. In both the markets I've worked (New York and LA) over the last eight years, real estate's an issue; physical space is an issue, so even if it's just from that component, there's just advantage in freeing up space that you can use for something else just to seat your hardware, so we're starting to get there. It's not even as much a capex/opex argument anymore, it's more so an old-school mindset than anything else.
You want to deploy applications or update applications quickly. You don't want to wait for infrastructure teams to rack and stack gear and be able to provide scale; Cloud gives you the elasticity and programmatic ability to test different things at a high velocity. And that means a lot to the business, there's a clear correlation with business objectives. And I think that's where the benefit of cloud adoption is enough to shift your infrastructure team from hugging metal and doing that to actually being programmatic and more engineering-centric. This is the evolution of IT, in general, is what I feel. Every company is pressured to do digital transformation and move faster, and you can't move faster if your team is bound by data centers and heavyweight infrastructure.
So many points I could pick up on that, but really digital transformation is now just day-to-day operations for me. It's like, "We've got a business problem, here's the tool we want to throw at it." It's 99.9% of the time something SaaS-related; there's nothing that's on-prem anymore except for very few things. Last year my joke with our CFO at the time was, "You know with this roadmap, you understand we are in the middle of digital transformation here?" And he was like, "Really?" “I mean, yes. You're trying to implement a re-architecture of our license server, Salesforce billing, Zuora RevPro, and Salesforce CPQ, all at the same time. That's your directive to me. What else would you call that?"<br><br>And he's like, "Oh. We just need to enable the different functions to be able to be more productive." And so, that's where we're at from an evolution perspective; we think about cloud and how new and how it was hard for everybody to wrap their heads around that to SaaS applications becoming the norm. Now it's like, "No. We just buy the tool and then it should just take two weeks, right? They said it's very easy to turn it on." And so, as I'm thinking about edge computing and things of that nature, more and more it's calling into question the reliability and the governance of the tools that we're using, and how they intersect and interplay with each other, because that's the biggest part of my job today: the governance piece of the data that sits inside of these systems.
So, it sounds like you're the eye of the digital tornado or hurricane in that.
The comment about elasticity resonated, I think, because in the pre-cloud world you had to provision hardware capacity for the largest spike but then your CPU network utilization was always super-low, and you were very inefficient from an operational perspective, the cost of ownership.