RON PANTOFARO: Welcome.
I'm Ron from the Google Databases product team.
Our very special guest today is Cyril Picchiottino,
vice president of quality and customer satisfaction
information systems in the Renault group.
Andi Gutmans, our VP and general manager for Google Cloud
Databases, and I are really excited to hear
about Renault's journey from Oracle
to Cloud SQL for Postgres SQL.
Cyril, good to have you here.
Can you tell us about the Renault group?
CYRIL PICCHIOTTINO: So Renault group
is historically a French carmaker
at the forefront of mobility, but it's reinventing itself.
So the group, reinforced by its alliance with Nissan
and Mitsubishi Motor Corporation,
has five complementary brands--
Renault, Dacia, LADA, Alpine, and Mobilize,
who offer sustainable and innovative mobility
solutions to its customers all around the world.
In terms of numbers, we have more than 170,000 employees
in 39 countries with 2.95 million vehicles sold in 2020.
Leader in Europe in terms of electric vehicle, our DNA
is innovation for more than 120 years.
With Renaulution Strategic Plan imposed by our new CEO Luca de
Meo, our aim is to pivot from a carmaker integrating tech
to a tech company integrating cars.
ANDI GUTMANS: Thanks, and thanks for joining us today, Cyril.
I'm really excited to talk to you.
Can you give us some background to Renault's decision
to move to the cloud and why you chose Google?
CYRIL PICCHIOTTINO: With the [? impression ?]
of our group's CIO, we started five years ago
cloud journey for new projects.
It was a mandatory step to set up modern CICD tool
train and deploy agility.
We also invest in internal technical skills in France
and in India, where we have an internal development center.
We choose Google as main cloud provider thanks
to the offer including data capabilities.
As we migrated our data lake and GCP,
it was quite a natural choice to have front end applications
also on GCP.
Beyond new products, we decided in my department
to migrate previously [INAUDIBLE]
all information system portfolio composed
of 70 in-house software with technologies
like Oracle, MySQL, Java, and QCFT, et cetera.
One of the main reasons was the will
to optimize existing IDS landscape, increase
[INAUDIBLE],, and improve response time.
With software that can be up to 20 years old,
you have a large diversity of core software,
almost deprecated infrastructure on the functional complexity
caused by 15 years of IS evolution.
So instead of spending time to do
part of the job on on-premise infrastructure,
we decided to be more ambitious with a public cloud
migration from Oracle database to Postgres.
We have the progressive approach.
Start first-- start with small ideas first, then bigger,
and finally migrate large audience information system.
And of course, database migration
from Oracle to Postgres was a hotspot.
But we had good surprises.
ANDI GUTMANS: That's really great to hear.
Can you tell us more about your database migration journey?
CYRIL PICCHIOTTINO: Yeah.
So before starting any migration,
we made a global analysis of the IS landscape
to have a deep understanding of the technologies used
and the complexity.
We used automated tools first, but the accuracy wasn't enough,
and nothing can replace knowledge of development teams
who maintain the software.
Based on the analysis on the sub-technologies used inside
the database-- for example, PLSQL or complex constraints--
we selected first the easiest IS for migration.
Main principle was to let existing teams
in charge of IS maintenance to do the job,
help with what we call champions and additional resources.
For [? capitalization, ?] we write an internal wiki.
As good news, we rapidly saw common patterns
in SQL with a clear learning curve all doing the migrations
but speed up the next migrations.
We deploy a sort of military approach--
prepare migration with some technical evolution on-premise,
then start the migration without any functional revolutions--
and this is the key point--
and then integrate business department for the acceptance
phase just before SOP.
And also take some time for capitalization,
because we have a lot of common patterns in database migration.
And depending on the case, we integrate
also some architecture simplifications,
and we take this opportunity to analyze and optimize
SQL queries during the work.
And if needed, have support from Google
with dedicated tools to fine-tune database performance.
Thanks to that, we achieved to divide by 3
compared to an on-prem database the duration of an [INAUDIBLE]..
Depending on the size of the application,
if we had to give a delay, it took from two
to five months with existing team
to migrate the full application, including a [INAUDIBLE]
to Postgres migration.
In my [? parameter, ?] we migrated
in that way more than 40 IS with an average of two IS per month.
We also had a close look on monitoring tool
like Dynatrace or JavaMelody to ensure
we improve user experience.
So with this approach, database migration
was initially seen as a [INAUDIBLE] point,
was finally not a so big issue.
ANDI GUTMANS: Migrating two applications a month
is really impressive.
Really, really awesome.
We have a lot of customers who want
to migrate off old guard databases,
moving from Oracle to open source.
What are some of the best practices
you can share with them?
CYRIL PICCHIOTTINO: So a public cloud migration is not
only a technical subject.
It's also a booster for the business
on the matter of management.
So we are entering now in a fully connected world
with our customers, vehicles, parts suppliers, authorities,
plants, et cetera, et cetera.
And in that case, to be on the cloud
is a clear asset to be in this world.
In terms of management, it's important to support it
and make this as a global transformation
program over several years.
It's key to onboard middle management
on teams and the purpose.
It's more a question of will than a question of budgets.
One of the key points is investment
done to develop internal skills, with motive to become
a tech company was our aim.
Resilience is key, as it can be achieved in six months.
And all the benefits will be there over the time.
In my case, it took two years to do the job.
So great thanks to my teams in France
and in India, who accepted and succeeded in this
challenge, and also thanks to operation department, who
drove this migration on the infrastructure side
with a great level of support.
And last point is onboarding of business stakeholders.
In my case, quality on customer satisfaction executive
VP encouraged and supported cloud migration.
So it was a clear booster for this journey.
ANDI GUTMANS: Really great to hear
how you got both your business stakeholders
and your technical stakeholders on the same page.
You run on Cloud SQL.
What is the value you're getting from Cloud SQL?
CYRIL PICCHIOTTINO: So values are various and important.
On performance side, one of my surprises
was to see better performance even
with information system with many users connected
on the large size database.
You have also levels regarding scalability and the ability
to fine tune global performance of the database,
and you don't have to wait.
So installation of new infrastructure on this point
is clearly a game changer.
Of course, it won't replace queries optimization,
but you have all the levers to increase [INAUDIBLE]
CPU, memory, et cetera.
You have also a clear view of the costs.
You know what is expensive in your IS landscape,
and with APM tools, you are able to see [INAUDIBLE]
points which can be improved.
So with that approach, you are entering in a virtuous cycle.
When you optimize your code, user will be happy.
But for you, it will also cost less.
So that's a great, great game changer compared
with what we have previously.
And now globally, compared to on-prem infrastructure
with non-open source technologies,
using GCP with managed services is cheaper.
For example, it costs around $1 per user per year
for all infrastructure and software
cost using managed services on an enterprise service
information system we migrated three months ago.
ANDI GUTMANS: That is great, and it definitely
sounds like things are better, faster, cheaper.
What is one thing you think other customers should
know about our managed database services, especially Cloud SQL?
CYRIL PICCHIOTTINO: So in a general manner,
developers think that we don't have enough infrastructure,
that's I would say classic.
On some time with on-premises infrastructure,
it's hard to separate code performance with infrastructure
limitations.
A public cloud migration with a database change,
when done in that way, is a clear opportunity
to really optimize an application on deploy--
and that's key-- monitoring criteria
with the ability to play with the infrastructure
if really needed.
So in the same time of GCP migration,
we deploy within Renault Google [INAUDIBLE] framework,
and both bring us very positive effects.
Even on 15 years old information system,
we are now, after some rework, much more faster
and more stable.
And the last point is we had an unexpected or unweighted effect
is a reduction of the run activity
thanks to the approach.
So the ROI of the migration is good.
And clearly, it's worth the price
to spend a couple of months to do this technical maintenance.
ANDI GUTMANS: And if you could ask us at Google for one thing,
what would that be?
CYRIL PICCHIOTTINO: So more than tradition,
industry respects innovation.
So please continue to propose new and scalable tools--
for example, a modern and universal business intelligence
tool.
And for quality information system,
data is key, and the way you analyze data is also
a key point for performance.
ANDI GUTMANS: That is a great point.
We will definitely take it into consideration.
We are seeing more and more customers
want to get real time insights from their operational
databases.
I'll hand it back to you now, Ron.
RON PANTOFARO: Thanks, Andy.
So Cyril, thank you so much for the inspiring migration story.
Andi, thank you so much for hosting.
On behalf of everyone here in Google Cloud Databases,
thank you for watching and see you in the next Fireside Chat.