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STEPHANIE WONG: Hey, everyone.
Welcome to Eyes on Enterprise, where
I'll be bringing on my lovely colleagues
to talk about the tech, strategies,
and best practices that are helping to shape enterprises
today.
My name is Stephanie Wong, developer advocate.
And today I have Sam Stoelinga on the show, customer engineer.
And we're going to be talking about hybrid and multi-cloud
and how to approach that.
So Sam, thanks for being on the show today.
SAM STOELINGA: Yeah, thank you for having me.
Happy to talk about hybrid and multi-cloud today.
And yeah, let's get started.
STEPHANIE WONG: First off, no large enterprise, no matter how
well prepared, can simply move to the cloud in one
fell swoop, even if their goal is
to migrate completely to the cloud, hence
multi-cloud and hybrid.
So can you help us define both of those
in the context of an enterprise?
SAM STOELINGA: Workloads and processes
are unique across different enterprises.
And that's why you also see the term hybrid and multi-cloud be
used inconsistently.
So let's start with hybrid cloud.
So hybrid cloud is really where you
have a private, on-prem data center,
and you're using a public cloud, and how can you
have workloads that are interconnected
and be deployed across these two different environments.
Multi-cloud, on the other hand, is really focused on what
if you have several cloud providers, public clouds,
and also, possibly, a private cloud or on-prem data center,
and how can you use these altogether for your workloads.
Multi-cloud, on the other hand, can also
mean if you'd only have one cloud provider.
But you want to make sure that your workloads are
ready to be ported when needed.
STEPHANIE WONG: Yeah.
So what's interesting here is it's
more about the architectural portability and readiness
of your workloads.
And one other thing you mentioned was it's
more about the extension of your private network into the cloud
or from cloud to cloud.
SAM STOELINGA: Yes, that's one technology
to enable a hybrid cloud.
So we have two technologies that really
enable you to extend your private data
center to the cloud, where you can even
treat a cloud as an additional rec
if you would like to stay that way.
So there is a dedicated interconnect,
and there's the cloud VPN.
And both allow you to [? span ?] a private network that's
running on-prem and connect it to the private network that's
running in Google Cloud, which we call a VPC network.
And that allows you to advertise the on-prem network
to the cloud and the cloud network to on-prem.
So any users on-prem can also directly access
any cloud service that's exposed only
over to private VPC network.
STEPHANIE WONG: Now, it's clear that, at this point,
there are a lot of misconceptions
about hybrid and multi-cloud.
So I wanted to talk about the top three misconceptions
that I've heard, and I want to hear what you think of them.
So the first one is that there is a hybrid product that
makes my workloads hybrid.
SAM STOELINGA: Yeah, so I've had questions
where I would get asked, like, what
is your hybrid cloud product?
And then they would assume that there
is a product that takes their workload
and makes it automatically run across their private data
center and on the public cloud.
And they would expect benefits that they get out from it,
like lower cost, better reliability, et cetera.
However, I noticed that I don't think there are
sorts of product that exist.
Actually, hybrid cloud is more about a set of technologies
that may or may not be adopted by different kind of workloads.
Also let's say we have a batch processing workload.
That workload [? needs to ?] [? be ?] run every night.
And it needs to be finished within four hours
before the next day begins.
The enterprise has a hybrid strategy
that they want to use their existing
investments for on-premise as much as possible.
So every workload owner is encouraged
to use that first, but for any excess capacity,
they need to go to the cloud, because they don't want
to invest more in on-premise, but they
want to make sure to keep the existing investments
and make the most out of them.
So what they do is they have an interconnect and the burst
processing workloads spins up more VMs in the cloud
and then it transfers-- it does some processing,
and it sends the results back to on-prem.
So the data stays on-prem.
Some capacity is being used from on-prem.
But the majority for this work needs to be in the cloud
because otherwise, they couldn't finish within four hours.
So it's a really good example of one hybrid architecture that's
useful for this work.
However, for other workloads you might see a different kind
of hybrid architecture.
STEPHANIE WONG: Right.
I think that's really interesting, because again,
it's more about the feature and technology that
enables you to burst or have better redundancy
by moving to the cloud.
So I want to talk about my second misconception, which
is that by moving to the public cloud,
that inherently makes your workloads publicly
facing to the internet.
SAM STOELINGA: Yeah, and, I mean, it comes
from the name of public cloud--
means everything has to be public, right?
So I would say it's not unheard of that people think that way.
However, it's not-- that's not true.
You can simply expose your workloads over a VPC network
only and then bridge that VPC network
if you're on-prem using the interconnect or a cloud VPN
that we have talked about previously.
STEPHANIE WONG: Now for the third misconception--
moving to hybrid and multi-cloud means
moving everything at once.
SAM STOELINGA: Yeah.
I think that really comes from the fact
that people have workloads that always
have many other dependencies.
And these dependencies often reside on-prem as well,
so they can--
they assume that the fact that they move the workload,
they also need to move all the dependencies with it.
However, that's not the case.
Like we explained earlier, we have hybrid cloud connectivity,
which allows you to move the workload
but still keep the dependencies on-prem.
STEPHANIE WONG: Do you mean like running
your legacy backend systems on-premise or your database
on-premise and then your Kubernetes Engine
front-end in the cloud?
SAM STOELINGA: Yeah, I think that would
be a great example of how you could migrate your workloads
with all its dependencies.
Yeah.
STEPHANIE WONG: Let's move on to deciding
on a strategy, because I know an estimated 88% of organizations
are adopting multi-cloud today.
And that can be for many reasons, one
being risk reduction-- they don't want to put
all their eggs in one basket.
Another being architectural similarity,
like for like between clouds, or maybe even best of breed
or feature availability in each cloud.
Have you seen any other motivating factors
for companies?
SAM STOELINGA: So I think you mostly captured it.
Most customers, they want to reduce the lock-in
they have to any vendor.
They want to have the leverage over the vendors versus losing
that altogether.
And they want to be able to choose the cloud provider that
provides them the best service.
STEPHANIE WONG: What about maintaining consistency
across environments?
You need consistent tooling that's
simple that allows you to manage things, like access policies,
and you might have dependencies between applications and needs
for performance and latency requirements.
SAM STOELINGA: Yeah, I know, exactly.
And maintaining consistency can be a challenge.
That's also why Google has several tools available,
such as containers, Kubernetes, and Anthos
that allow you to maintain consistency
across different environments.
STEPHANIE WONG: Now that we've talked
about the foundations of hybrid and multi-cloud,
I do want to talk about a specific case study.
What are some typical use cases in which performance, storage
cost, or modernization of existing apps
were key reasons to migrate?
SAM STOELINGA: So yeah, I'm working with this customer
today.
They're trying to modernize their [INAUDIBLE] on-prem IT
stack.
And they're running a CI/CD workload,
Jenkins, currently on-prem.
And their technical requirement is
where they need to be able to access the on-prem artifact
storage, and the on-prem users need
to be able to access the Jenkins instance as well.
So with these requirements, they came to us and said,
we want GKE on-prem.
STEPHANIE WONG: So it was clear to them
that they needed to continue running Jenkins
but on GKE on-premise.
SAM STOELINGA: Yeah, well, that's what they told,
but then we started talking more and more.
And we found out that, hey, we actually
can run all these things, matching these requirements,
while still running it on the cloud.
So we introduced this customer to several features,
one of them being GKE private masters
and private nodes, which allows you to run GKE clusters
in a fully private fashion.
So none of the GKE workloads are exposed publicly.
The GKE nodes themselves do not even have a public IP address.
Everything is directly available over the private network,
which is connected to on-prem.
And at the same time, this allows
them to run Jenkins on top of GKE
while still being able to access the artifact storage.
So in this way, we had a hybrid solution for this customer
by moving part of their CI/CD stack
to the cloud, while still being able to connect to on-prem.
STEPHANIE WONG: That's interesting.
And I think it clarifies that you
do need to have a product and networking
understanding to know that you can actually restrict access
to public endpoints for a private GKE cluster.
SAM STOELINGA: Yeah, yeah.
Networking experience is always needed.
Even people think they move to the cloud,
they don't need network engineers anymore.
But networking knowledge is required, even in the cloud.
STEPHANIE WONG: So let's talk about migrations now.
In most cases, migrations is a one-time, irreversible effort.
But with hybrid and multi-cloud, it
makes it so that you can move in phases now.
So I think portability here is key.
But let's say I'm an organization,
I want to make my workloads portable,
what would be my first step to do that?
SAM STOELINGA: Yeah, so the first step
is to make sure that your workload is
able to shift from one computing platform to another platform.
In order to do that, you need to separate the application
deployment and management from the artifact of how you
delivered the software itself.
So there are many tools that help you do that today.
And based on these tools, we can form a tool chain
that helps you do this for any VM or container-based workload
that you might have.
So I think key here is understanding
that making your workload portable
doesn't mean that you have to make it cloud native.
This is often a effort that is not significant to do.
And people can start doing that today with the tools available.
STEPHANIE WONG: OK, let's get specific.
Can you give me an example of a tool chain
that you can use to build VM images and deploy to any cloud
then?
SAM STOELINGA: There are a few tools critical to start a tool
chain, mostly for, I would say, there is a CI system,
there is the image builder, there's a source version
control system.
And all this together form a tool chain
that allows you to build images that can be
deployed across any platform.
So let me give an example of how you
would establish, like, what tools would you
use for this tool chain.
So for the Image Builder, there's
a great open source tool by HashiCorp,
which is called Packer, which takes in the application
deployment logic and a base image
like, for example, Ubuntu or another Linux system like RHEL,
and then builds an image that can be deployed
across different platforms.
But it's always built using the same deployment script.
So this really allows you to build deployable images
for any cloud platform or on-premise system.
The other system is the CI system
which job is really taking the latest commit from the source
version control system and building
an image using the latest application software.
And tying these together allows you to build a pipeline
that you can now build images automatically
for any platform whenever a new commit gets
pushed to the source version control system.
So that's really-- that's a simple example
of how you would do it.
And most customers, they should choose what
they're already familiar with.
So if you're using today Jenkins for CI,
you should continue using that.
However, if you're using [? another tool, ?] you
can easily plug and play different tools
to build such a pipeline.
STEPHANIE WONG: That tool chain sounds
really great for workloads that have an automated way
to deploy applications in VMs.
But what if I have an application in a VM already
and I wanted to deploy that to the cloud?
SAM STOELINGA: Yeah, so that's actually
a pretty common scenario, especially
for a large enterprise that buy their software from a vendor,
and that vendor gave them a VMware image,
and that VMware image doesn't have the applications separated
from the image itself.
So they have no way of taking the application and deploying
it [? on a ?] [? base image ?] that can be deployed to another
cloud.
So the only solution is to take that VM as is and somehow
get it to the cloud.
So there are two solutions that Google Cloud offers today
to customers.
There's Migrate for Compute Engine, which was previously
known as Velostrata, which allows you to take a VM as is
and migrate it to the cloud.
And it has a lot of cool features.
You can even migrate a VM, [INAUDIBLE] in the original VM,
and test whether the migration was successful.
So you can do a low risk VM migration to the cloud.
The other solution that I mentioned
is Anthos Migrate, which allows you to take a VM
and convert it to a container and run
that container in the cloud.
So both solutions allow you to move workloads
from on-prem or out-of-cloud providers to Google Cloud.
STEPHANIE WONG: So when would you use one over the other
then?
SAM STOELINGA: The two solutions are
different in what kind of use case it supports.
So Anthos Migrate is a solution that takes of a VM
and converts it to container.
And because it's a more sophisticated technology,
it's more limited into what kind of source workloads
it can support.
Migrate for Compute Engine, on the other hand,
allows you to migrate much bigger range of workloads.
I would say it support most workloads that you can imagine.
STEPHANIE WONG: In these cases, we're
talking about migrating existing VM workloads.
But what if I want to create a standard
for creating portable applications that we
can move to any cloud?
SAM STOELINGA: So that's really where containers fit in.
Containers really forces everyone
within the company to have a standard that
allows you to deploy the container the same way
in any environment.
However, if you start looking at how do I
manage a multi-host environment, you
get into a more sophisticated area.
And that's really where Kubernetes comes in.
So Kubernetes solves the chance of how can I
schedule containers across a host, a set of host
in a cluster.
How can I do low balancing across these containers?
How do I ensure that I can scale out when needed?
STEPHANIE WONG: Kubernetes has become the de facto standard,
but is there any difference in developer experience?
SAM STOELINGA: Yeah.
Definitely.
And that's a good thing.
I think improvement in developer experience
is always a good thing to have.
So developers can really focus on writing
the code versus worrying about where their code works well
in production and in development because they have
the same container that they build
that also gets used in development
but also gets used in production.
So they're able to improve their production reliability
by having this kind of developer experience.
STEPHANIE WONG: I think it would be helpful to jump
into another scenario.
Let's say that I am a company, and I've
containerized some applications, but I'm still
primarily using monolithic applications on-premise.
So how can I use Google tools to help modernize and port
to the cloud?
SAM STOELINGA: We have a modernization platform,
which we call Anthos, which allows
you to modernize your applications either on-prem
or in the cloud.
It's based on open platform.
So it says Kubernetes, which we call Anthos GKE;
STO, which we call Anthos Service Mesh;
and Knative, which we call Cloud Run.
And these technologies really allow you to modernize in place
and move to the cloud when you're ready.
STEPHANIE WONG: What does Anthos look like for IT
ops versus developers?
What's the user journey like, when it comes to migrating?
SAM STOELINGA: So I've been involved in a few Anthos
deployments.
And all of the cases that I've been involved,
both developers and the IT team have been engaged.
Actually, not just IT-- the networking team, security team,
which you could consider part of IT,
they've all been super engaged, especially
during the initial installation, but also
afterwards for making sure that the Kubernetes
platform, the Anthos platform stays running and up
and making sure the develop have a proper experience.
IT operations are always going to be
involved in those scenarios.
And developers, on the other end,
are going to be focused on making sure their workloads get
up and running successfully on Kubernetes
and make sure they stay up and running.
So they have different roles, but they are still
both fully engaged.
Yeah.
STEPHANIE WONG: To wrap up, what are
some of your views on the trends for hybrid and multi-cloud?
SAM STOELINGA: Yeah, so I have seen,
no matter which kind of customer I work with,
you often see them standardizing on Kubernetes
as the platform for workloads to be running for the future,
but also for current workers to be migrated to.
And even industries that are traditionally been slower
to adopt newer technologies, they're
also starting to adopt Kubernetes
as the standard for their internal applications
and external or any application.
Yeah.
STEPHANIE WONG: So for those people in that bucket,
what can they do to get started and get some value out of cloud
today?
SAM STOELINGA: I think that the biggest thing they should do
is just get started with a smaller pilot,
like find a workload that they want to modernize right now,
get it running on Kubernetes, see what benefits they
gain from doing that, and repeat it for other workloads as well.
But really, sometimes it's more of, just get it done and get
started.
STEPHANIE WONG: Sam, thank you so much for being on the show.
SAM STOELINGA: No, thank you for having me.
It was fun.
STEPHANIE WONG: Everyone, check out
the articles on hybrid and multi-cloud at the links below.
And comment with your own experience with it as well.
Join us next time for Eyes on Enterprise.
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