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STEPHANIE WONG: Hey, everyone.
Welcome to "Eyes on Enterprise," where
I'm bringing on Googlers to talk about the technology
landscapes that are helping enterprises scale,
adapt, and modernize.
My name is Stephanie Wong, and today I
have Sona Oakley, Solution Architect here at Google Cloud.
Very important topic that we're covering today--
we're talking about migration to the Cloud
and diving into strategies and the tools
to help you get there.
There's a lot that we're going to cover today,
so I want to thank you so much for being on the show.
SONA OAKLEY: Absolutely.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm really excited to come on the show
and talk about migrations.
STEPHANIE WONG: Great, so huge topic.
First off, migration is something
that people often consider for a long period of time
because they have rightful concerns over moving
their workloads to the Cloud.
And then, on top of that, small companies
versus large companies have different needs and migration
paths.
So how do you start to dissect that process?
SONA OAKLEY: Yes, absolutely.
I would say that the first thing that you want to start with,
because migrations is such a heavy topic,
is, you want to start with the why.
Ask yourself the question, why are we going down
this path, what is going to be the business goal that I'm
accomplishing, or even the technical goal that I'm
accomplishing.
And once you kind of frame that and keep that in mind,
it really makes it clear how we can
get from where your company is today to where
it is that you want to be.
And whether that's being able to develop faster, whether that's
being able to take advantage of all of the efficiencies
and scale that moving to the Cloud can bring,
it'll really vary based on your business
and how big your business is, what your business goals are.
STEPHANIE WONG: So there are a lot
of ways to move to the Cloud and along with it
many considerations when you're picking a strategy.
You know, some companies want to decommission some workloads.
They want to consolidate.
Others want to move their VM to the Cloud.
And others want to modernize by transforming
into the containers.
So how do you start in that decision-making process?
SONA OAKLEY: Essentially, the way
that you would want to think about it
is that once we have that North Star that we want
to accomplish, we want to go back to square one
and really start to build a catalog of all
of the applications that you have, the workloads
that you're thinking about moving,
what your networking and security requirements are.
And once we've categorized and built out that list,
we can start to think about what our migration strategy is
moving forward.
Now, when I say that, a lot of people think in their minds
that they need a very complicated system
diagram, where there's all these connections taking place--
you know, where we have the exact schematics of the way
that our applications work.
For larger enterprises and businesses
that have grown organically, sometimes that's not feasible.
So I would say that coming to the table
with anything, even if it's just a napkin, which
has happened to me--
a customer showed up with a napkin
of just all their applications and workloads written down
that they wrote down on the flight
to come up to Mountain View.
So I would say that even something that simple
gives us a good starting point and gives us
an idea of at least what is top-of-mind for you.
And then we can go through and dig through
with the other various groups and lines of business
that you have to figure out what are other applications, what
are other resources that are being used.
STEPHANIE WONG: So going back to the first part
of the workflow-- collecting inventory-- it can include
a lot of things like dependencies on your app stack,
including your database and message brokers.
And then you have your infrastructure underlying it,
firewall rules, security policies.
Am I missing anything there?
SONA OAKLEY: I mean, that really covers the meat of it.
And then things like source code repositories--
oftentimes, the gotchas happen when
a business grows organically.
And we see people coming out of the woodwork
as this migration process is happening.
Hey, actually I'm keeping my source code over here and not
in the official repository.
STEPHANIE WONG: Right.
SONA OAKLEY: Or if I've got this machine that I'm
using 2% of CPU on for, you know, my own workloads-- things
like that.
STEPHANIE WONG: Comprehensive evaluation ahead of time
is going to save you in the long run.
SONA OAKLEY: Yes.
STEPHANIE WONG: So I know that there
are a lot of cases where moving to the Cloud
may not be practical, or it's just not
technically feasible in the near-term.
So you know, like, for example, you
have licenses that you can't move to the Cloud
or your tech stack may not be virtualizable in some cases
or you have third-party frameworks and languages being
used.
So what do you do in those cases?
SONA OAKLEY: Yeah, I would say that in those cases,
it's OK to say no.
And sometimes, no is the right answer.
For example, you know, mainframes are not going away.
We've predicted that they will be for the past 40 years.
And they're here to stay.
So if you have legacy applications that
are running in those kinds of environments,
it's totally fine to leave them where they are
and then to focus on what we can accomplish
because the last thing we want to do
is kind of get into a situation where we're trying to force
a square peg into round hole.
And we can also do something that's
a close approximation to moving to Cloud.
So for example, I was working with a company
that was getting close to a data center shut down.
And so instead of having them move over
completely to the Cloud, what we did was,
we moved them to a co-location facility.
And what that allowed them to do was,
it allowed them to still reap some of the benefits
because they're still located close to a Cloud entry point
and are able to get that high throughput,
low latency that they were looking for without doing
the official Cloud migration.
STEPHANIE WONG: So just jumping off what you just said,
there are a lot of ways to approach this.
And you have to meet customers where they are.
And you know, some may want to do an all-in-one Lift
and Shift, while others prefer to do a hybrid approach--
private and public Cloud.
So how do you advise your customers on that?
SONA OAKLEY: Absolutely.
I would say that it, again, comes back
to what the customer wants.
You know, if most of your business
is on legacy applications and hardware,
we'll have to consider a very different migration path
than if you're already Cloud-native and looking
to scale.
So for example, we actually worked
with a customer who had very aggressive timelines
to shut down their data center.
Again, this is a very familiar story.
And what we did was, we advised them to kind of Lift
and Shift their current applications as-is
and then modernize later because they
were facing a really imminent time
crunch that we wanted to make sure that we could adhere to.
And then we can always modernize those applications
and advise on a containerization strategy
at a later point in time.
Don't feel like you have to do everything at the same time.
STEPHANIE WONG: On the topic of containerization,
people often ask, OK, how do I know if my application is
a good candidate for containerizing and pushing up
to the Cloud.
Things like Dev-Test applications,
multi-tier stacks, LAMP applications,
or perhaps you have a Java app running on Premise web apps--
how do you know?
SONA OAKLEY: Google can absolutely
help you in that effort-- you know,
especially once we've done that categorization of applications.
But generally, the ones that you mentioned
are good for containerization.
I would also include in there are things like training labs--
you know, thinking, also, about your application.
If it's resilient to restarts, then that
is a good one, as well, to be moving over.
And you know, again, it just goes back
to making sure that you're not trying to force
a containerization strategy.
I was working with a large-scale manufacturing
company who really wanted to go all-in on containers.
But due to their kind of technical requirements,
it wasn't the right fit for them.
So instead, we moved them onto system containers,
which still gives them a little bit of that flexibility
but isn't that full-container portfolio that we
were originally thinking about.
STEPHANIE WONG: So this still begs
the question, what do you do with monolithic applications
because, I mean, a lot of enterprises
are still running off that.
How do you migrate to a microservice environment?
SONA OAKLEY: The way that I think
about that is, if you're thinking about scaling
a building or scaling a mountain,
you don't try to jump all the way up to the top at one time.
You know, you take it step-by-step and really
go incrementally.
As your team learns more about Google Cloud and Kubernetes
and containerization, we can break down that application
and move toward more of a microservices strategy.
One of the things that Google has
done that's a little bit of a nice middle ground
there is using application containers.
So instead of thinking about containerization
in the normal context, an application container
allows you to put the application--
entire application-- into a container.
And so, that way, you can still take advantage of the higher
fault tolerance and portability that containerization provides
without necessarily moving or breaking down
that monolithic application all at once.
STEPHANIE WONG: Right, because I think that what's intimidating
is a full rearchitecture of these applications.
SONA OAKLEY: Yes, absolutely.
STEPHANIE WONG: Yeah, I love this idea of middle ground
and moving in parts because it lowers the risk and the barrier
to entry to Cloud migration.
And you can still take advantage of, like,
the software-defined networking, live migration, fast reboots.
But I do want to talk about specifics a little bit--
about the tools that exist to help you migrate, like,
for example, moving Compute workloads to the Cloud.
Do we have anything there?
SONA OAKLEY: Absolutely.
So we have Migrate for Compute Engine.
And essentially, what that allows you to do,
whether you're moving one workload or thousands,
it provides you a unified way to move all of these componentries
over to Google Compute Engine, which is GCE.
It also provides cloud testing and validation.
We have a plug-in that makes it really simple
to kind of find those workloads and move them over.
And then lastly, which I think is the most critical part--
and you touched on this at the beginning--
is that we have a stateful rollback.
So if, at any point, you feel like you
need to hit the ejector button and really just get out
of the migration, we have that capability,
where you can roll back to your on-premise environment.
We can pause, take a timeout, and see what's happening.
STEPHANIE WONG: Yes, and that's very important
because, once again, you want to make
sure you have compatibility towards the Cloud first
and you're not creating disruption for your user base.
So being able to roll back is a key, I think.
SONA OAKLEY: Yes, absolutely.
One of the customer examples that I always like to use
is that we had a Fortune 500 company who was using SAP,
actually.
Implement a-- they were originally
considering a Multicloud strategy,
and then they moved over to GCP.
And what we helped them do was, we
helped them run SAP on Google Cloud Platform, which
was really important because they were part of the pharma
business.
And that was important for their pharma and healthcare
verticals.
We, all-in-all, I believe covered something
like 7,000 systems across 30 different applications
with 12 terabytes of data moving on to GCP.
And all of that was done with Migrate for Compute Engine.
STEPHANIE WONG: Wow, great.
Another great example of a very common use case
is VMware migration to the cloud.
Do we have a tool that exists for that, as well?
SONA OAKLEY: If you've decided that retaining
use of a VMware-based control plane
is what's appropriate for your business,
we can actually support that.
And we have support for VMware vSphere workloads
that we can move over onto Google Cloud Platform.
STEPHANIE WONG: Awesome.
So what about the applications that do
need to stay on-premise, yet they
want to take advantage of the Cloud native capabilities?
What do we recommend in those cases?
SONA OAKLEY: Earlier in 2019, Google Cloud
came out with a new product called Anthos.
And essentially, that platform does exactly what you asked.
We have seen that customers are running their applications
on-premise in Google Cloud as well as other cloud providers.
And the management of that becomes very ornery.
Now you're looking at separate config managements,
separate monitoring platforms, separate logging platforms.
And Anthos seeks to unify all of that.
We pull all of the underlying hardware together and allow you
to manage your on-premise and your hybrid cloud--
Multicloud environments in one place.
If we do have a little bit deeper,
the way that we do it on-premise is that we have a tool
called GKE On-Premise, which allows
you to implement a containerization
strategy in your on-premise environments.
STEPHANIE WONG: Do you have an example
of a customer that is leveraging Anthos and using on-premise
and Cloud together?
SONA OAKLEY: Yes.
Actually, we have a very big banking customer
who's using Cisco HyperFlex as well as Anthos today
to really do exactly that.
They've found that it's been able to simplify
their monitoring, logging, and config management.
And they're still able to get access
to all the benefits of Cloud.
And it's as if they were deployed cloud-native,
but their underlying hardware is still on-premise.
STEPHANIE WONG: And that just reminded
me-- another exciting announcement was Migrate
for Anthos, which I know actually
lets customers move their VM-based workloads to the cloud
and convert them into containers,
which is amazing because you can support edge deployments.
You can actually migrate from Compute Engine,
on-premise, other clouds.
So I think this is going to be very exciting for the future,
as well.
SONA OAKLEY: Absolutely.
And that's actually why we're seeing
a lot of financial institutions have interest in Anthos--
is because they're running these data-driven applications, which
really hits that sweet spot for containerization because, you
know, instead of having a monolithic application,
you can really break it down into
its appropriate components.
And anything that you need to put a web or mobile front-end
on top of really lends itself to that use case very well.
STEPHANIE WONG: So for those that are wondering,
how can I get started in that decision-making process, what
is there to recommend?
SONA OAKLEY: Oh my gosh, there's a number of resources.
I would say that my favorite is probably--
we have a set of reference guides
available on cloud.google.com, which
I think will be linked below, that are a great Getting
Started guide and help you to think through what it actually
means to migrate your business.
Also, we have a variety of professional services,
resources, and-- internally, that organization
is called PSO.
And so, we can absolutely leverage workshops
that they have to help you out, as well.
STEPHANIE WONG: Awesome.
Well, thank you so much for being on the show.
We went over a ton of information.
So thanks again.
SONA OAKLEY: Absolutely.
This was a lot of fun.
So thank you so much for having me.
STEPHANIE WONG: Everyone, I encourage you all to check out
the resources below.
And check out our other series, "Stack Chat," where
we go into actual examples and bring on customers
to talk about how they're implementing our technology
and migration patterns.
Let us know what you think of migration.
Are you doing Lift and Shift, Multicloud?
What tools are you using?
Comment below, and join us next time for Eyes on Enterprise.
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