MARK MIRCHANDANI: On this episode,
we talk to doc.ai about how large health care
companies can start to gain the benefits of running
in the cloud.
[THEME MUSIC]
So how has the cloud kind of been
a catalyst to making this change in the industry as a whole?
AKSHAY SHARMA: Yeah, it's a great question.
So if you look at, traditionally,
most big health care-related companies
are not really on the cloud.
They're usually on their own data centers.
Moving to cloud has many challenges,
so one is regulatory and compliance challenge.
We are seeing that most cloud providers today
are HIPAA compliant out of the box, which reduces
the sort of barrier to entry.
But it's still pretty hard for them
to move massive amounts of data to cloud because there
is cost associated with it.
But the stickiness aspect with the cloud
is that you don't have to build tools from the ground up,
because there are so many services out of the box
that the cloud offers that it makes valuable because it's
a question of opportunity cost.
Can you get to market sooner?
However, still there are enough challenges for big health care
players to be on the cloud.
What we are seeing at doc.ai startups--
which is a startup, basically-- we don't have that issue.
We can be on cloud.
We are cloud-native from get-go.
So we want it to be scalable, resilient, and use
all the services out of the box so that we
can get to market sooner.
What we have seen is we were able to get
to market significantly faster, not
having to worry about infrastructure or managing
servers, and use the plethora of services
that Google Cloud provides.
A great example of that is Google Kubernetes Engine,
and along with all the other containers
that we can easily roll out and other type of services,
like SDL Proxy and so on, which makes it really easy for us
to not have a big infrastructure and dev ops team, but focus
on rolling back product features.
So it's been great that way to be on the cloud.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: And that makes sense
for startups, who, you know, they want to be a cloud native,
they need to get to market sooner.
It's really easy to be agile when you're small.
What would you say the most important kind
of cloud technologies or cloud-related resources
are available to larger companies that can help them
adopt a similar methodology?
AKSHAY SHARMA: That's a great question.
So I think it's a multi-phase approach for bigger companies
that are not on cloud already.
So what I suggest is that any of the new products and services
that you want to roll out, you want
to consider being on the cloud first.
So some principles of being cloud-native
means that you can use some of the open source technology
so that you're not necessarily locked into one cloud vendor,
and you have the optionality of being able to run that back
on your data center.
So the first suggestion from my point of view
is that you start building new services and products as sort
of a cloud-native version that can run on any cloud,
including your own data center.
Second phase of that would be, how
do you sort of bring other interesting data
that you sit on in your own data centers
and use that in conjunction with the data that's
being collected on your new services and products?
So you could bring your own data to the cloud
or you could sink the data back from the cloud to your own data
centers, where you are now building a much more robust set
of models or services.
But over time, as phase three, I would
say that you may want to consider
moving a lot of your computational needs
onto the cloud.
The challenge with that is at scale,
cloud becomes pretty expensive.
An example of that would be if you're
building a lot of interesting models
that require a lot of GPU computational resources,
then these are pretty expensive on a per hour basis.
So it's still very valuable to consider moving to a cloud,
but then build it and design it in a way
that you're not tied to a specific cloud.
And there are many open source tools and technologies
that let you do that so, that way,
you can bring it back to your own data center eventually.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: Yeah, and a hybrid approach
is still something that's not only relatable,
but actually really desirable to a lot of people.
So how does that relate to the cloud being more expensive?
AKSHAY SHARMA: Right, so it depends on where you
are in the company's journey.
So a big established company may have already
owned the real estate for having their own data centers.
So the marginal cost of adding the server
would still look far more lucrative for them
to move to cloud, as opposed to move to cloud.
But what I see is that there is going
to be an explosion of different tools and services,
and especially new type of computation environments
that you can get.
For example, you're seeing PPUs that Google is pioneering
and rolling out.
It'll almost be impossible to bring those
to back to your data centers.
So in some way, you're right that it's better
to be on cloud, because you can manage costs certainly
in some way because you only use it in on demand.
But then with already at scale, certain companies
find it easier and cheaper to roll out new machines,
but not necessarily offering the same capabilities.
It's an opportunity cost of the future versus marginal cost
of the present day, that these big companies
have to make a trade-off.
The initial cost will be higher on the cloud,
simply because to replicate the same level of computational
resources, it's going to be expensive.
But with the right sort of teams and right infrastructure teams
in place, where you're not spending up resources
and wasting it away, you can somehow
have a handle on the cloud.
But I think really it's the future
of where your products can go, which
I think is only possible being on a cloud provider today.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: Stay tuned for more conversations with doc.ai.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out the "Stack Chat"
playlist for more great videos.
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