¶ Defining Cloud Native Architecture
Just as someone that works in sales . I just want to say that I don't do any of that . Will so just to call that out .
I don't work in sales , I work in marketing . Now I'm even worse Technical marketing .
I am the problem . Welcome to the Cables to Clouds podcast , your one-stop shop for all things hybrid and multi-cloud networking . Now here are your hosts Tim , chris and Alex .
Hello and welcome back to yet another special , special episode of the Capels to Clouds podcast . My name is Chris Miles . I'll be your host for today , joining me , as always , my beautiful , lovely , adorable co-host , tim McConaughey at JuanGolbez on Twitter , as well as Alex Perkins , who is at Bumps in the Wire on Twitter , and we have a very special guest .
You know him , you love him , you see him all the time . We'd have him on here every episode if we could . Mr Will Collins of the Cloud Gambit how are you doing ? Today Will Never better Never better . Getting all my sleep in False .
Got a new baby here actually so for the audience we have a new baby Not even a week old , and apparently you know , new babies just don't sleep a lot . It's just one of those things . They like to wake up , like every hour .
They were sleeping for nine months in there . Bro , it's time to figure out they're out . They got stuff to party you know , yeah , exactly , um , so will has promised us some many , many hot takes on this episode , so we're we're glad to bring them on . So , um . So to the topic for today's episode is all about the term cloud native .
Um , and , just to make sure , I give them their flowers , I actually got this idea from an episode of the Gestalt IT podcast , which I believe used to be the on-premise IT roundtable . I remember there was , if you're familiar with the delineation between on-premise and on-premises . That is a battle I've been having as a grammar Nazi for many years at this point .
So I think they rebranded it just to simplify it , but it was actually a very clever name , but they had an episode about . Cloud Native has just become essentially a marketing term .
It's kind of strayed from its origins and the way that we use that today , the way that vendors use that today , the way that marketing uses that today , is all kind of tilted it on its head and it's not the same thing that it started out with , right ?
So we wanted to kind of just have a riff on this and give our perspective and what it means for specifically the world of cloud , especially cloud networking , as that's something we all know and love , right . So I think we'll start off . So I want to give just kind of a definition , like what is cloud native ?
And the consensus was that we all would use the cloud native , the CNCF cloud native . Oh my God , what is the second C for Cloud native computing foundation ?
Yeah , okay .
I can't believe I forgot what the C was . But anyway , Do you ? work in cloud or what I know . I've been saying CNCF , so you forget what it actually stands for , but anyway . So we've gone over to the CNCF for what a definition of cloud-native is , and this is version 1.1 . I believe this is relatively recent . Looks like there was some updates to this .
It's hosted on GitHub and last update was three months ago , so pretty recent definition . So I'm just going to read this verbatim and we'll start there . So , per the CNCF , cloud native practices empower organizations to develop , build and deploy workloads in computing environments .
In parentheses public , private hybrid cloud to meet their organizational needs at scale in a programmatic and repeatable manner . It is characterized by loosely coupled systems that interoperate in a manner that is secure , resilient , manageable , sustainable and observable and observable .
Cloud-native technologies and architectures typically consist of some combination of containers , service meshes , multi-tenancy microservices , immutable infrastructure , serverless and declarative APIs . This list is non-exhaustive . So that's from the CNCF .
As you can see , pretty all-encompassing casts , a very wide net across the cloud landscape of what can actually be quantifiable as cloud native . So we'll start there with that definition . What do you guys feel about ?
that I think the biggest thing is that it feels less like a definition and more like what's the word ? Loosely prescriptive architecture , if you will , the wording that they use specifically .
I mean , I get that we're trying to say what is cloud native and to me all those things sound very cloud native , those words , and loose coupling is a very big part of it . I mean , that's probably the most definitive thing I heard among all of those things . So I would definitely say that's , uh , that's the one that stands out to me the most .
I could go
¶ Debating the Definition of Cloud Native
. So I'm going to throw , throw in a hot take here , you know one that's kind of kind of unpopular , uh , but I'm going to throw it out anyway because of , uh , lack of sleep and uh , whatever , and this does not reflect , you know . So this is my opinion only .
It doesn't reflect the organization I work for or you know any of the groups , extracurricular groups I'm involved in . So I'm going to start by reading . I actually looked this up before we got going and wrote it down . If you look up native on dictionarycom , it says being the place or environment in which a person was born or a thing came into being .
So kind of like rephrasing that for the purpose of cloud , you know , being the place or environment in which you know a thing came into being , and so one of the things you know , I think in terms of making a calculation of what cloud native actually is and kind of like Tim was saying , like that is about as high level as you can possibly get .
It's almost like a design , you know , some separation of infrastructure and applications , which also , you know again , also becomes almost a double standard .
Sometimes look at it through the lens of like network and security infrastructure and not applications , and you say , hey , I'm bringing my F5 , my Palo Alto , I'm bringing my SD-WAN provider , and well , you're going to see tons of pushback from the app folks . You know who are going to say wait , you know , that isn't cloud native .
You're injecting all your third party meth into our beautiful fluffy cloud world . You know , not cool . But then you might push back and say , hey , look , what about Docker ? What about the Kubernetes , or even Git ? These , technically , were not born in that cloud .
You brought them along with you , though , and I want to bring my big , cumbersome , less than optimal performing firewall . Well , where does that leave us ?
And so , like the sort of the thing this is an opinion that I've come to over many years of doing this both on the enterprise side and on the vendor side , but to me , like cloud native for infrastructure really means using the constructs that are available to you in a given cloud provider .
They build these things , they're very tightly coupled , they work really good together , and when you start injecting a lot of third-party stuff you do have , I mean , it can provide some operational challenges . I'll just say that , and I'm not saying you shouldn't do that because there's so many .
In fact , if you're a big enterprise , most of the time to cross the compliance checkboxes , to meet all the scaling requirements and do all the things that are important for your organization , you have to inject some third-party stuff . It's just a fact of life . So that's sort of my hot take on it . Any opinions ?
I definitely agree . That's the same kind of definition that I've always thought of when I personally think of cloud native . I think that the problem with the CNCF definition it is so loose that it's allowed it's really kind of the genesis of why it has morphed so much because it is so open to interpretation and not strictly defined .
It really allowed anybody to come in and just claim that term and not strictly defined . It really allowed anybody to come in and just claim that term .
So I think also a lot of people have taken Kubernetes and just kind of made that like the de facto Kubernetes is cloud native and anything that works or integrates with Kubernetes or even runs on it or anything is considered cloud native .
So those two things I think are a huge issue as to why it has drifted so much and the marketing has gone out of control . But I agree a lot with the idea that cloud native , if you take it literally , is stuff that came from the cloud , like you said , like a native product that was built in a cloud provider .
So I just agree with you there for sure built in a cloud provider .
So I just agree with you there for sure . I think that there is an intrinsic kind of gestalt or belief in the community , you know , pushed by the cloud providers as well , that cloud native is necessarily better than you know other options .
And I think we have to address that and kind of set that to the side a little bit , because it's true that it can be better , like you know , for example , and it all depends on requirements , right ? I don't want to pull out the design engineer in me and just start saying it depends .
But uh , you know what will said about cloud native being like what's provided by the providers and it being operationally and administratively much simpler than a third party integration . I mean , I think that's . I don't think anybody would push back on that specific piece of it at all .
Like , definitely that's true and that's true of it , and that's been true since the days when we tried to interoperate any two vendors , even with standards-based you know networking , that any two vendors have still been horribly more complex to make work together than going with a single provider , right ?
So I completely agree that cloud native is probably what's provided by the cloud providers from an infrastructure perspective again , which is where we're speaking from , and that there's benefits to that , and there's also benefits to bringing in a third party , and I don't think a third party can just bandy the term around cloud native as easily , as they've kind of
shoehorned themselves in .
Yeah , and that's not saying that one is better than the other . It's just tradeoffs and decisions that a company has to make Like , ok , what are you trying to do ? How many applications is a company do you have ? A company has to make Like , okay , what are you trying to do ? How many applications is a company do you have ?
Do you have just one big application that you're looking for ? This gigantic distributed scale like globally , or you know but much you know . All the enterprises out there are much more complicated than that , you know .
And I think that being very prescriptive with the way we define things is really important here , because if you take that CNCF definition on its surface , well , any vendor out there can come in and say , hey , we're cloud native , this is the CNCF definition , let's go , and I think that's kind of it becomes a slippery slope , which is why , like , I've kind of
gone out of my way to try to define it more , kind of go just a little , a few layers deeper , just so it actually kind of has a real definition . But again , that is for some reason a very unpopular take on that . I've had a lot of debates , a lot of I'll call them character building sessions in debating this topic . So yeah , it's interesting .
Yeah , I think it's overly difficult when you start getting into the nuts and bolts of how infrastructure is deployed and how it's used .
Because I feel like I talked to and again echoing Will's point , I did not speak on behalf of my employer , I don't think anyone on this podcast does but I talked to a lot of customers of the cloud that are saying , wholeheartedly , we have a cloud native first approach , right . Our choice is always to pick something that's cloud native at the beginning .
But if you're going by the definition from the CNCF that is so vague that , like , what a cloud native adoption looks like is , that could be anything , right , if you're like , because it says it's a combination of any of these things . So that could be like .
If you're just using strictly serverless , technically you're cloud native , right , but how does that adapt to your hybrid environment , right ? How are you using serverless services on-prem ?
And I think , once you start introducing other things like containers and multi-tenancy , there's a strong emphasis at least on those foundational components about portability , right , and those things should be meant to run anywhere , right , and sometimes in certain situations the thing that you're running cannot be portable to another cloud provider , right ?
So , like , has cloud native just become CSP native at this point , right ? Or are we like ? I don't want to sit there and belittle the thing , but I think once we start talking about how this incorporates into vendor marketing and things like that , that's when it really becomes .
We need to separate this idea of cloud native just being better wholeheartedly than than the other options , because that's not always the case . Right , but that's my two cents on it .
Yeah , when you're not specific about things at the end of the day and you make things so broad , what that means for big vendors out there , for the big ones of the world and startups that are trying to gain market position somewhere , what that means is it's an opportunity to jump on that and ride that surf , on that wave which creates the absolutely mass
confusion right now . It's very confusing . There's so many different technologies since I started , you know , in the land of hey , we got a switch , we have a router and we have a firewall , maybe some load balancing involved , like where we are at today . There's so many different touch points , so many different vendors , so many different use cases .
So it's just there's so much out there and there's opportunity . Things are viewed as an opportunity most of the time , I think .
And the funny thing is , I don't think that customers are dumb . I say customers just because I work at a cloud vendor , but I mean not just customers , I don't think enterprises , I don't think anybody . I think anybody who says we're a cloud native first shop is not unclear to themselves about what they're talking about . You know what I mean .
Like , you know the vendor , you know vendors may come in and say , hey , we're cloud native too . But I think that most enterprises that say hey , we're cloud native first , uh , we have a cloud native first approach , you know , and we'll , we'll change based on the requirements . Um , they know what they're talking like . They know what they mean by it .
Right , and it's it's rarely the same definition that a lot , a lot of the vendors have .
Look at , like if you look at the CNCF landscape if you've never looked at this , please go look it up . I think it's just landscapecncfio . It is hundreds . It's like just an enormous display of all these different companies making a product that fall under this cloud native umbrella , and that's what happens when you don't have this strict definition .
So , like Tim said , anybody can just come in and be like , yeah , it's cloud native and that's what we mean . Like you said , there's no consensus . It's just if everyone thinks they're cloud native , then they are , and that's just how it is .
Yeah , and kind of , I guess , to their defense , to play devil's advocate a little bit . You've got to start really playing devil's advocate here . You've got to start somewhere , I guess . So that's you know . But again , like the , you know we all work .
You know , tim , chris and I work for vendors and we happen , you know , if you work in the network and security field and you were on the seller side , you're trying to sell to some of the some very smart folks that really are detail oriented .
They are going into all the nuts and bolts like ad nauseum , probably several times in several different lines of questioning . So that's you know .
That's one thing that we have where , if you're selling some sort of SaaS product or you're selling something that's going to do scanning against some infrastructure as code or some sort of app-related product I've seen , I've been part of some of those conversations as well they're much less . It's more like okay , yeah , we want this outcome .
Oh , you're compliant in X , y and Z . Yeah , let's try this thing out and adopt it . But on the network and security side it is , I think , because of the cascading impact and the responsibility that these practitioners have in these big companies . It's , you know , you're going to go into a lot more technical , a lot deeper conversations .
Yeah , 100% . I mean to your point , like the , if you look at the landscape , just like Alex said , like networking is a very small section of that entire landscape .
There's , there's uh , I'm looking at right now on my other screen , I don't even know if I could count , like give a ballpark estimate of how many things are listed on this landscape right now , but that's just . I mean that kind of speaks to it , right , it's there . There was the need for this to be , to have a foundation to qualify this stuff .
There has to be somewhat of a free market and in terms of entering this space as well , right . But so I mean let's , let's use that to kind of transition to , to the world of vendors , right . How do we feel vendors are using this term in their marketing and things like that , and do we feel like it's true to the definition or has it strayed from that ?
I will .
I'll jump in . I feel like it's the same thing as the customer thing that Tim mentioned .
Every vendor is coming out with their own definition and just saying not every vendor , but a lot of vendors are coming out and just saying our solution is completely cloud native , we can just plug into all these existing solutions , we work with all the CNCF projects , blah , blah , blah . A lot of times it's just vomit .
It's just the vendors just come out and say we're cloud native and that's it . And it's nobody challenges them on it Nobody , because because , again , there's no strict definition . So it's just . I think it's the same thing that we were just talking about with the customers .
The vendors are doing the same thing and that and it's just adding to the confusion and it's just a whole mess of confusion all around circling constantly .
Yeah , I could go on a rant here . Actually , I'm going to just go on a rant here . Actually , I'm gonna just go on a rant here . If you all want to stop me , just yell at me , throw me a virtual more than welcome it , though you know , first of all , like marketing , like as a practice , I've seen change over , like the past three to
¶ Navigating Cloud Native Technology Hype
four years . I think that you know that everyone that is not doing the selling aspect of all this sees this very clearly and it raises alarms for sure .
You know , specifically , the massive increase in the areas of like maybe being misleading , intentionally , being misleading really , and just ultra exaggeration , like making some super exaggerated claims which you get found out on .
So I gave a talk a while back , that kind of uh actually trying to highlight this to some degree , and you know , one of the directions I I chose to go was , you know , using sassy and ssc sort of as my punching bag , and you know I actually quoted .
You know I talked a lot about things that gartner has said , about , like the , you know , in the ztna hype cycle blogs that they have this is all public , but I remember , like of course they were , when they brought Sassy in the trough of disillusionment . Well , that was due to over exaggerated marketing by tech vendors , the security vendors out there .
I know that may seem surprising that security vendors would over exaggerate , but it happens . Moreover , the huge amount of noise being generated just noise , noise , noise . For the enterprise out there . It makes it nigh impossible to distinguish the real practices from hype .
And I think the last thing I talked about was these vendors really generalize specific enterprise use cases and they always lead with their solution first . So you combine these three and it's just . It's so hard , like if you're in the decision making seat , if you're a technical decision maker at a big company , that is okay .
That is why I know vendors get frustrated with all the bake offs and all the evaluations and the comparisons . But this is why there's so much noise out there . People will say anything to make a sale . So where does that put you ?
Because if you make a bad decision and you bring in something that you thought was going to do A , b and C but it doesn't even do A , then your integrity on the enterprise side , your value to that company , slowly starts to shrink and enter very long sales cycles .
Yeah , no , that's , that's absolutely true . And I mean , that's where you get the .
The old saw , like no one ever got fired for buying Cisco , right , like you know , something we don't think about enough , you know , speaking as you know people in a cloud networking startup is that the people who are making technical decisions and business decisions about , say , traditional vendors who say , hey , we're , we're cloud native , our , our , you know ,
firewall , our router . Hey , it runs in the cloud , it's on the AWS marketplace , so we must be cloud native . Right , you know , versus versus like say , it's containerized . So there you go right , um , but you know whatever , so they .
But the point is , a lot of those traditional vendors have , you know , 20 years of of reputation so they can make more noise and they can seem more . You know what's the word I'm looking for trustworthy , I guess , for example , because ultimately the whole thing comes down to trust .
Long sales cycles are about trust , every and , and it's because of what you just said , will , about the . Everybody out there with the hype cycle , everybody's saying the same . You know saying the same thing . We're all using SASE differently . This , this goes way down the rabbit hole , right Like this is hardly the first technology to have done that .
We could trace it all the way back . So , yeah , I think traditional vendors , and you know , jump right on the bandwagon with everybody else saying you know , hey , we're cloud native because our stuff runs in the cloud and with loose definition , you know , they can kind of squeeze in under the .
You know , kind of get under the circus tent if you will , you know , on that , just by saying , hey , our stuff runs in the cloud , so we're cloud native .
Yeah , um , just as someone that works in sales , I just want to say that I don't do any of that . Well , so just just just to call it out sales . I work in marketing now I'm even worse technical marketing .
I , I'm , I am the problem .
Yeah , but no , that's um . But I think you know , I think you make a great point about how things have kind of transitioned , where you know , I saw the same thing with SD-WAN , I feel like tenfold right . It was just like there was all these vendors out there that did one thing like WAN optimization or one of the basic constructs of SD-WAN .
They did one of them right . There may be core networking , that there might be WAN-OF , there might be something like that , and then the second SD-WAN was popping . They added one more feature and was like okay , now we're an SD-WAN product or an SD-WAN company , which that's the thing .
Though is the problem just the fact that there's a vague enough definition where vendors can do that . Is the definition , the crux of the problem , Because then it's like oh , if I can , I have this like insane catalog portfolio , what have you of all these products that I have ?
But if I can run one of them in a Docker container , am I have I made it cloud native Like does ? Should they be allowed to do that , or is that just kind of disingenuous across the board ?
I think the definition is definitely the problem . I mean , I just thought of this while we're talking , but I haven't fully thought this through . But is it IEEE that does certifications for certain standards like USB or Wi-Fi , like a certain version of Wi-Fi , or HDMI or things like that , right ?
Like I know , there's bodies that define these definitions and they certify products right and say that they're allowed to put this thing on their product that says , yes , this is USB 3.0 , for example .
There's nothing like that , and I don't know if that's a good thing or something that's needed here , something better than this , where , like you said , chris , you can just add a second feature and be like , yeah , we're SD-WAN now and that's it .
There needs to be some kind of stronger process , and I'm the last person to call for any kinds of standards bodies , but I don't know . There needs to be something there that makes this a little more rigid .
So this is funny , because SD-WAN , sase , sse , cloud , native so many of these words . I actually kind of have to point the finger at big , at the big G on this one . Gartner causes a lot of these problems yeah .
And provides a lot yeah , provides a lot of opportunity for vendors to even even looking back . It's funny . You know , chris , you brought up SD-WAN and I remember I remember when SD-WAN was really getting real and like companies were adopting it , like when I started getting into that foray .
And I remember when SD-WAN was really getting real and companies were adopting it when I started getting into that foray , and you look at the websites and you try and figure out what these different vendors are doing and then you realize at some point they're all just actually doing tunneling and there's some sort of controlling mechanism that allows me to do X .
Y and Z .
They're not . That I mean .
Okay , there are differences in the architecture , but if you fast forward to now like as confusing as that was , then , which is extremely confusing , especially when you were doing a bake-off with a lot of these companies- but , you fast forward to now and it's not just everybody's doing tunnels and you have some sort of control plane mechanism .
It's much more complicated when you throw in cloud , you throw in integrations , you throw in the API ecosystem and all these different things . You have so many different possibilities , so many different . You know the way that things function and the outcomes that you get from you know a product or a service . It's just so much more confusing .
It's got to be hard to be sitting in that seat evaluating a lot of this technology , because you can't say , oh , I'm going to build it all myself and we're just going to do it everything in-house . If you work for an enterprise , a lot of times you're lean . You have to really make some serious decisions on build versus buy .
You have to go through these buying cycles , these evaluations . Hopefully you have some sort of R&D involved to some capacity . It's just hard . I don't know if there's an easy fix because more things are just in with AI . Now their floodgates are not even there anymore .
That's a trust thing , right . That's why people buy the magic quadrant .
Yeah absolutely , and I'll say this . I mean one thing that , obviously , I work on the vendor side , specifically in sales . So , like , I have this conversation a lot , whereas , if like , if like , if you look , if you look up cloud native , you can even see , like each , each of the major CSPs out there , or have their own definition of this published as well .
And you know , like AWS even references the CNCF . It . It's really targeted as , like , this is how you build cloud native applications . Microsoft does the same thing , google does the same thing . They all have it out there , however , but that concept about always being cloud native has trickled into infrastructure as well .
So it's like , oh , I only use cloud native infrastructure and I'm like , I don't know if it aligns like that . Um you know like like , like product , aside from what I'm , what I'm working with or what I'm pitching .
If you're going to sit there and try to tell me that , that you know AWS , tgw or Azure , vlan or , um , uh , google , NCC , if those are cloud native solutions from an infrastructure perspective obviously I'm speaking about the networking ones , but there's tons of them across the board I have a hard time agreeing with you that that is a cloud native solution and
there's not a strong emphasis on using microservices and things like that . Maybe that's what the cloud provider is doing under the hood , but you , as the operator , are none the wiser . That could change tomorrow and you'd have no idea . So I don't know . How do you guys feel ? Do you agree with that ? Do you have a counterpoint
¶ Navigating Cloud Native Challenges
at all ?
I think the thing there is . So if you're using a , okay , so you have one of these services , it's connecting . You know they provided this service .
It's a cloud native service that is connecting your wide area network or allowing you , like an Azure route server , it's allowing you to plumb routes through , and then you have something that you're connecting on the other end of something that you're configuring on like a physical device over the internet or you know whatever , whatever it may be and on the other end
of that , you might have data somewhere in a data center that this thing needs to sip from . Yeah , Is .
That is that cloud native ?
In my opinion , I don't believe it is and really I believe that these services , especially the ones that allow you to integrate outside of that cloud provider , as far as I'm concerned , cloud native is a really amazing and really the right fit of a definition for something like even an application that's born in the cloud .
And in my opinion again very much William's opinion here if you're trying to bring legacy debt into the cloud and like a quarter of your application is sitting across two different data centers and who knows where , it's not cloud native . Again my opinion . But yeah , they have to have those services to integrate those and why they may be , quote-unquote cloud-native .
As far as AWS built them , the pattern or the architecture that you end up with , I believe , is not cloud-native , but again , very much my opinion . I just want to make sure that that is known .
I don't think it's possible to do hybrid cloud-native . That's not a thing , right ? You cannot do that , right ? So- .
Tell them to open stack .
Yeah , well , I mean sure I'll get right on that . I'll find my time machine and go back and they're still around . I'm just kidding , but yeah , I don't think it's possible . And from the infrastructure point of view , you brought up a really good point , right .
Like cloud native applications are probably a lot easier to build or to refactor , really than an infrastructure ever could be .
To be fully cloud native as an infrastructure , you would have to be entirely running within the cloud because at some point you're going to connect to a data center , you're going to connect to something that's outside the cloud in a hybrid manner , and it's just not going to be a cloud native approach to it .
right , you're messing with legacy , you're messing with on-prem , whatever you want to that is built and born in the cloud , in the public cloud , and you move it onto your hybrid cloud setup . Is it now no longer cloud native ? It gets so murky because of the definition . Again , it's like where's that cutoff for every different thing ?
And if somebody spins up an application on prem and it's running in a Kubernetes cluster , is that cloud native ? Because then you can port it right into the public cloud . So it's just , it gets so murky everywhere and I don't know how you ever define where a delineation could be .
I don't think so , contrary to popular belief here , I don't think . If you're running Kubernetes , native or in any other capacity , in your data center , one does not simply say okay , I'm just gonna um shoot this sucker over to aws and call it a day I've actually gone through these exercises .
Yeah , vendors say it all the time and I will tell you from experience , this is not the case . Um , because there's a lot of class . I mean how ? Yeah , I , that's a huge , you know , and that's part of the problem of all the buzzword bingo . That's happened .
Buzzword abuse is a real thing , and , whether it's AI , machine learning , kubernetes , cloud native insert , whatever hot thing at the moment that we're talking about , this seems to get applied to products or features that only tangentially relate to the technology in any capacity .
So you could say that and you could make that argument , but I don't think it's a good , you know , I think you're really . It's like buying into . I'm an Android person . Right now , I have a Google Pixel . I bought into them back on in Google land , land I , I was , I did have an iphone at one point .
But it's kind of the same thing like when you , when you go to apple , you're buying into their ecosystem , you're buying into their mark , your app store , you , you have your .
That is , it's all really tightly coupled and , uh , we don't want to go into regulation and all that's happening with apple right now , with opening up stuff and a big push to sideload apps and whatnot . But that's kind of a not a one-for-one example , but a kind of a similar example . They've locked it down .
Everything works really good together , the hardware and the software . It's vertically integrated , really nicely buttoned up and it just works and you have this thing . But as soon as you start going out , you know you're out of Apple's ecosystem .
Yeah , see , I think you're kind of leading exactly where I have a problem with it . Like we can sit here and argue over the grammar and the actual definition till we're blue in the face . But I wouldn't care if the true beneficiary to all of this was always the customer .
If adopting a cloud native first approach was always going to give you at least a better result as a customer in the long run every single time , then I wouldn't care . But the thing is , the marketing for cloud native solution has . The main beneficiary is the cloud providers .
Right , if they get to tell you to always choose the cloud native solution , that's more money in their pocket , that's more opportunity for them to charge you for . You know hourly and consumption charges across the board . Right , they always come out on top Like it's it's . You may not actually come out and come out with the exactly house always wins .
You may not actually come out with the best solution at the end of the day . So it's like I don't know . I feel like that's just the argument that we need to have sometimes .
Even if you're not even multi-cloud , let's just say single cloud but you have your own data centers and you've bought into some , dare I say , next-gen firewall vendor or something like . Your whole incident response process is built around this thing . You have all , all your teams are trained and all the processes are there .
And okay , like that cloud provider is trying to to sell you their native firewall solution , like , does it operationally make sense for you to adopt that ? Probably not , at least , at least at if you're going to cloud , I mean , unless you have a lot of time , a lot of resources and a lot of experience .
So again , is that cloud native , now that you're injecting the third-party stuff ? So you have that , you know . And again , it's neither thing is a good or a bad thing . It's not like one is bad and one is not . And I think that's something the community and us and anybody else like oh , one is not better than the other .
It's just what are you trying to do and what is your operational stance on things ? Where is your security operations today ? Where is your network operations ? There's so many things that come down back to the enterprise and an enterprise has to do what is best for them .
They can't just drop everything they're doing and say , okay , we're going to use everything native to this specific cloud provider . That's actually usually . It starts with that . Usually there is a start where that is the first okay , that's our baseline , that's our what we're going to start from .
But then is things start getting real and you start piecing things together and you start going through real , tangible requirements .
That's it . That's when the whole thing falls apart , man . When you need a route table bigger than a thousand routes , or when you need some level of observability , there's always something right . There's some checkbox that needs requirement that is immutable . That makes you think that , like you know again , cloud native isn't always the best .
Cloud native just as long as it meets the requirements .
It's probably simpler , but it's not always the best going back to what alex said earlier about the , the kubernetes thing and bringing that , you know , say you're running , that it's . It's funny because I was having a conversation with someone it's probably been about a month , but they had this vision of that .
They were going to build and architect their stuff in such a way to where they could move it's running on Kubernetes and they could just make it completely portable , this application , and move it from AWS to Azure , from Azure back to on-premises and from on-premises to wherever , wherever infrastructure existed and the whole .
I think their strategy I don't think it was cloud native , it was like cloud first something , something architecture , but the whole point premise was being cloud native and this whole thing had been pushed down from , of course , folks that are not maybe technical in nature , but that's what the vision was , and then that's what the engineers were saying .
The vision was even though some of them didn't , or like , yeah , this isn't really , you know , cloud native or whatever , but this is what we're saying . It is let's roll , you know . So that's called super cloud native .
Return with their token today native I expect royalties when gartner puts yeah , there you go yeah , trust me , I'm sure gartner will be giving you royalties .
They might be struggling for money right now . Man , I don't know . They're not making very much , all right , but yeah , just to round it out , I think I think , well , you made a great point . I think it's , but I think that it kind of comes down to the simplicity element , right , cause I mean , let's be honest , working in enterprise is hard .
You're probably doing 10 different things that weren't in your job description at the you know when you signed up for it . And if you can draw a direct correlation between best practice and cloud native and when you see the term , you're always going to go towards that , right , and it's easy to simplify it .
I mean , at the end of the day , you might not come out with the best thing , but you also might not care , uh , with the stress that it saves you and the complexity that it saves you of putting things together , right , so with that I think we will round it out . Um , this has been a really fun one .
I enjoyed this quite a bit , so thanks for coming on . Will Greatly appreciate you coming . Anything you want to plug about the Cloud Gambit , things like that .
If you haven't . I mean , I guess I'm more in the cloud and not so much in the network , so I'd say technically adjacent areas to the network , which are always good to learn about . The best thing you can do for your career is learn about all the teams and things around you that are doing things , and you can check that out at the Cloud Gambit .
What a sales pitch . I love it .
I love it .
Yeah , if you don't know he has now been joined at the Cloud Gambit with Yvonne Sharp , who has been on our show several times , and she's he's lucky to have her , lucky to have her .
She is truly a cloud philosopher . I don't know about a philosopher , psychiatrist , it's yeah she's amazing .
I think Chris Williams has the corner on therapist .
Philosopher . It is Depends on the day , probably yeah .
All right .
Well , again , thank you so much for tuning in . If you enjoyed this , please like , share , do all that stuff that you do every time we ask you to , I'm sure , and we will see you next week . Thank you so much , bye , bye , see you . Hi everyone , it's Chris and this has been the Cables to Clouds podcast . Thanks for tuning in today .
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