Nutanix Weekly: Moving from Multiple Clouds to Multicloud: 6 Steps to Creating a Modern Environment (Part 2)

Podcast Part 2 >> When you’re ready to make the move to a unified hybrid multicloud environment, it might seem daunting at first. You are most likely currently managing multiple operational silos across public, private, and possibly hybrid clouds and have been for years, and adapting to the minor and major inconveniences those disparate environments are causing you today.

Blog post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/moving-from-multiple-clouds-to-multicloud

Host: Phil Sellers, Practice Director for Modern Datacenter @ XenTegra
Co-host: Jirah Cox, Principal Solutions Architect @ Nutanix
Co-host: Chris Calhoun, Solutions Architect @ XenTegra

Transcript

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Philip Sellers: Welcome to another episode of Nutanix Weekly. One of the many Podcasts we do here from Zintegra like to call it content with context, because we try to bring the real world to the blogs and things that we talk about here. You know, it'd be boring if I was doing this alone. So I've got 2 great guests with me. We've got Gyra Cox with Nutanix joining us. Jaira, how are you doing today?

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Jirah Cox: Good still! Thanks for having me again

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Philip Sellers: And we've got Chris Calhoun solutions architect extraordinaire former

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Philip Sellers: nutanix but here with us is integra now. So, Chris, how you doing

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Fantastic, glad to be here and ready to have a good conversation

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Philip Sellers: Well appreciate everybody kinda jumping on and and also listening. I'm your host for today, Phil Sellers, practice director here at integra for what we call modern data center.

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Philip Sellers: And on our last podcast we were talking about multiple clouds versus multi, cloud and 6 steps to kind of help you navigate that modern environment strategy. And so we got through half of our 6 steps on the last episode. So if you didn't catch that rewind and listen to part one

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Philip Sellers: but for today's discussion we kind of left off on the topic of, you know, documenting and and working with your counterparts, so standardizing tools, listening to all your business. Associates, you know, folks from app dev folks from the business that you're reporting into.

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Philip Sellers: And so we want to kind of pick up on that topic and

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Philip Sellers: drive the conversation forward a little bit.

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Philip Sellers: and so I guess we'll dig right in for anybody listening that doesn't have the link. The title of the Blog post is moving from multiple clouds to Multi Cloud.

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Philip Sellers: Colon, 6 steps to creating a modern environment. This was written by Nicholas Hollyon

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Philip Sellers: with Nutanix. So shout out to him, thanks for posting this. And guys, I I guess let's let's dig right in step number 4. Assess your vendor relationships and pre commitments. This is something that's big inside of the cloud world. And

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Philip Sellers: In some ways cloud vendors. Public cloud vendors, aws, azure, have embraced lots of other software vendors, and so you may have your vendors of choice in their cloud.

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Philip Sellers: But these pre commitments are a huge deal. It drives a lot of, I guess, customer.

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Philip Sellers: customer direction, strategy and activities.

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Philip Sellers: but talking about assessing those relationships and the pre-commitments. What sticks out most with that from a strategy perspective, Jaira

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Jirah Cox: The the part that grabs me here is sort of this excellent, I think, coaching that that Nicholas's article here provides around sort of comparing

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Jirah Cox: current commitments, right which we understand fully exist, and contracts exist, and and things like cloud run rates are, are there for a good reason

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Jirah Cox: and sort of taking almost like a self inventory of like. Is this what we want it to be? Is this, where we want it to be in the future. Right? We understand we're on a maybe some contractual vehicles that might have a multi year, you know. Look to them, and that's and that's totally fine as well. But then, at the end of that time period, does that get us where we want to get to right? Or do we have to start planning make changes

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Jirah Cox: now that maybe have varying degrees of like efficacy or ability to execute over that time period. So if if I have my, you know my cloud logs up for the next 2 years. 5 years, 10 years is what the the article calls out. How does that

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Jirah Cox: compare to where we want to position ourselves in the future, where we here, being like a customer of the cloud, right? Is a direction we want to go into, grow into and how does that rationalize against like, say, new investments? Right? And so I think it's it's super realistic here, right to have the coaching here in this article that obviously as much as we're we all

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Jirah Cox: I'll say, primarily specialize in the technical side of this. There's a huge financial element that that simply cannot be overlooked or ignored. As we go through this process

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, absolutely true. And and

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Philip Sellers: you know, I I look at what Nicholas is saying here, too. Yeah, he says, it's easy to get stuck in on that idea that you've invested X amount of dollars in a particular vendor over the past decade, and I come up with that objection a lot of times talking to customers and listening, and even have said it as a customer myself.

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Philip Sellers: You know, there's that concept of

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Philip Sellers: continuing to fund the existing sort of strategies and the ways of the past, I guess, is a way of of summarizing it. What we've done in the past and trying to move that forward.

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Philip Sellers: But I think it's a a good time for companies to stop and think. Is this going to propel us

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Philip Sellers: into the next phase. Is it going to give us the advantages cloud is supposed to bring in terms of agility and speed?

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Philip Sellers: Or is this a boat anchor? And maybe I need to part ways with this particular vendor.

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Philip Sellers: Chris, I'm curious in your past experiences as a customer. How did you navigate this rationalization of of vendors and and contracts and things like that.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: You definitely have to to look at obviously the direction whether it's a short term. 2 year, 5 year, 10 years, like Jira mentioned. But you also need to like you said again, rationalize where you are in your journey. And that's really what, from a financial perspective, I think that you have to understand is.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: it talks about commitment, but it's the commitment both to the business and to the technical direction that you're going. So. And it's 1 of these, where I think folks want to be able to say, Okay, snap of the fingers.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: We're in the cloud now. Well, no, that's not the case. You have a journey, and along this journey is a transition period, and understanding that in order to get to that end, state that Jaira mentioned of Hey, we want to be an agile company. We want to have that flexibility within the next 2 years that you have to keep that into a realistic context and understand that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: you'll be maintaining some of the. We'll say the hardware that you have in your current data center and transition that off to now a cloud model. So that period of change is what sometimes is painful

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: for customers to manage those relationships. Because you've you're and it even says, Hey, sometimes you may need to cut. Cut your losses with some vendors. Well, cutting those losses and yet telling them, hey, look, we're not going to be able to

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: officially buy any more hardware gear from you, but yet we still need solid support. So you you can't burn bridges, and that's something that I had to make sure that I maintain those good working relationships from the hardware vendors that we worked with. Knowing that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: we were open and honest, and sharing with them our goals and vision of moving.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Most of the data center workload to the cloud. So strategically, those sales reps knew that they were losing business. But we, as a in turn wanted to be good customers and still have those active working

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: support contracts, support relationships. And I think that that's something that's valuable. You definitely don't want to burn bridges. You have to still look at holistically supporting the full landscape of your environment. And I think that that's really key is knowing that you're looking forward. But don't neglect where you are currently, so that something falls by the wayside. That's critical infrastructure.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, I think that's practical advice, right? And that's the value of partnership at the end of the day. You know, if if you're partnering with.

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Philip Sellers: you know reseller, or with a vendor partner, you, you've got that 2 Lane sort of

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Philip Sellers: dialogue going on, but we all know that that's not necessarily

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Philip Sellers: always the case. And so I think it's practical advice. Maybe

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Philip Sellers: I I don't know, not showing all your cards. As you're you're talking about your internal strategy, because again, you don't want to put yourself in a precarious situation.

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Philip Sellers: Sure, you know as as I think about this, too, the

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Philip Sellers: the the multi cloud strategy versus, you know, the vendor relationships. A lot of this is also contractual.

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Philip Sellers: You know, Jare, you mentioned this, and I'm gonna give us kind of a another analogy.

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Philip Sellers: It's kind of what we've been doing with large software vendors like Microsoft for years. Right? We we have large agreements. They include different components. Now, we're seeing that inside of the cloud vendors as well. Whether that's a commitment in order to reduce, you know, individual costs of different services, or

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Philip Sellers: whether that is, you know. Hey, try this free. And you know this is the new service available to you in your agreement, and the old Microsoft adage of You know these are the additional benefits of your enterprise agreement.

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Philip Sellers: We're seeing some of that kind of come into the cloud world, too.

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Philip Sellers: with with those sorts of things on the horizon, it's easy to to get stuck or locked in

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Philip Sellers: with different vendors. What's the best advice you've got in terms of, you know.

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Philip Sellers: avoiding that lock in and maybe also, as as Nicholas is talking about here, not getting too focused on

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Philip Sellers: being sold on a roadmap

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Jirah Cox: Last one's huge right? Kind of comes with the territory of of being in software right? There's always what it does and then what it's going to do in the future.

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Jirah Cox: So the the best advice I have for that one right is, is, have that

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Jirah Cox: balancing act of the current state of of the product of any product, right has to be minimally viable.

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Jirah Cox: Right, in my opinion, roadmap features should be

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Jirah Cox: ease of use, enhancements nice to have enhancements.

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Jirah Cox: but it's probably inappropriate to make almost any buying decision on a on a future roadmap. When there's critical required functionality on the line right like

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Jirah Cox: best to best to validate that things. Behave as you want them to, or need them to now. And of course there's always room to improve well, quite literally, everything in the world of software. Right? But but be rational with with the business and with your vendors as to what? What are your actual? You know, day 0 Mvp. Technical requirements?

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Jirah Cox: cause. Honestly, even as someone who who received that from customers just being honest is A is a big help, right like if if it's a you know, I cannot buy this until it does X and Y and V

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Jirah Cox: That's fine. That that helps us understand. You know. What we need to focus on from a market demand perspective. When you know how to not waste your time with a bunch of meetings until we can do those things. It's it's actually refreshing to have that kind of honesty and technical

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Jirah Cox: accuracy in a in a discussion

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Philip Sellers: Chris, I'm I'm kind of curious on your side, too. I mean as you.

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Philip Sellers: You've been on the consuming side of this.

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Philip Sellers: You know what? What are your thoughts on? You know? Roadmap versus reality, I mean, have you gotten caught in

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Philip Sellers: one of those situations where you're trying to dig in? And it's just. It's not quite there yet.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Yeah, I definitely think that that thinking back in in my customer years, you're focusing on planning for

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: a future technology that's not here yet is

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: tough to really lay a foundation, for, you know, if, hey.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: we're told second quarter, the feature that you're looking for will be ready, and it'll be ready for prime time. Well, that means that it hadn't been tested yet, potentially. So

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: those capabilities just in general are something that I think that you've got to be wary of of knowing whether you're in an early adoption of

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: the

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: new tech, and you're totally bought in. I think that that's got to be a strategy that you've you plan a solid foundation, not an iffy foundation on so

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Structurally, I think that you've got to make good sound decisions, knowing that a dot 0 release, because, as us techies know that we sometimes aren't.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: are on the bleeding edge or on the cutting edge and looking for more stability. I think that that's where, as customers are making these changes, you've got to understand that. This is a a 1st move for many customers that have been Diehard data center proponents for the past 1020, 50 years in their businesses. And so understanding how the model changes, understanding how support changes.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: thinking about all right as an engineer, as a manager, as any role in the organization. How does my day to day change with

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: the implementation of a cloud model. And I think that that's it's a bridge off of your statement around software predictions and capabilities to understanding just

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: what are those capabilities going to be, and what are they here now, so that you can parallel what you're doing now to what you're looking to do. Day 2 day 3 of a cloud journey. And that's something that I think that's got to be realistic and have those discussions in house with your teams is really important.

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Philip Sellers: And I think that's a great segue directly into Step number 5 here in the blog post, narrow down your environments and technologies. So you know, transitioning lots of siloed environments into a single standardized setup, takes time. And I think that is the core of what you're saying, Chris. These are going to be gradual steps. And so, you know, it may feel like we're

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Philip Sellers: we're crawling towards that goal a lot of times. I know. That's that's been my experience, you know, having run lots of merger and acquisition and technological sort of meshing over my career, you know. Sometimes you don't see huge steps.

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Philip Sellers: But you know I do have. This question is, is narrowing down the technologies. Kind of the the

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Philip Sellers: core application of that 80 20 rule where you're looking at something that addresses 80% of the need. Jared, what do you think

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Jirah Cox: So I think that that can be a huge part of it.

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Jirah Cox: what I what I took away from this section was just sort of the

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Jirah Cox: the high level coaching that as a on the customer side of this to be a technology leader.

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Jirah Cox: it's sort of just persistent, eternal change management right? And so, looking at through the lens of you know.

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Jirah Cox: How do I have a a framework and a process to understand? When can I retire a certain tool. When can I retire? A certain environment? Whether that's infrastructure or whether that's geographic, right? Like, what is my, what is the justification for keeping it around, because understanding that justification helps, it helps you sell it internally. Right? We have to renew this. We have to maintain this, we have to life cycle. This because of requirements A and B and C, it helps the business. Understand? Well, what if we.

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Jirah Cox: you know, change those requirements right? But you know nothing just in a vacuum, and everything is constantly changing all around us, right? So as networks get more reliable, as we can do more things in software that you should be defined in hardware as latency more or less lowers or approaches laws of physics speed limits. You know, all of these things

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Jirah Cox: give an opportunity for the technology leader to maintain this kind of living document? Right? Of what's our what's our what's our internal roadmap for lifecycling a given environment or a given technology

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Jirah Cox: with a with a, with an, with an eye towards certainly reducing that right like to your point, Phil. Around 80, 20 or where can I get more broader use out of a certain tool? Of course, this is where I mean easy stuff to highlight things like terraform things like ansible, then probably can be broadly rolled out across your environment today and offer standardization and broad reuse for the practitioner. Right? Even if they still do domain specific activities can have can have a broad set of values

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, I I think having worked through projects, you know.

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Philip Sellers: transitions of like an Erp system. You know, we we have our internal business processes. This is the way we work as an organization versus this is the way the software works right. And if you're in a transition like that, the more that you adopt the way the software works versus trying to force it to your hand

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Philip Sellers: the better off you are long, long term, because that's the way software is designed.

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Philip Sellers: I think the same thing sort of applies here. Right? You know, Cloud has a very specific way of operating. We need to adopt the way cloud operates. That's gonna force changes on us. Maybe organizationally. Certainly process wise

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Philip Sellers: but

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Philip Sellers: it it close closely ties, I think, back to the previous example which I'm gonna summarize. This don't throw good money after bad, just because you've

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Philip Sellers: had something for the last 10 years. Don't continue to to necessarily fund that look at that as as a way of maybe breaking and moving. And conceptually, a lot of this is really easy to talk about. But practically this becomes really hard to do.

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Philip Sellers: You know, nobody wants to give up their favorite toy right? And so we're probably gonna face a fair amount of pushback from constituents.

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Philip Sellers: As we go through this process of rationalizing and narrowing down environments and technologies.

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Philip Sellers: I'm gonna

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Philip Sellers: transition right into Step Number 6, which I think, is possibly the most interesting outcome. I think Nicholas has done a great job of leading us through kind of a funnel. When I look at this and think about it. It's sort of a funnel strategy, right? And so here we are at the at the narrow end of the funnel. And step number 6 embrace a cloud. Agnostic strategy. What is cloud agnostic like, I mean, what? What's he talking about here?

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Jirah Cox: So I think it refers to the framework by which you think about building and designing workloads. Let's say, let's say in clouds. And here. Clouds means just like traditional. You know, public cloud hyperscalar environments. It. It refers to. It doesn't have to. But that's what most people think it does. It says, you know, let's define and design our applications in such a way that

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Jirah Cox: they can do cloud like things, but cloud broadly right, and not lean too far heavily into any one provider

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Jirah Cox: cloud structures. Things like, let's let's use. I'll call back to my, you know, terraform ansible example. Let's use things like that to write our automations, to build, say, virtual machines or instances. Maybe not use like the aws cli, specifically right. Because then, when I down the road, choose to use a different cloud provider, or add a second cloud provider to my fleet. That's now an automation. I have to go, revisit or rework compared to maybe updating my terraform or ansible

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Jirah Cox: scripts to simply target a different environment. Right? So that kind of staying cloudy in design patterns right things of the service scalability. You know, ephemerality can all be cloud like design concepts. So that being too tightly coupled into one cloud provider. I think it's also going to be an eternal

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Jirah Cox: wrestling and or rational rationalizing exercise with every single opportunity to use something that is like, say, native to only one cloud and

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Jirah Cox: proprietary one cloud. What does it get me right? Does it give me faster time to market faster value?

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Jirah Cox: I would take a wild guess. It rarely represents lower cost. It's probably faster. Turn up right faster. Deployment

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Jirah Cox: only because things that are as a service right have more manageability management baked into the layers of them. Right? If I want database as a service, someone else's checking on that vm deployment and that OS deployment and patching the database engine. It's probably not lower cost. It's that I want some one of my teams not managing that right, or I want it faster right at the service. So

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Jirah Cox: you know, being honest with ourselves as to what? What does something that is more integrated? Give me versus something that is more reusable. Give me right. One, of course, keeps all my options up in the future, for when I want to add a second cloud, a 3rd cloud, or move it between clouds

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Jirah Cox: as an option versus a. You know what is the benefit for me if I use something that is more only in one cloud vendors lane

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, I I like this. You know, certainly something that

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Philip Sellers: I've advocated for in organizations in the past. This is a large

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Philip Sellers: reason why I've encouraged organizations to look at solutions like Kubernetes

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Philip Sellers: as a substrate. You know, that's standardized. That has very repeatable Apis across multiple different clouds. And again. You know, virtual machines.

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Philip Sellers: Kubernetes. Those are 2 very common ways of running services in cloud. And then, you know, as you said.

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Philip Sellers: maybe 20%, the things. The point products that

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Philip Sellers: offer competitive advantage or time to value.

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Philip Sellers: then adopt those in a particular cloud. But yeah, keep your options open. It's kind of like

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Philip Sellers: dating advice. I don't know. Playing the field. Hate to make that

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Jirah Cox: But

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Jirah Cox: at the risk of alienating all my friends in the Kubernetes world, I often will will be overly reductive and summarize Kubernetes right as just. It's the most fashionable way to install applications right now. Right? So if you're thinking about something that you write and therefore have to then go deploy. Why wouldn't you then consider

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Jirah Cox: the most mainstream way to deploy enterprise software nowadays? And of course, yeah, that's certainly Kubernetes. Another thought that I've had on more reflection. Right? We've all kind of lived. This is, I think, one of the easiest. Maybe let's call it a

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Jirah Cox: a pit to fall into one of the stickiest areas here to think about. How do I stay? Agnostic versus? Where should I lean in

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Jirah Cox: data? Right? We've all had this before. We're like the the heaviest thing in a given equation, right? Or the stickiest thing our founder used to say, data has gravity is, where does the application data reside? That's going to inform 20 more level of decision. Right? But you know, if I can't move the data for an application.

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Jirah Cox: a lot of things are decided for me when I can move the data for an application. I maintain a lot of my operational agility or freedom of choice in the future.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah.

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Philip Sellers: the requirements around that data is also very telling, right? Whereas many times as we make decisions based on licensing constraints

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Philip Sellers: based on where we can put data where data can reside is also another huge factor that drives our behavior. You know, I know Chris and I. We see a lot of enterprise designs based around Microsoft or oracle licensing and the constraints imposed by that licensing. You're not getting away from that in cloud, either.

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Philip Sellers: you. You've you've maybe just given it some steroids to beef it up a little bit. And so I think that

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Philip Sellers: giving yourself choice is kind of the underlying factor here with cloud agnostic strategy.

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Philip Sellers: You know. And so

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Philip Sellers: you know, as we talk about that, I'm curious, Chris. You know you mentioned maybe before we started recording. But just around the idea concept of lock in and things like that, I think that goes

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Philip Sellers: to the heart of this is just trying to. You know

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Philip Sellers: whether that's your commit forcing it. The easy button to consume more.

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Philip Sellers: you know, making smart decisions about, you know, if you need to pivot the agility of cloud that it brings

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Philip Sellers: could be negated by the lock in. If if you've chosen to do it all

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Philip Sellers: one style, one way of a cloud vendor. So curious your thoughts when it comes to the the lock in features

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Yeah, that agnostic approach is really key, because customers definitely lean in whenever they get incentivized to move workloads in in a timely manner, if it's hey? If you get X number of workloads to cloud vendor of choice within 12 months, then we will reduce the next

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: 2 to 3 months.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: charge that come out of the the fees for those workloads. And I think that not only that, the timing around that plus okay, we've got 12 months. Let's utilize their tooling so that we can get it done faster.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Well, utilizing their tooling is exactly what they want you to do, not staying agnostic. And that's part of the

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: discussion that we're having today about making sure that you do use or just reevaluate how you're tooling. Obviously die. Hard engineers want things done, the way that they've done them for the past 10 years. That's gonna change.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: but also just

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: hitting the easy button and using the vendors. Tooling means that you're in the vendors hands. And that's just one of those approaches that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: if it's about a financial decision and or a timing decision, that's where the tendency to lean in a little too strongly I've seen from customers

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: are then, hey? We're going to use their dns. We're going to use their scripting. We're going to use their models. Well, okay, you've just now become

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: less flexible, less agile. You'll get your results of being in their cloud.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: And that's that's not necessarily the best, most flexible way. When in the past you've potentially had a 2 hardware vendor scenario so that you don't get locked in. Well, why change that now? Why not have that flexibility, if you like, Jara, said. Reevaluate your tooling, and then make sure that you have

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: the right approach, so that it becomes generic enough so that it can be used in cloud 1, 2, or 3. And that's really what I've seen from customers is

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: if they're pushed for a time limit.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: They sometimes lean in too hard and now become pretty much locked in. So that's really the the focus. And even, hey, if you're not getting the results

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: as far as performance goes, in this cloud shared model, then they look to up that by committing to reserve instances for even a longer commit, so that the approach of

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: fixing it

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: from the outset and planning accordingly. Versus hey, we're here now. We've we're committed. We have to just be all in. So I think that's something that if you've got time to think, plan, and organize and have those thoughtful communication tracks with all of your peers and constituents, as we've mentioned before. It's really key to building out a solid landing zone for your cloud journey.

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Philip Sellers: I really like the way that Nicholas says this. Particularly talking about those incentive programs, he says carefully, evaluate those incentive programs and ask yourself, does it lead me down a path

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Philip Sellers: that gets me to a cloud agnostic goal? Or is this gonna put me in a forced proprietary situation and reduce my ability to operate a true hybrid multi cloud platform

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Bingo!

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Philip Sellers: I I love the way that he says that, because, you know, if you run it through that simple question, it's a long question. Let's but it's a a simple one. Right? Does this

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Philip Sellers: simplify things for me, or does it make it locked in right, you know. Is this agnostic, or is this locked in

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Philip Sellers: that simple question could save you a lot of grief in years to come?

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Philip Sellers: You know, there's a lot of people who are fans of a particular clouds way of operating particularly, I think, aws you. You see a lot of fans of the Aws style.

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Philip Sellers: and so I think this could help, you know, kind of

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Philip Sellers: make things a little more generalized in the strategy, so that you have choices down the road.

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Philip Sellers: And again I'm brought back to kind of that 80 20 thing right? I don't think there's anything wrong with using some of those cloud native services that that give you something you don't have

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Philip Sellers: you know, Chris, you're you're talking about something like

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Philip Sellers: Route 53 in aws, you know, for a vendor or for a customer who's looking for Geo. Redundancy of Dns services to kind of host their public zones. It's a great solution, right? It checks a lot of boxes and helps them. So I don't think any of us are advocating that you shouldn't use those 1st party services, but you should use them strategically right? That

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Absolutely.

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Philip Sellers: It should meet something that you're trying to accomplish and not just be the default, because it's there.

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Jirah Cox: I,

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Philip Sellers: I'm curious as we kinda close this out, because I I love everything that we've we've chatted about because I think it. It really goes to the heart of who Nutanix is as a a company, you know. This is, of course, a nutanix blog out on on your website.

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Philip Sellers: But Nutanix has always been about choice.

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Philip Sellers: and you know, a lot of this advice is really centered around providing choice to the customer. So in in closing kind of wrapping it up. Jaira, I'm curious. If you've got any thoughts around.

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Philip Sellers: you know choice and strategy here when it comes to multi cloud

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Jirah Cox: The I I did. I thought of something to circle back to that. I planted a little teaser in there around

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Jirah Cox: the way most customers think about this is applying to public cloud. I would submit. It applies to us, too, right as a cloud platform

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Philip Sellers: That is.

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Jirah Cox: Software platform. You can run anywhere, right in clouds or on Prem or at the edge, or in a colo, or in a great source provider like Syntegra. Like as a platform, you can deploy and run anywhere. Part of this even applies to us right? There's parts of our of our portfolio and our tool set where you can get more done faster by using our tooling for it. That, of course, will be, you know, a Nutanix choice. There's parts where you can also totally rationalize and say, we just want to use the best of breed technology like a terraform.

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Jirah Cox: as our build creation process and maintain our flexibility there, and our our tool reuse across everything. Right windows, Linux, Nutanix substrates in guest clouds, things that haven't even been invented yet right or configure my, my top rack switches as well with the exact same kind of tool set right so that 80 20 broad applicability applies even to us as right. So we're here about helping customers.

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Jirah Cox: I guess you could say, perhaps with like the sort of the geographic nature of cloud, right of like. It's cloudy. Wherever you choose to put it, you simply just get to draw on the whiteboard. I want my cloud to contain these areas of the world, right? Whether that's truly, you know continental or whether that's my technical world. Right? This data center, that data center. I want these to behave and act, and look like a cloud to my customers, my tenants, my business partners.

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Jirah Cox: But this works. This applies to us as well. Right? There's things to do with the ways to use that are, go faster and use the phoenix tooling that are, you know, stay more agile and right, and of course treat us like a cloud platform with agnostic tooling as well

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Philip Sellers: That's a great point, Chris. I'm curious if you've got thoughts, too.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: At.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Obviously, we're talking about generic. And we've talked about the the hyperscalers and the public clouds. But yeah, to Jara's point to me a lot of the the, I guess issues and diversions of some of the decisions that could be made. Can be simplified with

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: nutanix in the cloud, let's say, and it's the idea that we talked about last time is that cloud is not a location or even a destination. It's basically a an operating model. And that's the part that to me Nutanix offers. And through this whole 6 step blog, I was thinking, okay.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: this just amplifies the easier decision making that customers have when

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: consulting what direction? Well, Nutanix is the direction you just decide. Hey? We've got Cloud spend, and we'll say azure. We've got through the Ela, or we. We've got a working relationship with aws, let's continue that partnership. Let's utilize Nutanix there. We've got customers now that are going through a Poc

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: that are interested in advancing their Nutanix capabilities. They've seen the benefit they now are recognizing. Hey, look! Let's use some of that cloud spend and continue the flexibility of allowing

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: from a business standpoint. That's a global customer to have that flexibility of like you, said Cloud, geographic or cloud specific to the business as far as the location of their

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: business initiatives. Whether it's hey? Our apps are all in the cloud great, or they need to talk back to either us or overseas. That operating model is simplified with nutanix. They've got the capabilities now, and it's just a matter of

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: extending their efficient use of nutanix technologies. And I think that that's really key is

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: the hybrid cloud model gives customers in 2025. That option to be more dynamic.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Phil, you mentioned mergers and acquisitions. Obviously, to me.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: 2025 business, wise things are changing.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: partnering, businesses, collaboration, all of that is allowed through technology. And that's because of the flexibility that customers have. So I think, as customers do combine, you don't have to use your old 10 year old thinking strategy of. Okay, we've got to re home all of either old hardware

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: or purchase new hardware. Well, we've got that already in place. We've got the operating model in a software stack with Nutanix. That's ultimately capable of all of this, and more with the freedom of the choices you make with their included tooling, or bring your own tools, and I think that that's really the key

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, I I will say I. I like both both viewpoints there, and I will loop back to one of the other considerations we talked about earlier today. That's the financial implications, right? And

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Philip Sellers: when we holistically think about cloud, including a Nutanix stack, really not to go super geeky. But like we really come back to an Api conversation. Right? You know a lot of what cloud is and has been at least for our developer constituents. Is Api access to the infrastructure.

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Philip Sellers: And so Nutanix, as a stack gives us the ability to compete as internal it with the hyperscalers, and so it could be used and viewed as a competitive advantage.

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Philip Sellers: I know we've got one customer, good friend of mine, who has built out a cloud strategy and is successfully repatriating things at a lower price point, and competing with the hyperscalers as a internal service provider to his organization.

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Philip Sellers: And so when you start looking at that, you can have major financial shifts

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Philip Sellers: powered by a internal cloud stack. Internal you know, holistic sort of strategy that that allows you to become cloudy with a chance of sunshine. So hopefully,

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Philip Sellers: hopefully, that gives everybody some things to think about. Right? You know, we've got 6 different points here. Kind of drives towards

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Philip Sellers: best advice we can come up with for a multi cloud strategy. But

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Philip Sellers: yeah, I I think that there's a lot of

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Philip Sellers: food for thought. As we come out of this episode, I don't think this is the last time we'll be talking about multi cloud

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Philip Sellers: versus multiple clouds. And really, it all comes back down to to those core things that we covered. You know, it's it's a simplified way of operating, unified as opposed to just

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Philip Sellers: for luck of the draw, having points of presence in multiple different clouds. It's all about the intentionality of it. And hopefully, this advice helps you start creating that cloud strategy

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Philip Sellers: to chart your next decade plus of technology. So on behalf of Jaira and Chris, thanks for listening

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Philip Sellers: hopefully catch you on the next episode, but until then have a great day