The State of Cloud with Veeam’s Michael Cade | AWS re:Invent 2023

This is Textron tv. Hey, everyone. We're back here, live in Las Vegas for AWS Reinvent 2023, along with, you know, 59,980 of our close friends.

Um, but we are in a, our own little video suite here at the Wind in Las Vegas, and it's so, it's not crowded. It's nice. It's a pleasant place to do our video, and I'm happy to be joined.

Well, Mitchell's here with me. Most of you know, Mitchell, him and I do a lot of these together, but we're happy to be joined by Michael C who I feel I do a lot of these with too. Yeah, because recently, yeah, Michael and I were just, uh, in Chicago together for a cube con, and we did a, uh, an interview there.

I hope you, if you didn't catch it, it's actually available on Textron tv. Now, if you look up either Cube Con or look up cast in by Veeam or Michael Cade, CAD, you'll, it'll pop on Textron tv. You can watch it there.

Um, as I mentioned, Michael is though with cast in by Veeam, and if you've walked around any of the airports here in las, or there's really only one airport in Vegas, but if you've walked around the airport in Vegas, you might have seen their, uh, ubiquitous posters, billboards, videos, advertising, uh, their presence here. But Michael, it's great to see you And you and You. Yep.

It's good to be track. Yeah. You're making the rounds.

Yeah. This is the last one of the year though, so Me too. I'm glad.

God willing. I hope so. Yeah, man.

It's a good way to end the year. Very Much so. And then it'll be back home for you.

Um, you know what, Michael, we, we've done, actually Chicago was the last one, but you and I have spoken a number of times. I, but let's start with some basic foundational stuff. Not everyone out here is familiar with Veeam and then cast in by Veeam and 'cause they always go together, right?

I've seen Veeam advertised alone, but I never see cast in advertised without Veeam or mentioned advertised the bad word. Um, so why don't we start there? Veeam and Caston.

ve, So Veeam Veeam is the, is the, the company. Caston is the focus around cloud native. So Kubernetes, that's why you see the Caston side at, um, at Q Con.

From, from here though, point of view, everything that we do is about protecting workloads, protecting businesses, so that we can get you back up and running as fast as possible. So in particular, from a an AWS point of view, you've got your data in the cloud, it's your responsibility, it's your data. Bit of a misconception.

Like AWS will they do great at all. The nines, all the availability, but it's your data. You drop that database, they're not gonna bring that back.

That's on you. But, so when it comes to Veeam, it's about protecting that workload, being able to do something with that workload, and potentially providing some sort of migration or disaster recovery for that workload. So whether that be into another area of AWS potentially, we have a lot of customers that are hybrid.

They're still on premises, so they want to be able to protect or send data into AWS environments. So Veeam is around protecting those workloads, whether it be EC2 instances, your VPC configuration, your RDS, your, um, EFS, like all of that, the workload. But then equally, your virtual machines, your unstructured data that you have on premises, and then the cast and bit is your Kubernetes clusters, your EKS, your Red Hat, OpenShift on, on AWS, your and, and any other cloud.

Like, uh, no, we're here. So we have to talk about AWS but really we're agnostic to wherever we are. Yeah.

So it's about protecting our Absolutely. Time. Your customers are a multi-cloud environment too, so Exactly that.

Yeah, Absolutely. But, you know, it's interesting, you know what I love about AWS or event, Michael, is you get a such a mixed bag, you know, securities front and center, everything is generated of AI here. Yeah.

But backup cloud native, uh, developer tools, it's, it's all in the mix. Because really what it is, is when you get something like AWS, right? AWS is is the platform that we all operate under.

It's still the major, you know, I'm not saying they're the other nothing against Google, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, or anyone else, right? But AWS is the biggest, and we're all here. Um, but some people may say, I, I don't get backup for AWS, right?

'cause isn't that something AWS does? That's why I'm going to them. Right?

They're responsible for making sure my stuff doesn't get messed up. Yeah. And that, that is a, a huge misconception.

Like when you think about traditional backup, you think about like recovering that workloads we're always bottom of the list. Like it's never the exciting part at the top of the Christmas list Mm-Hmm. Is, oh, I need backup for this data apart from me.

I, I live and breathe this for the last nearly nine years. Um, but it's a necessity, right? Is that around the shared responsibility model that AWS clearly has, you see that they keep the, they'll keep the lights on, they're gonna give you the availability, they're gonna give you all the availability zones, the sites, everything that they've got across the globe.

But when it comes to your responsibility at the top is that the customer data is a huge box up there that that's on you as a consumer. Again, like I said about, if it's your database, if it's your NAS up in, up in the cloud, that's your responsibility. You make a mistake, and we all make mistakes.

Mm-Hmm. And that's without even getting to the cyber threat. Someone gets into our environments, how do we, how do we get that data back?

And it's generally, I find at least the conversations are, we, we seem to have the conversations after the fact. Someone's had a, had an issue and they need to bring, they need to recover fast. And that then starts the conversation about backup and recovery and mm-Hmm.

All of that good stuff. So it is always a, a misconception around that there. And it's around awareness.

So, so that, look, if you're gonna take one thing out of this out there people watching is you still need your, your backups. You still need those bread and butter kind of services that we've always had in our data centers for 30 or 40 or more years. Exactly.

Just because you're in the cloud doesn't mean they go away. And it's like what we said the other week, Alan, around Kubernetes, Kubernetes the cloud on-prem physical machines, there is no high availability is one thing, right? I want to be able to, if one host or server dies, I wanna make sure that my workload just moves over seamlessly into the other.

And availability is very different to data protection. And data management is exactly what you say is we need to make sure that we have that protection first, and then we can do some pretty cool stuff with that data to, I don't know whether it's like, get some insight from that data, leverage that data to, to find out, like leverage that rather than the production. And I think that's the starting point of being able to, to do something.

It's not just backup, it's, it's about being able to leverage it as well. That's a good question that I have is I remember using Veeam early on when, when they were fairly new on the market, using for off offsite storage backup, you know, but moving from tape to dis to sure to going to remote site. How is, how is that different from, we talked about workloads now, especially when we talk about cloud native, you know, that was all pretty cloud native days.

Give us some context for what workloads are and why that's different than just pure data backup. Yeah. So if you think about our application, and you have to look at it from an application point of view, whether the application is a database or a complete application to cloud native application, that then leverages, I don't know, RDS for example, using that as an example, we need to protect the whole piece because when something bad happens, we want to give you the choice to, well, what do you want to recover?

Because maybe it's just the database, or maybe it's a table within the database. I wanna be able to provide the granularity of, of being able to say, I just need that account table back, or I just need, or, or I need the whole database back. And that's no different to whether you are running a database on prem, in the cloud in Kubernetes, in a powers based service such as A-W-S-R-D-S or any other powers based solution.

So at the end of the day, all of it is still compute, storage, and networking. Right? That's what makes up the cloud.

Now, the responsibility or what you are in charge of as a, as an IT admin, cloud administrator, cloud engineer, you probably just offloaded some of that to, you're paying the, you're paying the premium of being able to take away that responsibility of managing that. But ul ultimately underneath the application is something that you still need. Everything in The cloud is still yours.

Right? Exactly. That, Yeah.

This, this was a lesson I learned early on with the cloud insecurity Mitchell, when we were doing still secure, which is when you, when you go to the cloud, you still have responsibility for things like security, including backup and recovery. So you still are responsible when stuff hits the fan, it's still your butt on the line. Yeah.

It's shared risk, but it's not, I mean, it's, you're still your responsibility at the end the day. It's, it's, it's shared risk. You know, it reminds you of the old story of the hen and the pig, right?

They walk by a breakfast place and they say, what a nice breakfast place. The head says, yeah, it is. I, I'd like to donate an egg to it.

The pig says, that's very nice. And the head says, yeah, maybe you should give them some ham. And the pig says, well, there's a huge difference here between the kind of commitment you are making and the commitment you want me to make it.

You know what I mean? One, I'm just giving an egg, and the other one, I'm, I'm done. Rick's committed.

Yeah. It's a big, yeah. Punchline, right?

So it's the same thing a little bit when we talk about cloud, right? Yeah. They have shared responsibility, but when it hits the fan, it's your, it's your name on the line.

It's your reputation, it's your business. And I think, I think it's very, it's very easy in any cloud, not just AWS, but it's very easy to open the door and let misconfigurations, how do I, it's very easy to go into your VPC into your security group, go 0, 0 0 slash zero, and that lets every IP across the internet in, and if you misconfigure that, and then that brings us onto things like S3 buckets, how many pub, if you just Google or any search engine, if you open public buckets and the amount of customer data that resides in there because it's misconfigurations, then that's even, like, that's before we even start talking about malicious activity and, and things like cyber threats and, and that resilience to that. But there's, that's a whole, these people are trained to attack data, exfiltrate data attack your systems.

Just having a public bucket is just exposing data yourself and misconfigurations. And there's a fine line between that responsibility and, and where that, that resilience to, to being able to restore and, and have that data. So I agree with you.

I hear you. Let's, you know, I think we, we've kinda made this point. Mm-Hmm.

Let us turn now to, Hey, we're here at AWS reinvent. Mm-Hmm. Do you guys have news or, or happenings?

I know we just spoke a couple weeks ago, the latest version. 5 is the three bucket item. If we, if we don't get to the video, if you don't get to the video of me and Alan in, in CubeCon is really around growth of, around multi cluster is around, um, SIEM integration with Datadog.

Again, another company that are massive here. You'll see 'em all over the place. Sure.

So a big integration into their seam product. Um, and then the ability actually one relevant to, to, uh, to AWS is the ability to help you import from a staple set. So running your database inside of, of Kubernetes and importing that into RDS.

So providing that mobility of data, whether it's a staple set, whether it's a Postgres or Postgres database on a vm, I wanna be able, we can provide the ability to take that and push that into RDS. So that's like the, the quick wrap wrap up of the six five. From a custom point of view, from a Veeam point of view, there's two items coming, um, that we're talking about on the booth.

And in the session that I do later on this week is around S3 backup. So when I talk about that public bucket and misconfigurations, we're seeing a lot of customers using S3 as a, as a first class system when it comes to storage, storing their CDN type, their content delivery network inside of object storage or their application data within that. So we brought out the ability, well, we're bringing out the ability to be able to protect those S3 buckets.

So that's being able to send S3 bucket data to S3 buckets. So that isn't just AWS focused, it is one obviously where you can get object storage, but ultimately that could be a migration tool as well. How can I get you from one object storage to a to another?

Mm-Hmm. So migration. The other is, and this is interesting from a serverless point of view, and that's where that cloud native and cloud responsibility around data comes in, is if you think about serverless.

So you think about functions, Lambda functions, they generally look at writing into a, a NoSQL database such as DynamoDB. So a large increase around customers leveraging DynamoDB for those lambda functions, as well as other NoSQL tasks. So we're bringing in the ability to protect Dynamo DB as a, as another data service as well in the, in the not too distant future.

I love it. Excellent. Um, have you been down at the booth and the show floor?

What impressions I have Is, so my, my take on reinvent is it is always busy, but it's also the best, in my opinion, the best event of the year because everyone's here, to your point, security, data storage. Yeah. Cloud.

Cloud, right? Everyone's here, secu, uh, we're all here so We can have good conversation to me. So that's the horizontal.

I think the other unique thing about AWS reinvent is the vertical. You have the cloud provider, you have the, the vendor who provides those tools, and then you have the si some people we used to call 'em sis, the integrator, the var whatever, you the job, the consultant. I don't really care what you, the SaaS advisor, right?

But it's that vertical as well as horizontal integration where this whole ecosystem comes together into one thing. What I think, and and kudos to AWS for doing this though, is they still keep this in AWS user conference, right? Yeah.

With all of the vertical and horizontal pieces, it's still their conference. They control, they control it, they do a really good job doing it, keeping the focus on them. And it's not easy.

Yes. You look, it's something like RSA for instance, right? We've been going RSA for, I've been known RSAA long time, 25, 30 years.

At one point it was all about RSA encryption and, and all of that good stuff, cryptography. Um, it's not anymore. It's just security and everything and anything.

Yeah. I I think that's to, to your point around the vertical as well, and you mentioned it earlier on, is that you've got developers here, you've got DevOps here, you've got operations, you've got SREs, the whole platform engineering space. They're all here.

Yeah. No, it's, I think that's a great conversation to have. And I think from ours, you said about we're all over the place.

We're on the strip, we're in screens everywhere. And it's about raising awareness, right? Raising awareness that one, you've got that responsibility of data.

You are gonna have to recover some of that at one point and then provide that resilience of that data. So just because it's available, just because we have all the nines, I think 11 nines is the, is the term that AWS use. It doesn't matter if you drop that database, if you make it, if you import or input some bad data, which we can, we're humans.

Um, we make mistakes. We wanna be able to, how do we roll back? How do we recover that, that data as fast as possible?

So I think, I think that's our, our key message is raising awareness of that responsibility model. Talk About, with Talk about who your customers, more of the personas are the who, who uses the casting, because it used to be kind of an operations function to back up and restore and recover from whatever kind of fault. You mentioned SREs platform engineers, you know, there's DevOps engineers, cloud engineers, a lot of, a lot Engineers.

It's no longer just systems Administrators anymore. It is. Exactly.

It is, It is. But aren't they all systems administrators? I agree you said that.

I didn't, but Okay. Look, blame him. Yeah, That was, that was an asterisk I was gonna put in there as well, because people need to, people want them raises as well, right?

So I'm all for all for this Change, right? Absolutely. Different Perform different functions.

But I'm curious, sorry. Yeah, curious from your perspective, you know, are, are all of those personas that you work with as customers, do they have different needs? How do you work with, in the, in the environment we have with all those different roles?

So I Think that's, that's a great point. Uh, I think traditionally we would, we would be speaking to the CIS admin, right? The CIS admin would have that responsibility of, of the data, whether it be on premises, the people that would look after the exchange servers, the SQL servers, the DBA wouldn't care about if it was backed up or they'd take their own backup in the least efficient way they possibly can.

I'm probably offending some DVAs at that point. You Said that. Yeah.

Okay. But over the last couple of years where we've had this influx of cloud-based workloads and SaaS based workloads, and, um, even still the, on-prem and Kubernetes, we're seeing that shift of that responsibility landing more left. So whether that be the DevOps engineer, even developers, I speak to developers probably on a weekly basis that are implementing databases.

And they're actually curious around what if this happens? Because we've seen this, right? The developer and the ops teams anyway are getting closer together, whether we call it DevOps engineer or not, they're having more responsibility about how do we make things resilient?

How can we help make sure that these guys don't have a hard time at three o'clock in the morning when bad things happen and they're conscious of that. Whereas a bit like the DBA, um, thing that I just said about DBAs don't care about backup. I think they are starting to have a, at least have an understanding and an awareness of data protection and that it's a necessity.

A bit like observability, we see observability everywhere. Observability is not in, in my, it, it is down there with backup, right? It's, it's a necessity, but it's very boring.

It's gonna give me all the information that I need to fix problems. But it's, it's, You couldn't live without it. Yeah, Exactly.

It's Hard. It is a fundamental thing. It is.

Well, Where's security observability and, and backup three at the bottom. But they're a necessity. They should be top of the list when it comes to how do I make sure things are secure?

How do I make sure that I can see when bad things are happening and how do I recover? How do I remediate when bad things happen as well? Do SREs ask different questions of you than developers then of platform engineers?

They're all kind of worried about the same fundamental Things. So it's interesting. So an SRE or an opera, let's say operations side, because whether it's SRE, whether it's systems administrator, cloud engineer, they, they might, they have an understanding of the, the underpinning storage or the platform underneath, whereas a developer potentially just sees, oh, this is a Mongo database, this is MongoDB.

This is MySQL. Mm-Hmm. They don't have that understanding of what the storage is underneath.

And I don't think we need them to either, like I, I think, but there's an, an awareness of where their knowledge stops and where it goes over to the operations is, is just, and that's no hard and hard and fast line. I've spoken to developers that absolutely understand storage and the speeds and feeds that we, that we still see out there in the storage world. One person or group abstracts away, another group takes care of, right?

Exactly. Or a provider or both. Sure.

Yeah. Okay. Hey, you know what, Michael, just in case anyone out here does, it does not feel you.

What's the best website to go get smart about, uh, Veeam and casting? com, um, everything's being moved over. So you're gonna find stuff around virtualization on there.

You're gonna find stuff around physical, unstructured data cloud, all the clouds, SaaS based workloads to be protected as well as Kubernetes. com. VEV Double EAN.

Sorry. Hey, man, when am I gonna see you again? Hopefully not until 2024.

No offense, Alan. I, I, I I'm with you. Probably cars.

Unless you're coming to the Keys for Christmas. I would, I would love to, but Yes, I've, I've got room an invitation. I've got room if you want to come and it's warm.

Yeah. But if Paris in March, yes. That's where I'll be Alrightyy Michael, always a pleasure, man.

Cheer, good to see you. Best of luck. Good to see you as well.

Take care if I don't see you till Paris, have a happy holiday season in New Year's. Michael Cade, cast in by Vem here. Live at AWS Reinvent in Vegas.

We're gonna take a break on the Techstrong network, and we'll be back in a little bit.