Taming Multi-Cloud Complexity and Sovereignty

Hey everybody, welcome back to Amsterdam. We're here at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe Conference with my new friend, Dirk. How you doing, Dirk?

Nice to meet you. Very well. All right.

We're having a little chat about cloud operations. We're at company's emma Technologies. They're an up-and-coming player in this space.

But before we get started, what is happening with cloud operations in general? Because it used to be kind of we managed all these clouds in isolation, and maybe are we starting to unify this a little bit? And what's driving all of that?

Yeah, I think it's a good starting point because when you look back in when emma was founded in 2021, it was still clouds, different clouds. Multi-cloud very often happened by accident or by acquisition. There was no deliberate choice.

Now fast-forward five years and multi-cloud is actually there. It's a consequence. It's because companies need to have solutions.

They need to have solutions for sovereignty. They need to have solutions for AI operations. They need to have solutions for whatever business needs they have.

And with more players next to the hyperscalers coming into the marketplace, there's more diversity, there's more complexity, there's more fragmentation. And that's also where emma comes in as a cloud operations platform where we unify the operations across those platforms or across those players in the cloud industry, including on-prem and including the cloud industry. Mm-hmm.

And it seems like what's changed, too, is organizations are more comfortable with putting workloads in different clouds in different places, and there's also even a movement, in some cases, back to on-premise because of AI. Yes. So are we making more deliberate choices about- Yeah ...

where workloads go, and it's not just this, I guess, for a while there, I kind of felt like the cloud, what was the question was the AI kind of thing. Yeah. I think cloud's a more strategic choice these days.

When you look at sovereignty, for example, it's a boardroom topic. There's a lot of decisions made on boardroom level saying we need to go and be sovereign in sovereign operations. And then, of course, the teams have to figure out what does it mean, what kind of level do we need, what providers do we need?

Where do we go? Can we stay with hyperscalers? Do we need European providers?

Do we need to go back on-prem with certain things? So that is the complexity that is happening, but the choices are definitely more strategic, and it's coming not only from regulatory, so sovereignty, it's coming also from cost pressure, and it's coming also from every other things and not to the least, cloud skills. Different providers, different skill needs, not enough experienced professionals on the marketplace.

So that means also where choices happen. I always felt, too, that people didn't fully appreciate the total cost of hiring different teams to run different cloud platforms because the labor was still the most expensive part of that. Yeah.

So have you seen people get a little savvier about understanding where their costs come from and how to streamline the management of multiple clouds as a result? FinOps is one great example that's came up, and it's evolving very rapidly, going from traditional cloud operations into other sectors, including also then AI. That is quite clear.

But yes, there's a lot of discussion around how do we make this happen. The new needs of the ways organizations operate in terms also from experimentation in AI, going to production of AI, need more resources, need more orchestration of what they are doing. They need also more control over what they are doing.

Cost is one part of that. There's more cost savviness already today, and also that drives decision. Do we need to keep these kind of applications or models and data in these data centers or these providers or are there more cost-efficient alternatives?

But of course, always without having any compromises on performance. Mm-hmm. Now we're here at the show, and as I understand it, you guys had an announcement here talking about support for brownfield environments.

Yeah. So what does that mean exactly? Well, emma was traditionally a greenfield platform, so customers came to us deploying their resources, infrastructure through emma into providers.

But the majority of companies, a large amount of companies still have their applications and data running on-prem. That's also what we said, you can't manage only part of your environment. You need to manage it in a unified way, coming back to the unification world.

So that's why we announced brownfield onboarding, which will allow our customers and companies to bring in their accounts from GCP, Azure, and AWS, gain the full visibility without migrating their resources. It is about discovery, it is about governing it, it's about making informed decisions, and starting also to pave way into do we need to stay with certain applications with our current providers? Can't we see where cost-effective alternatives are that don't compromise on performance?

And how do we go from provider A to provider B to fulfill current needs or future needs of the business? Do you think there'll also be more migration of workloads? I kind of feel like historically we deployed something, and we left it there because we were afraid to touch it.

But I wonder if, to your point, as people evaluate the costs or the needs of the- Yeah ... application change, will there be more migrations? Yeah.

I think migration is a data cost question also. Is how do you move data from A to B? We see this from conversations we have with partners is, well, if you as a neo cloud, you want to gain more business, you need to get more applications and data from others.

Too much for the egress. While Emma has a solution also, we are probably the only solution in the space that has its own multi-cloud networking backbone. So we can allow customers over our backbone to transfer data at one third of standard industry prices around.

That would facilitate, enable the data migration. But again, that's a business decision if that needs to happen or should happen. You can't walk down the show floor without somebody leaping out to tell you about their great new AI thing.

What impact is AI going to have on cloud operations and the way we should think about this? I think as everything. As everything.

You can't do without AI anymore in your daily work. I'm a marketeer, so even in marketing, you work with your AI, your agents, you're trying to get more your productivity up, without also compromising on quality of what you do. In cloud operations, it's going to be the same, AI ops.

It's not only operations for AI, but it's also how do you make your operations smarter? How do we get the algorithms predicting more? How do we do things that we help the people who operate cloud environments with AI?

So that's also for me, the philosophy of AI is making people smarter and do more work as they did before. And I think part of this conversation too is we're running a broader range of workloads. Mm-hmm.

We're going to have AI coding tools creating more software than ever, but this team isn't going to get any bigger that manages the infrastructure and that environment. So is part of this issue, the math around how do we make an existing team, enable them to manage IT at a level of scale that not too long ago would've been unimaginable? Yeah, but that's also where Emma comes in.

That's where we also look at when we talk to people and platform teams, how they need to manage their infrastructure. They have a lot of work with that. So for us, it's like, well, you do your need to work, you develop your application, you do your coding, and you use Emma for the deployment of the infrastructure.

That's what Emma today does already automatically. And we are also looking into how can we deploy agentic AI to make that even more smoother for the users of the platform. Nice.

As we go forward, are you seeing the roles of IT people change? Because historically, we always had like, there was a virtual machine specialist, and a networking specialist, and a storage specialist, and is that converging more? And what is the future of an IT organization look like to you?

Difficult question. For me, always when I look at how organizations work, and there's the future of work thinking is, you have the specialists, you have the generalists. Emma is a no-code platform, which means also it can be used by business people with a non-engineering background.

So that makes also that you can use a more diverse working population and profiles in your operations, and that is how also how it should work. Democratize the technology, make sure that non-engineers can use it, but with the necessary guardrails, with the necessary governance, which comes on top of that. Right.

You of course, have a platform that in my mind works horizontally across different platforms. Mm-hmm. When I talk to IT people, they often are attached to a particular management tool because it came with the product or the service that they're using.

So where is that moment where they go, "Aha, we can think about this differently"? " Yeah. " Yeah.

" Mm-hmm. " You can spin up the environments. You do not need the qualification skills for that second environment because that's what Emma does, the abstraction layer that helps you to spin up the second environments, and forth.

So what's next for you guys? Where are you going from here? Where are we going from here?

Well, Brownfield was our first step. I think there's going to be more and more around AI, how to make this happen, how to help customers to not only find the right resources they need, deploy what they need, and how to work this, and make sure that all of these things happen all within the sovereignty in mind. It's data, it's running, it costs money, it is putting companies at risk, so we are going further in that direction.

We also have our own infrastructure in Luxembourg's data center because that's also required. There's scarcity and we can also help our customers with that. So we try, and we want to be the most versatile platform on the market that allows cloud operations in whatever directions our customers want to go.

One of the things that we've been tracking is the rise of platform engineering, but it's one of these things where every second person that I talk to about it has a slightly different definition of what that means. Yeah. From your perspective, what are you seeing?

Are you seeing more of these teams and what are they focused on? Yes. The internal developer platforms, a lot of companies have that, but you need your team of developers to develop it, to maintain it, and that's not always that easy.

And that's also where we say, well, you can have similar capabilities with Emma off the shelf. But platform teams, yes, they prefer to develop their own solutions internal and maintain this internally. That's how we have the conversations also where we come in as alternative to existing platforms today.

So what's the biggest challenge that when you go talk to these customers that they're sharing with you in terms of their pain point, what is it that kind of is keeping them up at night? What keeps them up at night? Cost is one.

Clearly, you're in Europe, here in KubeCon for the first day, there's also sovereignty on the agenda. So for the European organizations, that is definitely a big point, and mostly it is not one or the other. It is a combination of things.

How can we do the right thing without neglecting something else? How can we do AI without paying too much or jeopardizing on sovereignty? How can we be sovereign in our operations without losing the innovation potential that we had before?

So how do we make this happen? How do we operate this? How do we orchestrate this?

All right. Well, folks, you heard it here. Change is hard, unless of course you got the right platform.

Hey, Buddy, thanks for being on the show. Thank you. All right.

And we'll be back in a minute.