Speaker 0 | 00:09.811

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds today. Keith Warfolk on the phone. Well, line, podcast, recording, I don’t know, whatever we called this thing. So, welcome to the show. I’m actually really excited. I was going over the notes and I figured… Here’s somebody that can talk about the cloud with intelligence. No puns intended there. So thank you for coming on the show.

Speaker 1 | 00:37.569

Yeah, because the cloud can exist with or without intelligence.

Speaker 0 | 00:43.773

Before we get started, let’s go back in time. First, computer, anything exciting? Can we even say that’s exciting now? I was telling my kids last night, you missed all the fun times. You missed all the fun times. I thought it was more fun back then when you actually saw technology evolving from really almost nothing. I was like, I was alive when the VCR was invented, kids. I now know that I’m old because my parents talked about the car being invented or the Model T. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 01:11.587

Well, I remember when neighbors started to pay for HBO like $10 a month and I thought, oh, that’s outrageous. Who’s going to pay for TV?

Speaker 0 | 01:20.651

True. Bottled water. Bottled water. We laughed at that. We scoffed at the idea of bottled water you drink out of the hose. What are people thinking? Bottled water?

Speaker 1 | 01:33.452

Exactly. And as far as first computers, so my first, I guess, real computer was just an IBM PC. So my dad was a 30-year IBM man, so we got one of the first of those. Those were big, clunky things. You might remember with the two floppy disk drives. i think yeah then if we yeah so yeah we had the box model right i think we had all of like

Speaker 0 | 02:00.070

256k between the two floppy disks oh excellent and what did you do with said said box uh i mean what i do with it after i was done with it well yeah what does someone do with said box back back in the day it

Speaker 1 | 02:16.774

probably spilled a number of landfills because these were things where you think they were steel They were heavy. No such thing as portability in computers back then.

Speaker 0 | 02:28.357

What do you mean recycling? We haven’t even invented bottled water yet.

Speaker 1 | 02:34.199

Exactly. All my friends that were into gaming were building their own computers back in those days.

Speaker 0 | 02:40.721

Yes. Did you see this new game we had that just came out? It’s called Hangman.

Speaker 1 | 02:47.843

Yeah, yeah. back in computer school so i was going to university of colorado this is in the 80s and we would do uh you know is that being older wait a second is that cu boulder or where it is that is cu boulder so i’m a buff oh yeah not good sorry

Speaker 0 | 03:04.996

i went to csu so we were way behind you guys are way smarter than us you guys were like really like more the ivy leaguers and we were like the like uh you’ve been on the street from greeley you can go to csu you

Speaker 1 | 03:19.628

Yeah. I was just up at CSU this weekend. So I do the MS-150 ride every year, you know, to raise money to fight multiple sclerosis. And that goes from Westminster to Fort Collins and back. So we get to stay on campus on Saturday night and see how amazingly that campus has grown every year. This ride for, I don’t know, 25 years or so. I would say it’s very competitive with CU Boulder these days.

Speaker 0 | 03:48.987

Oh, yes, for sure. Now it’s different. Now everyone ever. There was like the great migration to Colorado. You know, it’s just it’s it’s a different place now. I miss the old Frisbee golf course at CSU. A lot of fun playing Frisbee golf there. And I was always really worried someone would get. really badly injured because those it’s in the middle of campus and there’s people throwing these discs that are really hard plastic for anyone that’s never played frisbee golf and i’m sounding very crunchy and colorado-y and now even though i’m back in connecticut on the east coast yeah those discs are they can break your nose they can break your nose so how does this all now we have to bridge this all into some kind of it show and so we had an ibm you unrecycled computer that’s probably in a landfill somewhere to where you are today, riding bikes through the mountains of the foothills of Colorado. And how do you end up where you are?

Speaker 1 | 04:53.665

Yeah. So I took a roundabout way. I did follow my dad’s footsteps. And after CU Boulder joined IBM, they sent me to North Carolina, Research Triangle Park. So I started my career out as a developer on network products. Did that for a few years while I was in North Carolina. I got my MBA over at Duke. IBM was kind enough to offer to pay for that.

Speaker 0 | 05:18.880

What was that like back then, developer products? When you say develop, I mean, or networking products. I believe you said network. What was the network like back then?

Speaker 1 | 05:28.023

Much simpler than today. And there was no cloud. We’re talking early 90s now. And… Um, so a lot of,

Speaker 0 | 05:37.267

let’s, let’s talk about that though, really, because I don’t think people can really, sometimes people can’t grasp. My kids certainly cannot. No cloud. What do you mean? We used computers without the internet. Cause that’s, that was a reality we used. You don’t even really think about it right now. Sometimes I think back and like, yeah, we did.

Speaker 1 | 05:53.276

Yeah. The only internet that existed back then was the DARPA net that was for, uh, for defense. And that’s essentially where the internet grew from the technologies for the internet. came from DARPA. But back in those days, IBM would have its own network with shared telecom hubs and stuff. So that’s the closest thing to the internet would be a global company like an IBM that was talking with multiple regions.

Speaker 0 | 06:19.653

There was an internal network. So we still wired landfill boxes together, right? And what was the networking? I mean, was there any, do you remember any type of big Growth or change or like wow this this was great this this networking product or we were able to do this like we all Printed from the same printer or you know something like that I don’t you know was it was there was very low fear of cyber attacks back then right?

Speaker 1 | 06:49.600

I mean it wasn’t until it was sci-fi.

Speaker 0 | 06:52.141

It was like unreal It was like we made a movie about it hackers There was you know wasn’t even like a real thing or the Tron or Tron in a video game,

Speaker 1 | 07:00.686

right? Yeah, way ahead of their time. Now, no matter what our device is, it’s our phone, it’s our printer, it’s our router, we’re continually worried about cyber attacks, any size of business. It’s frigging incredible compared to… And you didn’t even think… Cyber security wasn’t even invented yet in the early 90s.

Speaker 0 | 07:26.537

Well, it wasn’t a thought. If it had been a thought…

Speaker 1 | 07:29.815

or if anyone had even realized that it could be a thing it would probably be a lot easier job now yeah yeah we were just yes it was you know to be a an ethical hacker so to speak uh you were late to the party because various people were kicking into gear by the late

Speaker 0 | 07:48.400

90s it’s my ease it’s much easier to be nefarious it’s much easier to be nefarious you know we just have to find one way in I’m not…

Speaker 1 | 07:57.083

You only have to be right once when you’re into the various one.

Speaker 0 | 08:02.826

Let’s jump right into this. Let’s fast forward. And I once had… I can’t remember who it was. We’ll have to go back in time. But anyways, your CEO reads about the cloud in Time Magazine and has to migrate to the cloud because he read about it in Time Magazine. And so we did it. And now we’re in the cloud. What are all the mistakes we made? And, you know, this is such a broad topic, but I want you to first maybe educate some people on this thing called Amazon and Azure and cloud services and private cloud and stuff. And what’s everyone doing wrong? Sure. You know, I don’t even know where to begin. I’ll let you I’ll let you spout off your, you know, your book title and where we need to begin with this.

Speaker 1 | 08:43.883

And there’s some very classic patterns of things that most companies were doing wrong and in some cases are still doing wrong. So. As companies heard about the buzzwords and their CIO said, yes, we must go to the cloud because our competitors are, or we want to be early in our industry to go to the cloud. So now we’re talking, let’s say, early to mid 2000s. Let’s say it’s about 2009 now. And this would be the birth of Azure and AWS has already been up for about four years. And we want to go to the cloud. And the easiest way seemingly. And the fastest way seemingly to do it is what they would call lift and shift. It’s an infrastructure as a service play. In other words, all the VMs we have running in our on-prem data centers and such, we’re going to replicate those babies up in one of these clouds. And we’re going to connect them the same way. We’re going to use basically a lot of the same protocols and security controls, etc. Problem with that, and they all became to notice. you know within two or three years after they did it tremendously more expensive because you often oversize things in the data centers because you have to be ready for an 80 spike in any time even if you’re only running at 30 most of the time the cloud is you pay for what you use or what or what you what you set it up as and and if you set it up for 80 capacity all the time you’re you’re paying for that all the time uh no yeah so you uh the platform

Speaker 0 | 10:22.490

why would someone move to the cloud just because though are do people really do that would a smart ceo really move to the cloud just because so he could brag to some people hey we’re in the well i’m probably going to make a few cios angry here but

Speaker 1 | 10:36.018

There are many CIOs I’ve met over the year, less than half, but there’s still a significant amount that really aren’t that technical.

Speaker 0 | 10:46.441

I want names. I want names and phone numbers. I’m joking.

Speaker 1 | 10:52.902

Well, they’re very susceptible to the salespeople and the buzzwords and the trends.

Speaker 0 | 10:58.984

Gartner magic quadrant.

Speaker 1 | 11:01.265

Bingo. They’re all bullshit. Well,

Speaker 0 | 11:04.646

Frost and Sullivan, Frost and Sullivan, Ice, Red. Keep going, keep going.

Speaker 1 | 11:10.529

Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 11:10.809

so they’ll- I got an email. I got an email the other day that- Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 11:14.410

and they’ll plant that seed with their head architect or their architecture team or their, as I say, most prominent application teams and say, guys, I want you to take a look at moving to the cloud. I hear it’s going to save us a bunch of money. So make it so. And now the people that really dug in and understood what it meant to go to the cloud maybe made some better moves. But to be perfectly honest, in all fairness, the idea of going to the cloud and it being overly expensive after the fact is not really everybody’s fault. First of all, the cloud service providers are nefariously trying to talk you into doing an infrastructure as a service play because they make more money there. So if you talk to their consultants, AWS, Azure, maybe even GCP, I’m not sure, but they will often help you with a migration acceleration program, which is all about infrastructure as a service. And then the idea that, oh, we’ll fix that later. We’ll optimize later. The problem is you now have got a plane in flight. All your operations are running on your new systems now in the cloud with all its connectivity. All right. you know, interwoven, and it’s harder to make that change. Your best opportunity to optimize for the cloud services is to do that before you get in flight. In other words, part of the migration, what should your target architecture be? It’s not going to look the same as it did on-prem, and it shouldn’t.

Speaker 0 | 12:47.998

Okay, so we need to translate that a little bit. So lift and shift. You’re saying lift and shift. but there is something there’s it’s not just lift and shift. It’s like lift and replicate. I don’t know. OK, lift and replicate and then and test and then shift. Or there’s there’s another piece to the puzzle here, which you’re saying people are missing. What does that look like? What does that look like and what can they do to do this right?

Speaker 1 | 13:17.897

Right. So the lift and shift is really shorthand for the targeted infrastructure as a service. And that infrastructure in the cloud would look very similar to what you did on-prem. And what you’re missing is an analysis step that says, what is the right architecture for this application workload to be in the cloud to run at – what you want is the right level of performance at the lowest cost.

Speaker 0 | 13:46.390

And do people know what that right architecture is?

Speaker 1 | 13:50.172

They do now. By now, they do. So there’s a number of Like AWS has, oh, I forget what it’s called, but it’s a recommended architecture framework that you can use. And there’s plenty of consulting firms like my own, WaveStone, where we regularly help them figure out what is the right target architecture. And by the way, not only target architecture, but target operating model. Going from on-prem to the cloud means a lot of differences for your. roles, responsibilities, racy daily activities for all, for not only your technical people, but it’s kind of an enterprise journey where it’s going to affect even your application owners. Where, um,

Speaker 0 | 14:34.802

where doth one begin with, um, with, with this, what are orders? I guess what, or we can go two different directions. What are some very good case studies or examples of where someone did this, did it right. And it really was beneficial and saved them money.

Speaker 1 | 14:51.262

Yeah, so and I’ll kind of point at an industry that has done it more right than wrong, and that’s financial services. They seem to have both the foresight and the vision. to be doing this in a pragmatic way, but thinking of optimization as they went.

Speaker 0 | 15:11.600

Is that because they deal with money though?

Speaker 1 | 15:14.742

It’s because they deal with, I say, multitudes of transactions. They’re used to high volume.

Speaker 0 | 15:20.925

Okay.

Speaker 1 | 15:22.146

And because of that, they actually know what, I say, high performance computing looks like in one place and understand there’s an investment if you were to move it someplace else.

Speaker 0 | 15:33.292

Gotcha. Can you paint a clear picture of where these efficiencies are? Or I guess there has to be some kind of paradigm shift or thinking of the cloud differently than thinking of it from an infrastructure standpoint. Is there a way that you can paint a clear picture there?

Speaker 1 | 15:47.648

There is. So the cloud is just different. In fact, we wrote a white paper recently about this, that when you’re moving to the cloud…

Speaker 0 | 15:57.191

Just so you know, that’s an amazing title for a book. The cloud is just different. I just think it’s great. But anyways, keep going.

Speaker 1 | 16:04.049

Yeah, no, I agree with you a hundred percent. And that is, I think that is the title of our blog that we just, that should be heading out anytime now on LinkedIn, keep an eye out for it. And it’s a three-part series, but it starts out with the cloud is different. And then it goes into the reasons why you need, why and how you need to optimize and build in your FinOps, your financial operations along the way.

Speaker 0 | 16:28.890

So keep going. How is it different?

Speaker 1 | 16:30.912

Yeah. So it’s different because you’re building to immediacy and need. So the amount of compute power you need, the amount of storage you need, even the type of database you need is what you need now. And you can configure it in a way that it can scale up or down. In the cloud, they call it elasticity because it’s not just scale up. It might be scaled down. And you can do that. for certain infrastructure things, but you can do it even better for what they call the platform as a service, PaaS services. And a good proxy for this is database as a service. If you no longer have to do database administration and you set up via rules that it’s going to scale up as needed and it’s got all these connections to the right applications and you’re doing this all as configurability rather than… rather than custom code. It’s tremendously powerful. And the other piece of that puzzle is you’re using far less human resources to maintain it over time. So the old infrastructure as a service, whether it was on-prem or in the cloud, and you had so many, you’d have one administrator managing 100 machines maybe. Well, now you’re running services that can span almost infinitely across many machines, and you’re configuring it all in one place.

Speaker 0 | 18:07.605

Any ideal picture of mix and match of hybrid cloud versus regular cloud for you? Obviously, my answer would always be every organization is different. Every organization has a very specific individual group of end users. uh curious how you feel about where should you put um i don’t know desktop as a service and should we have should we have um you know virtual desktops or should we still have physical desktops are we there yet are we there with the virtual desktops yet because i speak with my microsoft guy he’s going to say you know microsoft is making leaps and bounds when it comes to security and various different issues so sure and when i say microsoft guy i mean internal Microsoft engineer, I don’t mean the guy that came off of Gartner Magic Quadrant and is calling me from Microsoft.

Speaker 1 | 18:52.914

But it’s a good question because a lot of people, a lot of companies either say, we’re going everything to the cloud. They honestly don’t understand the, because the cloud is not the end all be all. It’s not the answer to everything, nor will it ever be. If you’re a large company with a very diverse set of applications, including some older applications and older technologies that are still part. And where I see this a lot is in defense industry or aerospace. I’ve worked for some companies that build rockets and you might have something still running on Windows 95. And so

Speaker 0 | 19:35.919

I’ve run into people that have. you know all of their servers and stuff floating in a container ship offshore completely off the grid that has to be um you know so highly secure that i had to sign an nda just to talk on the phone with them or something you know uh you know various different things like that well and before it became legal to do gambling as much as we do here in the u.s that’s where many of the gambling apps

Speaker 1 | 19:59.814

were were right offshore where it was in international waters you

Speaker 0 | 20:05.057

How far offshore do we have to go? Now let’s go to this section of the show called conspiracy theories. How many miles do we have to go offshore to be out of internet? Isn’t it like six miles or seven miles? It’s not far.

Speaker 1 | 20:21.723

Do you know that? I was thinking 10 or 12, but it’s not far.

Speaker 0 | 20:27.520

It’s less than 20. Let’s just put it that way, which is not very far to be in international waters. So if anyone has any ideas of, you know, what’s Microsoft doing down there, sinking those underwater data centers, you know, what’s going on there? You mentioned rockets. No, but in all seriousness, this is the section of the show called Conspiracy Theories or anything. You said you were an old school when we were talking earlier, an old school X-Files, you know, fan or anything. Is there any wild stuff that, you know? any wild stuff can we talk russia are we allowed to do that is is this a cia op is this is this like a psyop you know this this whole uh you know uh uh you know russian coup attempt or is this you know is this putin’s like you know genius genius military plan i i happen to think it might be that i i think it’s so yeah you know it’s kind of a yeah interesting i’m just watching i’m just sitting back you know you know popping well but you know so i think i think you

Speaker 1 | 21:23.728

Putin, in many regards, has failed miserably. Now, remember, he did this years ago with Afghanistan as well. And it just does not work to go. If you go into a country that has a strong national bond and they’re not going to leave, you know, and now they’ve even tried shipping people out from, you know, into Russia, you know, because,

Speaker 0 | 21:49.806

yeah. Migrating.

Speaker 1 | 21:51.227

Yeah. As they. they have forced migration they’ve actually done that in some of the towns that they’ve they’ve overtaken in ukraine and uh now i don’t know how that long that’s going to last people will maybe find ways to get back but uh i think crazy you can’t you can’t occupy a country this is one of those things that as humans evolve a little further they’ll stop trying to take over land you know because with today’s uh has a visibility into everything you’re doing you can’t just take a land and execute everyone and now we have the land it’s you know that’s not that’s never going to happen again well let’s hope not but the mass the mass extinction of genocides that we’ve seen in past hopefully we are past that and because of that yes what putin is trying to do is is not sustainable and he’s eventually going to lose this now everyone’s going to lose you know ukraine is are already losing life And they’re losing everything they’ve built up because they were a fledgling democracy on the rise. And now they’ve got a tremendous amount of rebuilding they have to do because of the war. So that’s the only thing that Putin’s achieved. So I think he is going to lose this. And I think he is starting to lose the, how to say, the support of at least parts of the Russian people, despite the fact that he owns the media there.

Speaker 0 | 23:16.038

It is quite… I think from a general layman’s point of view, and you see people in the street with cell phones nowadays, and when you think of it from a technology standpoint, because again, this is a technology show, and you see people filming things with their cell phones and stuff, you get a real clear picture of the majority of the people are just walking around wanting to go get their burrito at Chipotle and whatever it is on a daily basis. Meanwhile, there’s tanks going through the street and wildness like that. I don’t think the…

Speaker 1 | 23:47.072

the majority of people really are just trying to live their life they are on the side you know whether they’re russians or ukrainians they’re they i don’t think either side the regular people want what’s going on there and uh i think it sucks that there’s a megalomaniac like putin that thinks he can you know he wants he wants the old ussr He’s not going to.

Speaker 0 | 24:10.888

I can’t speak to any of this because I’m completely ignorant to politics and all of this stuff. I mean, I’m a guy with eight kids. I’m the guy that just, you know, that, again, wants to go to Chipotle and get his burrito. I’m completely clueless of all of this. I’m just being honest with you. I don’t.

Speaker 1 | 24:26.022

I think Americans are like that, too. I mean, most Americans just want to live their lives and and actually don’t like.

Speaker 0 | 24:31.968

the polarization of politics that we have i wouldn’t know i to me i i wouldn’t really know what’s true that that’s my general thought on all this is i don’t really know what is real anymore and what’s not real it’s hard to tell yeah um however i do know that people can overspend on Amazon Web Services. That I do know is a truth. That I do know. Whether all the stuff that I read in the marketing noise, whether all the marketing noise is real or not, and who really is in the upper right-hand quadrant and all that type of stuff, that I am a little bit skeptical of. So of the companies that you see on a, I don’t know, daily basis that are in Azure or some form of the cloud, how many of them are, would you say… are not fully optimized and have a lot of work to do that’s good work.

Speaker 1 | 25:25.987

Oh, it’s probably 80%. It’s a high percentage.

Speaker 0 | 25:28.669

It’s an 80-20 rule. So 80% of everyone out there right now listening to this show that has something up in Azure at some point or something in the cloud, there’s a good chance that you’re overpaying and not optimized and have some good work to do. So your job security is there.

Speaker 1 | 25:46.801

Yeah. And if you want to get help… it’ll more than pay for itself,

Speaker 0 | 25:51.865

which is which we will help you do. We if anyone would like to get that help, you can reach out to both me and Keith, and we will work together to make sure you get that help. And that it pays for itself. Guaranteed. Something like that. What mentors, just general leadership in general, your your career in general? Have you had any great mentors? What what has been some of your biggest learning experiences? And where can people go? what would your philosophy be on that?

Speaker 1 | 26:20.186

Yeah. And I would say, you know, particularly to any young folks out there kind of earlier in their career, you know, in really almost any, in any area, but especially IT is find someone that you really respect, that you like, that you can talk to, to get some guidance because, you know, IT like any, really like anything else. does have a little bit of politics to it. It’s just, it’s a little unavoidable, but you want to make sure you’re getting on the right projects that builds the career for the skills you want to build. The great thing about IT is it’s broad. There’s so much there. And the bad thing about it is if you’re really good at one thing, I actually had this earlier in my career where I was a super good developer and I was never going to get out of that role until I became bold about it, right? And I got… I got my MBA at Duke. I kind of worked my way into more leadership roles. And then later on, I did some consulting where I lived and worked overseas for a number of years, which helped me grow as a person as well as an IT specialist. But you have to actually do those things. If you’re very good at one particular area of IT, your boss doesn’t really have a whole lot of incentive to move you around.

Speaker 0 | 27:38.461

It’s interesting because most people say, don’t spread yourself thin. But in this particular field of work, it it is kind of good to be a jack of all trades and, and, and spread yourself a thing, which is, which is odd. It’s just, it’s just not that, you know, uh, it’s just an interesting thing. The, and so did you, I guess, did you have any mentors there? I mean, at what point, you know, were you like, did someone just tell you, Hey, um, stop developing software and act dumb or make some bad code? I mean, what, you know, at what point, at what point did you realize, you know, you said you traveled and you got some different experience. Was there any, um,

Speaker 1 | 28:13.928

Yeah. So my first really good mentor, and I wish I could remember his last name right now, is Mike. He was a manager of mine at IBM in North Carolina. And he was the guy that was my champion that said, he talked to the people upstairs and said, if you get accepted to Duke’s MBA program, we’ll pay for it. So what a great guy. He really helped boost my career and my self-confidence at the time. And I could also hang out with him. He was a very easygoing, down-to-earth guy. So I just learned a lot about how things work amongst people. I’d have to say I came, and I think this is true for a lot of IT people, particularly in the development space, is I was somewhat of an introvert earlier in my career. And I had to learn to socialize and get really comfortable with people because that’s… how you get things done. You influence.

Speaker 0 | 29:11.336

How did you do that? Because I was the guy in high school that walked from my head down, didn’t talk to anybody. I was. I mean, people are like, what are you talking about? When I tell people, I’m like, honestly, I was the guy. I was like, I’ve scared of my own shadow. I didn’t talk to people. I was absolutely an introvert. People don’t believe me. I’m like, now you have this. I do this podcast as therapy for that.

Speaker 1 | 29:31.702

Well, you almost have to, you know, you put yourself in situations where you have to grow in that area. a reason why you do these podcasts because you it keeps you going in that direction uh one of my outlets that got me i say more socialized was sports i yes over the years i play a lot i even still play a lot of ice hockey and uh you know nothing’s better than doing something as a team you know even in a sports context uh i told you i went cycling this weekend for the ms-150 that was with my team and uh and that gets you out there nothing

Speaker 0 | 30:10.583

like contact sports too where there’s fighting involved and blood well it becomes quite a bonding moment because it does i tell people i like I, I’m going off to roll around with a bunch of sweaty men right now because I go do, you know, jujitsu or whatever, you know, you know, and like you come back sometimes with like, you know, blood on your gi and stuff like that. But there’s just, I don’t know. You’re right. Sports is, um, uh, getting out there, getting yourself involved in a sport or something like that. Definitely, definitely would help, especially from the stereotypical. software development guys that are sitting in a closet with all the lights off in front of a screen for hours on end.

Speaker 1 | 30:48.773

They’re just shoving pizza under the door to keep you going.

Speaker 0 | 30:51.714

Thank you. Thank you. Yes, absolutely. The MBA, was that necessary or just a nice bullet point?

Speaker 1 | 31:00.759

It became more necessary over time. I’ll tell you, because that too was a transition for me from being a pure technologist to now doing these classes about business. A number of the people in the MBA school weren’t technologists, right? It’s probably maybe 10% to 15% of us that came from an IT background. The rest were in business and sales. So there I was getting exposed to people who knew business a lot better than I did and working on projects with them. Tremendously enlightening. And it helped me the rest of my career because right after that, after I left IBM is when I started my consulting career. And did some international consulting for about five years. And that has a socialization for the MBA to learning about business. It really helped that further transition to now going abroad. And I tell all my young friends, if you ever have the chance to really go somewhere, not just for a two-week vacation, but go live and work somewhere. Learn a language. Learn a culture.

Speaker 0 | 32:06.131

Do you know any other languages?

Speaker 1 | 32:07.692

I used to. Jag tala lite svenska. I speak a little Swedish, but I’m really rusty.

Speaker 0 | 32:14.677

But if you went there, it would come back real quick. It would come back.

Speaker 1 | 32:18.461

It would. And Swedish is not a hard language compared to so many others. It’s mostly it’s Germanic based and it has roughly the same sentence structure as English.

Speaker 0 | 32:29.351

I’m really trying really hard to learn Arabic. I have been doing it for years, for years. And I’m going to Morocco next month for at least a month to take a couple of my daughters and also go surfing at the same time. I guess it’s some of the best surfing in the world. But yes, traveling.

Speaker 1 | 32:45.168

You surf here in the US?

Speaker 0 | 32:46.910

Yeah, I surf in Maine, of all places, in the wintertime. The water temperature is about 35 degrees.

Speaker 1 | 32:54.514

Right. Wetsuit time.

Speaker 0 | 32:57.195

Yeah. Six mil webs, wetsuits. Fine. People think you’re wild and crazy, but you’re warmer than the people walking on the beach in a winter jacket. So,

Speaker 1 | 33:05.878

well, there’s Canadian surfers too. So yeah,

Speaker 0 | 33:08.299

Iceland, people surf, there’s ice, there’s surfing in Iceland. Look, Google people, Google surfing right now. Some good breaks in Iceland.

Speaker 1 | 33:17.143

What it’s worth. I love surfing too. I generally go to California.

Speaker 0 | 33:20.905

I would love to. Um, have the only time i’ve ever been to california was to san francisco for some work trip a while ago and that was it uh i would love to just go on a surfing trip my nephew lived in bali for a long time was wow jealous of his waves every day um because we get you know maybe a dozen really good just really good days you know i would prefer to have it like every day but sure i did live on the beach for a while it does get it can get old doing that every single day for a while um which i never thought it would get old but it it’s um it was kind of like oh you gotta do something with your life now and all the servers out there were like what what do you mean what do you mean dude what are you talking about he’s stupid like this is a way of life what do you mean and it’s there really is like a surfer like stereotype it’s hilarious i want I went out surfing right after a big great white sighting. A great white had killed this minky whale, or was eating off a dead… No, a minky whale had died. And there hasn’t been great whites in Maine in a long time. They’re usually down in Cape Cod, but with, I don’t know, global warming or something, all of a sudden, there’s great whites in Maine now. And we’ve never had a shark attack death ever in 100 years. And then we had our first one, it was a year or two ago. and there was a huge great white and they had pictures of it biting into this whale it’s just you know wow 15 i mean the whale washed up on shore like i could see the whale and where the and then you know there was good waves that day so in the all the flags were up from the lifeguards and i’m sitting there waiting it’s almost five o’clock the lifeguard’s gonna go away i jumped in the water right after the lifeguard you know with the server and i went out and there’s the one guy out there kind of started to post a game and uh his kid was on the front of the board did you see that i was like do you see what that shark he’s hey man come on my kids are on the front of the board i was like oh yeah sorry i was like you know he’s like besides he’s like the sharks have always been here he said just like the sharks have always been here man always will be you’ve been here a thousand years before you’re not yeah you know it’s good for the surfers they get the tourists out of the water that’s great that was great um so i guess final thing so i had And we’ll end on Amazon or some sort of cloud piece because I had a close friend to me. You know, I get these questions every now and then, the people that aren’t in technology, but they’re young and, you know, they’re looking for some sort of mentorship or they’re getting out of college or they’re getting ready to graduate. So what do you think about Amazon? I’m thinking about doing that. You know, and you’re like, I don’t even know what I don’t know where to tell. I’m thinking about taking this course on Amazon. I don’t know. where to tell you, I don’t even know where to tell you where to begin. I was like, but I was like, you do realize it’s a very broad field and you know, yes, you could go get certifications and you could learn this and you could learn that. What would you tell someone that’s trying to find a job in life? Like most of the, I don’t know. I just, I can remember being at CSU and I was a creative writing major. So I didn’t know what I was doing when I was getting out of college. Any advice for someone that might actually, if you were to get involved in. cloud and technology, where would you start?

Speaker 1 | 36:37.297

Yeah. So, I mean, there’s a number of ways to do it. And over the years, because I’ve worked as a CTO in a number of places and the people that work for me as developers, architects, or data architects, I’ve often helped them make the transition into cloud and tried to mentor them. I tried to give them the mentoring I didn’t always have when I was younger, because I think that’s just the right thing to do. And long story short, if you have a particular area to go, like data, there’s some very, has a very easy path to take. But it usually starts with some certifications. So if you choose your platform of choice, but know that whatever you learn in Amazon or whatever you learn in Azure is likely transferable to the other platform, even GCP for the most part, though. It’s a little bit of, it’s almost like a different language there. But the idea is like between Azure and AWS, everything you can do in one, you can do in the other. It’s just got a different name. And so there’s this basic certification called, what’s it called? Certified Cloud Practitioner. They both have it. And, you know, there was an irony that I got certified in AWS, but actually knew more about Azure. Yeah, for that. for that cloud practitioner one.

Speaker 0 | 38:00.836

Certified cloud practitioner. Okay.

Speaker 1 | 38:03.237

And that gives you a broad spectrum of all, like pretty much everything to do in a broad way. You know, and you get tested on it. You get the certification. It’s a good thing to add to your resume. And then you can kind of decide, you know what? I like data or I like solution architecture and so on and so on. And then go deeper in those areas that you get excited for. And if you’re a business person, maybe a little less technical, but you really like cloud, things like cloud optimization and FinOps is all about your operating model to make it better for the organization going on.

Speaker 0 | 38:42.234

That’s great, because I’m going to now send him this podcast and be like, hey, I got an answer to your question. You got to listen to this whole podcast, and it’s right at the end of it. You can’t fast forward. It’s somewhere in there. No, it’s somewhere in the podcast. I answered. answered her question so uh thank you very much for being on the show this was uh this was a pleasure and uh i think very eye-opening as well so a lot of great advice appreciate it you’re welcome phil i enjoyed the conversation uh good stuff and we’ll do it again sometime awesome