Episode 6 - War of The Clouds

[00:00:07] Tom: Welcome to the DevSecOps podcast, where we explore the past, present and future of computing in the modern workplace. [00:00:12] Scotti: Your hosts are a trio of experts from Cordant, each representing different areas within it. A bit like a nerdy A team. [00:00:19] James: So join Tom, James and Scotty for a regular, mostly serious podcast providing you with pragmatic advice and insights into modernizing your IT environment. [00:00:30] Tom: Welcome back to the devsecoops podcast. My name's Tom. I'm once again joined by my good friends James and Scotty from Cordon. How are you guys today? [00:00:38] James: Excellent, very good, thanks, Tom. Great to be here. [00:00:40] Scotti: Yeah, likewise. Pretty, pretty good. [00:00:42] Tom: I think we've all been very excited about this particular podcast. Today we are bringing you the Cloud Wars. And whilst of course we at Cordant here are very multi cloud, multi disciplined, we thought it would be a bit of fun to back a horse today and represent a cloud in the battle of the the big two AWS and Azure. And also oci maybe just give you a bit of background as to why this is actually very important, besides being what we think will be a very fun episode. James, do you want to take it? [00:01:11] James: Yeah, absolutely. Look, I think to me there's a couple of key dimensions to this that do make it such an interesting and compelling topic. Right. The first and primary one is we're all out working with clients on a regular basis. You know, we know that often they struggle with the decisioning around which cloud should they be going with? Is it one, is it two? If so, which ones, when, why and how. And there's a number of different dimensions that you have to take into consideration around this. So when choosing the right cloud provider for your business, you know, we're going to deep dive on some of these things and understand exactly what would drive that decision making. And then the other thing that I keep thinking about in this whole thing is it's also really important to the cloud providers themselves. [00:01:48] Scotti: Right? [00:01:48] James: This is very, very big business we're talking about now. You know, I was reviewing some of the revenue numbers the other day for the cloud providers and just Amazon alone is over $100 billion annual revenue. Now. Microsoft has tipped that same scale. Put it in contrast, if you look at the ASX BHP, top of the chart there, pulled in about 56 billion Australian dollars. So do the conversions, right? You'd have to add up about the top four in the ASX to just be the equivalent of what Amazon alone is doing. You're talking about a total $200 billion a year market across the big four cloud providers. So cloud wars is very real and it's very, very important to the providers as much as it is to our clients. [00:02:30] Scotti: I'm representing Oracle here, so I've got to back myself in this one. It is also really important for our customers. As partners of cloud providers, we typically get asked, like, which cloud provider do we go with and why? And the answer differs depending on the customer and where you are in your maturity journey, what the rest of your tech stack looks like, how big your organization is, where you plan on going, what regions you operate in. There's a whole range of factors that would essentially factor into a decision of which cloud provider or which cloud providers that you would choose. So I'm really excited for this episode. I think Oracle's got a really strong, strong backing in this, in this race. [00:03:08] Tom: Awesome. And look, that, that's what this is all about. We're gonna, we're gonna lay out the. The benefits and pros and cons of each cloud for various Personas within the business. We think that's a very, very important angle to take, I guess. I guess first and foremost, we should probably talk to the various platforms that we're representing today and what our experience is with that cloud platform. So I might start. So I'm here today representing Azure, Microsoft. I've been a Wintel engineer my entire career, effectively, so I've been steeped in the Microsoft ecosystem for the last 25 years. I won't lie, I'm a massive fan of Microsoft. I also won't lie, maybe that's waning a bit of recent times where I feel Microsoft's been a bit gregarious here in some of its commercial strategies. However, I still strongly believe that they have a very solid cloud offering and I'll try and do that justice today in our discussions. James. [00:04:02] James: Thanks, Tom. I'll be representing Amazon today. Funnily enough, in terms of my background, I've done a lot in the AWS ecosystem, but I do also have genuine commercial experience in both Azure and gcp. Not so much oci. But, yeah, I've got a fairly broad view. There are definitely things I like and dislike about each of the different cloud providers. And yeah, looking forward to basically, basically riding the big horse of Amazon today and bringing everything that they've got in terms of their history and capability to the table to utterly trounce the competition. [00:04:31] Scotti: And I'll go last. Interesting you say history because I had to look this up. I'm supporting Oracle, backing Oracle cloud infrastructure. Funnily enough, Oracle perhaps a little bit interestingly put Oracle in oci. I think they would have probably done better if they'd given it a different name. But speaking of history, Oracle started in 1977 on the 16th of June. So if we want to talk about providers that have a long history of providing enterprise solutions, cloud is the one that you would typically go for. So as far as my background, I've been security practitioner for 15 years. If anyone's been listening to the podcast, they'd know that I also started life as a software developer, interestingly a Microsoft developer. Right. So this is, this will be quite an interesting conversation when we start talking about Azure. And I also worked in the OCI security specialist team at Oracle for about 18 months, so quite intimately familiar with all of the things that Oracle does and the things that they've introduced recently. So yeah, I think this will be a great discussion and we should also. [00:05:31] Tom: Call out that we have at Cordon implemented, designed, advised customers on all three of these clouds as well. So we are coming from a point of view that is customer centric and with real world experience as well. So maybe with that given, given your, you're probably the underdog here, Scotty, I don't want to sway the, sway the audience, but your strengths come from the developer space. So why don't we start with the developer Persona. So maybe to mix it up a bit. Scotty, do you want to start with what OCI offers for developers? [00:06:05] Scotti: This is a topic close to my heart coming from software development background I like. My first foray into software development was actually Visual Basic 6, so you can probably work out how old I am based on that. I do have some experience with some older languages like you Tom, like Basic and things like that, but other than having seen it, haven't really played with it too much. Did a lot of work with Visual Basic 6, did a lot of work with. NET when it first came out, spent a lot of time with Borland Delphi because you know, when I went to university they said hey, let's use this great enterprise industry first language. And then they whipped out Delphi and I went, yeah, don't think so. In my second year at uni. And you'll see where I'm going with this in a second. They turned around and said, oh, we've got this, this other great language called Java and we should all learn Java because it's going to be the way of the future. Your enterprise uses Java. And I went yeah, no, and that was actually about the time that I, I quit university. So I don't know if there's a correlation here between someone trying to introduce me and tell me that Java was a good language and me leaving, I'll leave that up to our listeners to decide. But if I look at where Oracle has come in the developer space and I think this is, this will be the, this will be true for you guys as well. A lot like you don't move to the cloud, you know, for just the sake of moving to the cloud. There needs to be a reason and impetus to move to the cloud and I think one of those you actually need to focus on is, well, where is your organization going? How are you building your software to run on these cloud platforms? And Oracle I think has a pretty strong platform for developers, as I said, really strong in the Java space. A lot of the stuff that Oracle has produced is actually based on open standards. So as one really simple example, I'm designing a solution at the moment using Oracle cloud infrastructure streaming service and it's actually backed by Kafka. So whilst it doesn't say Kafka when you start digging down a little bit, most of the things that Oracle has actually built is based on open standards. So I'm a big fan of doing just enough to get the job done and I think Oracle definitely delivers on that as far as the number of services it provides. I will concede though, it isn't, is it doesn't have as many developer focused services and I know I can't avoid, I can't get away from this, right? OCI and Oracle when it comes to developers, like it is a smaller community, there is not a strong development community for Oracle in Australia and I think, I think that's, that's a real shame. I think they could definitely be capitalizing on that. And if you want to increase your cloud consumption and you want people to adopt OCI faster, the quickest way to do that is through developers. Developers are the ones that are producing applications that drive business value, that generate revenue, right? So it makes total sense that you need to win over the developer community before you're actually going to start seeing an increase in cloud adoption, in moving other workloads to Oracle cloud. [00:08:55] James: It's so interesting that you touch on this point Scott, because you know, obviously I'm looking at the Amazon perspective and I've got similar software development background to you guys as well. But really with aws that was where it all began, right? They, they appealed to the developer community. You know, I go way back to the start. The very first services that were put out there were S3 for storage and a bit of EC2 to spin up some compute and do things in the cloud. And the very name Amazon Web Services was about providing services to developers. And it's kind of fascinating, you know, because I think even today they have an amazingly deep pool of capabilities that they offer to developers. The SDKs are really mature and very much have a very strong developer community. And it was definitely one of the big ways they influenced take up of cloud in the early days. But the flip side of that, you know, the challenge for Amazon is it took them a long time to actually then gain the credibility of larger enterprise because they were seen as something that was really, you know, cool for tinkerers, developers and small startups. And you know, your OCI perspective, you sort of got the polar opposite, right? You're talking about a very large enterprise that then had to appeal to a developer community. And Tom, you know, really interesting, right, Just to balance it out with the Microsoft perspective, you've sort of got both dimensions playing out in the Microsoft space, haven't you? And just such strong development capability historically from a Microsoft point of view, right? [00:10:16] Tom: Two words you'll probably hear me use a fair bit as I talk to to Azure is integration and ecosystem. And that's where I think Azure really shines from a developer perspective. You know, Scotty touched on the point earlier talking about. Net. One of the key benefits of Azure is that tight knit integration with. NET Visual Studio. Visual Studio code, you know, you're talking from the IDE straight through to Azure. That seamless onboarding experience for developers as well is very simple. And we were talking Scotty, just the other week to to an organization that is fully embracing of. NET and the Visual Studio ecosystem and it's really easy for them to onboard developers and develop to a standard set of platforms tools ecosystem there. So I think that's a big tick for Microsoft. I think you're right, James. I think part of it is the challenge of the hearts and minds. Microsoft really does sit somewhere in the middle. And to be honest, as much as there are a large number of developers in Visual Studio and Net, there still seems to be this hatred in a lot of the developer community of Microsoft. I'm not looking in anyone's direction at all, Scotty, but I'm not a developer myself like you touched on. I sort of started with Basic and Turbo, Pascal and PHP C. Never got much further than that in terms of development. So I don't quite get the hatred for Microsoft in the community because yeah, I think there's a lot In Azure for the developer, you got Azure DevOps, which is a fully featured CI CD pipeline. Great integration now with GitHub, with the acquisition of GitHub, perhaps it is the acquisition of all these tools that people had loved previously and now being hoovered up by conglomerates. Java, you've got Entra id. It's another one I'm going to bang on about today. That tight knit integration with Entra ID as well makes it super easy to get SSO and tools for identity gateways. And it's just easy in Azure if you buy into that ecosystem. Everything else I sort of see just as, as sort of table stakes. If you like Kubernetes services, serverless functions and the like aws, oci, Azure, we're all doing it. I think it really is for mine with Azure that if you're a Net shop or you're starting up looking to say how are we going to build and develop on this? I think it's a struggle to go past Azure in that sense. With AWS it's more than just targeting the developer community, it's a deep understanding of the developer community and what matters to them. And I think to be honest, that's where both Microsoft and OCI still fail to really understand and it's probably why they're not capturing those hearts and minds. [00:12:56] Scotti: You make some interesting points. It's funny you say they deeply understand developers and I can say this, being a developer is that they love shiny new things. So AWS is really good at producing lots and lots of shiny new things. That plus side for Amazon is that once you start adopting them, that Amazon only, there's no portability here. You are now locked into a single cloud provider. You actually can't specifically move away. You talked about, and I will also talk about the hatred of some of Microsoft's ecosystem and perhaps this is just my own, my own view. I like your comment around Azure DevOps and this is something where I definitely think Oracle should take Microsoft's lead is, you know, say we're not, we're not the best at doing source code, we're not the best at doing DevOps pipeline. So in fact Azure DevOps plays really well with OCI and I think that was, was a great benefit to Oracle to actually say, well you know what, everyone probably uses Azure for Entra ID and we'll talk about privileged access management and PIM roles shortly because it's one of my pet peeves with Azure. But if, if we actually want to go, well, where do cloud providers play? What do they do Well, I definitely think might make sense for Oracle to potentially leverage some of what Amazon has done and actually integrate to those services better. Like what we see with the Oracle exadata being provisioned and accessible through Azure. Not in Australia, I don't think yet, but definitely in other regions. You can connect your Microsoft environment and your Azure environment to run your Oracle databases in oci, but also keep your workloads in in Azure. And we've seen a lot of organizations and I saw a lot when I was at Oracle coming in saying hey, we tried to run Oracle database and I know we're going to talk about data later but it's important from a developer's point of view. We tried to run our Oracle database on Azure and it didn't work because Rack isn't a thing. Real time application clustering. So how do we make this work? [00:14:49] James: It's interesting Scott, that you raised that point about the lock in in the ecosystem but at the same time you also talk about interoperability and learning from what Amazon did and it's sort of joining the dots on what I said earlier about Amazon consciously having to move much closer to the enterprise community and one of the ways in which they did that was really try to simplify things like user management, single sign on and being able to leverage the existing investments that organizations had made in all of that stuff. And I think there was a really conscious decision there that don't try to fight ad. It's so, you know, core to what most enterprises are doing, extend on things like Azure, ad build that interoperability. And I don't know, I think from a development perspective it's really interesting that yes, you can start to use a lot of native AWS services and there is a degree of locking with that, but I don't know that it's any more or less than a lot of the other cloud providers. You know, perhaps OCI is built on open standards a little bit more. I know Microsoft had to very consciously push themselves in that direction at one point to really embrace open standard platforms and move away from the thou shalt use Windows type mantra. But you know, we see it across all the different cloud providers. And whilst I think that there are some absolute native services that are really compelling, I also do see mechanisms for interoperability that are probably more mature now than they were four or five years ago. So it's definitely an interesting landscape. I'm going to pivot slightly right. And it's a little bit of a segue, but we haven't spoken Much from the point of view of an engineer, because I think along with software development comes the whole cloud engineering and how do I automate and build things out. And one of my really interesting observations in this space has been that all of the cloud providers have approached this a little bit differently, right? So they've all had their languages that they use or the command line tools that they use for saying I want to spin up a virtual machine or I want to build a Blob Store or whatever, right? And you know, they haven't been awesome, right? It's, it's quite fascinating because, you know, AWS cloudformation, yeah it's really functional but it's also a bit quirky and a bit challenging to work in. And you know, Tom, we see the, you know, the ARM templates and all this sort of stuff. Although, you know, I love what Microsoft did with bicep, but it probably still hasn't had huge take up in the community. But I just wonder from the point of view of you guys, you know, do you think that this is really telling that the community actually then pivoted to a third party platform like Terraform and that's actually become the de facto industry standard? Do you think that was something that the cloud providers, they just missed it, they just didn't get it right on this one? Or was it inevitable that people would want to move to something a little bit more agnostic if we look at. [00:17:19] Tom: What we preach to our customers? Again, harkening back to that, avoiding lock in, I always look to abstract things away from any one provider as much as possible and I think the customers have been doing that on prem with the likes of Ansible and that for quite some time and I think Terraform was a logical extension of that. I think in early days I saw a lot of people adopt particularly Cloudformation because it was something new and fun, but very soon realised that that was something endemic to aws. So I think that shift to look for something that was abstracted and universal came at a pretty early point. And so I think, yeah, whilst those that are in a single cloud ecosystem, I tend to still find, adopt the cloud formation, the ARM templates, et cetera, anyone that has any kind of view of multi or hybrid cloud tend to be adopting the likes of Terraform. And I think Terraform certainly has sort of floated to the top or been pushed to the top as the sort of, you know, infrastructure as code of choice and I think rightly so. It's a, it's a well supported platform. [00:18:22] Scotti: I think it was inevitable. Because if you look about it, we're focusing very much on the three cloud providers here today and we're looking at provisioning cloud resources or managing via Terraform. But if you look at the terraform ecosystem, it's huge, right? There's terraform providers and modules that you can then integrate into your cloud ecosystem. Because we're not just talking about provisioning an EC2 or provisioning an OCI bare metal machine or a Linux machine in Azure. We're actually talking about provisioning the things that then run on those resources as well. So it doesn't make sense for one or multiple cloud providers to have their own individual thing. Terraform is good, very good at, for creating things, not so good at managing and removing things. So as long as everyone keeps that in mind that it isn't a panacea. A lot of the time people go, infrastructure is code only. That's the only way we manage things. But those people, I would guarantee you have never actually tried to delete something, certainly not out of an OCI tenancy using Terraform. So what do you end up with, to your point, James, you end up Falling back to SDKs, you end up falling back to CLI tools or pure clickups, which is the whole antithesis of, you know, this is not how you're supposed to do cloud. [00:19:27] Tom: Or maybe, maybe we take that opportunity to now put ourselves in the shoes of an infrastructure Engineer or a DevOps engineer. What's in the cloud platform for them, James? [00:19:37] James: From an infrastructure standpoint, really? Yeah, it's inevitable that we go from talking about infrastructure as code to the infrastructure world. And I don't know, like, I've got a bit of a passion around this and you guys have heard me talk about this a lot because to my mind, when we start to take a really infrastructure centric lens on cloud, this is where it all went wrong. You know, I think when the developer community was driving cloud adoption, there was actually a really logical, sensible adoption curve. And I think when it got handed over to the infrastructure community, I think all the problems that arose with cloud stem from this one movement of making it an infrastructure problem, an IT problem, as opposed to an application business product opportunity. And it's so funny that we're working so hard now to unpick and reverse that trend. But I rewind it. I saw it at the time and it frustrated the hell out of me because, you know, look, I've come from a very infrastructure centric background along with my software development. This is where we started to try to shoehorn existing patterns into cloud and say, oh yeah, that's cool, we can do that. But you know, we know how to spin up virtual machines better and we're going to bring all of our tools and we're going to get our single pane of glass and I'm happy to have three clouds and all that, that's great. But I just want to bring my single pane of glass and management layer across the whole lot and treat them all as just another data center. And so to me that's where I think things really fell down. But getting specific around aws, awesome infrastructure capability, there's no question about it. And I think that's probably ubiquitous across all the cloud providers now. But really the first realization that they needed to start to specialize and go, okay, so some people are going to want GPUs on tap for their machines, other people don't. You know, we're going to need things that are CPU intensive or memory intensive, really starting to tailor that. Things like making the fleet available for spot instances, being really, really creative in the mechanisms by which they could deliver infrastructure capacity. But you know, I go back to that thing around democratizing it, democratizing technology, democratizing infrastructure. And I really saw this driven primarily by aws. You know, back in the day when I came out of large banking environments where I had multiple data centers at play, I could spin up all of this infrastructure because I had deep pockets and the capability to do. And then all of a sudden in cloud I'm seeing that anybody can do this without a massive capital investment. And I first saw that through the lens of aws. So to me I feel that the infrastructure capability in AWS has always been incredibly strong. What has been weak is the catch up around the operational tooling processes and fundamentals. And that's why I think it all went a little bit awry when the infrastructure teams took over. Because things like the systems management capabilities, the patch management, the automation, the tagging, the stuff just didn't exist. So it got a little bit chaotic. What do you guys think? Is that sort of how things played out in the Microsoft spacetime? [00:22:23] Tom: That's the exact area where Microsoft picked up and I think saw the opportunity in the market. Obviously it's deep on prem experience with operations, monitoring, management, visibility. So for mine, the big benefit to Azure in the infrastructure space, you're right, the infrastructure capabilities at a big core component, storage, networking, compute, a fairly ubiquitous and standard across the various players. Where it comes in is that management layer and that's where particularly ARC Shines I think as an integrated on prem cloud single pane of glass hybrid. Again, I'll use the term ecosystem but it's there and it's true and a lot of our customers are in a hybrid world. As much as we sort of say things went wrong when infrastructure came into play, I think that was an inevitability of the level of maturity organizations globally were in terms of their readiness for cloud and everyone's sort of taken that at a different pace and a different speed. And I think it's probably fair to say that having worked, I worked for Oracle as well. I think there was a view that organizations around the world are a lot further on in that cloud maturity journey than they actually are. And particularly here in Australia, I think we've done things in a very traditional fashion for a very long time, whether it's scale, whether it's our isolation, we haven't, you know, we haven't necessarily adopted some of that, you know, the benefits of cloud through that cloud nativity. And for that reason, I think particularly in the Australian market, the Azure with ARC is a very, very interesting prospect because for those unaware what it does, it installs an agent on your on prem machines and that's nothing that's, you know, unique in that respect. I think AWS has a similar, similar sort of solution with Systems Manager and the like. I can't remember sadly if OCI does, but I'm sure there are, I know there are definitely on prem agents for database monitoring and the like. Once you've got arc, you know, those resources appear as resource, your on prem resources appear as resources within Azure. All of a sudden you've got integration with the whole Defender suite which we'll touch on a bit later probably with security, no doubt with security you've got that monitoring, so you've got your infrastructure monitoring and you've got your, your application monitoring as well and that becomes that single pane of glass. So the cloud becomes the cent of your operations world. So it's part of that journey into the cloud for organization staging. Ready to start leveraging the benefits of some of those cloud native solutions for the old infrastructure Head, what am I the infrastructure tragic here the whole concept of governance and desired state baselining, that's all there as part of Azure policy as well. We've recently helped one of our customers implement Azure Update as well, which is not just looking at replacing SCCM on prem, but it's also looking to manage updates for their Linux fleet as well through again that single pane of glass you extend that to SQL management. And Arc also extends into VMware as well. So you can literally use the same mechanisms to deploy a cloud VM as you do an on Prem vm. So I think whilst yes, it's probably a little poo pooed in terms of that, that's doing things the old way. We need to appreciate where organizations are in that maturity journey and giving them that toe in the water to cloud like capabilities and infrastructure as code, but applying that in a hybrid sense. I think Azure does a great job of opening that up to organizations and simplifying operations for them. So I think this is one where Azure has a really strong play to be fair in an area where it has been strong consistently over decades now. Microsoft in that sense, I do think. [00:26:02] James: ARC and by extension Azure Stack is probably the best of what's out there. There's no question about that in my mind. And it is due to that heritage like you say. But Scotty, what's the answer? Is there actually something in OCI that is an equivalent to this? [00:26:14] Scotti: I wish. It pains me to say I agree we 100% have to understand that a lot of organizations, certainly enterprise organizations, small medium businesses, they don't go out there and buy MacBooks because they're too expensive. They don't go out there and say I'm going to run Ubuntu desktop and oci. I'm yet to come across an organization that does that. If anybody out there does listen and does want to tell us that they do, I would love to hear about it. It's interesting you touch on how did it kind of get screwed up a little bit? James and I've been thinking about it as Tom's been talking and I agree, I see kind of see it in two parts. When developers got involved they also produced their own or introduced their own problems, which was there isn't a lot of guardrails, there wasn't a lot of security controls around how developers should build and release things securely into the cloud. And so as a result we end up with this spaghetti mess everywhere and we're now trying to retrofit security back into those workloads. So we see, you know, CSPM players, we see DSPM players, we see CIEM players, all the major cloud providers have their own individual tooling that does something in their own cloud. But we've now got these third parties coming in because there is a huge gap certainly in the security space. It's been introduced by not having these guardrails and from an infrastructure or traditional infrastructure Point of view, I definitely see a lot of people just going, we don't want to run our own infrastructure anymore. It's expensive, it's costly. Right. We've got to have basically two data centers. Geographically redundant cloud gives us a way to essentially move to a consumption based model without having to, you know, really scale up or continually hire and retain these resources to maintain physical data centers somewhere, wherever it might be. Certainly at oci, right? So what we've seen is initially there was like I'll just lift and shift my VMS to the cloud, right? Well that isn't cloud native, that doesn't solve the problem. But everyone thought that was like, oh this is great. And then it's like oh, well now our VMware hardware is expiring, what are we going to do? Well, we'll move that to the cloud as well. So I know all the cloud providers, OCI included, has a VMware solution. Once again, you're swapping one set of problems for another. So I can kind of see that everyone just kind of went let's just move to the cloud and then not really address the underlying modernization problem, which I know we've talked about before from an infrastructure point of view around oci. You guys talk about this great stack and this, this great heritage around on PREM and cloud and interoperability between these two things. Yes, Oracle does have on PREM stuff. We do have some customers that run like Oracle User Directory or they run Oracle Apex and ORDS and stuff on prem. They do play well with the cloud. But I would say that certainly in Australia the minority of the customers that we work with, right, most people are a Microsoft stack on prem. So we can't, can't move past that. Where I think Oracle shines is we look at, they've kind of gone well, what are the things that we really should charge our customers for and what are the things that we shouldn't? One of the things that I really love is when we talk about that hybrid approach or you know, utilizing the cloud for what makes you know, for its, its best benefits like having a fast connect which is like a direct connect out of AWS or an express route out of Azure. Oracle only charge you for the port and the speed. They don't charge you for the amount of data that you transfer. Looking at you Microsoft, you know, so like there are a whole bunch of things here that Oracle has certainly gone well. How can we play nicely with the likes of AWS and play nicely with Microsoft without actually having to, you know, fleece the Customer looking at you at Microsoft. If I take one step back though as well, like I don't come from a traditional infrastructure background. So for me I like networking a bit like development to be simple, easy to understand without a huge learning curve. And I think Oracle nailed it this time certainly with the learnings that they were late coming to the cloud. There's all the performance stuff that we could kind of talk about, everything only being a couple of hops away from everything else being a very flat network like you can go look this up on Oracle's website. The thing for me, more so is that they've abstracted a lot of the complexity away. So if I'm wanting to build some infrastructure that's highly scalable, you know, replicates across region, is fast, has failover, all of the things that I would want to build an enterprise solution. Oracle makes it really easy for someone that doesn't have, you know, your traditional infrastructure on prem background to actually adopt the cloud. And I think that, you know, you can't deploy workloads to the cloud until you have some infrastructure and typically that starts with a network. So I think this is one that OCI definitely excels at. [00:30:49] Tom: It pains me to say it, but I had to upgrade the RAM in my machine just to open a pull down menu in Azure with all the different combinations of speed, performance, tier, replicability, et cetera. It's just, it kind of inundates you with options and you almost need a PhD in performance tuning to understand what tier you actually want, what tier you actually need. And to be fair, they're probably going to financially sting you to use those performance options. And to OCI's credit, the performance is it's out of the box and you kind of don't have to worry about it. That is what I do like about oci. [00:31:24] James: Scott. I really was fascinated with this point that you raised around ease of adoption though. Because to round out what I'm saying about the infrastructure mess, the answer to it was paas, right? And this is exactly why the cloud providers started to create platform as a service, because they were looking saying this is interesting guys, but that's not how you configure a database, right? So that's not how you build SQL or postgres. How about we build one for you and make it available as a service? And so I think easing that adoption, making it more consistent and improving the security landscape was a big driver behind the realization that infrastructure people weren't getting it right and we needed more prescriptive capability. So it's kind of fascinating to see how all of this evolves. And I want to touch on the big thing that you mentioned in here, security, because this is something else that I've just seen such a massive transition in attitude in cloud adoption over the last decade or so. Where initially everybody was terrified of security in cloud, we adopt cloud because the security is actually so good and the perspective and the tooling and the capabilities, although there's still obviously a lot of room for improvement and you know, third party product plays, et cetera, are doing really well in this space. But Scotty, I'm sort of really keen to get your perspective on this. You know, taking the Oracle point of view and being late to the table, seeing all of the deficiencies that existed in the other clouds. Do you think the Oracle toolset around security is actually better than what you're seeing in other clouds? [00:32:44] Scotti: I am biased. I've just got to say this 100%. I look at it from a few different points. There's no one short answer. As I said earlier, we've got third party security players that have come to market and are succeeding really well. We all know them. I think we're going to talk to one of them in a future episode. But there's a reason why they exist and why they are doing so well. I think all of the cloud providers including OCI could do better in this space. I think OCI is perhaps a little bit ahead because they have a smaller footprint, they have fewer services, there's fewer things for them to look at. I'd also say from a security point of view it should be on by default, it should be there. It shouldn't be something you have to pay for. So I heard a really good saying once that was Microsoft's business model is they will sell you a foot gun and then a bulletproof shoe which is basically Microsoft Defender for insert product line here Cloud endpoint. Pretty sure there's one for Office 365 now. Like it just, it's a never ending gravy train for these other providers. So Oracle is really good that they will only charge you for security services where it actually costs them money. As an example, Oracle Data Guard is free for all databases running in the cloud because that's just how they operate. They charge you a very nominal fee to extend that to your on prem Oracle based databases because there is some ingress and egress charges that go along with it. So I really like the idea that it's they just give the tool, give you the tools for Free in the Oracle cloud. The other thing I really like is things are denied by default, which means you have to enable them to allow them to work. So by default, users, resources, services, nothing can talk to one another. So you create a tendency and it's the biggest learning curve. You'll find that when you go into oci, it's like, hey, I just want this thing to work. And it's like, well, actually to make that work, you need to write a policy. You need to know the structure of the policy being natural language to actually enable one service to talk to another. You can't just write to a bucket. I know that in other clouds and I'll let you guys talk to that more specifically, right? The way that you enable services and the way that permissions are granted to do things in the cloud is done very differently. So I like how Oracle does it. I think it's straightforward for someone to learn. Once you learn the policy syntax, it's pretty straightforward. The other thing that I really enjoy, that's kind of aligned with the identity and access management pieces around compartments. So if we think about complexity being the antithesis of security, like Azure or AWS, you've either got subscriptions, resource groups, so in AWS's world, you've got accounts and then they introduced organizations and then you merge them for billing. Right. Like it's very difficult to actually see all your resources in one place. Ergo, we now have a third party solution or there are many third party solutions that actually solve that for you. Oracle, you don't really need. They do have subtenancies, but you can ideally just create compartments which are logical separators of which you apply policies. And I don't want to go down too deep beyond that. The only thing I will say is that they do make it complicated because the policies are inherited. So I really wish Oracle would introduce a tool to say what permissions a specific resource has in a specific compartment, because that would actually make the auditing of the access much simpler than it is today. [00:35:55] Tom: We have developed a tool, however, to overcome that deficiency, haven't we, Scotty? [00:36:00] Scotti: Funny, I wasn't actually going to plug my own thing, but yeah, no. So when I was at Oracle, it was a question I'd always be asked like, hey, we need to audit this. How do we know we don't have excessive permissions in the tenancy? Yes, there is a tool I created that basically creates a graph that will show and present the overlay of permissions, noting that it works out the inherited policies. If you're in like five or six nested compartments. [00:36:21] Tom: So there you go. Couldn't bring you the things the cloud providers don't. [00:36:25] Scotti: I did try when I worked at Oracle get them to introduce it but they are still, still a wee ways off. I think the only other thing I will say as well, and it's something that I'd be curious to hear your guys thoughts on is around like on the things for free. One of the things I was really surprised about when I got my hands on Oracle cloud for the first time is threat intelligence is just provided for three for free. So if you have a SIEM or a SOC solution quite often you have to go out there and buy, you know, crowdstrike threat intel or you need to buy a MISP enabled feed or you go to Cybercrix or someone like that and then you have to pay for it on an ongoing basis. So I was really surprised that Oracle just gives you, you can just look up those indicators of compromise whether it be URL, hash, IP address for free. So I really like that Oracle have lent into the security element and gone how can we provide things like they collect the data themselves as well, right? They have an edge, they're working out what's, who's good, who's bad, they're providing that to end users. Whereas I would see perhaps, and I'll let you guys fight between yourselves. Who wants to answer this first? Isn't this something that Microsoft or AWS would charge you for? [00:37:31] James: This is a really interesting differentiator across the clouds and I think that you've touched on something that is actually really worth us unpacking a bit here because it's a bit of a bugbear of mine as well. And the pricing model for security tools is different across the different cloud providers and I think it's super important to know and I love what Oracle have done there by the way. Amazon's interesting in the sense that they've had a consistent evolution of security tooling and capability. You know it started off fairly fundamental and primitive. What they've been working really hard on is bringing a more integrated lens across all of their different security tools. So the creation of things such as their security hub and trying to make all that a little bit easier but from a pricing point of view it's fairly linear, right. You turn on these tools and you know, the more that you consume and the more things you have, obviously the more you pay. It's a little bit like storage or compute. What I find really fascinating though, Tom and I want to Explore this with Microsoft is their model's quite different because they have some really cool security tools. Right. Like, I love Sentinel and I think even just the basic Azure security Center as well has always been a really powerful tool. But it's kind of like you've got this layer at which you can play and that's cool. That costs you a couple of dollars. But, oh, you want the enterprise version? Oh, well, you're going to pay for that, dude. Right? And that's going to cost you a lot of money. And Amazon had this mantra that, you know, day zero, job zero, right, is all about security. If you put a paywall between enterprise adoption and security, I think you're doing a massive disservice to cloud uptake. You're doing a massive disservice to your clients. And I've never been able to understand Microsoft's position on this. Is there some kind of logic in this that I'm missing? Is there a reason for this? What's sort of your take on the Azure security landscape and the way Microsoft are handling that, if you excuse the. [00:39:12] Tom: Pun, I can't really defend it. I touched on this earlier. That's where I think there are some certain business practices that I don't necessarily agree with, where I think Microsoft has evolved to the point where, look, they're all commercial businesses and they're making their money one avenue or another. I was going to say, if I wanted to talk to the benefits of hazily, it very much is around that. That Defender suite, the Defender for cloud is great. You know, ARC opens up the world of Defender for endpoint, of Defender for servers, and you get that unified single pane of glass. James, you touched on Sentinel. You've got a complete security solution there because you're also talking about a SIEM SOC that is seeing increased adoption across the market. It's not much cheaper than Splunk, but it is. And in the tough times that we're facing at the moment, that's actually enough for some organizations. I think that Microsoft have invested a lot in developing this ecosystem and doing its best to unify the products. It's not always great at that, but I think it's better than anything else in the market in terms of giving that holistic. I'll talk to it a bit later, but really, if you're talking about one provider, if you only went with one cloud that also manages your enterprise features and into your business, I think Microsoft's a great way of doing that. So I think these things are paid for, but they probably they're probably paid for and the benefit there is the fact that you're working within a single ecosystem and you get that economy of single look and feel across your organization. So whilst yes, some of those things are free in OCI and potentially not as high cost in aws, you make that back in operational savings by working in that one ecosystem as well. So that's where I sit. I think they're, they're really solid tools. I think if you can pay for them, they provide a really good unified platform. [00:41:05] Scotti: I have a question, so can you, can you explain to me? Because I've, I've worked with Azure quite a lot over the last 18 months as well. One of our big customers is a very big Azure customer and there are a couple of things that have irked me and the first one is around privileged identity management. So you request a particular role like we do it as well here at Cordant. When we have to access our Azure environment, we have to request specific permissions. Someone has to then approve it. Why is it that it takes like 15 minutes for those permissions to be effective on Azure in a different region? Like I go in, it says success, it says don't do anything, we'll reload your screen and then nothing happens. [00:41:41] Tom: I'm not exactly sure. I think it's a global replication issue, but I can tell you 100% for sure it's a lot quicker than Oracle's non existent privileged identity management solution that they offer through oci. [00:41:54] Scotti: Touche. I'll take that, I'll take that. [00:41:57] Tom: Whilst I jest, Scotty, the reality is Entra ID is more than just a cloud identity solution for the cloud hyperscaler. This is something that pervades the entire business and I think that's probably a good segue to talk to the cloud platform's benefits and value to the business. This is one area I like to think Microsoft shines. And I know too that from an Oracle perspective, Oracle has solutions from the IAAS and on prem all the way up to SaaS Solutions. Maybe on that front I'd like to get James's view to begin with because I see customers and I think myself, I think aws, I think, yeah, great cloud hyperscale platform. But where does AWS sit above that IAAS and PAAS layer and what's it offering to the rest of the business? [00:42:44] James: It's a really fascinating lens because there is a significant difference between the way AWS plays in their space versus say Microsoft, for example. Right? Because Microsoft does have a very well integrated Business enterprise ecosystem, of which Azure is one component, whereas aws, you know, almost going back to those early days we spoke about, is a set of discrete services and capabilities and they don't really have those SaaS type plays for organizations. What they have tried to do is make tooling around their platform much more compelling for adoption. So if you take things like in the data and AI world, you know, very competitive landscape now. But you know, what aws did with SageMaker and bringing that to the table at the time they did was quite revolutionary. Other organizations weren't taking that lens of the data science community and saying how do we actually provide them better tools and better capability? Right. And I say that loosely because, you know, obviously they were, but I just think that SageMaker had such an impact and it's only one example of tools and capabilities that have been made available. You know, I think AWS have really tried a little bit harder than the others to bring cost transparency to the table from a business consumption point of view. And again, there are third party products that do it better. But really trying to drive this idea of if I tag things appropriately, I should be able to get good insight into them. I want to have things like the Trusted Advisor available that's going to help me find opportunities to reduce spend in the enterprise landscape. They've been very, very good at assigning things like technical account managers to work with clients on driving down cost and finding better ways to consume services. So it's really quite interesting in the sense that it's not necessarily products per se, but what they have tried to do is really guide business. And it's fascinating that when I look at things like the cloud value framework, you know, these came out of Amazon. So really looking at this idea of how do I break down the benefit realization of cloud, is it all just about being able to spin up servers and storage cheaper than I could when I was on premises? Well, no, it's actually about trying to address things like business agility, staff efficiency, even sustainability. You know, I see Microsoft in particular doing amazing things in sustainability. But you know, from my perspective, Amazon were moving there much faster. So I think bringing that business benefit and bringing those multiple dimensions and trying to understand those very much part of the AWS philosophy, trying to support organizations to do things different and to manage infrastructure better and create unique, differentiated business opportunity. But yes, the real difference here is that it's not a product play. It's not like the, you know, the Google suite, it's not like the Microsoft M365 and Dynamics type plays as well. So yeah, a genuine differentiator. And Scotty, it's interesting too because from I think that business perspective, obviously you know, oci Oracle has a huge tradition in very, very large enterprise and you know, a bunch of suit wearing people doing very, very large scale handshake deals and all this sort of stuff, you know, is that sort of transitioning? Are we seeing a little bit of a difference in the Persona of Oracle here? You know, how are they retaining that business type appeal versus trying to drive some pretty progressive uptake as well? [00:45:55] Scotti: I'm definitely not the typical business stakeholder, right. So like I said, I come from a security and active background. So for me like if I, if I had to choose a development platform, right, Oracle, I'll be honest, probably wouldn't be on my radar or even one that I would look at as one of my first choices of where I would go from a business point of view. Tom, you touched on it. Well, Oracle has a lot of history with a lot of organizations. So the very largest of organizations use Oracle database. Highly likely that they also use Oracle applications, whether they be on PREM or whether they've migrated those to OCI or whether they're running on OCI and the customer's consuming them as a SaaS model but not actually realizing that it's actually running on OCI or it's probably not commonly known that Oracle actually made a conscious decision to exit its physical data centers and runs its entire operation. The whole organization also runs on oci. So they've really proven that it's a platform that can run enterprise workloads and it runs its own on it to prove that. So they've got a lot of applications that run really performant that have always performed well that are core to some of the largest organizations in the world, whether those be government or private enterprise. So from my point of view I think that it's a no brainer. Oracle's like a, you know, we should just do it because things just play nicely. You're getting the performance if you're talking about networking from on prem of your Oracle applications to the cloud as well. Oracle has a huge data suite, whether that be Oracle Data Integrator, Oracle analytics cloud service. There's a whole range of products that plug nicely into these other products which you an enterprise or a large enterprise probably runs as well. So from a business point of view I certainly see the ecosystem being one of their strongest points. That's probably on the flip side a bit of a detractor if we're Looking at small medium enterprise or small medium businesses, like they probably don't run Oracle things and I know Australia is a bit different to the rest of the world, but there is a bit of a hesitation to kind of look at Oracle based on how they've been with like on prem licensing of some of their products in the past. So, you know, this is very much a trade off between who do we really want to go after. I definitely see that, you know, as more businesses transition, you know, I think Amazon's probably got a good view here that, you know, do I really want one large business if you know, a large value or do I want lots of little ones? And I think when I say little, I mean, you know, they are quite large now that use Amazon and Azure as well. But I think from a, from an overall point of view, if I'm looking as a business and I was a business stakeholder, my number one thing would be does it do what it says it does and how can I minimize my risk of essentially moving to the cloud? And I think Oracle being around for so long has a really good pedigree. Anyone that's running their products on prem are going to go. You know, Oracle cloud is most likely bulletproof because our on prem products just work and we rely on them day to day. [00:48:49] James: But it's interesting that when we're talking about Oracle and Amazon, we're still talking a lot about the technology set capability as opposed to that really polished, rounded set of business services. Tom, I think Microsoft are probably doing this better than anyone. What's your perspective on how that's gelling with business? Do you think it's really resonating? [00:49:06] Tom: I think Azure's biggest strength and the jewel in the crown is you touched on the James, the M365 integration and that's just growing, growing by the iteration integration with things like power apps for low code, no code, and distributing that across the business. And much like OCI, customers who are in SaaS and borrowing PaaS components don't even know they're in OCI. That's very much the case with people leveraging the power apps and the likes of Power BI and the like. So Azure offers that solution from a user consumable point of view beyond just the DevOps community. I feel all the way up. Again, James, you touched on it through to the Dynamics, through to the large enterprise application suites that are being leveraged that again have possibly not always seamless but very high levels of integration and access to the tools that Azure offers as a platform. As well. One thing I will say that I think aws, even though it is a set of tools, does very well is those industry plays that it puts together. So that's actually where I think OCI would and should have a very good story around that. But AWS does a very good job of taking almost its weakness in the sense that it doesn't have these application stacks and saying, well, here's the toolkit that you can use to build up these solutions for your particular industry and here's where we've done it before very successfully around the world. And I think that's another area that Microsoft has covered very well as well. It's a solution led business approach rather than, hey, we've got this great technology that that's super fast and super performant and security is free and, and the like. It comes in with, here's a solution end to end for your business, here's what it means for your various stakeholders across the organization as well, not just targeted. And I probably feel that's, that's OCI's marketing weakness at the moment, at least in Australia, is that it's very targeted at the DBAs, the data engineer, very, very focused on individual parts of the business. Businesses want holistic solutions and I think in particular that's where Microsoft offers that, particularly with M365. [00:51:13] James: So it's quite fascinating because I think this is very much a lesson learned in the AWS space in the sense that they have increasingly been trying to appeal to specific industry verticals. So you know, examples are their healthcare data lake that they built and making sure they've got all the right compliance, tick boxes, et cetera, you know, so out of the box you get that if you deploy that. But to me, you know, I really saw Microsoft leading this and I know I'm supposed to be sort of pushing the AWS barrow a little bit here, but I come back to Satya, you know, and the guy I think just had an ability to see an angle that others didn't see. And he was really the first one that got out and started talking about the Microsoft clouds for industry and that industry verticalization of cloud lens. It comes back to this idea of prescriptive plays and how can we make it easier? How can we say, hey, this is how others like you have done this before and this is how we can help and support you. It also speaks to a really interesting aspect around the business point of view with the different cloud providers and how they play as well. And it's something that I do really want to touch on, which very much AWS sort of looks to their partners to fill that gap. AWS says we've got these great building blocks and we love Nothing more than ISVs and we will support them and we will encourage them to build products and services and bring those to market that do address those industry verticals. You know, I've certainly played in this space myself in my earlier life and you know, I find that Microsoft are trying to bring products and services to market themselves, whereas what I'm really seeing is that Amazon are relying on their partner community to do this. Not to say that Microsoft doesn't partner very well also and you don't do a lot of co sell in industry, but it's just different to see the philosophies. But by extension the thing that I really want to touch on and perhaps it's considered a little bit controversial, but doing business with the different cloud providers is actually quite different, you know, and I think it's a really interesting one that when we talk to our C Suite execs in the various clients that we work with, it's something that's easily overlooked. We tend to gravitate towards this idea of the best technology fit, but there is also a cultural fit and an organizational values type fit. And some organizations are absolutely easier to do business with than others. And I see this play out in the cloud space as well. Some of them move faster than others, some of them will bring money to the table faster than others. Some of them just have such a compelling integrated service offering that it's very, very hard to look beyond that. So I do find the cloud providers quite different in their approach and their reach within the community as well. And I'm sort of curious, you know, is that something that you guys see as well? You know, you don't have to necessarily say, oh yeah, Oracle is really responsive and does this. But I'm just interested, is that difference in the approach something that you actually see play out and does it influence client strategy? [00:53:54] Tom: My mother said if you have nothing nice to say, not to say anything at all. All joking aside, I think I will pass on this one because look, the reality is, at the end of the day, whether it's aws, Oracle or Microsoft, they're not benevolent societies. They're out there to make money. So they, they are in there to, to win business off you, they'll say what you want to hear. If you're in a particular position to want to hear it, if it means that there's, there's business in it for them. So I think given that they're all in it for the, for the same thing, it really comes down to how they best acknowledge and understand your, your true business challenges. And I think that does come from those industry perspectives. I think the, the vendor that talks to you best on that front is the one that's going to, to provide the best fit in terms of your business transformation. [00:54:42] Scotti: I think I'm going to be a little bit more diplomatic about this. I think, yeah, they were all out to make money. It's a no brainer. I think it is really hard coming from a pre sales specialist. Very difficult for me to kind of put my mind or portray myself or come up with ideas if I'm now a sizer of a, you know, a mining industry. How, how does my cloud offering differ from another cloud offering? Like it is actually a really hard challenge for an organization to align with. Right. I understand that, yeah, there's some really good articles, some really good thought leadership from cloud providers in this space. But I think when we talk about cultural fit, right, If I'm, if I'm now a customer and I say, hey, I need, what do I need from my cloud provider? I need answers to the questions that I have. I need those answers to be correct and I need them to be in a timely manner. Right. Those are kind of my three key criteria when I would go and look to which cloud provider would be a cultural fit. And the reality is it really comes down to who you get at the cloud provider. I've worked and dealt with people both at Oracle, both as customer and as a vendor. I've also worked with AWS as a customer and a partner. Not so much in the Azure space, but I imagine that it would apply as well that you might get a response from someone in an hour and then you might email someone else and get a response in 10 days. So this is something I see, you know, all cloud providers could get better at is providing the same consistent experience regardless of whether I'm starting out in the cloud or whether I'm, you know, I've been a cloud customer for two or three years and I'm spending millions of dollars. Right. Often, you know, cloud providers and the salespeople, because they're also paid based on commission, are going to focus on those large accounts. But the reality is it's the people that are starting out that probably need more handholding certainly at the beginning. So yeah, a bit of a, bit of a roundabout way of saying I think it really comes down to cloud providers having really good people that engage with the customer, both to understand them, to your point, James, but then also to provide them the solutions that they're after, to answer those questions, to be there when things don't work. Because the first few roadblocks that you have, the customer is going to start thinking, well, was this the right decision for me? [00:56:50] Tom: I think ultimately for Azure, the key is ecosystem. You know, sure, you've got a very capable and mature cloud hyperscale platform, but really it is that association with Entra ID M365, the power of arc to unite a heavy investment in traditional on prem, you know, active directory, the Office suite, et cetera. I haven't mentioned it today, but you know, that integration too, with the likes of Intune, it gives you that single pane of glass view. It gives you that one stop ecosystem. Throw Defender into that which a lot of people are licensed for, whether they like it or not. You know, some may call it entrapment, others just, you know, say you're building an ecosystem that works really well together. And I don't hold that against Microsoft at all. I think there's some great economy of scale through all of that. So in my view, and again, we'll. I'm sure we'll touch on it in another podcast around multi cloud versus single cloud. But you know, I would say if you are going with a single cloud provider and if you have some investment at all in the Microsoft ecosystem, I think Azure is the sort of cloud to back because you're going to get that operational benefit for your infrastructure and operations teams. You're going to get that business integration within 365 and the range of SaaS products that you can leverage like Dynamics. And ultimately you get the security angle as well with the complete suite of Defender. If you're ready to buy into an ecosystem, Azure's there, it's turnkey. And if your developers can get over the fact that they have to work on Microsoft platforms, I think it's happy days for everyone. [00:58:19] Scotti: So taking what we've just heard from Tom, like, this is a really hard position for you and I, James, we've now got to pitch AWS and OCI based on, you know, why would we choose them if we already have an existing Microsoft investment, which is pretty much everybody. So it's the pinnacle of lessons learned for me. Right? Oci, they, you know, Oracle did have a Gen 1 cloud. You know, we don't really talk about it. Oracle don't certainly mention it anymore. The Gen 2 cloud is the one that you See today. So it is the culmination of what did AWS do well? What did AWS do poorly? What did GCP and Azure do well? What did they do poorly? And I think Oracle have distilled it down into here are the really core fundamental things that you, as an enterprise, medium business, small medium enterprise, whatever it is, needs to actually adopt the cloud in a, in a pragmatic, in a secure fashion. That means that we don't have to become cloud experts, that we can also move away if we choose to, but also we're not being, you know, potentially being overcharged for things that we we don't need or we need to buy because it's the only way to secure our workload, for example. So I definitely like OCI for those reasons. I think anybody that is looking to adopt the cloud, move to the cloud, look at adding a new cloud, maybe you've got some existing Oracle databases that aren't working so well in your other cloud provider. I would 100% jump straight into OCI without any hesitation. [00:59:42] James: So to round it out from the AWS perspective, I'm just going to go with the old adage that it's very well proven. You know, I think there's a lot of demonstrable AWS adoption in industry. It's been very, very successful in enterprise and it covers a lot of ground. You know, that very strength is obviously the thing that does overwhelm some organizations and can be a little bit intimidating. There are so many different things I could do in aws, but the reality is you're not expected to do them all. You work with the things that actually make sense for your business. And this is really what I want to come back to, because in doing some research for this episode and really looking at the strengths and weaknesses of the different cloud providers, it's kind of a little bit surprised that a lot of the cliches in industry actually do hold true in cloud. So the first thing I would say to our audience is, you can be very successful regardless of which cloud provider you choose. There is no right or wrong answer for this. The cloud capabilities that exist today in market are absolutely phenomenal. The tools, the services, everything on offer, the entire ecosystem, and increasingly the interoperability of that ecosystem. So the ability for the different clouds to work well together and not compete in that sense, so you can absolutely be successful. So, you know, I think looking at depth of Amazon, the fully integrated capability of Microsoft, the power of data in Google, the fact that OCI brings a very, very polish set of capabilities to market that has learned from a lot of the lessons of the past. You know, to me, I think these are the things that people tend to think of immediately when they look at the different cloud providers and they've absolutely held true. So the difficult thing is you got to step back and start to think about what are the needs of your business. And the hint I would give in this is think less in terms of infrastructure, you know, storage, machines, servers, and think more about the service plays that those different cloud providers can help you with. Think about your industry verticals and where they're proven, what they can actually bring to the table. Can they bring genuine global expertise that's going to help you with your business? What does their partner ecosystem look like? Can they tap into some really creative and capable partners that can help you with some of the things that might be challenging or unique for your business and then finally, never, ever lose sight of the people. So what I'm getting at here is skill within industry. It's going to be really important to think through. Do you have access to the right skills? What does training and education look like? Can I achieve all of those things that I want to be able to achieve in a realistic and reasonable manner? And is my cloud provider going to partner with me really successfully on making sure that happens, or are they just going to point me off to someone else and say, oh, here's a really great partner, knock yourself out and good luck with that. Right. And these things genuinely do happen in industry. There are differences between the ways that the different organizations will partner with you, but absolutely key message is you can be successful and there are very, very well proven paths in order to do that. We're always here to help if you ever want to talk to anybody. But with that, I think I'd like to wrap up today. So for Tom, Scotty and myself, thank you for listening, stay safe and we'll catch you all in the next episode. [01:02:43] Scotti: If you could use a little help or advice with modernizing your IT environment, visit Cordant Au to start a conversation with us. This has been a KBI Media production.