Episode Details

Highlights from this episode include: 

• Key market drivers that are causing Cloud Comrade’s clients to containerize applications — including the role that the global pandemic is playing.  
• The pitfalls of approaching cloud migration with a cost-first strategy, and why Andy doesn’t believe in this approach. 
• Common misconceptions that can arise when comparing cloud TCO to on-premise infrastructure.
• How today’s enterprises tend to view cloud computing versus cloud-native. Andy also mentions a key requirement that companies have to have when integrating cloud services.
• Andy’s thoughts on build versus buy when integrating cloud services at the enterprise level.
• Why cloud migration is a relatively safe undertaking for companies because it’s easy to correct mistakes.
• Why businesses need to re-think AI and to be more realistic in terms of what can actually be automated. 
• Andy’s must-have engineering tool, which may surprise you.

Links:

• Cloud Comrade LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cloud-comrade/
• Follow Andy on Twitter: @andywaroma
• Connect with Andy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyw/

Transcript

Emily: Hi everyone. I’m Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product’s value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn’t talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I’m hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join me.

Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and today I'm here with Andy Waroma. Andy, I just wanted to start with having you introduce yourself.

Andy: Yeah, hi. Thanks, Emily for having me on your podcast. My name is Andy Waroma, and I'm based in Singapore, but originally from Finland. I've been [unintelligible] in Singapore for about 20 years, and for 11 years I spent with a company called SAP focusing on business software applications. And then more recently, about six years ago, I co-founded together with my ex-colleague from SAP, a company called Cloud Comrade, and we have been running Cloud Comrade now for six years and Cloud Comrade focuses on two things: number one, on cloud migrations; and number two, on cloud managed services across the Southeast Asia region.

Emily: What kind of things do you help companies understand when you're helping with cloud migrations? Is this like, like, a lift and shift? To what extent are you helping them change the architecture of their applications?

Andy: Good question. So, typically, if you look at the Southeast Asian market, we are probably anywhere between one to two years behind that of the US market. And I always like to say that the benefit that we have in Southeast Asia is that we have a time machine at our disposal. So, whatever has happened in the US in the past 18 months or so it's going to be happening also in Singapore and Southeast Asia. And for the first three to four years of this business, we saw a lot of lift and shift migrations, but more recently, we have been asked to go and containerize applications to microservices, revamp applications from monolithic approach to a much more flexible and cloud-native approach, and we just see those requirements increasing as companies understand what kind of innovation they can do on different cloud platforms.