Episode Details

Some of the highlights include: 

• Why Vodafone moved to a cloud native architecture. As Tom explains, the company was struggling to manage operations across more than 20 markets. They also needed to improve the customer experience, and foster customer loyalty. 
• Why their business and engineering teams were both in favor of cloud native.
• The benefits of deploying daily operational activities around a single cloud native platform.  
• An overview of where Vodavone currently is in their overall cloud native journey. Tom also explains how cloud native conversations have changed inside of the company throughout their journey, as various business units have caught on to the benefits of the cloud.
• Vodafaone’s transition from outsourcing roughly 97 percent of their operations, to bringing 95 percent in house. Tom explains how this has improved efficiency and expedited time to market.
• The challenge that Vodafone faced in trying to apply legacy network security solutions to distributed and dynamic systems. 
• Tom’s thoughts on why Vodafone’s cloud native transition and modernization efforts have been crucial to their success over the last five years. 

Links:

• Vodafone Group: https://www.vodafone.com/
• Connect with Tom on LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tom-kivlin-5b469321
• The Business of Cloud Native: http://thebusinessofcloudnative.com 
• Tom’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/tomkivlin
• CNCF GitHub: https://github.com/cncf
• CNCF Slack: https://slack.cncf.io/
• Kubernetes Slack: http://slack.kubernetes.io/

Transcript

Announcer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast, where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.

Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and today I am chatting with Tom Kivlin. Tom, thank you so much for joining us.

Tom: You're welcome. No problem.

Emily: Let's just start out with having you introduce yourself. What do you do? Where do you work, and what do you actually do during your workday?

Tom: Sure. So, I'm a principal cloud orchestration architect at Vodafone Group. I work in the UK. And my day job consists of providing guidance and strategy and architectural blueprints for cloud-native platforms within Vodafone. So, that's around providing guidance to the software domains that are looking to adopt cloud-native architectures and methodologies and also to the more traditional infrastructure domains to try and help them provide their services in a more cloud-native manner to those modern teams.

Emily: And what does that mean when you go into the office—or your home office, go into your dining room where your laptop is, I don't know—what do you actually do? What does an average day look like?

Tom: It can vary. So, depending on the activity at the time, it could be anything from preparing a global policy that needs to go through the senior technology leadership team, to preparing some extremely detailed requirements for selection process or creating some infrastructures code, or the code artifacts for the deployment of cloud-native services, whether that's in our lab, or to help our services teams within Vodafone.

Emily: Tell me a little bit more about what pain made Vodafone think about moving to cl