Episode Details

Emily and Dejan cover the following points:

• 8x8’s journey to a leading cloud technology provider.
• Why 8x8 decided to migrate to Kubernetes, a move that gave them the flexibility to run workloads wherever they want.
• Dejan’s thoughts on the Kubernetes migration, and how it’s helped the company improve its operations. For example, Kubernetes has helped 8x8 migrate away from several legacy systems.
• The biggest challenges and surprises that the 8x8 team experienced during their migration journey, such as getting engineering teams to embrace a culture built around monitoring, observability, and documentation.
• How 8x8 has avoided “feature bloat” and maintained a product that performs at a high level, while staying true to the features that are important for its core customer base. 
• The strategy of obtaining buy-in from stakeholders and fellow executives by focusing on business problems, instead of technical issues. This included cost, velocity of innovation, global scale, and so on.
• How 8x8’s cloud-native architecture has made it faster and easier to scale. 

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, and I am talking with Dejan Deklich, from 8x8.

Dejan: So, I'm the Chief Product Officer at 8x8. To give you an idea, 8x8 is now 16 or 1700 employees worldwide, 450 million in revenue, give or take, offices all over the world, customers all over the world. I'm responsible for all product management, engineering, QA, project management operations for all the products worldwide for 8x8.

Emily: Can you give me a little bit of an idea of 8x8’s history in the Cloud?

Dejan: So, 8x8 has been around, probably, a lot longer than most companies you're talking about. We've been public 30 years, give or take. We have been in the business of communication and collaboration since early 2000s. As you can imagine, we have gone through so many different tech stacks, architectures, and so on, that it is pretty amazing. 

We have, in the last several years, done a massive cleanup and rebuild of our software stack. We rebuilt pretty much all of the mobile apps, desktop apps, web apps. We rebuilt the platform starting with billing and provisioning all the way down to how the voice traverses the world. So, it's been a incredible couple of years, incredible journey where I would argue we have gone from the early versions of hosted service to early versions of Cloud, maybe 10 years ago, and we are now what I would like to call a proper cloud technology company. And it's been a very interesting, difficult journey. We learned a lot. We messed up a lot of things, then we learned some more than they did it correctly.

Emily: When you first moved to Kubernetes, and the modern public cloud, what was the rationale? What were their business reasons?

Dejan: Those multiple steps there. We moved to public cloud I don't know, five, six, seven years ago. We ran a lot of things in Amazon. And to be fair, we still also have data centers around the world. So, let me explain quickly what we actually running because I think it's important. So, we have, I think 16 data centers around the world, and then we run in pretty much every region of Amazon, we use Google Cloud extensively, and we have now shifted a lot of workloads to Oracle Cloud. At the same time, business is threatening me with Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud as something that might be coming our way in the next couple of quarters. So, data centers are there because on the networking layer, the Cloud does