Future of Cloud - Growth Mindset Show

Thank you

Thank you

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and welcome to the Growth Mindset Show

My name is Mahesh Chand. I'm founder of C Sharp Corner and host of this weekly Growth Mindset Show

If you are joining us first time, this show is every Friday, 12 noon Eastern

During the last couple of months, during summertime, we have been on and off

but starting now and next month this should be more regular every friday 12 noon eastern time

if you're joining us from asia india i'm sure it's evening there um good evening and welcome

to the show uh ryan welcome to the show of shake uh as you all know if you are joining us back you

already know deepak welcome back to the show i see some familiar faces kesav is joining us from

today welcome kesab uh so if you already know that this show is all about you we talk about

different topics as a growth mindset our focus is on growth growth your growth right how do we grow

from this level to the next level right we're always trying to grow as a human being and this

is what we talk in this show not just technical but non-technical in different topics um you can

ask any questions in the show. We don't restrict any kind of questions. Try to post as many

questions you like. Questions for me, questions for guests, anything about community, jobs

career, you know, weather, whatever you want to talk about. We are open to in this show

This show is pretty open. We talk about, you know, general topics, what's going on out

there in the world. Everything is here open. So as I said, welcome to the show. Let's have

some fun today. Today as you probably saw Ed, you know we are on social media, you probably

saw that. Today's focus is cloud. Cloud, you know, cloud is one of the fastest growing

technologies of today. Every company is hiring cloud developers, cloud advocates, cloud architects

So today we have a special guest which was Lely. He is a good friend, the Microsoft Regional

director for Microsoft MVP and he's a CTO of the company which we will talk in a minute

So if you have any questions about cloud, future of cloud, bring your questions, make sure you have

your questions ready for our guests and you can post all the questions. As I said this show is

all about you. If you think that any of your friends, co-workers, anybody who can benefit

from this show, let them know. Please do share this on your social media

Like comments so more people can benefit from it. I see a bunch of familiar faces here

I see, welcome Ryan, Anjali, Suchita, Atul Gupta, Shivangi Sharma. Welcome to the show

Deepak, looks like we have good people joining us from different places

Looks like a lot of people joining us from India. I see a couple of people join us from the US as well

Chairman, good morning. Good evening there if you're joining us from India

Again, guys, this show is all about you, your future. We are going to talk about cloud and a bunch of other things

Before we bring our guest list, I hope that COVID situation is getting better wherever you are

I know COVID is still here, slowly growing in the US. here. Cases are kind of, they're kind of growing. It's big. You know, a lot of people are, even

though almost half of the population is vaccinated here in the U.S., but still there's new variants

coming up. So wherever you are, hopefully you're safe. Hopefully things are getting better for you

If you are not vaccinated, please go get vaccinated. I'm vaccinated. And now they're

even saying that, you know, you still have to wear a mask. So please take precautions

We don't know about this. It's still unknown. So many things are unknown. So hopefully you and your family and friends are safe

So, yeah. So today what we are going to talk about is we are going to talk about some things mostly

around cloud technologies. And after that, we will also talk about career jobs

if you're trying to switch your job you're looking for a new career path anything around that so if

you have any of those questions you want to post in the comments please feel free to post comments

we will take some of those questions in later in this show and also second half is almost open to

this all the questions i see more people join aman chaman taron deepak ashish welcome to the show

if you also guys have some when we are talking about certain topics if you have any feedback

any experience feel free to post your comment there as well we try to you know make it like

very conversational so mega welcome to the show with that said let's bring our guest today

before actually i bring our guest there's one more thing i want to cover is that

And if you, all of you guys, if you're familiar with that, C Sharp Corner partner with several other events and conference companies, we have partner and we are doing this one of the largest conference, Azure Summit

It's all focused on Azure. And I don't know if you saw that, but in the beginning, we started that as a two-day conference, then started a three-day conference

Then it was five days, it was seven days. Now it is 10 days conference, 10 days of nonstop learning as you're learning

It's because there's so many people are signing up. So many speakers are asking us to participate in that

I believe we have close to 150, if not more. We have 150, you know, speakers speaking for 10 days

And then we have already more than 20,000 registrations already for the conference

And keep in mind it still a long way to go It in September It in September starting September 13 so we still have a month and a half to go we are expecting more than 50 000 people are going to

join this conference each day it's a it's a 10 days so we have to figure it out each day there's

going to be a different keynote on different topics but it's everything about as you are so

So if you are working or you want to learn about Microsoft Azure, or you're trying to get certified, or you have questions and you want to learn new topics, check out the agenda

Follow Azure Summit. It's on LinkedIn. It's on Facebook. It's on Twitter

It's on YouTube, everywhere. So go for Azure Summit 2021. Also, azuresummit.live

I believe that's the URL. Simon just put in there, azuresummit.live. Check it out

So that's something I'm very excited about next month. We also recently launched a challenge on C Sharp Corner

So challenge is a new feature we announced where you can take a challenge and figure out, see how good you are in a specific technology

For example, you can take a C Sharp challenge. You can take Azure challenge

You can take a blockchain challenge and see how you fare out there

And if you think you didn't pass the challenge, if you pass the challenge

you're going to get a certificate, by the way. And then you can share that certificate on your social media and also on your profile

But if you don't pass, there's also help available. Say if you go and read these documents and tutorials

you can learn more about that topic. So check it out, the challenge. It's still in beta

We have not fully launched it yet. If you have any feedback, just let us know

And again, welcome to the show. Looks like more people joining in

This is a growth mindset every Friday, 12 noon Eastern time. Here we talk about growth and how to build your growth mindset

We bring different guests. Each week there's different guests. We talk about different topics

Today's topic is cloud, future of cloud, and anything about your career and jobs

All right. So let's bring in our guest, Vishwas Lele. Thank you

hey it's was good afternoon how are you i'm doing well mahesh thank you for having me

great thanks for joining us today this friday i know everybody's busy i'm sure you are very busy

with the whole cloud and you know with your company uh where are you joining us you want

to tell our audience about where you're joining us and how the situation has changed during this

pandemic from, you know, post-pandemic, I mean, previous pandemic, how things are going with you

Yeah, we are not quite in post-pandemic, unfortunately. I am based in Northern Virginia

which is about 20 miles west of Washington, D.C. So that's where I'm based in. And

And Mahesh, once again, thank you for inviting me. Your second question was, how have things changed in the pandemic

Did I parse that question correctly? Yeah, for you, not only just professionally, from work-wise and also family-wise

Yes, yes, yes. No, I appreciate the question. So, Mahesh, we have been fortunate as technologists, and many of the people who are attending are probably in the same boat

As technologists, we have been really fortunate. A, we are quite used to working remotely

And so this idea that you had to work over the last 18 months or so remotely, we're quite used to that and our nature of work is conducive to that

So we are fortunate. And I have to say that many other professions are not as fortunate and people had to be in the front lines of the pandemic

And many of the audience members are joining from India. my own family in India, went through a difficult time all the month of June

They're doing okay now, but there was, you know, including close family members and friends

So, you know, just ourselves, just myself in this area, we did okay, but not so much the other family members

In terms of pandemic affecting the work, Mahesh, since we are primarily focused on the cloud and we've been for the last several years

pandemics saw an increase in investment in the cloud there's no surprises there people wanted to

make their infrastructure more resilient people wanted to work remotely people wanted to scale up

people wanted to scale up their collaboration pieces or software all of that resulted in

an increased workload on us and our employees, which I suppose is a good problem to have

But being a cloud-first company, we saw a lot of demand on our times

since the beginning of the pandemic. Okay, that's great. So everybody who's watching us

you know, this was joining us from Virginia, two hours from me, I would say

two hours where I live outside of Philadelphia. yes but I agree with you

things have changed I mean from like personal front I see I have friends

and family they've been affected especially in India from this whole COVID situation

but from work wise I agree with you we are used to

working remotely even before pandemic so for me also and us it's like

there's actually more work than less work right and we've been fortunate

in that industry so everybody who's watching this as Viswa said, that cloud is growing

I think during pandemic, the need of cloud has grown even much faster

than it was supposed to. And I think somebody in Microsoft keynote

or somehow I heard that we have moved, even in Zoom or something

they said we have moved actually five years ahead in last one year because of the pandemic

in cloud and tech space. Do you agree with that? Yeah, in fact, I'll give you my own example

one of our customers who'd been a pretty advanced user of Azure

they provisioned compute resources in the first 30 days of the lockdown

that were greater than all of the compute resources that they had provisioned in the last five years

So in the first 30 days. So as soon as the shutdown happened, they had to go into this mode of enabling their thousands

and thousands of remote workers through this capability. These people were all based in the different centers around the country and overnight they had to come up with an infrastructure where they could dial in and do their work We provisioned literally more compute capability

than all of the five years combined. So there is no doubt that cloud was already

even before pandemic, it was pretty clear, if you just look at the numbers that Amazon and Azure

and Google and other cloud providers have been posting, Even before 2020, if you look at that, there's no doubt in anybody's mind that public cloud is the future of enterprise IT or any IT for that matter

It was very clear. And companies that had invested in thinking about the cloud were better prepared to handle the pandemic

There was no question. And you can look at a number of papers now they're talking about how can you make your company more resilient

and all of the investments that people made. Because it's not, you might be able to go to a SaaS service overnight

but you will not be able to go to more enterprise cloud scenarios overnight

if you have not been doing the planning for that, right? So the example that I mentioned

that this company did more compute capability provisioning in 30 days than over the last five years

What enabled them to do that was they had all of the governance, the brokerage, the automation maturity baked in into their environment that allowed them to scale up in this manner

If they had been waiting on the sidelines, not having thought about the cloud, not thought about the cloud transformation, and this comes upon you, then it would have been very hard to drive that kind of change that would have allowed thousands of their remote workers to be able to continue to be productive

yeah that's that's very very good point and valid point and there are some companies now

they're rushing and it's they're challenging especially if you have the big lot of data and

you're trying to migrate that that's can't be done overnight that's going to take you know

time and a lot of companies if they are not cloud savvy staff and you know they don't have that

there's a challenge for them that's that's that's sorry that's absolutely yeah yeah and i'll give

an example and then you can finish that is one of the company i can say the name they're one of the

large telecom they tried to move their 3 000 applications so they moved already in last two

year and so but now their cost is 300 times more than what they were doing before it's because

they didn't have a staff who understand how to you know configure and all that yep yep so no no

Mahesh, that's a great example. You know, many of your listeners probably read a very interesting article that came out about two or three months ago

It's called The Trillion, Trillion as in T as in Tom, Trillion Dollar Paradox

And if you've not read that article, I encourage you to check it out. And it is talking about, The Trillion Dollar Paradox is talking about the costs overrun in the public cloud

right so cloud is great for innovation you jump in you create the resources there's less friction

but then once you're in there if you do not have a mature way of provisioning a mature way of

tracking your costs it can become a big drag and in fact that's the premise of that article

that companies, there are a few examples, and I don't want to be

I don't want to sound alarmist at all by any means, but there are some companies, especially ISVs

who have been doing a lot of thinking about their cloud spend and saying, maybe, you know, we need to rethink

how we've architected our applications because this model is not sustainable. So read that article when you get a chance

and maybe we can have a conversation offline about that. Pretty interesting

Yeah, and what you just said is that's exactly why this company reached out to me is like, can you help us

Because how come we moved to cloud? We were thinking it would be less costly

How come it's so costly? What can we do? And then I was looking at like, that's all wrong

You can't just go and spin up a one VM for every application and just keep it running even though you don't use it

So that was funny. Well, I will talk more on this topic, but before I go more deep into the cloud and, you know, there's a lot of questions coming in

So everybody, thank you for asking these great questions. Again, you're asking questions is very important for us because that kind of tells me that at least you are listening

First of all, you're listening and at least you like our guest, what guest is saying

So thank you for all these great questions. We are going to take your questions in a few minutes, but let me finish first my questions

so before we go into cloud and all this was you want to give our audience a little background

on your like your college where you come from and now you are a cto of a big company how do

you reach to that level and yeah then i'll have more questions about related to this

yes yes uh so thank you for that question actually my background is pretty simple you'll know what i

mean uh i and i'll try to take your other part of the question that you know how did i reach

this point, which I don't think we are a very big company or very distinguished role or any of that

sort. But let me just tell you what my background is, and then I'll try to answer the second part

of the question. So Mahesh, I started out doing an undergrad engineering from India

My degree in undergrad engineering was electrical engineering, nothing to do with programming at

that time. And I should say one other thing. Even before engineering, I was fortunate enough that

one of the neighbors had a computer, which was the Sinclair Spectrum. You probably, I'm sure you

know this, the ZX81, which came out in 1982. It was a little home computer, right, which could

connect to your TV and you could write some programs. And the neighbor was very kind to me

that they knew that I was interested in that device. They would let me

Now I look back, Mahesh, that I was sure I was quite bothersome to them

to show up in their house every day. They wouldn't let me take the computer away because it was expensive

but I would show up in their house every day, and they were very kind and let me use it

So I had some interest in programming. That was in the high school days

And then I could not get into a computer science program, so I got into electrical engineering

The school I went to did not have computer science degree. So I ended up doing all my programming in assembly

And I quickly figured out, Mahesh, that I was not very good in the electrical engineering aspects of things

So I focused on more of sort of the microprocessor based programming, the 8085, 8086, if you remember all of that

Some of you may not remember that aspect of it. And then essentially took up my first job was out of Delhi I know many of your audience members have joined from Delhi My first job was in Delhi I started out working for a collaboration between Tata and Unisys Corporation called Tata Unisys I joined that in 89 And I worked at that company for about five years My main skill areas

were doing assembly programming because I was mainly working on a COBOL compiler at that time

which was largely written in assembly. And then that was about five years of that. And then in

1994, I joined my current company, which is Applied Information Sciences. And at that time

they were building a product, which was a mainframe modernization product back in 94. So I said to

myself, these guys are building a mainframe modernization product, and I need to modernize

my skills. So I think, you know, there's a good opportunity to work here. So that was 27 years ago

And that's why I said, Mahesh, that, you know, my history is pretty simple. I joined one company

and then I switched the job, and I've been here for the 27 years. I joined AIS as an engineer

and have been doing, working on various technologies, working as an engineer, a senior

engineer and at some point architect and that's been my journey Mahesh. So oh that's great that's

great you've been in one company for so long that's awesome so what was the biggest like

if you look at back look you know like what was the biggest you know either challenge or

you would say you faced during this time during you know you obviously 27 years you've seen a lot

in your company in our industry, what was the biggest challenge? Either you had to upgrade your company

to the next level or upgrade your staff, any challenges you faced where you feel like

you know what, this was the biggest challenge? Yeah, so one of the biggest things, Mahesh

the challenge is, you know, I still consider ourselves, I know this is relative, Mahesh

but I still consider ourselves a small company with about 750 people or so

which may not be small by some standards, but is small from somebody else's perspective

The biggest challenge I feel is that as a company of a small to midsize, you have to constantly reinvent yourself

because the larger software companies will come and commoditize what you're working on and drive you out of the market

right so in some ways when i look at my 27 years it on one hand it seems like it's a long time

but i don't think that it is so long for for a couple of reasons i think of my stay here

as broken up into four or five phases right my my first phase was building the product

second phase was sort of more building dot net came out so doing some asp applications

then we wrote the SharePoint as an enterprise platform wave for a number of years

then came the cloud and over the last few years or I would say the last 18 months or 24 months

you've been heavily focused on data and AI so the biggest challenge is that you have to

constantly find a way to reinvent yourself otherwise you're going to get commoditized

and that requires looking out for what is changing, retooling the company

training the people that you work with, all of that. Those are some of the biggest challenges

that I've seen in the last few years. In addition to the challenges that every company faces

which is how do you hire people? How do you keep them trained? How do you differentiate yourself in the marketplace

All of those challenges are common to everybody. But since your question was

what is the core challenge that i've seen in my years which is to stay relevant and

differentiated over a period of time that's great that's great and that leads to my next question

but before that hey uh welcome back welcome i mean we have more people join here vishnu aditi

siwangi ganesh uh spi co arjun ravish welcome to the show uh this is a growth mindset so today

we are talking with our guest, Mishwas Lele. He's a CTO at AIS and also Microsoft Regional Director

And you are still Microsoft MVP? I am. Okay, so you're also Microsoft MVP

How many times now? Well, I was an MVP in other areas before

but since 2013, I've been an Azure MVP. Azure MVP. Yep, so we'll talk a little bit about MVP

but back to your what you just said that these small to mid-sized companies they have to compete

with large corporations and they have to kind of keep up up not only just up to date but pretty much

ahead of curve right so they can go and tell clients like we can do this faster and better

than large corporations right yeah so if you have to advise to our audience and this question i get

a lot so i'm taking this question old question that should they be joining a small company startup or

mid-size or large corporation? What is your advice and why and to who? Yeah, my advice

and Mahesh, I don't know that if I have a template or a blueprint or, you know, do these things and

you know, you'll be successful. I don't think I have it. But I really like to think about

many of your listeners know about the famous speech that Steve Jobs gave at the Stanford

commencement address. If you've not heard that speech, go back and listen to it. So what Steve

Jobs was saying there was, it is really difficult to connect the dots going forward, right? You can't

say, I'll do this, and I will do this, and I'll reach this point X. You can't do that. It's really

hard to do that. It's hard for Steve Jobs to do that, you know, leave alone people like us, right

But what Steve Jobs said is, it's always possible to connect the dots backwards, right? If you are

at a certain point and you see, I did this and this led to this. So what Steve Jobs was saying

in that speech, and it was a long speech, and I encourage you to listen to it or read that speech

that you have to go with your gut feeling about what things and what choices and what decisions

you make and knowing that those decisions will collectively take you to the point where you

want to reach, right? But what I would say is the small company or large company really doesn't

matter that much, right? What matters is what you are doing, what you are putting in in your progress

right? So I'll give you a very concrete example, Mahesh, that you might be a developer. And let's

take a simple example that everybody can follow. You might be a developer, a web developer on one

of the projects somewhere, small company, mid-sized company, large company, doesn't matter, right

And let's say you have a couple of years of experience and you're developing for this company

The important thing is to take some time outside of your core work and think about and reflect on

how you can become a better engineer, a better craftsman. So I'll give you an example. So the

the code that you wrote, maybe in the current sprint, reflect on it, and maybe did you consider

all of the chaos scenarios? if this application was to be subjected to the spike in load

did you think about that chaos scenario? And if you did not

maybe you will spend a couple of hours looking at some great courses out there on chaos scenarios

Now you have expanded your knowledge. Nobody, you did not burn down any scrum hours by doing that

Nobody came and told you that, but you yourself took the time to reflect on what you're doing

you try to improve what you did as part of your work

And I guarantee you, nobody will. So let's say you spend a couple of hours

thinking about chaos scenarios in your web application over the weekend, like Sunday morning

I'm going to spend a couple of hours on the chaos scenarios. I guarantee you on Monday morning

you will not get any pats on the back from your project manager, none

You will not get it. You should not expect it. But if you keep doing this week over week over week over week, in the long run, you would have created enough value, not just for your employer, but for yourself, right

You would have widened your horizons from being a developer to someone who thinks more holistically about a problem

And that ultimately is going to bear fruits in the longer run

So that would be my advice and probably not different from what you've heard from others

Yeah, so that's a great advice. So you have to, I think, goal is to find the challenging work where you have learning

opportunities and also growth, right? There are some people, they complain that, oh, I've been working in this project for

three years and all I do is bug fixing. So that's probably, I mean, it's good as a company, you have to do that, but you have

to figure out side by side how you are learning new things, right

That's kind of... So now... I'm sorry, Mahesh. So I hear that a lot, that, hey, I got put in a project

where really my learning has stopped, right? And now there are enough opportunities

Once you have a commitment to learning and once you have a dedication to continuous improvement

your current project may not give you an opportunity to do some other work

But there are enough open source projects out there that if you spend two or three hours a week just contributing to that project, you might make connections, you might learn from it

And in the end, you might be able to actually go to your employer and say, I've been doing bug fixes, but here's what I've accomplished outside in terms of my contributions in this open source project

Or maybe you can bring an innovative idea of, you know, I've been seeing too many bugs in this area

And here is a white paper that I wrote, which can then be sent to the source team about how to tackle those kinds of errors

And these are all ways of trying to extract yourself from a situation with not be conducive to learning

So, yeah. Well, that's great. That's great. And then I have one more question before

we're going to take a break two minutes break after this question and then there's a lot of

questions coming uh in here so we're going to start taking some of these questions as well

and then i have more questions so looks like it's going to be busy session um so one thing i uh i

cannot totally actually there's a question here as well i'm going we're going to talk multi multi

cloud we're going to talk about all the cloud questions guys in the second half of this session

so do do do yeah so i have a question about this young guys coming right young students coming in

um i i talk to them sometimes and i'm speaking at the college and you know when i say hey why

we have a project why don't you start learning in this project and it's a c sharp and all that

and all of a sudden it's to say oh i'm not interested in c sharp i'm i want to i'm more

interest in python i hear this a lot what advice do you give to the students and young developers who

close mind their opportunity to work on a real project in different language versus they're

trying to learn themselves something python or is it the right thing or they should how they should

they think so i think that and i'm trying to understand your question mahesh here as well so

help me out so when they let me let me add more to this so in there's a trend going on in india

and universities and colleges that every student is learning python they feel like the python is

going to take over the world and there's no other jobs anywhere else so all they learn python so

they are not even open to work so you know we are trying to hire say let's say some interns

say interns we found these guys poor students join us to get a full-time employment right away

you're going to learn c-sharp and this and that are like no we're looking for python

so to me i think if you ask me it's a bad thing to wait around rather than learning something it

can be any technology i don't think it matters if you learn python or c-sharp end of the day

your goals should be problem solved that i i completely agree with you so here's here's my

advice on that, right? When you're starting your career, you're not trying to chase the shiny

object, right? Python may be the most popular language. That's fine. And Python is great for

scenarios and it will continue to be great for many scenarios. But it may not be so great for

other scenarios, right? What you should be as somebody who's trying to look for an opportunity

you should be looking at a computational thinking model. And I know this is a fancy word to use

but what I really mean by that is languages are a mean to a solution, right

C-sharp, Python, Go, Lang, or whatever. These are all, these are a means to achieving a solution

We are not becoming developers and programmers just for our fun, that we want to have fun with this, right

Ultimately, somebody is paying for our salaries and that has to be tracked back

to some sort of a business value enablement, right? I mean, that's what is paying for our time

and things like that, right? So it's not about a certain language

And I'll go back to the fancy term I used, which I hate to use, but it communicates an important point

We are trying to solve the problem that a business has. and in order to solve a problem

what you need to do is exhibit a computational thinking mindset, right

How will you solve that problem, right? Language is just a syntax

but how will you solve the problem? Does it make sense to rewrite this piece of code

What should be the logic? How would you write this code to be more robust

Those are all aspects of computational thinking. Languages are just a means of achieving that

So be open-minded about that. You can learn more than one language

you can join a project and say this piece of this code

can be best served using Python, fine, go for it. But if the rest of the team

which may be 20 or 30 people are using or converging on another language

you have to do what the other teams are doing So be open about it There are plenty of opportunities to learn new languages Well that great Great answer And we going to take a two break and then we be back

Looks like a lot of questions coming up. I don't think we'll cover this in an hour

but we'll try to cover as many questions, guys. Keep those questions coming. Everybody will be right back

Thank you

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Hey guys, can't believe we haven't seen each other since graduation in May

What's going on? Not much. With the pandemic, I can't really do anything right now

Me too. I mostly just stay at home, hang out with my dog, and watch the news. I feel you

Have you guys been able to get jobs yet? Funny that you ask. Gary and I actually have been working on something together

Yeah, we came up with an idea for a startup that's an app that will help us stay active since we both have been sitting around so much during this quarantine

That's genius. I could definitely use something like that. When are you guys launching it

Well, that's the issue. We don't really know how to build it, so we're kind of stuck

I know of this company that does startup advising if you guys are interested

Oh, really? Yeah, they're called Mindcracker, and they'll help you validate your idea and connect you with angel investors

and help you build everything from your product MVP to your technical team and even your go-to market planning and execution

Wow, that's awesome. Do you know how we can get in touch with them? Yeah, you can just visit their website, mindcracker.us

That's awesome, Mae. Thanks. I'm excited to get started on this. Of course. Good luck, guys, and let's talk soon. Thanks, May

All right. We are back here. Welcome back to the show. Everybody, welcome to the show

I see new people join. Welcome to the show. And everybody who's here, welcome back to the show

We are here today with this Ross talking about cloud. Simon, you can start putting questions after this question here, and then looks like we'll try to cover more questions

as many we can so i know as far as you work as a cto and we're not going to go too much into because

we have so many more questions but one question i have and also audience have is multi-cloud right

uh using multiple clouds so you want to spend a little a couple of minutes on what multi-cloud is

as your company is involved in multiple different clients uh and uh and why it's important to

don't even know about multi-cloud? Right. So I think multi-cloud is becoming more and more of

a reality, right? If you wish I had a picture that I could show you, or I'll send a tweet out later

with that picture. So you might be a large corporation and because of some acquisitions

that you made or different business units had a certain use case that was better served by one

cloud versus another, you end up in a multi-cloud. So some number, like a high number of companies

are today in a multi-cloud for one reason or another, right? And what do we mean

60 plus percent. 60 plus percent. And the thing to be careful about is when we talk multi-cloud, we have to

be a little bit more specific. If you are, if you have Salesforce and Azure, to me, that's not a

definition of multi-cloud, right? The definition of multi-cloud is that the same sort of a

computational workload is being deployed to more than one cloud providers, right? That's when you

are multi-cloud, because otherwise, if you have this definition of, you have a SaaS service

which could be running in any cloud, and then you have something else running in PaaS

by definition, you're multi-cloud, and I bet you that number would be 90-plus percent

So when I'm talking on multi-cloud is you're trying to deploy similar kinds of workloads

across more than one cloud provider. So that's the definition of multi-cloud

Of course, what's happening lately is we are seeing the advent of things like Azure Arc

Amazon Outpost Google Anthos which allows you a distributed cloud capability so that you can have one control plane

that is managing resources across more than one cloud the final thing I'll say

of course this is a big topic we could just spend the entire talk

on multi-cloud because then the next question would be should I be in multi-cloud

I'm really good in one cloud should I be in multi-cloud what are the cost implications of doing that

because you have to have a maturity in the cloud, right? If you're trying to deploy these applications

you have to have the automation maturity. You should have to have the governance maturity

Can you achieve the maturity in all of the clouds? And there was a chart from Gartner which said

as you increase your footprint across the cloud, your costs are going to rise as well

So that's other aspect. But the final point I'll say is multi-cloud is reality

And as we are designing applications, if we think of them as cloud native applications

think of them as containerized Kubernetes applications, which give our customers an ability to move across the cloud

that bodes well for a multi-cloud distribution. Yep. So yeah, check out the search

cloud native if you search even c-sharp phone or google there's a big article on what cloud native

is and i know you and um you and a bunch of our and rds and mvps always talk about cloud native

so cloud native is something if you're building a cloud focused application and it's new application

cloud native is something you want to look for agree with that so simon let's start taking some

of the questions. Some we will escape. I mean, this question says what are the optimizing strategies in the cloud I don think it a simple answer but go ahead What are the optimization strategies So thank you for the question first of all

and thank you for listening. Optimization strategies can be multifold, right? And let's just take one aspect

because we don't have time to cover all of them. Let's talk about cost optimization, for example

And Mahesh was talking about this earlier, the company that approached you, Mahesh

I think that the cost maturity comes with your cloud maturity, which means you look at the workload and you say, are they right sized

You know, we have a tendency to over provision. Are they right size? Would it make sense for this application

Do I need to buy reserved instances, which means a long term commitment? I can get these discounts

Do I have the automation that is needed to scale up and down when I need to

I'm only using the capacity that is needed. So all of that is important as part of cloud optimization

No, that's great. Simon, let's take more questions. So before going to cloud, what are the essential things to consider by users, I guess, customers or users

I think, Arjun, that's a good question. So I'm just trying to relate your question to your point is, hey, before you jump into the cloud, there are a few things that you need to do

And I completely agree with that. You should not be going to the cloud for savings, as Maisha's customer found out

I mean, that's not the reason. You have to think deeply about why you're trying to go to the cloud

What are the kinds of outcomes you need? You need to have a long-term roadmap

Cloud is changing rapidly. If you look at just in the last 12 months

Microsoft Azure team had over 3,000 new releases in terms of new versions and new features and capabilities

So if you don't have a good governance model, if you don't have a good brokerage model

which tells you where to deploy things, if you don't have a good center of excellence planned around the cloud that is keeping up

if you don't have executive buy-in then just going to a cloud computing platform is not going

to give you the desired results and i hope that answers your question arjun yeah and you definitely

somebody expert in your your team who knows how to do all those things that's right yeah

So this is a good question. I think we were talking about this a little bit

How long does it take to become proficient with cloud services? Yeah

So Chaman, the cloud services is a loaded word in the Azure community, right

There's a service called Azure Cloud Service. And I'm sure you're not talking

Yeah, he meant the whole cloud. You mean the whole thing. right so the way i would answer the question is if there are 3 000 releases coming out every year

you cannot become proficient in all of them no way you are going to be get proficient right so

what i think is the way to to get proficient is there are some core fundamentals of the cloud

that you need to understand right that are orthogonal to all the new capabilities that

that are coming in, right? For example, you need to understand what software-based networking are all about, right

If you want to create a network, if you want to create network segmentation

if you're a developer, you need to understand the core concept of software-defined networks

You need to understand the core concepts of software-defined storage. What is a blob storage

You have to understand the key concepts of what differentiates a PaaS

and how do you do monitoring in the cloud? So I would say there are core components of the cloud

that you need to understand and become proficient in. So that's one way, getting the fundamentals right

And once you have that, depending on the project that you're working on

your current project may be Azure Functions and Cosmos DB. Dive deep into those two

But have your fundamentals needed. And Chavan, I'll take an example, right

So your current project is Azure Functions talking to Cosmos DB. And you will be wondering, why am I talking about networking here, right

The reason I'm talking about networking here is, if you're working for that application for a bank

they may be concerned about how the data flows from the Azure Function to Cosmos DB

and you need to understand the notion of Azure Private Link that is under the covers

that ensures that your packets only flow through your network and never navigate the internet, right

So fundamentals are important. I used to teach, Mahesh, I used to teach a three-day class

on take those 50 fundamental concepts and just eight, nine hours each day

to go over those fundamentals, like software-defined networking, basics of a VM

And once you do that, then you can jump into the technologies that are relevant to the project that you're working on

Yeah, I agree. And when you, our goal is to keep doing it, right? You just can't say

let me first become expert and then I'll do the work. I think if you, if you try to jump in and

get in a real project, start working, whatever you work from those, just start learning those

and get into the basics. All right. So here's another question. This is a, can you please

highlight carrier path for a fresher in cloud and fraud. So yeah, first of all, I don't, I commend you for asking this question

I don't see too many new entrants trying to, they all want to write

angular or a Python script. So I commend that question first of all, because I'll tell you there's so much

work that can be done in the cloud infrastructure area, right? I like to joke that Azure data center or the Amazon data center is just a, to us developers, it is just an object model

What do I mean? I can make an API call and get a router. I can make an API call and get an IP address, right

What better as a developer than to think of infrastructure as code and think of the data center as an object model

So what I would do if I were you is try to understand how the cloud works, understand, look at some of the talks that Mark Rasanovich has given about insights of a data center. Start there. Build up your knowledge. Learn automation scripts, whether you want to learn Terraform or R&T templates or PowerShell or what have you, learn that. Start doing these projects

There are some really interesting projects out there that you can accomplish if you finish those 50 projects

One of them is how do I secure this three-tier setup from a cloud infrastructure perspective

How do I make this PCI compliant? There are a list of projects out there

You can start working on them, look at the code, deploy that yourself, play with it, and that would be a good way to learn it

Mahesh, am I taking too much time to answer these questions? I know you good You good No we want to make sure that the questions are answered right So people can even go watch later But as you said security alone like compliance alone are big field

If you are really good in security, there is a job already there for you

Cloud security architects and cloud security developers are not enough. Yep. So let's take more

Yep. Come on. Yeah. You know, Mahesh, we had this discussion three or four years ago

that I was talking to our India team as well. And I was saying

how many people are interested in learning PowerShell? There were very few people because

hey, I would rather learn Angular and all of that. But the people who took the time

to learn PowerShell at that time have unending stream of work because there's so much of the cloud success

is incumbent on automation, right? So go ahead. And this trend is growing, right

There's more automation happening in the cloud than building, you know, as Simon posted here, that AI is doing great in power platform, right

So power platform alone is being used to build so many new applications

Yeah. All right. So there's another question from Vishnu. Blockchain is going to affect clouds

So Vishnu, it is already affecting the clouds. If you look at, it's sort of mixed

all the cloud providers are offering a blockchain service at this point, you can see

In fact, those are reflecting in services. So there's a service in Azure Storage

which is basically guaranteed to be tamper-proof and the underpinning of that is a blockchain model

So I think it is already affecting it either directly as a service

or the implications of that on other services. Yeah, and I think even Azure ledger is now offering the same thing, right

That's right, absolutely. So good questions, great questions, guys. I'm impressed with the questions we're getting here

All right, Aditi asked that are any of these cloud services easier to learn than others

That's a good question. well it really depends on what you want to do you know things that you enjoy doing seem

easier isn't it right but i think it's a valid question aditi what i would do

is you know we are moving towards a model of uh and and mahesha i'm going to take a step to

step back to answer this question, right? So what we are seeing is, you know, I've been talking a lot

about network and infrastructure and things like that. And those are hard concepts to understand

important, but hard, right? But not everybody has to worry about network segmentation and private

link and all of that, right? If you're looking to get started quickly, if you look at the whole

abstraction layer of the cloud right if you look at the whole term microsoft cloud it is not just

azure right microsoft cloud is comprised of three clouds it is azure it is m365 and it's the power

platform right and power platform is the no code low code platform so if you're coming to the to the

mix without having a programming a professional software developer programming background and you

and you wanted to get started quickly. One way of doing that would be to dip your toes

in something like a no code, low code model that you can learn in a matter of days or weeks

And then combine that. So let's say you wanted to build an application

somebody called you to build an application. You can take, rather than having to know

the intricacies of SQL server and all of that, you could build a very simple Canvas application

and store the data in something called the Dataverse, which is, you know, all of the business entities are there

you can drop your own custom entities. So that may be a good model

but if you wanted to go one step further, the logic that you want to write

cannot be fully incorporated inside, let's say, a low code programming model

In that case, what you can do is maybe you can write a few lines of Python code, drop it in Azure Functions

and combine it and call it from Canvas applications. So there are, I'm glad you asked this question Aditi

because there are ways to get started quickly and get, and start to add value

for your customers or your employers. And then peel the layers of complexity

as you have time and as you have interest. That's great, definitely good question

We have a couple of minutes left. Let's take another question. Sonam says, how is useful cloud for AI

or how AI is related to cloud? I'll combine those all together

Yeah. So Sonam, good question. The way I would say is cloud has really

the cheap computing capability. So if you think about it, what is making AI successful

And we should maybe talk about AI in a separate discussion, right

AI for developers should be another topic. Mahesh, maybe you can invite somebody to talk about it

Not AI from a data science perspective, but AI for developers. So if you look at what is creating so much interest in AI, two things

Availability of computational capability and availability of data. And if you think about it, both of these things are powered by the cloud

You're spinning up these applications which are generating the data exhaust, which is going into the training of the models

And you have cheap capabilities in computation to train your models. So the confluence of computational capabilities and data is what is leading to cloud being a useful thing for AI

Yeah. And being there and everything is there, it's easy to set up, it's easy to start everything

that's why yeah there's one more question i want to take last and then that would be

so any certification needed to cloud or what's the importance of certification i will add my

own question there when you hire people the certification adds any value to you and your

company yeah so we've been hiring a lot maish we have almost hired just in the u.s here

we have hired more than 100 people in the last 90 days or something like that so we've hired a lot

of people. Your other question about certifications, I think certifications are important. I personally

think that certifications are important, but it really depends on what you do while you're

preparing for those certifications, right? If all you're doing is just, if your goal is to just do

enough to be able to clear the certification exam, that is not going to take you too far, right? So

So having a certification looks good, but as you're preparing for the certification exam

it is really important for you to broaden your skills. What you take out of the preparation

for a certification exam is up to you. And if you do that

then certification becomes really valuable. But I like the idea of somebody having

and as someone who has helped prepare some of those certification exams

or served as a reviewer of these exams, I think that a lot of work goes into

including the product team saying, these 20 topics are important. If somebody learns these topics, they will be valuable to their teams

So if somebody has done hours of that work, you can benefit by that targeted blueprint of learning

But then don't limit yourself to exams. Think broadly as you prepare for these

Well, great. That's great. That's great. And then last question before we close down this is what is the future of cloud

What is the future of the cloud? I wish I knew the answer, but I will give you my two cents

What is happening is now that we started out with the infrastructure service of course we went into PaaS right Then we obviously SaaS has been around for a long time But if you watch the Build conference just two or three months ago

Microsoft announced two different flavors of the cloud. And for those who didn't follow the Build announcements

one is called the Microsoft Cloud for Health and the other one is the Microsoft Cloud for Retail

So what we are seeing is a super specialization of cloud capabilities dedicated to certain verticals, right

So storage compute network have become commodities, right? Kubernetes clusters have become a commodity

So, you know, everybody has a Kubernetes cluster. You can just go to anyone. So what is the next thing in the game, which is raise the level of abstraction

which is highly targeted community cloud environments that can allow companies to realize value faster

So that's the direction that we are headed. And it makes sense, right

It makes sense that all retail, for example, all retail customers need same thing

So why all of them have to build their own different applications

So here Michael say he already built for you Just go figure it out put your products out there start selling that makes sense to me if you ask me that right and and the other thing i would say and we are over

time so i'll be very short here so one is this special specialty clouds this notion of specialty

clouds as you said mahesh you know putting cross-cutting capabilities that are domain specific

in the cloud. That's one aspect of it. And the other aspect of it, now that you have AI-powered

algorithms available to you, how do you make intelligent applications in the cloud? That's

the other part. Don't just build applications that are declarative in nature, but you can start to

take advantage of AI ML, infuse them with AI ML to make them intelligent applications. So those are

the two trends that I'm seeing emerge, high productivity, low code, specialized cloud, and intelligent applications

Well, that was great. That was great. We had fun. So many people joined, everybody

Thank you for joining It was fun You asked all those questions That made it very interesting and which was very great answers This recording will be available to everybody on YouTube soon

maybe by tomorrow if somebody wants to go watch it later or share. But again, which was Friday, it's noon

I'll let you go. Thank you so much for coming, and hope to see you soon

Thank you, Mahesh, for having me, and thank you for all your listeners who took the time to listen

and pose questions. I wish them the very best. Thank you all

And I will see you next Friday, 12 noon. Transcription by CastingWords