April 04, 2023
Driving Cloud Innovation in AWS with STAX.io | Episode #62
In this episode I talk with Adam Beavis, Managing Director at STAX. STAX developed a cloud management platform that simplifies AWS infrastructure management by deploying a controlled landing zone into an AWS tenancy. Adam and I discuss the origins of STAX, how it helps customers with cloud architecture, compliance, security, and cost optimization. They also touch on the i…
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In this episode I talk with Adam Beavis, Managing Director at STAX. STAX developed a cloud management platform that simplifies AWS infrastructure management by deploying a controlled landing zone into an AWS tenancy. Adam and I discuss the origins of STAX, how it helps customers with cloud architecture, compliance, security, and cost optimization. They also touch on the importance of AWS Marketplace, the future of multi-cloud, and the exciting new STAX integrations with partners like Veeam and Datadog.
The ultimate Amazon Web Services Landing Zone! Compliance, security, and cost optimization with STAX.io
In this episode I talk with Adam Beavis, Managing Director at STAX. STAX developed a cloud management platform that simplifies AWS infrastructure management by deploying a controlled landing zone into an AWS tenancy. Adam and I discuss the origins of STAX, how it helps customers with cloud architecture, compliance, security, and cost optimization. They also touch on the importance of AWS Marketplace, the future of multi-cloud, and the exciting new STAX integrations with partners like Veeam and Datadog.
The company was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia
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☑️ Technology and Technology Partners Mentioned: AWS, Amazon, VMware, Veeam, Datadog, Public Cloud
☑️ Raw Talking Points:
- Buy vs Buy
☑️ Web: https://stax.io ☑️ Crunch Base Profile: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/xyonix
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Transcript
RAW COPY - ERRORS MAY BE PRESENT
Corrections okay anything else before we kick in no mate I'm just gonna yeah make sure we're on it actually I forgot to actually do that give me a second yeah it's always annoying when the beeps come through hello and welcome to episode 62 of great things with great Tech the podcast highlighting companies doing great things with great technology my name's Anthony spiteri and in this episode we're talking to a company that is making Cloud absurdly easy purpose built for AWS they produce a cloud native
Cloud management platform with a rich and robust place to set to help customers migrate build operate and support a thriving AWS ecosystem that company is Stacks I'm speaking to Adam Bevis managing director at Stax welcome to the show Adam uh Anthony real pleasure to be here excellent so before we dive into the world again of AWS um and what Stacks actually does I just want to give a shout out to the show so if you love great things with great Tech and would like to feature in future episodes you can click on the link in
the show notes or go to gtwgt.com and register your interest just as a reminder all episodes of GTW GTR available and all good podcasting platforms Google Apple Spotify all hosted and distributed by Spotify which was anchor.fm and that'll keep you up to date on all previous shows as a final reminder don't forget to go to YouTube gtwjt podcast hit like And subscribe and follow and you'll get all future episodes so with that out of the way Adam let's talk about stacks and maybe firstly um introduce yourself and then give a
little bit of background on stacks and basically the the founding of the company fantastic thank Anthony yeah how to BBC the the managing director and it's interesting the history of stats because it was really born out of aws's you know very fantastic Consulting companies at the time which was the Versant group and and tour and James and a couple of the founders there as they started to do migration after migration after migration with many organizations they really started to understand the pros and the cons sometimes if when people
move to the cloud understanding cost management initially and then compliance once you're in the cloud and stats was originally a cost and compliance tool that really helped people understand where they are spending the money and just that how compliant the environment was very very important early on and many of those tools weren't available native in AWS at the time and stacks then Grew From there so spun out of the Versa group became a standalone organization and rapidly started to scale up and what they also started to
see is that when organizations moved to the cloud a lot of the foundations that are laid down are repeatable you know when you want to design and build foundations in AWS you want to make sure you get things at the base they're really important and we consider this in many cases a landing Zone then once you've got this really base Landing Zone done with the guardrails around how do you want to do account management that can be quite difficult in AWS especially if you don't have the skills so Stacks
started to move further into you know simplifying the account management as well then you go through the build phase things like networking again networking very complicated stuff Stacks took an opinionated due on best practice on how you should do uh how you should do networking and then little other components or other components started to grow from their identity and access management and then security controls risk management and so today we talk about Stacks being ready to deploy Foundation to get going very very
quickly into AWS we can lay that down in around 24 hours so people can have a an Enterprise grade Landing Zone within 24 hours but then we give you everything that you need to operate and maintain that AWS environment one of the big is one of the big problem stats definitely overcomes is speed to deployment but also the drift inside an environment you know what you've built today in AWS you know it could be out of sync by tomorrow let alone six months let alone 12 months Stacks as a managed service we focus on maintaining that and that's
what we call Evergreen so long answer to the question of a little bit of the history and then as we touch into the product there yeah I think it's interesting though right because I think looking at this people probably asking so what actually is it right so it's a like a it's a cloud environment that's pre-configured with controls for security networking connectivity identity management access control all that kind of jazz which you know some people might ask and go well doesn't AWS give you that out of the box so why why
do why are you guys kind of doing this and adding this additional layer that's a great question that's a great question because I think everyone believed that for a long time God eight years at AWS I thought that as well but getting going in the cloud it's difficult it usually involves a 12-week engagement to build the landing Zone and even then there's a lot of work that needs to be done around that that can usually cost you know for an Enterprise three four hundred thousand dollars and then after a month
off and they'll have to do that again uh and that's the piece that stats really takes away you know what we can deploy in 24 hours and then configure over about a week is usually a 12-week build and three hundred thousand dollar statement of work so it's all that foundation and work that people neglect and sometimes don't think about when you want to move to the cloud let alone when you want to then start moving Enterprise applications or business critical applications into the cloud yeah so that
Landing Zone that you're talking about um just maybe explain what what that is in terms of you know like I I my assumption of it is that basically you've got this this location where you're times your your units um your your IT staff can literally sit and start to operate and start to build you know the applications the services that might be required to actually make an application work as you migrate from on-prem into into AWS is that effectively what it is and I think after that we'll get into a little bit more
about what Stacks actually is because I think that's intriguing in itself yeah and I could probably answer both those questions there because exactly what you said it's great you can get into the cloud you can deploy a VM or workload or AMS whatever we want to call it but you know to do that you want to make sure your securities set up correctly you know Amazon talks about having a well architected framework you want to be able to make sure you're adhering to all those different pillars that means you're security posture
you're doing that correctly you want to make sure you're following best practice the way you start to set up accounts following best practice the way you want to do networking and securely setting them up you want to make sure you're doing all your cost management correctly because you know people moving from a traditional data center into Cloud a traditional data center you've already paid for the cost outside of some of the running costs you don't get that configured correctly in the cloud costs
can very easily blow out and you want to make sure you've got all your alerting configured around that probably the next big one it's definitely all the security controls and risk management so how do you set up those guard rails around that so you can allow your developers to move really really quickly but if they move outside the well architected framework or you know the benchmarks that CIS put on on to make sure people are operating in the right environment within compliance you need to make sure all of
that set up as well and that's what stats provides in a really big way if someone leaves an S3 bucket open you want to know that the Risk Managers want to know that the business owners want to write that and they want to know it's been closed as well they want to make sure as they're moving those workloads into the cloud that they're doing so in a secure and cost efficient fashion yeah so it effectively Stacks is a stack I'm guessing that's basically where the where the company name comes from in
terms of you know what it is it's it's pretty self-explanatory unless there's some other story along the way as opposed to no I'm not really pretty basically not the active way it works though right it works as a short and snappy name and actually the website Stacks at IO you know that's that's the website as well I'll link to that in the show notes but so basically this isn't when it's a matter of service as such but it's not a traditional MSP type managed service that you would see maybe in traditional
infrastructure as a service um because this isn't multi-tenant as such is it it's basically deployed once again multi-ten in the environment and the way you think about that the stacks sits on the side he doesn't interrupt you going natively onto the console but we manage and maintain all the AWS pieces that often drift within an environment you know if there's a new rule around the way architected framework the way an S3 bucket should be managing kit compliant we'll make sure that that's changed
within the stacks environment so the customer gets those controls we deploy it out to One customer it goes out to all our customers as well okay so yeah okay so so in that case it's there's a central is there a central deployment or is there one deployment that you put into a customer which is then managed at a higher level per customer and then manage centrally by us I get it okay no worries yeah that makes total sense so it's not like there's a there's a single one-to-many you know platform that that it sits within the
individualized yeah cool and I guess that that adds some value as well because not every customer is especially in this world not every customer is equal and in fact most customers will have very very particular sets of tasks so what I'm what I'm guessing is that you guys will deploy you know the base the base Stacks it goes in there it does all the best practice that you guys have come up with over the years of experience but then because it's not you know Central or one to many it gives the opportunity to maybe tailor that a
little bit as well at some point or you know we stay within the best practice of the framework but then people can customize the way they use AWS within this that's it that's it so you mentioned it allows us to have such a variety of customers so from the smaller startups that you Stacks because they don't want to spend money to get going through to some of the largest isvs in the world or large financial institutions that again really want to make sure at any one time that their environment is fully
compliant well managed you know cost efficiencies put in there as well and it's consistently being maintained and updated one of the things I mentioned earlier around drift is still one of the the different most difficult things in Cloud people come in and build an environment yeah the contract believes the partner leads the next person comes in and does it the next way the next way and then two or three years down the track or sometimes 12 months nobody's quite sure what everything looks like is it compliant isn't it and that's what
causes people to stall putting workloads into the cloud whereas Stacks the way it's built day one you can be assured by the time to use that it's still you know maintained within the mobile architected frame on it and that's all about consistency right which I think it's one of the ironies of the public cloud is that it's a struggle to keep consistency and without consistency and control you you have what happens what you mentioned right you have drift you have cost blowout um you have people that don't know what
you know what's happening when one person leaves so to have a a sort of platform there that manages all that for you is worth its weight in gold not only not not for the people really that are you know in in the now but really it's a future proofing situation isn't it as well so if your company's committed to going into you know move applications from on-prem to the cloud you're going to want to be there for a while but you want to make sure that you know in five years time someone hasn't come back at
you and go why did we do this yeah exactly right exactly right so in terms of you mentioned cost and you know Bill shock and visibility and you've mentioned yourself like I've I forgot to mention at the top that you and I have known each other for a while in the industry like you know over the years in Australia um and you've spent a bit of time at um traditional msps you've spent a bit of time at you know AWS so you've got this round of knowledge of both sides of the industry just starting with cost and
poor visibility how much of a problem is that with the public Cloud because I I struggle with this the fact that it is a problem I know why it is but why is it still a problem today yeah definitely I think people with judge at times how hard it can be I I mean there's two different thoughts of that when you're lifting up a traditional application and you're not going to change anything and drop it in like an sap now a lot of people still think the best thing you can do is just crank out the bigger CPUs on what you
need drop it in and if it's running it's fine let's leave it it's going to do that so people don't go back and start to then tailor down to what the original budgets that they said for them the UPS are in there and they're running and they have cost blow out there as well I think it's the responsibility in the the visibility that can also be provided into different application owners and into the business which has always been quite difficult at times to to go say okay this group of
users call it marketing call it the supply chain teams and start to allocate costs out and that was a big promise for the cloud that people didn't follow through and that's one era it Stacks where we can get quite granular down to allocating costs down to a team to a person Jason Blackman at Car Sales is a great customer of ours and he you know the first thing he checks in the morning is the cost and how much of his team's blowing out but they are very disciplined the way that they think about it and they put the responsibility
in the hands of the developers and that's a very rare case so I think you know if I separate those two conversations out it's a discipline to do it and when people went about moving to cloud in a traditional way the way they thought about a traditional data center none of those disciplines and controls were put in for day one tagging of all the different environments didn't work so it's difficult to allocate cost and as you go on six months 12 months it's very hard to pull that back again
so yeah go ahead go ahead I was just saying it's a big area now where he's starting to see a lot of these finops organizations develop because it's one thing to have the tools but then to have someone in and start to talk about the discipline of how a team should manage um you know not the the costs within Cloud it's a real you know it's a real big piece of work getting that Center of Excellence right so Philips Philips is an interesting piece right and I think well I've heard two definitions of
finops in terms of financial operations with being actual finance and what they're doing in Tech but then your sort of angle of synops is really what you just talked about being able to manage and and maintain and keep consistent the costs of you know a particular environment like this which traditionally if I think back to when we started you mentioned it you touching it when it was on premises if it was actually you know all-purpose build equipment in a data center that you bought server storage networking that
was a stunt cost he might have got Finance on it right but no one was worried about you know an individual VM coming up because is all part of a bigger allocation it's all part of that tin right and then we moved into this um you know infrastructure as a service world where it became a little bit more of we we care about the actual instance or we might care about in the VMware Cloud director world you know we might hear about an allocation pool or a data center a virtual DC which you get a bunch of allocation but effectively you
know that wasn't being paid as you go for every little Cent every little every little service right every little thing that you do in the public Cloud world like AWS you're getting charged for so the men what's happening is the older guys like myself who are you know were trained on that it's not our world at the moment it's it's a very hard concept to grasp and so when those guys act as the leaders to move and shift from on-prem to the cloud you're probably not ready for it and that's where Stacks
come is in the play right it is and it goes back to the original purpose of stacks was to identify where in many cases where the videos might have been and how much that they were costing and why they were costing that much and then how do you start to pull that cost down by applying at the time reserved instances which are now savings plans but you touch on something else having flashbacks when you're saying that around VMware Cloud director and VMware where it was an allocated pool of resource that would share what was up
what was down whereas as we know with the modern day public Cloud it's that single instance that you're getting charged for and you know as a new instance has come out more and more and more and more often I'll look at the new gravitons from from Amazon I mean they can cut 30 40 out of costs for people but there has to be someone there managing that making those recommendations and planning that almost well it will be on full time you know it's usually it's multiple large organizations and that's what spawned
that the birth of finops many people that have been doing that at um large organizations are now spinning off companies where they're going to help other Enterprises do that now and I think that's an area that will continue you need to grow yeah and actually to be fair I've had a couple of those companies on the on the show in the last of this year actually could cost last year um I had another cast AI they're all about kind of being being smart in that area right of trying to work out exactly
what's best for the customer um it's funny I I had a thought there you know this is all sort of stuff that maybe Amazon doesn't like because For the Longest Time Amazon to my end was was always good to milk you know those little bits and pieces and they were almost like those guys in the background of Amazon and AWS must have sitting back laughing going that these guys having the right size to it love this customer let's keep in mind as long as possible you know so to a certain extent I'll
have to defend them a little bit there it's funny one thing within the culture of Amazon that we amazed me and I'm not sure if it still goes on now but the teams used to get gold on reducing customer bills there you go coming from a traditional it world where as you said it was always the opposite one thing they were always really good at is being able to do that but you know as a cloud adoption bro and Brew it gets harder and harder to do that across you know many customers and logically logically the
end goal there is that if you keep the customer happy they stay like you don't want to keep them blow and blow it out like yeah it was a great philosophy yeah all right guys I just saw the security just on the security side before we move into some general conversation about where we're at in in in in this time in the industry so how important is security because um and how important is security for Stacks because I know I've had personal experiences where I've had my very early on in my tinkering with AWS so it wasn't
that early on I must admit it's a bit embarrassing I had my AWS key secret key and access key basically put out on GitHub and within a couple of seconds boom I was I was basically trolled and I had like a thousand servers spun up across the world and it was all on me so I know that it's a very very tenuous you know area of the business and apart from having these purpose almost like the phynops guys you have the security of secops guys but Stacks is obviously doing a lot of that work as well and making sure that when customers are
deploying through the through the interface through the landing Zone they're doing it in the right secure way which is super important right spot on and that's a thing and again I'll steal the shared responsibility model uh from Amazon you know you can only do so much but you've got to make sure people follow the best practice when they're using it but it's really good to make sure you're doing that from the start all the security controls are set up the way all your accounts are
established at their setup the way you're reading logs the way your learning's working the way you're then running those alerts across all the different bundles depending where you are you know a good example of that is we've got an upper bundle you know an opera all the controls that someone needs to you know satisfy to ensure to be apple compliant we have bundles that allow organizations to see if they are compliant against those very important CIS we just released last week that um the PCI I think your private beta as
well so as a as a business owner or a risk manager or anyone in the business the it manager the CIO to know that from the moment you get going that you've done every everything you possibly can to make sure your environment's set up correctly securely and then you've got the right logging alerting and monitoring on that just in case something does go wrong it's a real peace of mind for customers as I said that is a you know to get that right in in to be honest with you it could be 12 months of a team getting to that level
you know in within an environment and then in quite often up to you know a million plus dollars for Enterprise yeah but so that's so there's I was I really haven't I probably haven't asked the question I ask a lot of companies I have on like what's the why what's the what was the problem that you know Stax was trying to solve and you've basically gone through it right over the last sort of 10 minutes with regards to what you've just talked about but if you were to nail it down and if I was to ask that
question like what what is ultimately Stacks there for in the Valley of the customer and I'd say that to get going quickly and then to ensure that peace of mind that once you're in the cloud that you're remaining compliant as well and secure and always adhering to best practice like you need to things move so quickly yeah and that drift kicks in and people I'll be honest with you when people start in the cloud and it's so exciting and you talk to them and then you talk to people that have been on
cloud 2.0 cloud.3.0 they really understand the pain and often think well if only I knew this as we got going from the start or had something like facts ensuring we remain compliant as we got started yeah yeah and there's clearly a market for it because you guys have been quite successful you've done you've done really well I think I I saw that in 2021 in the Australian crn fast 50 you were like number three right so you guys are obviously doing something really well and it's great to see um the one question I've got around
and it relates to what you just talked about so if if people move into the cloud and they're so focused on trying to get those little bells and whistles and knobs right surely that means that they struggle to actually innovate within the cloud right because they might have just got in there they're lifting and shifting at the start but the end goal is maybe to transform an application to be actually properly Cloud native serverless whatever it might be um to leverage the actual benefits of you know what AWS has and what the other
public clouds has so how much how much do you see companies struggling to innovate within AWS because of all the complexity that you know we've talked about that's a question to be honest we get answered a lot and I my answer is still I don't believe it comes down to the tech I mean the the there's no doubt that the Innovation people see within the cloud especially companies that really embrace it and do it properly it's incredible I've heard organizations like Woodside that have done amazing
things building digital twins I look at some of the great startups well they're not startups anymore out of Australia Ford Rea or Jason and his team at Car Sales the work that they've done absolutely amazing origin energy big traditional organizations as well but it's all about building a culture that allows people to get those ideas out and one of the things the cloud enabled that I loved in the early days and still goes on today is how quickly they go from idea into prototype into Innovation and
if you think about that prototype or that experiment if that experiment moves into production no matter how big that's Innovation and so you see these organizations that experiment more two might fail three move into production they learn more and then they start to drive that Innovation wheel and often that comes from within the business I think a big mistake organization's always made was we need to be Innovative but I'm sure it's going on with things like open air at the moment we need to
be Innovative I.T Department go and do it it's not their responsibility it's the business's responsibility so I think that building the culture of innovation is one thing and then I believe the the platform or a cloud platform like AWS and allows them to move really quickly they've got mechanisms they need a platform and then the culture really core components that allow our organization to to start to innovate quickly yeah and I think that also lends itself to the fact that you know when you when you're addressing or looking to
go to a cloud like AWS it's it's a tool set right like it's a tool set of many many services I mean you and I were both that reinvent last year and they just continue to add Services you know almost you know weekly monthly whatever it is so you know to be able to leverage all those tool sets freely and openly without um the hassle of the stuff that stack solves is going to allow them to innovate quickly they're absolutely right um that that comes into this build versus buy so I I've heard that quite
often of like would you build versus buy just explain what exactly that is for people that might not know like me exactly to get it no it's a really good concept because you think about everything we spoke about to get going in the cloud Good Foundations accounts networking identity then the management and things that to bring all that together within AWS if you're good you can do it be a builder absolutely and that was always the story that wasn't a big thing right Bill Bill and people did it but then it's harder to maintain and
those great people that build it move on and partners move on and it it's hard to maintain um compared to buying it you know off the shelf you can I think people use a Bunnings analogy you can go into Bunnings and get all the right things like AWS and build it or you can just actually buy it and it's there it's already done and and that's the difference one it's speed and cost savings and doesn't limit things and what starts to drive that even more are the skills shortages at the moment and
yeah and everyone talked about certainly being done to death but it's a fact that getting skills out there is very hard if you're a Cutting Edge startup or a large corporate like a bank that can pay big money for them fantastic you're probably always going to get really good people but there's a lot of organizations that cannot attract that talent and at times cannot afford that talent and time to go and build and maintain these environments and that's where products like Stacks really start to come into
play and we're seeing it also across other areas if you look at data and analytics I think yeah some of the more successful companies that were you know really took advantage of cloud architecture and Computing snowflakes a good example databricks is another good example the two that I thought yeah yeah you can build those environments and there's no doubt people do and they can do it really well or it can just go and buy it you know already done you know a snowflake or data bricks there as well so there you know they're really good
examples of build versus buy and those patterns are starting to appear more and more which is great because it's spawning this incredible ecosystem of amazing isvs that are sitting on top of the the cloud platform and utilizing those beautiful Rich services that they all can continue to go and develop year after year yeah it's certainly there there is certainly a bit of an explosion of companies that are adding value on top of these public clouds I had um were effectual from the US on a couple of episodes ago actually you know
doing doing slightly different things to you guys but still focusing on AWS and trying to enable their customers and their Partners to be successful themselves right um so on that the marketplace is a very important part of AWS in general right so how does Stax is obviously available there so for people that want to get started with it do they have to engage directly with you guys or can they just go straight away the marketplace and go bang no thank you great I think for an organization like I actually called a small local ISP
Marketplace is you know that that ability to go Global off Marketplace the ability to transact very very quickly um I shouldn't say bypass procurement because I think procurement's now aware of marketplace so you still have to divert to them occasionally but a good example of that is Trials you know one of the way you know as we've made a big shift to product-led growth as an organization we needed to start allowing customers to do a trial Saturday early day now sometimes the paperwork to do that could be you know tricky
difficult but something like Marketplace is very easy to transact the terms and conditions a click of a button for the customer you can then deploy Stacks they do the trial and then it can continue to um transact through Marketplace so it's been for for areas like that it takes a while to figure out I'll be honest with you but once you get good at leveraging Marketplace you can now do custom deals on Marketplace so it's come a long way over the last few years that has made it much easier for isvs or software
companies to transact on it yeah and you made a really good point around um you know trial I didn't even think about that like it's because effective it's a piece of software right so yeah you know how do you get people to kind of buy into it but if you've got those trials that's that's amazing so I'll link to that in the show notes as well um I've been about 10 minutes left I wanted to touch on just you know where the industry is at like you guys am I right and saying you guys are purely AWS
focused yeah we are we are there's no doubt about it I mean we've got a amazing relationship with AWS and I'm not going to release this till Tuesday but I could say this but you know we're about so I know we've just signed a very large strategic collaboration agreement a multi-million dollar multi-year agreement with AWS which is very very exciting and that's to help co-develop more and more AWS Solutions which is exciting for us it will help us expand into the UK and the US so and you know
many years though I am very biased but you know I do love AWS but there is no doubt multi-cloud is something that you know over time I'm sure we'll have to think about it again there's a lot of the vendors were mentioned now it's very rare where you'll find one isv that hasn't developed their solution to either manage across all three yeah or deployed on all three and that's coming from customer demand I I still believe a a mid-size organization that can get everything they need off one Cloud
there's probably no point going to multi-cloud outside of maybe the you know I tend to agree I tend to agree yeah yeah and then but larger ones Banks and that they'll be driven by Regulators in fact they already have things absolutely I recognize this so yeah I I still love single Cloud I think it's very hard to get one right I think it's in my advice to customers always is be really good at one before you think about two and then actually really think about why you have to go and do two because they might seem the same but
fundamentally there are differences you know in the cloud the way they do networking the way they think about org structures things like that so in the middle of a skill shortage do you really want to have two teams skilled up where essentially you could run the same thing just in one Cloud so I I stick to that until we get to a certain point where you know naturally the larger companies will always start to move towards a multi-cloud yeah there's there's a and with the thought of this multi-cloud you know sort of seamless
transition of applications and resources between different clouds um it's always been a bit of a fanciful Panacea for me um I remember VMware pushing it very hard I remember being in Sydney at one of their events and it was on the ground I never forget it one Cloud I think is what it what it was right back then you know triggering the memories there right but I think it's been a thing that everyone has talked about for the best part of the last 15 years now making me feel old as well but I think the rationalization of that is what you just
said I think it's only going to be a horses for courses scenario for many SM smbs smes that are going even a startup right a net new company they go out and they it's driven by the application to a certain extent so potentially they might have a need to deploy the majority of something on in AWS but maybe they go out and they need to do something a little bit off off the Beaten Track and then that application might need to be deployed in AWS but that might be a corner case right it's not like they're
going to be actually deploying or architecting applications to literally fail over from you know one Cloud to the next I don't think we've reached that level of Desire or sophistication just yet not yet you know there's no doubt that banks are trying to do that and again Regulators will force them to do that will it ever be a highly available type move where it would stay up and move on the flight I don't know but there's certainly you know the time to restore things even using tools like you're familiar with
big theme and some of these things possible today to do it and I think that's where people go but where we get to there maybe one day but the need at the moment I still don't see you know hot transfer over workload between clouds and there was always the myth that it might be a dollar cheaper over here one day and oh yeah I remember that yeah wouldn't that be I haven't been growing that on whiteboards for years yeah and really I don't think I think networks will ever get to the point where we'll start to be able to
just throw applications around across different clouds but I could be wrong I could be wrong yeah I mean kubernetes and containers does open it to a certain extent instead because it's obviously abstracted at one level but you're right you're still going to think about the networking the cost uh it's just like the idea is great but the reality of it's a little bit more fanciful um on that though where do you see because you know IDC and all these kind of people in this hybrid world there's still quite a
bit of workloads that sit on premises right so in your experience you know are you seeing customers obviously you are seeing customers move fully into it right but are you getting coming across some customers that say Hey we've still got an on-prem situation we next wanted to run on-prem workloads but we are going to start to pull a few things in or maybe we're going to be half and half 30 30 70 whatever it is how do you deal with that like from the Stack's point of view um I you know in many cases a lot of the
easy workloads have gone you know there's lag Arts you know there's probably almost a thousand Enterprises you know probably across just even Australia that haven't moved significant workloads yet and I'll come that they'll always be lag Arts the thing that we realize now is what's left is hard a lot of mid-range out there a lot of Mainframe out there yeah a lot of these applications will probably die on-prem and be replaced and I think that that's what we'll see I think a lot of people
moved early in applications up then they've got great benefits out of it um and there's other ones now and they've learned a lot enough to say you know what we're going to leave then and we're going to absolutely as one of the hours retire those apps yeah and not move them in because they are complicated to go but there's still a lot to go you know even just normal x86 workloads there is a fair bit to go I I would say a lot of it's a lot more complicated than it was where we were
just you know everyone was moving things up yeah absolutely yeah hey just quickly touch on you mentioned obviously what we're trying to do with veeam and whatnot but just mention your Partnerships and Integrations maybe in in a minute or so under a minute because time's getting short yeah just explain your Integrations and how that works at the moment and what you're looking to do there yeah one of the big areas we're trying to solve for is if you think about stuff tax we solve for getting going quickly and take care of a lot of
heavy lifting you know when organizations want to get really good at the cloud often they want to have some really good backup really good observability as well and then third-party security tools now that can take time effort and money to integrate great examples we we use data dog we love data dog but it's a big heavy lift to be able to implement that into all your AWS environment your accounts which ones is a test is it development is it tag how do we do that and so if you think about ones like that how do we
make that easy again for organizations so one of the things we're putting into private preview that will be at Summit on Tuesday is how we're going to make that easier for organizations and as you know one of them we're selecting is is veeam so you know when organizations choose a backup product and we're using vein I think as the first backup one how do you pre-build your environment sorry deployed into your environment to make it easier for then your engineers to ensure they can just tag something click
a button and sure that everything's backed up and that can be quite difficult to do and so with Stacks because we you know have the ability to see and understand the environment in the way it is it's much easier for us to get that sort of pre-built for organizations just to be able to turn it on put in their licensing configure a few services and Away there go and and for example our datadog one you know that took us three months using stacks and the new connections Hub you could probably do that in a couple of hours
changing time and we'll continue to build out and add more sisvs across observability backup and security customers requests so it's quite exciting yeah that's a great you know next step for the company right in terms of yeah making it making the platform that's already great for compliance security costing a lot more powerful and robust right in terms of these other additional Services which I think traditionally they probably don't think about so much at the start definitely need them after the facts so to offer
that as part of that Landing zone onboarding is huge so yeah you guys are doing some great work and again like like you said well we're releasing this episode on the day of AWS Summit um so you know this is going to be great we've got some great news around a couple of special bits and pieces there so Adam thanks very much for being on the show um just as a final reminder if you're out subscribed or new to the show and you like what you hear you can subscribe to the podcast or go to jtwjt.com and register your
interest and with that I would like to thank Adam and stacks for being on episode 62 of great things with grade 10. hello there Anthony thank you [Music]
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