AWS re:Invent 2024 - Migration and modernization strategies to grow your business (SMB307)
If anyone's done a session already this morning, I'm very impressed, queued up to you. Uh My name is Matthew Burditt and along with my colleague, Melini Chatterjee and S Full Steam CTO Saja Sankaran, we're going to spend the next 45 minutes or so talking about strategies and plans to help you migrate and modernize and ultimately help grow your business. So let's dive in uh and let's start with some definitions. So whilst everyone probably knows what I mean when I say migration, what I really mean is, you know, a lift and shift or a re hosting of your environment and not making too much change to the environment or the application modernizations. On the other hand, slightly different, let's double click on that. When most people think about modernizations or the path to modernizations, they think about this, they think about moving from V MS to containers and maybe cus let's gloss over the fact that perhaps containers and cus are not, are not uh are often the same thing. You can have
a container running as a cus instance. But the point is I want you to think about it a little bit more holistically than just the run time. It isn't just the run time. I think you need to think about this in terms of, if you're hand cranking your deployments, you probably don't have a truly modern environment. If you don't have automation, you're probably not a mod, it's probably not a modern auto uh environment.
If you have a lack of observ ability or you're not taking advantage of managed services, it's probably not a modernized environment. And the same is true with whether with, with your actual application architecture, if you, if you have a monolith, if it's written in COBOL, it's probably not a modernized ar architecture or a modernized environment. So I'd encourage you to think about this as modernization is more than just the run time. Please don't get hung up on that. So now that we know what we're talking about, let's understand why people are doing it. Well,
as you can imagine whether you migrate or you modernize, you're going to receive some benefits, you're gonna realize some benefits within your environment. Everyone will talk about cost uh cost, uh cost savings, kind of table stakes. You're gonna see that regardless. But the key point is that you're also going to see uh improvements in your staff productivity and you're going to start to see more efficiencies within your I overall it infrastructure. Yeah, a friend of mine and an exco made this comment once and whilst I don't fully agree with him, I understand where he's coming from. If you do lift, just lift and shift, you're not really taking full advantage of the cloud. There's a lot more to cloud than just recreating your data center in, in uh in Aws. So, thanks
Gregor, you're kind of right, but I agree with your sentiment. Um So if you do look to modernize, if you do look to go beyond just that lift and shift, what would you typically see? Well, we talked about the cost savings, you know, you're going to be using an optimized infrastructure, you're going to be reducing your costs. But more importantly, in my, from my perspective, you're gonna be increasing your business agility. And by that, I mean, you're going to be using a modern architecture, you're going to be uh far faster to market with a lot of uh with a lot of your applications and you're going to be more agile, you're gonna be more adaptable. Thirdly, you're going to start using probably managed services, you're also probably gonna use multiple regions. Therefore, your operational resilience is going to improve. So you're going to realize
some benefits from that as well. And finally, that staff productivity piece because you're using those managed services because you're using an en you're working in an environment that's easy to spin up, easy to spin down individuals who work, who work on. Your teams are going to be able to focus their efforts on more differentiating type of activities So the business agility and the bus and the improvements you're going to get within your business are going to be greater because they're gonna focus on things that actually matter to your business. And that's key. Don't just take my word for it.
Smart people at mckinsey have said that the opportunity for customers that move beyond the lift and shift is $3 trillion. Now, a couple of points there, that's just for the largest 2000 companies in the world. So the actual opportunity is far greater than that.
The second key point is that 2.7 trillion, sorry 2.3 trillion of that three trillion number is derived from business agility, innovation, and operational resilience. So it's not related to the cost savings. So that's what I want you to focus on. That's what I would encourage you to think about as we go through this.
So with all of that said, why is it that we kind of see that this is certainly historically has been the typical customer journey that that customers go through, you know, this kind of two step process of starting with a migration and then moving to a modernization later on. Um the reality is that historically, at least people want to make progress fast, they want to get to the cloud uh as fast as they possibly can and then do the modernization later, they want to build uh kind of a skill set within their organization Um And so that's completely fine and full disclosure. Long before I joined Aws, I was an Aws customer and I was faced with that same challenge and I took that same approach. I took the approach of migrating first and then modernizing second. And the reason
I did that was because frankly, I didn't think that I had the right people and the organization was not yet ready for a full, truly modernized cloud environment. Eight years ago, nine years ago, when I was making these decisions, skill sets weren't, weren't widely available in the marketplace. People didn't really know how to operate a cloud environment effectively. So I made that decision I made, you know, that was a big part of the decision. Why I why I went down that route.
Secondly, there are multiple references to cake in this presentation. The there is too much choice. One of the great things about Aws is the the breadth and depth of services. We have. One of the worst things about Aws is the breadth and depth of services we have because there's so much choice and sometimes knowing what, what service to use can just be an overwhelming experience given that we didn't have a a ton of experience within the organization uh of cloud environments. I felt that too many choices was actually a bad thing. So I wanted to keep it nice
and simple for us. I didn't want to end up with this kind of decision fatigue where we were continuously, you know, evaluating whether we'd made the right choice around services. But if that was then, and that was about eight or nine years ago, as I said, what would we need to do to make it to make the change today? Like how could we change the overall customer journey? So that that first step is to have more modernized workloads in that first wave of the of, of your effort.
What would we need to do to do that? Well, the reality is that if moderni if migration is an evolution, then modernization is more of a transformation. And so what I would encourage you to start thinking about and probably in this order of importance is building the right culture within your organization to support that transformation, you need, that needs to come from the top. You need top down direction around how you're going to build the culture within your organization.
Make sure that you're focusing on innovation. Innovation is again, go back to that mckinsey number. Innovation was the biggest driver of that $3 trillion number. So you're going to need to build a culture within your organization that's comfortable with innovating and that every single member of your organization feels empowered to innovate and use the right services people in process. Unsurprisingly, this is the hard part. You need to train
your organization, you need to make a commitment to train your organization. You need to have uh evangelists within the organization that are gonna lead the rest of the organization through this. This starts at the top, but you need to have evangelists across the organization and you need to prepare your organization for that.
And finally, and there is, there is a reason this is third technology, the other two Trump technology, the technology will continue to evolve it. Um And so focusing everything on just the technology change, you're probably not gonna get too far. You need to focus on all of these three things. So with that said, another reference to cake, is it possible? And I believe it is cos I've seen customers do this now, is it possible to have your cake and eat it? Can you do both a successful migration and modernization? A combination of both or could you just move straight to a modernized architecture from the start? I want to bring in uh a friend and uh also an Aws customer, Sajan Saka Sankaran, the CTO of Full Steam. He's doing exactly
exactly this and he can give you some more insight into that. Thank you, Matthew. Thanks. Ok. So before we go further, let's go back and look at that picture there, Matthew actually wanted a picture of me gobbling a piece of cake, but lucky for me, we were able to find a very old picture of Matthew instead.
Anyway, Matthew Moini, thanks for, you know, having me here. Thanks to. Thanks for you guys. To, you know, helping me share what we are doing at Full Steam with respect to modernization and transformation. So before I go further, let me introduce Full Steam to you guys. So Full Steam is a multi vertical software company with attached payments. Full Steam has
grown through acquisitions. We have about 8080 plus acquisitions so far, you know, so these are companies who provide vertical software through, you know, to niche customers. So these are companies like yours, I hope, right. Um So we have over 60,000 customers, unique customers across these 80 plus business units.
Actually, we call them as business units, right? So once we acquire these companies, we call them as business units. So we have about 80 plus business units. And between them, we have about 60,000 unique customers that we serve with niche software.
And of course, you know, payment is the central theme of our business and we have about $18 billion worth of payment volume going through our system every year. So I talked about 80 plus business units and these 80 plus business units are in over 12 different verticals. So, on your way to this conference, if you park your car in the airport or if you have taken a black car to get here, very likely you used full steam software for that or the provider used full steam software for that. If you own a home and have Homeowners Association or pest control or, you know, even servicing your heating and cooling system, very likely, you know, you used a full steam system if you are into drinking some wine and enjoy wine and if you are part of a wine club, very likely you use the full steam software.
So full Steam is one company or if you play golf, you know, or eat at restaurants, very likely, you know, you use full steam software as part of that. So Full Steam is one company that you don't realize that you are using. But it's there. If you use a small and a medium business software or a service provider, very likely use Full Steam.
So Full Steam is made up of these diverse set of companies and with that comes a diverse set of technical challenges to deal with. So before I go into the technical challenges, let me talk a little bit about what these 80 plus acquisitions benefit from Full Steam, right? What, what is their, you know, what are they gaining by being part of Full Steam Family? One, they get access to 60,000 unique customers who are happy and we have a healthy relationship with them. So it's easy for these new business units or new companies that we bring in to be able to cross sell to those customers. An example, if a new restaurant software that we bring in, they are able to sell that to country club, you know, where we already have a golf software running, right? So R if you are, you know, fim also provides common platform and add on capabilities. So these business units as they come into full steam, they are very quickly able to take advantage of the full steam platform and add on services.
It's not just the payments. We also have marketing insurance and other services. So an example would be, you know, storage facility software. That's again, you know, we have
quite a few in full steam and they are able to very quickly provide insurance for storage units, you know, by a quick integration with our platform. So the next is full team providing an enterprise caliber sales and services team. So, you know, especially when we bring in these small and medium software companies, we are able to provide an enterprise caliber sales and services team, financial and analysis, billing and entitlement management systems to these providers, to these companies that we bring in. But the most important of them all is about technology, right? So what are we doing there? So when you join full steam, you know, we are able to provide the right level of expertise when it comes to technology and I'll double click on that in a second. So to kind of recap something Matthew finished.
He was talking about three themes that matters the most, right, for a successful cloud migration, cloud modernization, one is culture, right? So as part of culture, Matthew talked about how it needs to start from the very top and how the business goals and the technology goals need to align at full steam. We aligned the business goals and the technology goals and drove the change from the very top aligned operations mandate to migration to the cloud innovation first mentality. And most importantly, making our software products the best of the breed came from the very top. So here today, I have a couple of our portfolio presidents here who kind of control the 81 business unit. So if you guys want to talk a little bit about what we do outside, you know, we'll be waiting out, we can talk to you a little more about it. Ok? Anyway, so back on the technology transformation, aligning the technology goals with the business goals is the key.
And to do that, what we did here is we tried to plot all the 80 some business units in this four box. So we took the business units and on the left, you can see the software product market fit and on the right, you see the payment product market fit because that's where the business units get most of the revenue from either from selling the software, recurring revenue from software or from through the payments. So we plotted the 80 plus business units on this four box just to see where they are so that we can focus on the right business unit with the right strategy. So each one of these business units on this graph have a business strategy and now we need to be able to align the technology strategy for it. So take, you know business unit in box two, for example, we would want to be able to add more payment features so that we are able to make them as the best in breed, get them on to the top right corner.
So you know business units within box one take is I software which is in the bottom left corner of box one, you know, there are so many new features and capabilities through A I and other things that we are driving, which will make them the best of the breed and best in class software. So let me take you to the next slide. This is basically about the technology for box, right? So in the previous slide, we talked about the product four box. So we took the business units from box one and two of the product, meaning these are the ones which have the highest potential for very quick transformation. And we plotted them in a technology four box. So we actually
took about 50 different data points with respect to technical stack, hosting environment, security development tools and practices and et cetera. So over 50 different data points and we plotted those business units on this technical on this four box. So to make it simpler, we took the business units from box one and two so that you can actually follow us and not all the 80. So the ones that have the highest potential we put them on this box. And as you can see the business units in box one have a fantastic cloud maturity and R and D practices and tools. But we do have quite a few business units in box three that we need to work on. And
basically we are talking about what do we do to transform those business units? And we have been working with Malini and the Aws team on transforming these each one of these business units to move up to box one. Let me invite Malini to kind of double click into what actions we are performing on those business units to move them to the top right corner. Perfect. Thank you, Sergeant. Thank you.
Thank you for believing in Aws and us and partnering with us. So let's first start with some of the successes that our customers like Sajan has achieved and then we will see the how part of it in Aws. We have taken a lot of survey with questioning around 405 100 customers about their cloud migration and modernization journey in doing so, the results that we have found significantly are in the three key areas. The first one is the agility or improving the speed of innovation. The second is improving the performance and resiliency. And third last but not the least efficiency and improving the cost optimization.
Now let's take full steam business units. Examples. Aura started their lift and shift journey and now are in the scaling and modernization journey. Same with limo anywhere salon runner optical pos actually started their lift and shift journey way back. And now
they have been successfully modernizing using a the migration, data migration and data modernization journey. And now they have achieved over 10 x of their customer base improvement and more acquisitions just by reducing their it spend. And that's a significant result from just one business unit optical PS. We will delve deep into that
more. Now, let's see how AWS can help customers like fulls team across that migration and modernization journey. We do understand every customer is different and they do have varied needs, same like the different business units of full steam. So typically here what you see we have plotted the time on the X axis and there are two trends on the Y axis. The one which trending downwards is reducing the compute costs and the one on the blue trending upwards is increasing the innovation or the speed of innovation. So as customers embark on their cloud migration and modernization journey, typically we have seen around 20% of the per CPU cycle unit cost reduction just by lift and shift just by starting to migrate over to the cloud.
Now by further right sizing their resources, breaking away from the licenses. And by just understanding what is the right model of their usage and what payment suits them, they can actually achieve 10 to 20% more savings on top of it. But that's where the magic starts to happen. It does not end there from there on. You can see
or use more modernization techniques and using those modernization techniques which we will be seeing a little bit later, you can see achieve 60% more cost savings and improvements and all of that savings actually does go into speeding up your innovation. So what how do we do that? Let's double tap on that 60% more cost savings from the different modernization pathways. Now, what are these modernization pathways? I would like to say as a solution architect, they are some prescriptive guidance which we provide and we have seen with multiple customers using some of these you know guidance to get to their reference architectures in those targeted technology developments.
Uh This is highly scalable. You learn once repeat it often and scale it infinitely. Let's see some of those modernization pathways.
The first is move to cloud native. This is where you start decoupling from your monolith architecture into more loosely coupled distributed architecture and build scalable applications. Actually, Sajan did point out about ISI software ISI software did start their initial journey just by adopting this modernization pathway. Next is move to containers.
This is where you can start, you know, migrating your existing workloads using the container orchestration strategies. S actually embarked on their modernization journey using containerization. Next is adapting the managed databases. This is where you can break away from your traditional licensed databases and data warehouses and actually go and build purpose built highly scalable distributed applications using the managed databases. Aura actually did use Aurora Post for the same purpose.
Move to open source. This is where you move as the name suggests, move away from the traditional licenses into more of the open source software for the ease of use and flexibility. Examples then move to modern analytics as the name suggests, build highly scalable data lake architectures with real time analytics.
Optical pos have been doing that with their data migration and modernization journey using glue and Athena last but not the least using modern devs. That's where you can use all of the CD best practices for improving your agility and speed up your innovation. Now, with that being said, we have heard from Matthew already about those three pillars to drive that modernization, Matthew, I do remember the order that you mentioned first comes culture, then comes people and the processes and then comes the technology now being an essay myself and seeing around all of the changes happening, especially from you know, the latest announcements in A I and ML.
How come if we suggest that technology is not only that enabler which is going to provide you the tooling for your people to upscale or to automate some of the processes. But that is the enabler to foster that culture of innovation, how that's where J A comes into the picture. Anybody raise hands who is here to learn more about the latest and the greatest from the gen announcements in re invent.
Yeah, same almost even me over here. So now let's start with the J journey in 2023. Actually, it was a year where a lot of discovery customers were getting started, some already got some initial success. And in 2024 all across this year and way forward, it's going to be very, very different already. What we are seeing, our customers are actually starting their journey to adopt generative A I and accelerate at an unprecedented pace.
There are already some of the areas where we are seeing some disruption. In fact, the supported supported human workers are already showing 30% more productivity on an average. And Gartner actually has predicted that by 2026 around 80% of the enterprises will have the gen A PS deployed models or GEN enabled apps in their production. Now, customers definitely want to take the advantage of what the public knowledge and the large language models available out there. How about we provide access to the employees in those large enterprises to have access to their own data, enterprise data and take decisions faster and quicker. Some of those early areas where we are seeing disruption is cloud development or software development and that's an early disruption and customers are trying to adopt as fast as they can to provide the same to their employees and their developers to stay ahead of the competition.
That's where Amazon Q comes into the picture last year in re invent. In 2023 we heard a lot of the big announcement. I'm sure there are going to be more announcements. I'm not going to steal the thunder by giving away some of those announcements. Now you have
to hold on for the keynotes. But what I definitely can say is the experience that the customers are already sharing with us since the past one year. Their experience using Amazon Q just a quick recap. Amazon Q business is your most capable generative A I assist to discover your content, generate summaries, write efficient emails and increase your employees' productivity.
Amazon Q developer using the cutting edge gen technology in code development unit, test cases across your software development life cycle. Amazon Q and quicksight which increases the productivity by enabling gen A I in your business analytics and the business intelligence capabilities for your bi needs for creating reports, dashboards, even executive summaries or Amazon Q in connect, enabling your, you know, call center representatives to get the responses faster and better to the end users and increase the customer satisfaction. And last but not the least queue in supply chain for your demand planning and getting all the ML insights in your supply chain applications.
Now, let's delve deep into how Q developer can help across a software development life cycle in the software development life cycle. In the planning phase. You can imagine and start using Amazon Q developer uh Amazon Q in the AWS console. Learning
more about the architectures, getting the tutorials how to get started things and even learn more about the well architected framework. Not only that in your ID, you can actually learn more from your existing code base. Understand the code base using Amazon Q in the create phase, you can use Amazon Q's in line code assistance to generate new features in a more efficient way in the test and secure phase.
Amazon Q can actually help in finding and fixing troubleshooting errors, security vulnerabilities and also help in the unit test case generation capabilities in the operate phase. It can help in troubleshooting, analyzing your VPC reach or and can provide for the tips and tricks for optimization last but not the least in the maintain and modernize phase. It can also help you in upgrading your software versions and we'll see it in a little bit.
Um Amazon Q business capabilities for any software development life cycle or the project life cycle. When the analysts are are starting to gather the information, you can discover more of that information from your internal Wikis SharePoint. Um All of your enterprise data connected to provide a unified search experience, you can analyze quickly, understand the documents compare between those the documents and get even the create some of the specs uh in the create phase, it can actually create content summarize the content, help in creating your product specifications, business specifications, technological specifications also and then take action many a times you have seen that based on some of these responses. When you are building the app or designing an application or in your technology components, you need to have actions taken for troubleshooting, for example, go and create a ticket in your ticketing system using Amazon Q business custom plugins. You can actually do that. Not only that you can have the capability of scheduling an appointment or scheduling a further action seamlessly using Q business.
Last but not the least of all of these activities that Amazon Q business is helping with, you can create highly customized applications to automate some of these processes. Now, let's talk about the software development platform altogether. The success of that software development platform highly depends on the you know the how the developers are performing and what is that load, cognitive load on that developers. If we can use generative A I as a catalyst, it can improve significantly your platform engineering capabilities. I'll give you here three use cases using Amazon Q and Amazon.
Amazon Q Business and Amazon Q developer where you can actually improve your platform engineering. First is a chatbot capability using Q business where you can get help of learning more about the playbooks, your run books, troubleshooting documents and also your access to that unified data for your knowledge base or your knowledge repositories for for your enterprise data. Second is the Amazon Q developer customization capability can actually help generate some of those platform artifacts.
Like if you can connect it with the with Amazon Q developer customization capability, some of those platform templates, then what it essentially can do is provide you or the developers assistance in a much faster way so that when they are starting to create a code or an application in their ID, you get to maintain the standards that your company or your organization needs to have for the developer. And last but not the least use Q DEV as SD as your DEV team extension. There is in line code creation assistance in the IDE. There is unit test case generation in as well as helping finding and fixing some of the errors and security vulnerabilities.
Using these three use cases, you can see how significantly that cognitive load on the developers can be reduced and in line improve the platform engineering now last but not the least. What I would also like to share over here is even in the software development life cycle, you can take the assistance of generative A I to create the code. But there is the pain of maintaining the code, upgrading the code base from one version to the other.
Even before joining AWS in one of a large financial institutions. Me and my team were responsible for the scheduled maintenance every other week. And as you can understand, it was always happening in the non office hours, like outside work hours over the weekends. So
my team members, the developers also they had to spend significant amount of the time sitting and upgrading the software versions, installing the latest security patches to enable that. We provide that seamless experience to our end customers and have that latest and the greatest software which is secure and scalable. How about I say today with Amazon Q developer code transformation, that cognitive load on the developers can be reduced drastically with Q developer code transformation capability. You can actually upgrade Java eight to Java 17 code with just a few clicks of a button and that significantly decreases the amount of time needed to upgrade and maintain the software versions. And that's just one, I'm sure there will be more announcements underway which you will be hearing and even I am excited to learn more about them.
With that being said, what I can see over here is technology is not that third pillar as Matthew was mentioning but to do me and that's my perception. I feel technology is at the center. It's the enabler for you know, fostering that culture of innovation in your organization, assisting all of your people and automating your processes. With that being said, I would hand it over to Matt, I have to have the final word on this.
Uh All right, I concede technology is still important as long as it's in support of cultural people or process. That's my concession. That's all I'm gonna make. Alright, so we're gonna wrap up. So I want to try and distill a lot of what we've talked about this morning into six key themes as as to around how you can drive this. And again, this is applicable to
both migration and modernization or a hybrid of both. But obviously, it starts from the top. You have to establish a clear vision and that has to come from leadership, you have to have your organization bought into it and it starts at the very, very top. The second thing I would encourage you to do is take a leaf out of Full Steam's book. The process that Saja talked you through around understanding the value of the business product and then the capabilities or the current capabilities and the potential of the technology pro uh technology solutions they had that mapping is really, really important. I refer to it as sometimes as uh uh as kind of wave planning, but that's what you need to do. You need
to align both the business outcomes you're looking to achieve and the technology that you actually have in your, in your environment, you do need to create some best practices or a reference architecture. And once you apply that best practices and that reference architecture against the wave planning. What you're going to end up with is some quick wins. You're gonna get some quick wins from, from going through that process, which in turn is going to build momentum.
It's going to build excitement within your organization and you're going to start winning the hearts and minds of the individuals within, within the teams. Um And that's going to allow you to, to move faster. You might like to think about the these six things as almost like a flywheel. We like flywheels at Amazon. You'll probably hear about a, an Amazon flywheel once or twice, at least this week. Think of this as like a flywheel. It starts at the top, starts with some top down direction.
You use technology and you use some planning to help build momentum as you go through this call to action. What do I want you to take away from this? What do I want you to take the next steps? Well, they say make call to make a call to action three things. So I'm gonna take some creative license here and call one A and one B uh and three A and three C just so that I can fit into this. Um
They're also aligned to Amazon's leadership principles. So the first one is think big and think big on behalf of your customer like you, I would encourage you to think about the art of the possible. Don't just think about what's gonna happen in the next 6 to 12 months. Try
and take a longer term view. I work with customers and I try and work with them on their, their 3 to 5 year road map and what that might look like and what that looks like for their customers. So I encourage you to, to think big but think big on behalf of your customers as well. Two bias for action. So engage with your Aws account manager, they can make sure that you're aligned with specialists like Melini uh or myself uh partners who can help you along along the way with this. But also the programs that Aws have uh making available to use example, being the migration and modernization acceleration program program near and dear to my heart.
But that's, you know, if you can get align with that, that's gonna help you through this thi this process, three A and three B learn and be curious and dive deep. So this week you're at re Invent, there is no better time for you to, to lean. I would also encourage you. And this is the key part of one of the reasons I think certainly when I was a customer re invent was so powerful is you get to speak to other customers, you get to speak to other companies that are in the same situation as you. So I would encourage you to do that, learn from, learn from other attendees, uh dive in take a page out of fte's book. So Jan would be delighted to talk to you about how he, how he did that value mapping. Um So with that, that's our session. I appreciate
you taking the time. Thank you so much for attending.
2024-12-08 10:06
