Cloud Gossip is back for season two. Today we’re joined by our dear friend Mike Martin! Mike works as Cloud Solution Architect for ISV's at Microsoft and he’s a veteran IT expert with more than 20 years of experience in the field.
Mike Martin is going to talk to us about his role in the company, how ISVs and the Microsoft OCP operate, his thoughts on the future of tech, and the importance of diversity and inclusion in IT and outside of it.
He’s also going to share some key advice to future startups and scale-ups and he’ll explain his approach to software creation and what he believes are the key factors companies should focus on.
Mike’s going to talk about how he communicates with his team and how to provide constructive criticism in a way that encourages others.
We’re also going to learn more about Mike’s favorite communities, the importance of Ecology, and some of his personal experiences working with ISVs.
Guest Bio:
Mike Martin works for Microsoft Western Europe as Cloud Solution Architect for ISV's with a focus on the Microsoft Cloud Platform.
He’s been active in the IT industry for more than 20 years and has performed almost all types of job profiles, going from coaching and leading a team to architecting and systems design and training.
Today he’s primarily into the Microsoft Cloud Platform and Application Lifecycle Management. He’s not a stranger to both dev and IT Pro topics. On April 1st 2013 he also became a Microsoft Azure MVP, an award he managed to get 5 years in a row.
Quote
"Think about how your business model should evolve and what you need to do next inside of your business model. Thinking of features it's not hard. Thinking of the next move in becoming a large enterprise......that's the hardest part." Mike Martin
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Annie: [00:00:00] This is a Cloud Gossip, the podcast demystifying the cloud and the people behind it.
INTRO MUSIC
Hello everyone! I'm Annie Talvasto and I am a cloud native technology marketing manager, and I work for tech companies ranging from startups to fortune 500 enterprises.
Karl: [00:00:51] And my name is Karl Ots, I'm a cloud security leader working at a large Swiss financial sector company.
Annie: [00:00:58] ...and you are listening to Cloud Gossip!
And this is the first episode of season two. I am at least very excited! So, as the first season of Cloud Gossip covered the fundamentals of cloud conception, the basics you could say.
This season we will be diving deeper through the cloud and tech world, and we will be interviewing top industry professionals.
So the best of the best. So, as a smooth transition, Karl won't you intro to our first guest of season two ?
Karl: [00:01:31] today we have a real treat for you! We have Mike Martin joining us.
Mike is a really long time industry veteran, a grand old man of the community, former Azure MVP, and now CSA at Microsoft.
Welcome Mike and could you please, uh, introduce yourself and tell us who are you and what exactly are you doing? What is a CSA?
Mike: [00:01:52] So I'll just put my wheel carts to decides because you've called me an old man, but it's true.
I mean...I'm in the industry for 24 years, so thank you first of all, for having me.
Yeah, I'm a CSA as announced. I work now for Microsoft for two and a half years. And what my role is... is...I speak to partners and software builders on the technical level.
I validate their architectures and I try to build with them. I don't sell them anything. I tried to build with them and give them the best possible breed of solutions..... on how they should be building their own solutions.
So to give you an idea, any kind of company that comes up to us, whether they're in a scaleup or in a startup environment, they come to us, with their ideas.
And they go like, "Yeah, we're building this or we already have that and we wanna optimize this or we wanna make it more cloud-aware or even better, cloud-native.
Then we can start doing discussions and doing whiteboard sessions and all of these things. And this is how we roll, so.... and that's my role, um, they're specifically for the ISV parts still, for about 80%.
So an ISV is an independent software vendor.
And those actually are the most fun type of companies that you can work with, to be honest.
Because they always have great ideas, also sometimes like ridiculous, insane ideas. But Hey! Everybody loves the challenge, right?
Annie: [00:03:18] Cool.
Karl: [00:03:18] Everybody likes a challenge and everybody likes to challenge, indeed.
Annie: [00:03:22] Yeah. Just as a quick, question. So I work for Microsoft, you work for Microsoft. We know what ISV is, but what is it for our audience?
Karl: [00:03:31] You kind of opened that as a TLA three letter acronym there. But, you also mentioned that you're working with software builders, but you kind of differentiate between those. So...yeah..
Mike: [00:03:43] I work for the partner organization. So what we call in Microsoft, the OCP organization or the, ummmm, one commercial partner. So I don't work at the customer side,I really work on the system integrators and the ISV part, which is the independent software vendors, as I already said in the acronym translation.
So an ISV is really a company that builds software, whether it's tools or whether it's a SAS platform or whether it's a plugin for any of our products, uh, which we then also help them sell. And we have an entire ecosystem surrounding that. So the part of that ecosystem can be divided in two parts.
Those who do services, like the big companies, like a top thousand, and then the Capgeminis and the associates and all these companies that you know, from all over the world. And they offer services, and they also of course built projects for you. They build software, which is one of their incentives. But the independent software vendors, actually they're building software for their own, to be transactable in the marketplace or.... think of them as the next Spotify or the next, ummm, Netflix that they're building, but it could be in any kind of industry.
That's also the beauty of it. They're not bound to any kind of industry. They go vertical and they go horizontal. And they....I mean, I've worked with healthcare partners. I've worked with industry partners, for IOT. I've worked with all, with them all over the place. And that's, that's the fun part in the ISV sphere because they all have brilliant ideas as I said.
So I hope that kind of correctly describes what an ISV is. So it's a very broad definition in a very broad ecosystem where you end up in.
Karl: [00:05:27] That sounds really great. And thanks for giving some examples there as well, so...
You're not specifically working with Capgeminis and the large, managed service partners who do everything, including software.
Uh, It's more closer to Spotify and kind of app builders of the world.
Mike: [00:05:47] Exactly, yes...exactly yeah.
Although the ESIS....are also a little bit my responsibility, but only when necessary. So....Fidel's typically I don't, ummmmmm...validation, but I'd rather talk to them to readiness, prepare them for the future. Uh, bring them up to speed in cloud native development, or even, better organized ways of doing stuff like...... talking about, ummmm, cloud framework and then well-architected framework and all these things.....and then making them....making sure that they understand what we are building and how we can service our customers.
And then again, they can service their customers. It's a little bit on their sides. Yep.
Karl: [00:06:24] So, that really sounds like a role that you get to play around with the latest technologies, but you kind of stop at a point where you would need to go to production or think about testing or this kind of boring stuff.
Mike: [00:06:35] Yes, exactly. I'm not allowed to touch production code maybe for the better. I mean, if I talk about the number of years that I had done actively development in a team, then it's better not to...
But, I still play around with technology and I still love it. Tight integration with the product groups and with the communities that are doing these things.
And I still go into discussions with subject matter experts every single day. And we learn from each other a little bit. I know where I can find people to help them out or even help me out, to find better solutions for their problems. It's indeed a very varied role, as you can
Annie: [00:07:20] That's really cool. And...it's always I think inspiring to hear from people what are they doing? Because everyone does...and specializes in an interesting, interesting topics as well.
So as I think, um, I think anyone can kind of...decide from there that you're a true expert on the field, so....
Ummm, I think we would be really interested to hear, in your opinion, on what's currently happening in the software company space, what is the industry overview at the moment?
Mike: [00:07:47] The industry is we're still in that...thing as an industry where we try to hype as much as possible, and everybody's focusing still on AI ...and then all these...and the machine learning...and deep neural networks...and..
But also. We still focus on the smaller things and not so big hype topics anymore, where we try to improve.
To give you an idea. Ummmm, the things that I'm seeing now, more with my partners...is that they really are willing to focus more on a better service catalog and a better integration of everything, which is DevOps.
DevOps has been around for a long time....and again, I find the DevOps...
Uh, worth of every dirty words. It's a culture thing...but it has always been there. The only thing is that nobody ever wanted to talk to each other. And that's a little bit..... the biggest difference today. "Well, we have a DevOps engineer!". It doesn't exist.
You're either a Dev or an Ops, but you work together with any of those teams.
That doesn't mean that you don't have to know from each other what you're doing.
It's a different story. And this is where the culture part comes on in. But, if you take a look at... from those perspectives, the things that the industry is doing there, it's pretty cool!
We see more and more leverage on security in those sectors. We see more and more leverage on better testing tools. We see more and more leverage on.....uh...integrations are all over the place.
I like what you're doing with GitHub. GitHub Action stuff, for instance. It's pretty cool, and everybody can contribute to that, but....
Even....azure DevOps pipelines, it's a beautiful product that we work together with all the others, uh, build tools or release pipeline tools or repos whether it's JetBrains, whether it's TeamCity whether it's Atlassian, whether it's Jenkins, we all work....we all work together! And that's the beauty of that, so!
What I see in the industry is that....the further we grow apart our products, the more we grow closer together. Because we see the integration as a benefit and no longer as a competition. We try to pick something from everyone and, uhhhh, to give a terrific idea...
I love what for instance the JetBrains guys are doing with Rider.
They build an awesome Dotnet IDE, but....still they endorse our tools too, and that it is pretty cool!
And then we still have ReSharper in visual studio and that all works nicely together...if it starts up! Um, you know, it's........ Visual Studio.
No, maybe because of that. Yeah....sometimes your projects are really, really heavy and....you know.. Uh, and we all have that thing. Even we have that thing... so, but yeah...but everybody... it all comes so nicely together
And it even goes beyond that!
I mean, if you take a look then at the next level, where everybody's playing on.....all of a sudden.....due to these difficult times we are at today. We are still in 2020. This is still the COVID period. And, everybody's seen the news the last couple of months, that tools like Teams and Zoom and Slack, they sky rised, right?
And, if you see what we're doing there in that space, it's pretty, pretty cool. Because we integrate developer products inside of teams, for instance. Zoom is not really focusing on those things, but, you know, we all try to do.....more magical stuff and try to create new spaces and new basises...
Karl: [00:11:07] Let's double click on that.
Mike: [00:11:11] Sure.
Karl: [00:11:12] So you mentioned that, dev ops is really all about developers, actually talking to each other and now ....maybe that might feel a little bit more comfortable to a, this kind of stereotypical, uh geekery, who doesn't really want to talk to a human being, but maybe now that they are forced to go through the screen, that might be something that's maybe more approachable or at least, it's now kind of the only way to collaborate.
You mentioned there are some tools for developers with teams, but there's also a resource to do code share and these others have just tooling...so.... what sort of things are your partner organizations that you are working with? How have their use of technology now evolved this past half a year now?
Mike: [00:11:54] Yeah. And that's the thing with they, all of a sudden, everybody wants to be more prepared for the next wave. In either kind of definition, whether it's COVID or the technology wave. And I look at it from that perspective.
And we see a lot of. Uh, to give you an idea....we see a lot of indeed companies working more and more remotely, and they tried to do quick solution buildings....they did go ....
They re-issued that citizen development part, although they're real developers, but we see them... doing other stuff to integrate that again in DevOps kind of sphere. So that way it's also stays in their kind of ecosystem. The large sharing of coding onlineis indeed something which we've been building the last three years on.
And it's pretty, it's pretty cool what we did there. And we actually see that now that people are actually working on that, to do code reviews, to do peer programming and extreme programming together.....just by the use of a browser or two different screens and two different worlds.
So, um, And that brings us to do the really commercial....note that Sasha brought out in...in.... I think it was April or May that he said, "Well, we saw in two months of digital transformation that became......that was normally possible only in two years."
And it's true. I mean, every partner that I talked to today, they're all prepared.
They use any kind of remote tool at their benefits and typically they also stay in one ecosystem. And for that, we are pretty lucky because.....we have a pretty complete ecosystem.
But even for the competition, we try to mix and merge all these things also into our tools. So everybody has chores to go forward, to do that digital transformation.
And it's a dirty word....I know it's a dirty thing to say "digital transformation", it's a buzzword.
But, it is true people are looking differently at technology today and that they tried to make the best out of every single tool that they have, and those get more intelligent and better every single day.
And that's the beauty of it, everybody benefits! So ...it's indeed exciting times.
Karl: [00:14:11] Awesome!
So it really sounds like the successful software houses or software development companies are really moving,.....moving along also during this time. And .....even from this hardcore perspective companies who are actually developing from scratch by themselves.... not integrating existing pieces of software, not kind of citizen developer point of view, but, but kind of....
What's the opposit of a citizen?.......governor? ......illegal alien? ...Something?
Mike: [00:14:42] ....something like that, yeah!
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah,
Karl: [00:14:45] so.... it really sounds like there's lots of new activities there.
Mike: [00:14:48] Yeah, true. And even the classic software builders, so those who were not really...uh, that never had an idea that they were gonna move in that direction.
I'm going to give you a great example of a couple of ....that I've been working with the last two years. And one of them, we only came across in December last year, so December 2019.
And it's a company in a typical very conservative industry......healthcare.
You know, healthcare is typically .......they're bound to:
"Oh yeah, we have to run on a windows seven environment and we have to......". You know?
That kind of stereotype. Imagine that and keep that in mind.
So they came to us in December, and they said, "Ah, we are looking for a cloud provider and we don't want to do too much stuff and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah"
And I had a discussion with the CEO and it's not a small one. The company is a MIBS, it's a Belgian company and their headquartersis a UK company.
So, what they do there is...... they have a laboratory software where you can follow the chain...... the supply chain of a medical test. So imagine that your blood samples, "Hey, go figure....blood samples"... have to go through clinical trials and clinical testing.
You will actually have a full chain of when that test was taken, and what has to be tested for.
And it's a full chain, just like a forensic chain when you're doing forensic research, or when you do a supply chain, there's always a track of everything that you're doing. And those guys where "Ah but we have a mullet application and it has to run on two machines, and we're never gonna rewrite those.......and it just has to run!"
So typically you're looking at a lift and shift here. "Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we don't want to worry about it. And then... we don't take responsibility for the running it in the clouds. "
Okay. So who's going to manage it? So we had this entire discussion and at that point they were like, "Nah, it's never going to work, it's never going to work, it's not going to work!"
Then March came and......we had a very troublesome period here because nobody could do the testing. So what the government did .......the Belgian government did say ....."We're going to work together with three partners. One for identity management, one for clinical testing management, and one for doing the real tests. And the alerting have got some AI on those things.
And those....funny enough were three partners of mine! So, yeah!
And that one partner where I spoke to in December, they actually came to to us and said
"now we have to move really, really quick. Help us!"
So what we did here was the impossible. We totally transformed their solution, from a hardon on-premise solution to fully distributed .....with unfortunately some windows virtual desktop, but it was a very good solution. A scalable solution to have this thing all nationwide. And, increase our testing capacity going from 500 tests per day to 10 thousands tests per day.
Because of the scaling that we put behind it. So we took away some elements from the....... we pasted it into a cloud native thing, and guess what? It just worked.
We took away their own identity and management, we put in place an EID management and it just worked. And people were amazed and we did that in less than a week. And that was a beauty of it.
So, If you want to, and even the most conservative companies, and it's a little bit the thing I'm trying to reach, if you....
if you're going into that space and you have pressure, and, but you also have people that are willing to give their effort into it, you can achieve a lot of stuff. And times like these make these solutions and make these decisions a lot easier to build. So. ....I hope it stops here because I don't want to build too many of those solutions anymore, but yeah, it's been very interesting from that perspective.
And from, you know, even from a lot of misery, a lot of beautiful things come, and this is one of the perfect examples that happened the last couple of months.
Karl: [00:19:16] I love how that ties back into them thinking for a while, putting that on hold for a bit. And then when a need came, then you, you were able to move very fast.
And these fast moving companies are really interesting to me.
Mike: [00:19:31] Yeah, exactly. That's the beauty of it indeed.
Annie: [00:19:36] Wow, perfect.
Nice transition there as well, because now we'll be moving on to talking about fast growing companies! So scale ups yes.....scale ups by definition would be companies, at least by popular definition, would be companies who have at least 20% growth in the past three years.
And they start from really small and they grow very fast. So in maybe, everyday terms, they are the companies who are not quite the garage startups anymore, but they aren't the corporates anymore either. Kind of like, as you said, the future Spotifys, so....So you could say.
So, what guidance would you to start ups that want to aspire, to become the scale-ups of the future?
What should be their technology? So choices, their investment in skilling, anything else?
Mike: [00:20:24] So typically, and now I'm really gonna speak specifically for that ISV standard that I'm talking about. Typically the advice that I give. The fun thing is I've never loved sales or business development, but the last couple of months were really fun because I have.... I had a very good colleague, who did the business development part for me.
And I did the technical support for him. But I learned a lot from that perspective....and that's something I already knew before, but now it really came true that what he's saying I was always thinking, so it was an acknowledgment for me that I was actually thinking in the correct way.
But the one thing....the one real thing of guidance and pro-tip that I'm gonna give is: look at your business model.
And I'm not talking about what you're building, I'm talking about how you can deliver. And that's the most important part. It's really good to have a solution in the market where everybody can use it, and then you say: "I make you pay like $20 for my application." Yeah, but maybe take a look at how your business can grew afterwards. If $20 cannot cut your total costs and cannot cut your entire environment, then maybe you should start looking at it from a different angle. Start doing it more on a transactional base for instance.
Have a different kind of thresholds on where you wanna charge your customers. Sometimes you even just give your software for free and you start selling the data.
And with the data selling, I don't mean in a Google kind of way, but more in a way of ....make sure that the industry that you're in and the specialization that you have, whether it's vertical or horizontal, it doesn't matter.....that you have an additional value to sell afterwards.
If you can make a software work and you give away the software for free, but you can create a very intelligent machine learning model out of this. This is a gold mine and they always keep saying, y"eah, yeah, data is a new oro. It's true, but you also need a refinery.
And this is where the ISV can actually start making a lot of money. And that's the biggest guidance that I would give them. Build an ecosystem that can be built upon APIs so that everybody can start using your tools with no matter what tools you have...and that brings us back down to that citizen developmentship. But also make sure that for those who can even make more money out of it, get access to de-anonymize data and get more intelligent out of it.
And this is where your hardcore should be as a scale-up.
Because as a startup, you start building on the software and it has to look shiny in overview. You thought a little around with colors and then it's minimal things.
It's like ....minimal design things! But once you're there and your feature ready.....it stops.
And what are you gonna monetize on that afterwards? And this is something a lot of companies don't realize, and we did a couple of nise exercises with lots of ISVs that were in a car that recruit motion. So does that were onboarding into our program?
We did a pricing workshop with them, uh, with really, really cool Danish guy who really understands how markets and economies work from a vendor perspective as a software vendor.
And that was really, really cool to see how that works. And this is a real pro tip that I give to every startup and even scale up. Think about how your business model should evolve and what you need to do next inside of your business model. Thinking of features it's not hard. Thinking of the next move in becoming a large enterprise......that's the hardest part.
Karl: [00:24:18] So, let me, kind of try to wrap my things around.....head round, all of, all of these things.
So, you mentioned, at the really beginning of that modeling of the business of a software companies is really that understanding of, "how much wills someone actually pay for the use of this."
And you also want the cost of the environment. There will be some sort of relationship between. If it's an application that is going to be used forever, it's not something that I'm just going to use once and throw away. It will still create some cloud infrastructure and environment costs.
And then you moved on into comparing, okay. If there is no direct causality between those two, for example, by price per data stored or something like that, maybe can there be some sort of relationship between how much data are they generating for me that I could actually....that it's not specific. ....that doesn't include personally identifiable information. That doesn't include trade secrets. Is there something that we are learning from this particular technology?
And that's where this industry specific part comes in. It's not just about:
" Hey, we'll test. Take a look at this application......web application that we have, and it seems that there's a lot of, ACTP answers at 200 here. It seems to be that pages are loading.
"
No, that's not, that's not analytics.
But it's something to do with the actual context of the eventual users of the application.
Mike: [00:25:43] Exactly.
Karl: [00:25:44] Cool.,and very interesting!
So maybe ......at that time, technology is not the first thing that drives you. You mentioned the business model., how does it scale? You need to understand .....how does....what is the relationship.... what happens when everything goes well?
Uh, there is a once in a century event and suddenly your business needs to grow very fast?
Or some something happens, you do hard work and you're in the league of this larger company.
You are no longer working, with 10 of your best friends who are......some hundred people or so, uh, you really need to start scaling. Sales are picking up.
When should they focus now on the technology perspective?
Mike: [00:26:25] Technology should also be considered from in the beginning.
Your technology choices will also help you support your business model, and vice versa. You need to be viable to make the correct technologies choices also.
Hence why...and that's the discussion I go on with every single ISV. All the time,.
Because a lot of these guys that are starting out....the startups. They still go like VM way....all the way. So they always go inside a virtual machine and just start building there.
"Yeah, because it's cloud right?" No, it's not cloud.
Try to do as much as cloud native development as possible and push a.....lift and shift is not cloud native. No, no, no.
Karl: [00:27:04] So what do we mean by cloud native? Give our listeners a definition.
Mike: [00:27:07] So cloud native is everything that gives you the benefits of a true cloud environment.
That means scalability and elasticity when you need it, but also resiliency and availability of services that you don't want to manage.
Typically it's things like message queues, and backend services that you don't want wanna foresee as a real own service.
You just wanna outsource that. It's that simple.
Identity management, don't go there! Don't go into the realms of identity management, make sure that your system can talk to an identity management system and that identity can be managed by your end customer and not by yourself.
It's these little. Things that will make your life a lot easier!
They will take away some of the management over it, but also some of the management pains that you will have because a lot of these things convert, responsibilities, liabilities, and all these things that you typically want to avoid in a business.
You want to focus on your product, but also on running your business and running your....your sales, right?
Thats pure economics. Even I understand that and I'm not even a salesperson
Karl: [00:28:15] You start. Don't just go and pick a virtual machine like you did earlier, but think from this cloud native mentality, and by that you don't mean starts learning about Kubernetes and hire a hundred people.....to actually run that.
You mean actually start thinking of what is possible to outsource from my day-to-day operations, identity management, everything as a service as possible, not focusing on making sure that that cluster is up and running, but actually focusing on your application there.
Mike: [00:28:43] Yes, exactly. And....
Which choice of technology ummmmmmm.......again? You said the buzzword there.....kubernetes
Again. Your application can run anywhere. You need to take a look on how your application will be designed, what your solution will look like from an architecture perspective.
And typically today.....I don't know about you, but it really makes me mad that everybody goes, "Oh, you have to go the full microservices way!"
"You have to run a full scale kubernetes cluster and then!"
No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Look at what you can use. And lend, the things that you want to build in the correct technology that you will need it for.
Look at the pros and look at the cons. Okay. Kubernetes may be the Holy grail for everything.
Which is not. And I know Kubernetes may endorse a little bit to the building of microservices, but it's not the end goal. It shouldn't be the end goal. You can perfectly have a single....umm...a semi monolith with some small services living apart. What is important, however, is that you make it as failable as possible.
Design for failure is imminent.
That's something that I have to keep repeating to every single one. If you design a solution, make sure that it can fail scale and restore itself independently from any other part in your solution.
And any other part in that service layers. To give you an idea. If your front end task is not a bottleneck but your backend is a bottleneck, make sure that you put a queue in between and that the bottleneck can be picking up the queue whenever it can or after it's scaled, for instance.
That's the way you should design. And that's something that they don't teach kids at school. A lot of us have forgotten. Because in the past, when we were working with mainframes, you had to do that same damn thing.
We have to partition. We had to make sure that memory was allocated and that all these things could virtually......self heal itself and all these things, but we just forgot on how to do it.
And we have to go back to the basics to not build machines with 32 terabytes of Ram in there. No, no...we need to make sure that we build our software accordingly so that it doesn't over-consume its Ram level, for instance.
And we don't wanna create these ugly beasts that are.....that once you put it on a server, you always need to have bigger servers. No, you need to make sure that a server can run hundreds of those applications, and make it more cost efficient.
So, those things we forgotten, uh, compute. And that's also the downside of of all these technology .... like growths we had and evolutions we have seen.
I mean, compute capacity and storage and memory have become a commodity and become very, very cheap and we don't care anymore, but sometimes it's worthwhile to investigate a little bit and make a performing tool without having to scale and, you know, and that's
........yeah.......so....
And indeed, if we then take a look at how people build their software and their start up with something new, they immediately start thinking:
" Yeah because it's cool and nice, and I wanna do Kubernetes. "
Look at what you get to build, use some serverless material, use some.....use storage instead ofVM disk, use, whatever you can use to make your life easier, but also less complex. Perfectly.
Karl: [00:32:19] I think that's excellent insight! Look at whatever can make your life easier. Don't just go over all of the buzzwords, or maybe your potential new job are. Go where you can actually build something meaningful, you can focus your development work on the actual business value, something that differentiates you from others.
And, as a developer, don't choose technologies that make you actually go back and rework on it, or have continuous operational work there.
Mike: [00:32:54] ...or with a steep learning curve Kubernetes for instance, it's a beautiful technology, but it's darn hard to learn.
Karl: [00:33:02] What I've always, well, what I often often say is Kubernetes is an excellent technology choice for an organization that has a hundred million to spend
Mike: [00:33:13] True. Amen to that.
Annie: [00:33:17] Really nice, really good controversial opinions here or not controversial. It depends on your viewpoint of course, as well. Um, yeah, as an organizer of Kubernetes meets ups quite often....it's...fun!
Mike: [00:33:30] I'm sorry. I'm not saying that it is a bad thing. I'm not shooting it, but yeah, but..... again. Use a technology for what it can be used for and not over you use it because it's pretty.
I mean, because it's a buzzword make educated choice.
Annie: [00:33:51] Yeah.. Educated choices, I think are usually the best ones. You know, it's not a cookie cutter. It's not one size fits all. So it's always ....deeper into this thing.
Yeah. Perfect! Well, yeah, we have really kind of covered many different kind of companies, but let's bring it back to you, Mike for a while as well.
So what kind of impact do you see from your role? Like what is the impact that you see on your everyday day to day role and how it's impacting the project that you work with?
Mike: [00:34:22] Um, I'm not average. Let me put it I'm one of the guys that can actually speak up and say, "dude, You're doing it wrong". But that's appreciated.
So that's kind of the impact that I do. And, with all respect to everybody, I mean, we all make mistakes and.....everybody should be open to a discussion and everyone should be able to just speak up and say their opinion with all respect to everybody of course.
I can't just say that the thing that you built is like, it's like a nightmare.
Sure. But have a good argument to say why it's a nightmare and not because it's, it is ugly, right? You're not going to say that.
Everybody loves cars, and some people still love Fiat doblos for instance, or whatever you have... Have you ever seen that? Look it up, you will see what I mean.
It's officially been named the ugliest car ever, but hey! If somebody loves that kind of a car, because it's spacious on the inside and he doesn't care what it looks like on the outside.
If that works for you. And it is indeed a great family car, to give an analogy. So you should be able to discuss those things, but also when you discussing those things, make sure that you, if you want to make an impact, you gain the trust of everybody and that you come with good arguments. And even sometimes I agree to disagree or even say that sometimes you could be wrong too.
And, that is, in my opinion, my job. The most fun part of my job, because I can actually speak up. I don't have anything to sell. I can say just what I think. And that makes my job pretty darn cool, from that perspective. Maybe not everybody agrees, especially not in government or parts, but that's a different story, but yeah, I mean..... I know my job might sound like a job from an ivory tower, but I have my mileage.
I know what I'm talking about, or....think. And even if I don't know what I think I'm talking about, I can probably have a good argument to just convince you anyway. But, uh, no, but I mean, also...have some respect for people and be open to any kind of idea.
Because sometimes you can be wrong too. It happen to me already a couple of times, and then you come to think of it and yeah, maybe that's the better solution.
So, that's part of the game. That makes my role, not only a technical one, but also like kind of the shrink role. Where does it hurt? And, how far are we? In company slide-out approach.
Annie: [00:37:13] Really cool. I think, I think it's always. Super interesting to hear about the impacts of, of, of a person in a company. And then how do they view their kind of impacts around them as well? So really interesting.
So, I think we have heard many interesting companies and projects that you've worked with. And....and...but is there anything else that you would like to mention that's our.....what is the coolest things happening at the moment or was it all? Or was the healthcare companies already that?
Mike: [00:37:41] Oooh no...I haven't even....especially the last....two years, I've seen so many beautiful companies coming up with so many beautiful ideas and sometimes even ideas that were already existing, you know, everybody likes to reinvent the wheel.
Uh, but..... I mean,I've seen company is going from really, really small to immediately grow out to a million dollar company.
In like no time, which is really, really cool. Especially the company in the identity sphere, uh, it's a partner that has a, a multifactor authentication, which will replace the identity card in Belgium.
And they are actually a company which is fully European regulated on IDdas
So, if you know it, Jaydas, so they actually provides the company is called "IT'S ME" and they actually did they came from AWS, but don't tell anybody.
So that was kind of a compete win. But the thing where they came from and where were they going in, and the ideas that they have it's amazing. And, yeah, and I can name so many of those companies.
I even work with some unicorns, which are really, really cool. Unfortunately, I can not tell too much about those because we are on a clause of the NDA, but they have so many beautiful ideas and they grew rom a $0 company to a billion dollar company, not the million, but the billion dollar company.
I mean, And yeah, that's good. It's good for business, but also good for recognition. But also the, the things that they're doing and what they're doing and how they're using technology and what, the difference that they are making some in some industries or in some parts of the world.
It'samazing.....that brings back the glorious part of my job. I can actually see people grow. And make it better for themselves. And knowing in the back of my head, I was like a little part of it. Pretty, pretty darn proud of that. And I hope I can see them grow even more when they go to the stock market and stuff like that.
It's really, really nice. Yeah.
Annie: [00:39:56] So, now for a really interesting recurring segment that we're starting in season two, our mission is to talk with the best people in the business, and we would really like to hear your thoughts on the future of tech as well. It might sound like a big and scary thing to predict the future or tech everyone's trying to do it.
But I think it would be really interesting to hear your thoughts on the matter.
So, what are the three biggest things in tech than you are excited at the moment, whether it'd be the possibility of having time travel someday or serverless or anything else in between.
Mike: [00:40:51] Right. So the first thing that I see as a trend and that I strongly believe in, is that... everybody's making an effort to go green. Fully green ,on everything.
So ecology, right? And the way today, everybody's pinching in, to that level. Is that they're trying to make their data centers as green as possible. Trying to be as ecological as possible in consumption of energy to make everything run, but also in returning the favor. And we've seen some very nice things going on there.
And even with the latest announcements, the things that we're going to do in the future with going to space and all these things, it all makes....science fiction come become a reality!
But the ecology part is a really important one because we all haveto make sure that by 2050 we didn't blow up our planet.
We need to make sure that we act now. I think it was a Greenpeace slogan a couple of years ago, right? Act Now..,Right?
And they were actually right. We need to do something about it. And technology on all facts actually is helping them. Even we're still using resources to build technology, because we all know that compute capacity needs, ores and minerals and, and all these things to make chips and make sure that we can have silicium and all these things.
So it comes also with an ecological cost. But, if you look at the effort he industry is making there, that's already pretty darn cool. And this is...... it's not that the..... for me the future of technology is not really like the science fiction things. And we have some nice science fiction, things like VR and AR and all these things.
That's pretty cool. And machine learning algorhythms! And hopefully one day we won't wake up in the skynet world. That's still my biggest concern, but let's hope we don't get there.
Karl: [00:43:01] .....that we won't wake up
Mike: [00:43:02] No, exactly! Yeah. Or too late. Um, But the green part is something actually, a lot of us are considering nowadays.
And again, cloud computing can help.....there. ....I believe
Because you minimize the footprint where everybody's running their compute, only to a couple of data centers, and they can be optimized to be as ecological as possible. For me, that is the biggest. Evolution and revolution that we're seeing.
I mean, the things that some data the centers are running at, and we're running data centers on the water, which create new ecosystems surrounding it because the water becomes a little bit more warmer. So you get new fresh breeds, you get new, you get a better interaction of that ecosystem again. The plankton is growing better, the plants are growing better.
Also, you get new species that were extincted are coming back for instance, like certain kind of gray fish. It's really weird. But maybe not for the bad.
. But also, like in data centers, running on biofuel and solar cells and wind energy and returning the energy back to housing capacity, to warm houses and stuff.
Those are pretty darn cool things that we can see in technology where we can benefit from technology. And so it's not only what we built with it, but it's also how we build technology, that is .... that I'm most looking forward to what will be the next thing there.
And if then really have to talk about technology, it's.... like, how far can we go with technology?
What will be our next compute part?
We're already talking about quantum computing and the Schrodinger's cat effect that we have on that thing. And then teleportation and all these things. What will be the next thing?
Will we actually get there? And then we will not be talking about time travel, but we will be talking about materialization of moving objects from one place to another, without moving for instance and things like that, because we can actually reach those things.
And yeah, those are really exciting times.
So, from a technology perspective, I want to see where we are in 50 years and maybe we haven't come that far.....as we think.
I mean, the last 50 years were a revolution, but I think we know are slowly moving into an evolution because we cannot follow anymore ourselves.
So we need to make smarter machines to make smarter machines. Does this actually not sounding good?
Because making smarter machines at the end indeed will bring us to that Skynet world.
Karl: [00:45:43] And especially coming from someone who works at a company who has both Dotnet and Skype.
Mike: [00:45:48] Yeah. Yes. Okay.....and now bombshell. No, indeed. Yeah, maybe, but at least we don't produce.. Robots, like some other Cupertino company does....for instance.
I mean, we don't have a, a material company like alphabet does, for instance, they have robots. We don't. But all enough, I love joking around, so. ...
And then I haven't even spoken about the things that we haven't invented yet, that we still haven't thought of. And I think with all the people today, focusing on technology, and I don't know whether it's a good trend, yes or no, because we are investing heavily on everything in an education, from a STEM perspective, or more women in IT and not thinking against it, don't get me wrong.
I feel very obliged to have, more inclusion of women in IT. Not because we are lacking them, but we need them. And not because they are females. No, just because they are females because a woman thinks differently and they see all the perspectives. And say that we're the most respect to all women out there, but they see things differently.
Men we are to focus on details.
And it's that kind of a vision that we need more, and women and technology are really, really important for that. And we should have really, really more.
And I cannot stress it enough, uh, to see more women standing up for having voice in IT and then bringing that more to the community.
And then, that's also something that comes with the territory. Technology is no longer to be man's bastion, it should be everybody's bastion.
Annie: [00:47:37] . Yes, for sure. I think it's so obvious that it's....but it should be always.....you mentioned even, even though it is obvious that multiple viewpoints bring so much richness.
The decision making process, the creation process. So everything kind of like improves if there is multiple viewpoints from diversity and inclusion point of course.....as well.
Mike: [00:48:00] Exactly.
Karl: [00:48:00] Yeah. I really agree that when we are thinking of building the future of the technology, you mentioned that the next evolutionary step in..... not just kind of software, but other technologies as well.
If the people building that are coming from the same schools, they are coming from the same backgrounds, they look alike, they're all from the same gender. They do everything together in a way that is at least very homogeneous, that really doesn't produce the best possible variations into the, this big mix or this big machinery.
So if you get more diverse set of people, engineers, more diverse engineers, but also people who are not engineers, people who are coming from different, paths of life who might have started their careers faced with something else.
I think that's a very good way to really increase the chances that we will find those pieces that have not really been invented yet. Uh, as you mentioned
Mike: [00:48:57] Exactly.
Karl: [00:49:12] We are thinking of having this recurring segment. Now in this season of cloud Gossip.
What will be something that maybe you haven't encountered somebody else doing? Or maybe you have done yourself, or what would you encourage as a project or initiative in the inclusiveness space that you have seen that you should..... you think should get more light on or should be shared, or everyone should do this.
Mike: [00:49:36] We should bring it really back to the basics here. We should start listening and looking again.
Do very simple senses that we all have, or, unfortunately for those who don't have those anymore, uh, the one that gets more expanded than the other.
And that's also a DNI by the way. It's not only those who are perfectly healthy, but and from a matter of race or culture or gender, but it's also those we don't have a fully in good health or in good 100%, physical state.
And that doesn't mean that they're less, that doesn't mean that theyre are different. It's just... they are either in bad luck. It's kind of a harsh word to say, or there were, or they're perfectly happy because they were born away and they never knew anything else. But the most important thing is that we learn to listen and to see again, who we have in front of us.
Look at the person, speak to the person.
You're not talking to a woman, you're talking to a person. And of course it's of a gender woman, but you cannot disagree on that. Or if it's Asian culture person or an Afro American culture person, it doesn't matter. They're people. And I think the last year as being a very important year, when it comes down to diversity and inclusion and I'm not taking any political stances here and I'm not opening a harsh fight.
Karl: [00:51:13] .....beyond Kubernetes.
Mike: [00:51:15] ....beyond Kubernetes, that's a different story! We'll always peak a fight, but people just need to pay respect to people. Gender, race, culture. It doesn't matter. In the end, we all die. We are all the same little bunch of bones and skin and whatever it runs around in our bodies, we all go to Ash. Periods.
And that's harsh. I know, but it's a fact, it's a given.
And nobody cares in the end anymore. Whether you're black or white or yellow or whatever color you have, you're a person. And that's the most important part...and that is something we need to dig back. And if there's one thing that people..... I wanna gift to the world is.
Start with the little things. And it's maybe hard to reach out to somebody who is in a minority group, or at least that is being seen as a world, but as a minority group, because it's hard to talk about these things because you don't want to insult anybody. You know?
And I also have that problem. I mean, if I say minority group it makes me kind of feel like I'm looking down on them, which is not!
I'm not seeing them as a minority, but we call them that way, period, nothing we can do about it.
We try to change our culture, we have the entire, ummm Master Slave thing that is going on in the repository space, which we are now calling trunk. For good matters.
And it's these little things that can actually change our mindsets and that will make us listen again, and look again at people, instead of looking at "yeah, it's normal."
"That's the way it was. Cope with it"
No, maybe we should change a little bit into that sphere and look at it from any kind of angle that people are bringing up. With respect to the others, because elsewhere you will also become as those other too.
Annie: [00:53:14] For sure, really, really powerful words and really important topic. And it's good to have these discussions because, they are needed to be had and heard as well.
So. Two kind of concrete tips for our listeners. So, do you have any tips on how you or someone can lift people, lift others up?
So, how can you empower people around you to create a better world ?
Mike: [00:53:43] Again, listen and speak to people. Ask how somebody is doing. Just start with that. Just start a conversation. Perfect stranger.
Unless he's not chasing you with a knife and a machete, everything is fine and maybe it's still Halloween, so you can still have a discussion.
And that's one of the things that I miss. I miss meeting strangers. You know me, I mean, we've been going all together to do conferences in the past, and then you get to meet all sorts of people.
Which is really, really cool. And which is one of the benefits of my job, because I'm a very social animal and I love to be among people and especially among friends.
But everybody can be a friend. Even those who are different of mind, unless they are talking in such an aggressive way that you can not really......like...agree with their mindsets because it's like totally off,.
But everybody deserves the respect of at least talk to them. That's a powerful thing. Our voices. are something powerful and asking somebody, "how are you" and care.... really caring about it.
It's not just say, "Hey, how are, you" ...no
You have to really mean it. That's the only thing that really matters in the end.
Karl: [00:55:17] That's very true. And you mentioned the community part. You mentioned different conferences, which we all organized, attended, spoken altogether in different conferences and meetups and environments.
If you put aside your work hat and put on your community leader and event organizer, hat.
Now is really at the time for kind of a humble brag or promoting and lifting others really up.
So, we are not doing......any of us are doing it alone. It really takes a village to raise a child and all of that....so just ....would you like to give us some shout outs to communities close to your heart?
Mike: [00:55:59] Yeah, there's so many. And of course there's my own community that we run.
There's the Azure user group in Belgium.
With all my friends in there. we're not a community, we're friends. We do it for fun, right?
And that is your user group still in Finland, "the folk" and the things that you're doing. And then we are actually,fraternize all over the world with those community groups. So the MVP community is still at my heart.
Uh, but also there's some new members around the block. People who made my life more interesting and more, more thoughtful....and considerate..It's guys like, like, Danny, The Cleric, for instance.
He's an awesome guy. It is an awesome community if you're in it and everybody loves that guy....and for good reasons! Because he's doing the great things ,and he's doing the good things from that perspective.
And then there's people like you and like Annie and Isidora for instance, like you, you drive the,....
, Karl: [00:57:01] Humans in IT
...Humans in IT!
Mike: [00:57:03] It's these things that are Important to me, and they are close to me, and that we should endorse them ....for the better.
And they should get all the attention and bring fun and humanity into a community. So keep up with the good work...I would say.
Annie: [00:57:24] Perfect. That's good to hear. And as a sneak peek preview.
We should have Isidora in the upcoming episodes of cloud as a guest. ...so...look out for that as well.
Mike: [00:57:34] Make sure you have a dance floor available.
Karl: [00:57:37] Speaking of dancing, that really wraps this up.
So today we talked with Mike Martin, from Microsoft. We learned all about, lots of dirty words, lots of buzzwords.
We talked about meaningful insights around ISVs.... scale-ups...all of these software companies. And we even dealt into have a deep look at ourselves and talked about humanity.
We talked about the future with green data centers, with how to interact with others.
Excellent. Thanks a lot, Mike.
Mike: [00:58:05] Thank you. Bye-bye.
Hey,
Karl: [00:58:13] thanks for listening to cloud gossip. You can find us from our website cloud gross-up dot net. Please leave us a review and subscribe to us at iTunes, Google, or Spotify. .