Lukasz's Blog

Platforms for Digital Business

The nature of what organisations want & need from their IT systems has well & truly changed. It used to be all about efficiency & automating repeatable business processes; now its about creating whole new products, services and customer experiences using technology. It used to be all about cost; now its about agility & speed to market.

Of course in reality the world isn’t that black & white; like everything else its a balancing act. A range of different platforms is needed to support the efficient and effective operations of a modern organisation - especially if the organisation has legacy systems.

We are adopting what we’ve dubbed the ‘hybrid platform’ approach. That means making use of a range of on-premise, public cloud and SaaS based platforms. This gives us maximum flexibility, forces standardisation in areas where it makes sense and frees us up to put most of our effort into the things that are truly unique (differentiators) to our organisation.

Using a mix of platforms means we have to put in place some foundational building blocks such as identity & access management which supports a federated model, operational & security management tools which traverse traditional system boundaries and processes & practices that support service aggregation & federation. Additionally we need to know which platforms we want to use and will actually work for us. We often refer to these - and other building blocks - as the ‘orchestration and governance’ layer.

Using a range of platforms means we can go at whatever ‘speed’ we need to. We can maintain a core of legacy master data (slow moving) whilst connecting it to a chatbot service (fast moving) to provide end users with self-service functionality in a matter of days, not weeks or months.

Public cloud services and SaaS offerings form the basis for most of our new application development however at the same time we have a fleet of legacy business applications which would need to be re-written/re-factored to operate in a pure cloud environment. For those we need platforms that support a more traditional, tiered architecture. For the bulk of our applications we utilise a mix of virtualisation and containerisation.

Our data centre infrastructure is part of what enables us to operate at these different speeds. VMWare and AWS recently announced a partnership which allows organisations to fuse their on-premise and AWS platforms. The idea is that we can continue to utilise the tools & processes we have in place whilst taking advantage of the services and functionality offered by AWS, all whilst seamlessly spanning data centre facilities anywhere in the world (in our case Wellington and Sydney). This enables the hybrid model and also simplifies any migrations to the public cloud by allowing you to stage & manage them better.

A few weeks ago we completed a proof of concept of the VMWare on AWS offering and we able to successfully create a Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC) environment which delivered on the promise of the hybrid model. The POC passed on all the test scenarios & success criteria we set out and gave us the confidence that the hybrid platform architecture we want to build is possible, scalable and cost effective.

Careful application portfolio management (another discipline you need to develop) will allow us now to decide how we tackle modernising our legacy IT systems. For some we may choose to rewrite them, however for others it may simply be a matter of replatforming them onto our hybrid platform.

The days of standardisation and ‘one size fits all’ are over. Modern organisations need a range of platforms to enable their business. I think this applies to both technologies and practices - it’s one of the reasons I believe the traditional PMO approach is well and truly dead (did it ever actually work for anyone?!?).

Understanding the drivers for each part of your organisation and what ‘speed’ they need to go at will allow you to respond to (and sometimes even preempt) the platform needs of your organisation.

Disclaimer - I’m not advocating for or promoting any product or vendor in this post, rather the intent is to share thinking & experiences so others can build on those/factor them into their own activities (or not). As always I would suggest you do your own research and figure out what will work best for you.

Pathways to the Cloud

Over the past couple of years we have helped and advised a range of organisations (both public and commercial) in relation to cloud adoption, largely based on our experiences in that space to date. At the recent AWS ReInvent there was a lot of chatter amongst exec about the approach to cloud adoption - unsurprisingly most organisations still seem to follow the ‘lift and shift’ approach to getting out into the cloud.

Broadly speaking there are two pathways to cloud - one is the lift & shift and the second is re-engineering for cloud. Each pathway comes with its own set of considerations as well as risks & benefits. We have experience with both approaches and I thought it might be useful to capture highlights from each approach here.

The lift and shift approach requires little up front work and can get you into the cloud faster. On the downside this pathway can require a fair amount of clean up work. Post shift you will mostly likely need to remediate things like network & security configurations to make best use of cloud environments & tools as well as a bunch of cost optimisation work to ensure you’re getting best bang for buck in terms of CPU, storage etc. costs. Looking at things like machine sizes/types, reserved vs non-reserved instances and the like requires someone who understands cloud infrastructure to optimise your application/infrastructure environment.

Problems tend to start cropping up when organisations complete the first part of the lift and shift and then don’t do the follow up actions. You essentially end up with the worst of both worlds, and the benefits of neither. I think a lot of people who are disillusioned with cloud adoption are in this camp. Like I’ve said countless time - cloud adoption isn’t simply about someone else running your infrastructure and yet so many people still seem to get stuck there.

On the flipside a re-engineering for cloud approach requires more time and investment up front. In effect this involves converting the existing application/infrastructure to take full advantage of cloud based technologies such as serverless and ‘as a service’ components such as a databases. This approach simplifies the migration and helps you realise the benefits associated with cloud adoption quicker. It’s also the more future-proof of the two approaches.

Either approach is a valid pathway to the cloud but you need to understand the implications of both pathways and select the one that makes sense for your organisation and strategy. Whichever way you approach it you do need to ensure you have a robust plan and sufficient funding/resources allocated to the effort.

We have kicked off the modernisation of our core line up business application (actually roughly 17 apps in one molithic stack, thousands of lines of Java code, approaching 15 years old) and as part of that we are replatforming the database, implementing a container based infrastructure and converting the monolithic applications to microservices & APIs. This is squarely down the re-engineering pathway.

We are doing all of that on a hybrid of public and private cloud but operating under a ‘cloud first’ principle. The plan is to modularise the application to create more choices (some of the modules might for example be replaced by SaaS offerings) before modernising components and eventually rebuilding the UI/UX elements.

Part of this modernisation will include a move towards a more DevOps-style operating model and and adoption of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). We are investing a lot in building capability in that space and helping people & teams transition from the current operating model and tools to the future operatng model.

Modernisation of a legacy application is always inherently risky (and expensive)  - you only need to look at other modernisation efforts like Kiwi Bank to see examples of that. Utilising cloud-based technologies helps us accelerate the change and trial/test options to find the best way through the modernisation effort.

We expect our modernisation efforts to take between 18-24 months and they are an integral part of our wider organisational digital transformation efforts. We will continue to migrate other workloads, and builds new applications, on public cloud infrastructure during that time.

Reflections on ReInvent 2017

This years AWS ReInvent was bigger than ever before - the conference spanned five different hotels/conference centres along the Las Vegas strip so getting your daily allocation of steps in was no challenge. Roughly 43,000 people attended the event this year! If you’ve attended ReInvent in previous years you would know that there is a fair amount of walking involved - this year really kicked it up a notch with people shredding shoes in a matter of days

Physical exercise and footwear aside this year event provided what seemed like an endless list of new services in almost every category. CEO Andy Jassy kicked things off with his keynote presentation which riffled through a bunch of new service announcements. They key ones for me were:

• Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), a managed Kubernetes service running on top of AWS. Simplifying running and managing containers.
• Aurora Serverless—on-demand, auto-scaling Amazon Aurora. This service eliminates the need to provision instances, automatically scales up/down, and starts up and shuts down automatically. It was very clear that AWS is keep to liberate customers from the tyranny of their existing database vendors (leave you to guess who they mean…)
• In the Machine Learning space Andy introduced Amazon SageMaker (leverages open source Jupyter project). SageMaker provides built-in, high performance algorithms, but doesn’t prevent users from bringing their own algorithms and frameworks. SageMaker also greatly simplifies training and tuning, and helps automate the deployment/operation of machine learning in production.
  
• DeepLens, the world’s first HD video camera with built-in machine learning support. This technology is incredible - I attended the workshop session and walked away with a DeepLens unit so expect more detail on this front in the coming few weeks/months.
  
• Amazon Translate, which does real-time language translation as well as batch translation.
  

Andy’s keynote focused on what ‘builders’ wanted and how they would build the organisations and societies of the future. It’s very clear that AWS is trying to take the heavy lifting out of technology, making it simpler for anyone to be a builder.

It’s very clear that AWS is sticking to it’s ‘customer obsessed’ mantra, not only in terms of how it delivers services to its customers but also in the types/range of services its bringing to market for AWS users to utilise to improve the experience of their customers. Investments in voice technologies, AI and machine learning are all geared towards re-inventing how organisations interact with their customers.

In contrast Werner Vogels’ keynote was light on service announcements and more focused on 21st century architectures and how technology will shape (and will be shaped) by the world in the coming 5-10 years. Werner’s presentation also showcased a number of female techies doing some impressive things in their respective organisations/industries - pretty inspiring stuff.

Werner did announce a couple of key services which stood out for me:

• Alexa for Business is a fully managed service for Alexa voice-controlled devices at work.
  
• AWS Cloud9, a cloud-based IDE which AWS acquired last year. Cloud9 is a clean and feature rich IDE but the ‘killer app’ is collaboration. You can invite other AWS users to join your project for pair programming sessions with a nice little chat box to help you work through bugs (it comes with a full debugger for solo projects as well).
  
• Lambda language support for .Net and Go meeting a long requested feature request.

Serverless architectures and services were definite a headline topic this year. A number of the presentations included case studies of AWS customer leveraging serverless technologies to deliver on-demand applications and services. This is consistent with the AWS strategy of ‘business rules being the only thing you will need to code’ in the future.

One of my special interest categories this year was around artificial intelligence and machine learning. It’s clear that AI/ML will bring about unprecedented workforce/job changes in the coming decade. I think a lot of people assume that AI is coming when in reality it’s already here and getting better every day.

A number of services announced were intended to make AI/ML accessible to a wider user base - to take it out of labs and into the hands of people building front-line products and services. These AI/ML developments - paired with things like DeepLens - will pave the way for potentially changing the way we interact with technology in every aspect of our lives.

Cloud adoption still seems to be variable - based on the people I talked to and the round-table sessions I attended. Many organisations are still pursuing the ‘lift and shift’ approach with variable benefits. There are organisations re-engineering their processes and applications as part of the move to cloud but they are still the exception. Worryingly I was actually part of a couple of round-table sessions where some people seemed to be advocating for the on-premise model as a better option.

On a global scale what we are doing around cloud adoption in New Zealand still seems to be on par with what leaders in other parts of the world are doing.

In terms of logistics, you could perhaps argue that ReInvent got too large this year. The travel times between venues were high and I know lots of people missed sessions they wanted to attend due to travel times or popular sessions not offering any walk up spots. From what I remember the 2016 event (which was all at the Venetian) seemed to flow more smoothly with fewer frustrations from attendees. Perhaps it’s time to split ReInvent into two events - one in the US and one in Europe?

Chatbot Sam

I think a common misconception is that citizens (customers) want to have an ‘experience’ when dealing with government agencies. As a customer of a range of agencies what I really want is a pain-free experience that let’s me do what I need to get done in the most expedient manner possible. Get in, get it sorted and get out - as quickly as possible, no experience thanks!

Part of a creating what I refer to as a ‘low friction experience’ is understanding how your customers already utilise online/digital services and slipstreaming in as much as possible with that. The idea of meeting the customer where they are at, rather than setting up another whole new channel for them to engage with.

We know the majority of our customers are part of one or multiple social network platforms. We also know that most of them would list ‘talking to another person on the phone’ as one of their least preferred ways of getting anything done. Based on that it makes solid sense for us to develop a chatbot interface we can deploy on the various social network platforms.

Enter Sam - Sam is our self-service chatbot which provides some very basic functionality but due to the magic of cloud only took hours (not days or months) to set up. Sam is currently in early beta but can help you look up your student number, reset your password and provide you with information on the exam and results publication timetable.

Sam is built on a combination of Amazon’s Lex and Lambda services. Lex provides the chatbot front end whilst Lambda does the behind the scenes functions like interacting with the database hosted on AWS to look up student numbers and other information. We have currently deployed Sam on the Facebook platform meaning it integrates seamlessly with Facebook pages and works on both desktop and mobile devices.

Sam is a pretty basic chatbot - it works based on key terms and rules - however it provides some really good self-service functionality given that it took just a few hours to set up.

The next iteration of Sam will combine Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Machine Learning to provide a much richer set of functionality as well as the ability to learn from the conversations it has. We also intend to use Amazon Poly to support Speech Input.

For me Sam re-enforces the power of the Cloud. Five years ago the investment required - and lead times to implement - would have probably seen the idea dead in the water. Today we can deliver a whole new friction-less channel to our customers in a matter of hours.

We are shifting away from running technology to delivering digital services and that’s the exciting opportunity for organisations who are ready and willing to embrace the Cloud.

CEOs need to be challenging their CIOs and IT departments to deliver these same sorts of customer-focused solutions; I’m convinced that will move the cloud adoption conversation forward in most organisations that may be ‘stuck’ in the enterprise IT paradigm.