February 4, 2025 • 44 mins
From managing servers in his closet to leading the AWS Well-Architected Framework performance pillar, Ryan Comingdeer's cloud journey mirrors the evolution of cloud governance itself. Now, as Co-Founder & CEO of Platformr, he's tackling one of cloud computing's biggest challenges: how to scale governance from individual workloads to entire organizations. Join us for a conversation that spans personal experiences, technical insights, and a vision for the future of cloud management that goes beyond traditional frameworks.
Where to Find Ryan
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/comingdeer/
- Company: https://platformr.cloud/
Show Links
- AWS Well-Architected Framework: https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/
- Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE): https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/enterprise-strategy/what-is-a-cloud-center-of-excellence-and-why-do-you-need-one/
- AWS Trusted Advisor: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/technology/trusted-advisor/
- Platform Engineering: https://platformengineering.org/
- Re:Invent: https://reinvent.awsevents.com/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Ryan (00:00):
The well-elected framework is really a good tool for
looking at one workload at atime.
Right.
A workload is a set ofcomponents that make up an
application.
If a company has 15 workloads,they're doing 15 well-elected
reviews.
Well, that's great at theworkload level, but what is it
at the organization level thatgives the whole organizational
kind of governance and bestpractices across all 15 of those
(00:21):
workloads?
William (00:34):
Hello world.
I am your host, william, andI'm here to bring that main
character, energy, no cap.
And with me is my co-host,yvonne Sharp, one of the
greatest minds in deductivereasoning and literally slaying
that cheesecake game daily.
She's so based, it's actuallyunhinged.
(00:57):
How are you doing today, yvonne?
Eyvonne (01:00):
I have no idea what you just said.
You're trying to be the coolkid on the block and you need a
new crowd because it's over myhead, man.
William (01:12):
So for the audience, my you know again, my son plays a
travel sport.
So I'm in this locker room withall these eight, nine and 10
year olds and they talk in adifferent language and I'm
trying very hard to learn someof that language, but it's
honestly like learning acomplete new language.
It's pretty wild.
Eyvonne (01:29):
When we were children, all you had to say was something
was bad, which actually backthen meant it was good, and our
elders gave us the eye roll, andI feel like that challenge has
increased, or that dynamic isjust growing exponentially.
(01:49):
Like they're not even words now.
William (01:52):
So Agreed, yeah, joining us today is Ryan
Cummingdeer, ceo at Platformer.
So, first of all, thanks forjoining us today, ryan, and how
are things going?
Did you?
Do you have all the Christmasshopping done?
Ryan (02:07):
I do have all the Christmas shopping done.
This year we jumped ahead alittle bit before Thanksgiving
to take care of a lot of thosethis year.
William (02:16):
Talk about prepared.
I love it.
That's awesome.
Ryan (02:20):
We actually opened Christmas gifts a little bit
already.
So my kids, can you know, whilethey're out of school, spend
the whole Christmas breakplaying with their toys.
Eyvonne (02:31):
Awesome.
William (02:32):
I wish my parents would have done that with me growing
up.
Thank you again for joining us.
I think we both had theopportunity to be at reInvent
this last year and just kind oflooking through.
A lot of your experience hasbeen in cloud, or at least your
more recent experience.
But let's go back maybe alittle bit further first.
(02:52):
You know, do you want to giveus just kind of a quick overview
of your background, Like, wasit always grounded in software
or how did you get to where youare today?
Ryan (03:02):
Sure, long story short, I took my first programming class
in seventh grade, loved it eversince.
So I was in app development andprogramming from the mid to late
90s, all the way until today,did a lot of consulting, a lot
of application building, mobileapps, web apps, enterprise like
(03:23):
B2B apps as well.
But, yeah, I got introduced tothe cloud and I think 2008.
At that time I had a datacenter where I hosted all of my
websites that I built and thatdata center went down while I
was on vacation and I had todrive all the way back into town
.
I was like a six hour drive inthe middle of the night to work
(03:43):
on my servers and I thinkshortly after that I said where
can I put these that are not inmy closet anymore?
So I think 2008 is when Istarted looking at AWS at that
time.
So I've moving all my serversup to EC2s.
And then after that it was kindof a history from AWS's
perspective.
I joined AWS on every one ofthe services they started
working on for the last 15 yearsand have never looked back.
Eyvonne (04:07):
It's got to be a better way.
Moment.
When we were hostinginfrastructure right Years ago,
I worked for an engineering firmand the cooling apparatus that
was in our data center wouldfrequently go out and there were
no windows.
There was no, and you know, Iremember, in the middle of the
dice storm, the power went out.
(04:28):
Driving to the office andtrying to like skate up the
frozen driveway to get in thebuilding, to open the door, to
set up, you know, to try andcool it, with no power in the
building other than thegenerator power that was running
the systems but not the coolant.
And uh yeah, we've, we've allbeen like there's got to be a
(04:49):
better way yeah, not having toworry about that infrastructure
is is pretty a pretty big dealyeah, that's exactly what I was
gonna say is, for those of usthat love the software side of
things, uh, dealing with thehardware and the infrastructure.
Ryan (05:03):
Was that necessary evil that we were happy to get rid of
?
So?
William (05:07):
absolutely yeah.
Even with if you think aboutjust uh, things, things in the
past that were so hard like ifyou had, like, multiple data
centers, you have to make sureyour, your application is highly
available.
You know, the bigger thecompany means you probably have
some dr to look after as well,and having to build out your
(05:28):
high availability in DR acrossmultiple data centers for a
highly distributed application,versus doing it in cloud, it is
much different and much easier.
Ryan (05:40):
I think, as we say, the undifferentiated heavy lifting
that every company has used todo by doing disaster recovery
environments, by doinginfrastructure management, is
now mostly removed at some leveland as far as the full-time
jobs that require that specialtyknowledge, now you've
transitioned to more of thatcloud specialty knowledge and
hopefully have that opportunityto scale more.
William (06:03):
Yeah, so let's talk.
I mean, one of the things youhave experience with is the AWS
Well-Architected Framework, orat least what I could see from
some of the work that you'vedone.
If you had to, I guess, if youhad to explain what this
framework is to you know maybesomeone in a coffee shop that
doesn't know tech as well as youdo how would you explain it?
Ryan (06:27):
Um, I would probably start with why I even looked at the
well-actuated framework um andwhy I started there.
Um, so, as I had built up mycompanies over the last 15 years
, um, I I was helping a lot, Iwas a consultant and I was
helping a lot of customers overand over and over again, most of
them in that startup to smallto medium size and they were
(06:47):
asking for a softwaredevelopment company to come in
and help them out.
But what they really needed wasa CTO to kind of tell them how
to manage their technology, howto look at everything from
security of the software toreliability of the software, to
the cost Make sure that the costof the goods sold is matching
what the revenue model lookslike for their customers.
So more and more of thosecustomers started leaning on us
(07:09):
to give them more than justtechnology what they said
technology, software developmentguidance, but really kind of
business guidance.
And so I kind of built my ownlittle internal framework back
in like 2012, just for like achecklist of things that I think
I talked to the customers about.
But then when Amazon came outwith that well-elected framework
that replaced mine and it wasby far the most holistic kind of
(07:32):
business checklist of how youshould look at technology, how
to manage as far as like, bestpractices things, questions.
You should ask yourself whetheryou are outsourcing your IT
team, whether you have anin-house IT team, whether your
technology is in the cloud orwhether your technology is
on-prem.
It asks you all the rightquestions to at least think
through what matters to thebusiness.
And so I started working, Ithink, as a beta partner for the
(07:55):
Well-Contributed team in like2016.
And then when it launched, Ithink me personally did more
well-experienced reviews thanany other solutions architect
over like a four-year period, soI really enjoyed it.
As I told other, my job titleat the time was a CTO and as I
(08:15):
told other CTOs, like, if youwant to be a good CTO, you've
got to memorize awell-experienced framework.
It gives you this framework,this lane to stay in to say this
is what good looks like, but ithelps you kind of communicate
that to the other costdepartments, security
departments, operations, thatproduct owners for usability and
performance.
(08:35):
So it helps you translate fromjust writing the code and
getting the job done to actuallywhat matters to business.
So it was kind of my CTO Bible,I guess you can say, for a long
time.
I sold my company in 2020.
And then, after I sold mycompany, I went and joined that
Lockdown team.
So I became a pillar lead forthat Lockdown team.
Just because I loved it so muchand I wanted to kind of keep
(08:58):
seeing it mature and grow andget to more of the customers,
get to more of the lessonslearned.
I was like okay, well, whatdidn't the walkthrough framework
cover?
What pain points was a surpriseto the customer?
Because they went through thisand we had a gap.
And so I wanted to kind ofstart filling in some more of
those gaps on the walkthroughframework and I really enjoyed
(09:19):
working on those best practicesand understanding how it impacts
customers.
William (09:24):
That's awesome.
I love how they have.
For those of you that don'tknow, there's six pillars.
Which pillar did you work withspecifically?
Ryan (09:35):
I was in charge of the performance pillar, which by far
is the most technical pillar,and it was probably because of
my application developmentbackground.
William (09:44):
I know that, like there's so like I had the
opportunity to go through and dosome things with this framework
as well, like in a, you know,within a real company.
And one of the things that Ithought was interesting just
because you have these, thiswell-architected framework, it
doesn't mean that it makes thework any easier.
It doesn't mean that it makesthe work any easier or that you
(10:07):
know, if you don't underunderstand your applications,
that you're there's some likeeasy button, you still there's a
lot of work to do and a lot oftimes what tends to happen is
you end up bringing in someprofessional services or
something like that to assist inthis journey, because there's
going to be a lot of timesthere's things that a company, a
(10:29):
big company, is ready for, butthen there's a lot of things
that that company may not beready for.
So I guess where am I goingwith this?
So do you have any like uh, isthere any misconceptions that
you've seen over the years thatare maybe common with companies
as far as, like, adopting thisframework?
Like, oh, we think weunderstand this, but then you
(10:49):
start, you know the wheels startturning and you start doing
things and it's like, oh wait,we.
Ryan (10:54):
We didn't understand this as well as we thought um yeah,
so, um, as you said, it has sixpillars, um, and to repeat what
those pillars are, you haveoperations, which is always a
good place to start because itreally is an underlying pillar
across all those other fivepillars.
You've got security, you've gotcosts, you have performance,
(11:15):
you have sustainability and youhave reliability.
And what I have seen as far asmisunderstanding or even
misusing that well-actuatedframework is the well-actuated
framework team at AWS, at Azure,at GCP.
They try to make it anobjective best practices and
(11:36):
recommendations, and what I havefound after doing hundreds of
these well-educated reviews isthat the two biggest outcomes of
going through that is one,education of what best practices
look like, but number two isprioritizing your risks that are
contextual to your business,and that is, I think, the
biggest struggle that companieshave, or that AWS has trying to
(11:59):
use a blockchain framework forcustomers is trying to make an
objective across all companieswith the same level of risk
based on the same best practices, and I found that that's not
the case.
A startup has a different levelof acceptance of a risk, such as
disaster recovery, than anenterprise company does, and so,
even though the long-shadedframework might say, because you
(12:22):
don't have a good DR plan inplace, that might be a high risk
for you.
Well, that's not necessarilytrue at a startup company when
they are trying to do time tomarket, when they're trying to
prove out a market pain point,whereas opposed to the
enterprise company where everyminute downtime is an extra
$10,000 an hour right orwhatever that ends up being with
the cost level.
So that was probably the biggestfriction that the Wellic
(12:45):
framework has is that it is notsubjective to based on your
company profile.
Framework has is that it is notsubjective to base it based on
your company profile.
One of the initiatives that Itried to start at the Wellick
when I was on the Wellick teamwas creating a business profile
that would show or hidedifferent best practices based
on where we thought you werecoming from.
So a startup company that isgoing digital native from day
(13:08):
one is a completely differentlist of best practices and risks
than an enterprise company thathad a lift and shift migration
two years ago and is running a$1 million annual indie dress
spend.
So that was probably thebiggest friction that I've seen
customers experience with thatwell-intended framework and I
think and I hope that thewell-intended team is, and if
(13:31):
they're listening today.
I hope they are taking some ofthat and trying to figure out
how to adapt it to companies.
Eyvonne (13:38):
So so, as you, as you look at those frameworks and I
think you know I've worked withcustomers, I was a customer,
I've worked with customers for along time you know they often
want a prescriptive answer.
And how do you, how do youguide customers when, yeah,
you've got a framework, but butthe framework isn't a turn by
(14:02):
turn map for how to get whereyou want to go.
It's, it's a framework.
It's like well, you, you, youknow if you're, if you're in
Kentucky and you're driving toOregon, you know people need to
go, you know north and west, butit's not a turn by turn guide.
How do you help fill in thoseblanks for customers who you
know really what they reallywant is a turn by turn.
Ryan (14:26):
So that's a great question and a topic and I believe all
the cloud providers are going tohead those directions.
So, out of the well-optinatedframework about 60% of the best
practices you can be fairlyprescriptive on the
recommendation.
And because you can beprescriptive on the
recommendation, that leads tothe question of then why can't
(14:47):
that be an automatedrecommendation?
And why can't we have thatbuilt into our cloud consoles to
say now go fix it.
If you can automaticallyidentify this as a problem and
you're recommending it to me,why can't you just automatically
fix it for me?
And there are a lot of thirdparty companies out there trying
to do that.
There's also AWS.
Specifically, I think thetrusted advisor team was
(15:22):
starting to work with thewell-elected framework team
saying if you're recommendingthat all of our servers have an
encrypted EBS volume, then whenwe find one, we'll make an easy
button for the customer to saythis is your prescriptive
remediation.
For that, you know, is the isthe reality that every company
has a snowflake solution outthere.
Uh, with different tech stocks,different business priorities,
um, different recovery timeobjectives, different security
compliances, and it's reallyhard to create a
one-size-fit-all um that isinexpensive and um appropriate
(15:46):
for every company out there.
So there's always going to besome need for either
professional services companiesor for education for the
developers to come in and do itfrom the ground up.
William (15:59):
Yeah, so earlier you were talking about being on the
performance pillar, which isgreat.
Many or a lot of conversations,I think these days, at least
that I'm in, tend to resolve orrevolve around cost optimization
, you know, but sometimes itfeels like it's competing with
(16:19):
performance and there's just alot of confusion there.
Is there some like balance orsweet spot to be found, you know
, between cost and performance?
Ryan (16:30):
Absolutely, and I think that depends on your business
goals, right.
So if you have a website thatis loading after doing a page
load after 10 seconds, you haveto look at that opportunity loss
that you are experiencing withthose customers, right, that
they just can't sit around andwait and look at what that could
be if you sped that website upto less than a second type of
(16:52):
page load, would that increaseusability?
Would that increase yourexpansion of your product?
Would that include morecustomers coming on board?
You always have to look atthose third-party numbers on
what makes sense for yourcompany and for your technology
product there.
But yeah, a lot of times on theperformance, you can get bigger
servers, faster servers, fasterIOPS and that does result in an
(17:18):
instantly higher cost.
But if you can now offset thatwith more on-demand, not
reserved kind of compute for allthe times that you might need
to be running that server, soit's more scaling as your
customers scale, there's alwayskind of those offsets you can
run there.
But that was a constantconversation while I was having
(17:44):
is me and the cost pillar hisname was Ben at the time sitting
down side by side and sayinghow can we get both faster and
cheaper at the same time, and alot of times.
Then you always have theunderlying requirement of, and
we have to meet the securityrequirement, no matter how fast
and how cheap we go, and thatwas.
It's always that naturalfriction, which is why it's not
one size fits all as aremediation.
Eyvonne (18:07):
Well, and there's the.
We need the fastest performancewe can get side of the coin.
The enterprise we need comesfrom the enterprise world, which
is really where, where williamand I cut our teeth, there's
this we're going to deploy thebiggest, fastest thing there,
(18:27):
just in case, right.
And so there isn't, there isn'tmuscle memory and there aren't
skills built around determiningwhat exactly do I need.
You know, like, what does thisapplication require?
And how do I determine that sothat I'm not over deploying
(18:48):
right, because I see so manycustomers who end up upside down
in a cost scenario because theydidn't really interrogate what
kind of performance theirapplication needed and they just
over deployed because they feltlike they could and because
they have that old muscle memoryaround.
Just give me the fastest,because I've already bought it
all anyway.
Right, they're not used to, youknow, paying by the slice.
(19:10):
As an example, they're likejust give me a whole pizza.
So how do you handle that sideof it?
Ryan (19:16):
Well, the cloud providers, so AWS specifically.
They are introducing more andmore services and tools that
will help you identify thatquickly.
In the past 10 years there'sbeen a lot of companies that
have been filling that hole ofshowing you your unused CPU or
disk space or IOPS and networkusage.
But AWS now has a costoptimization dashboard that
(19:39):
really highlights for you, say,here's your unused resources and
your opportunity to shrinkthose down.
So those are the easy,low-hanging identification and
recommendations that you couldautomate that prescriptive
solution for the customers on.
There's always those exceptions,especially in the enterprise
(20:00):
world.
Virtual memory manager isalways the gotcha when you're
trying to reserve those big EC2s, those big servers where you
need memory more than you needCPU.
And so right off the bat thoseenterprises were like, well, I'm
not going to look at the memoryoptimized instance classes, I'm
(20:22):
going to just look at thegeneral ones, and because that
one has got 32 gigs of memory,that's what I'm going to use.
And then they end up having 90%of unused CPU.
So you end up getting morespecialized later down the road
into more of that memoryoptimized because of the Java
memory manager.
But yeah, aws is trying to helpthose customers.
That's one thing I actuallyreally love about AWS is they
(20:43):
are so customer obsessed.
They are willing to figure outhow to save the customer money,
even though it's going to getthem less revenue in the door,
because they believe thatcustomer is going to stick
around and use that budgetelsewhere on innovation and
growth.
William (20:56):
Great answer there, which I guess I wanted to sort
of split this up.
So I did want to talk about thewell-architected framework and
we've talked about a lot of goodthings, but what I really
wanted to talk to you about,honestly, was you know you in
2023, you co-founded Platformerwith Bill Stock.
So, first of all, was there anyparticular inspiration behind
(21:22):
going off and starting thiscompany?
Ryan (21:24):
Yeah, absolutely, and you've actually helped me kind
of talk a little bit aboutalready.
So the well-elected frameworkis really a good tool for
looking at one workload at atime, right.
A workload is a set ofcomponents that make up an
application, and so if a companyhas 15 workloads, they're doing
15 well-elected reviews.
(21:45):
Well, that's great at theworkload level, but what is it
at the organization level thatgives a whole organizational
kind of governance and bestpractices across all 15 of those
workloads?
And that's really why westarted Platformer.
We saw that companies now hadsome guidance from the
blockchain framework team on howto make one software run really
(22:06):
well and meets best practices.
They introduced the cloudcenter of excellence idea and
team for a governing group ofpeople at a enterprise company
or a midsize company to definewhat cloud best practices look
like.
But there's no tools.
There's no.
The industry is just nowmaturing to the point where now
we can start looking at thebigger company management
(22:27):
company governance across all oftheir cloud usage, and that's
why we actually startedPlatformer is some of these
services that AWS has releasedover the last four years have
just now started making itpossible to start automating
more of the organizationalgovernance where it hasn't been
existing in the past.
And so we saw that companiescoming on board AWS were still.
(22:50):
The only option they had wereprofessional services, were
consultants that gave companieskind of snowflake solutions and
their own unique spin based ontheir experiences on how to set
up company governance, to thenlook at all 15 of your workloads
, making sure they have the samegovernance for operations, for
security, for cost, forliability, to meet those
(23:13):
business requirements.
So that is the fundamentalreason why we built Platformer
was to elevate it from aworkload level up to the company
level and say let's look atthis holistically.
William (23:23):
And I'm guessing by the name Platformer.
It is a platform so kind oflike an as-a-service platform
that you would plug your as acertain kind of like an as a
service platform that you wouldplug your stuff into and begin
working on.
Is that a correct assumption?
Ryan (23:35):
It is a good.
This is a good, a goodassumption.
Um, it is a platform for cloudops.
We're for cloud governance.
Um, what we, uh our philosophyhere is um, you know Bill Stock,
my co-founder.
He's been.
He was a AWS pro serve forabout six years.
I ran a consulting company forabout 15 years.
We are taking all of ourprescriptive guidance on how to
(23:57):
build cloud governance as wellas how to manage workloads
within AWS and making that intoa product and a platform.
The number one thing thatcustomers want is just a
prescriptive answer, as you saidearlier.
It's like okay, I have aWordPress website.
Well, how do I host a WordPresswebsite on AWS?
If you go look at AWSdocumentation, they'll say
here's 30 different ways to doit, but we know as a consultant
(24:21):
there's really only one or twoways to do it right that meet
most of those businessrequirements out there.
Sorry, I picked up WordPress.
It's probably one of the leastboring or the most boring topics
of hosting technology on awebsite, but that's an example
of saying let us be a veryprescriptive push button.
Go configure AWS for you basedon your workload type and based
(24:42):
on your business requirements.
William (24:44):
That's great and you're absolutely right, building on
AWS is like is like building ahouse, like you can go to Home
Depot and say, hey, I need tobuild a house.
I'm going to say like, there'sthe nails, there's the concrete,
there's all your stuff.
Have fun, yeah, it'd be a blast, but there's got to be some
middle ground to where you dohave, you know, sort of these
platforms that bring a lot ofthings together for you and they
(25:07):
still allow you to have theflexibility of what you want
your outcome to be and, you know, sort of tie back into your
organizational structure, yourorganizational policies,
compliance and all these things.
So you still get theflexibility to choose how
something is done, but a lot ofthe tedious, the you know, all
this work under that layer iskind of abstracted to you, which
(25:31):
is great?
Ryan (25:33):
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, amazon uses the analogyof Lego blocks, right?
So Amazon's got more than 220different services, so 220
different types of Lego blocksthat they give the customers and
they kind of just say here,have fun, and you can create a
mess out of those Lego blocks ifyou really wanted to.
Where we are trying to say no,we know how to build this Lego
(25:53):
dinosaur.
Really well, let's build it foryou.
We're going to ask you a fewquestions like what color do you
want?
Some basic things that anycompany would be able to dictate
to a consulting company, andthen, 90% of the times, we're
just going to build everythingelse out behind the scenes and
take care of that for thecustomer.
Yeah, and that's where we'rereally excited to head out.
(26:14):
We're taking that.
So I see this cloud governancespace as kind of three different
areas.
You have your organizationalgovernance, which is like your
security compliance across theboard, your operations across
the board, so your standardoperating procedures for each
workload type, where usuallyeach department needs to follow.
And then your cost, your budgets, budgets, your cfo, that's
(26:35):
saying here's all my budgetsacross all my workload types.
So you have your organizationalgovernance.
And then you have yourdevelopment team or your I, your
it team's governance and, um,the the term platform
engineering has come out in thelast few years.
Um, that's kind of been builtoff of the devops, uh, role, um,
and we're taking a lot of thattoo and say now we have the
(26:55):
company governance, we're movinginto platform engineering so we
can help out your developmentteams and your product ownership
teams.
And then the final thing wewant to do is now help your
support team and understand thehealth of both your company and
your workload types, because, inthe end, that support team,
your internal security team,your IT team, your SREs they
need to understand how to definehealth between not only the
(27:18):
company but also each workloadtype that you're managing.
Eyvonne (27:22):
One of the I love the Lego analogy.
By the way, one of the thingsI've said and I believe a lot of
this is a maturity curve withpublic cloud Like it's, you know
it's just.
We are just now getting enoughinfrastructure in the public
cloud getting it's, you knowit's just.
We are just now getting enoughinfrastructure in the public
cloud, getting large enoughorganizations in there where we
realize, you know, wait, we needgovernance.
(27:43):
It used to be for me thatthings like governance, program
management, all of that weredirty words, but at the end of
the day you've got to have somestructure for how things get
done.
But the analogy that I've usedoften is that customers want a
Millennium Falcon right, theywant the Lego Millennium Falcon
(28:03):
and they want that to sit ontheir shelf and look at, and
often what they get handed is abag of gray Lego blocks without
instructions and frameworks.
Governance best practices arethe difference between that bag
of gray Lego blocks and aconstructed thing that actually
(28:25):
delivers what you want it to.
Ryan (28:29):
Yeah, I think.
I think you're absolutely right.
So, in my own words, william, Ithink platformer is the
evolution of where well-actuatedframework will go.
I think well-actuated frameworkis at a workload type, and I
think AWS has released what'scalled their cloud foundations,
best practices, which is reallythat governance at the top level
, and that's where we are tryingto start with and get ahead of
(28:52):
the customers to say there'seasy answers to this Go find
your Lego masters, your masterbuilders Is that what it's
called?
Your master builders?
And let us build out those Legosolutions for you at a time,
and you just press the go button.
So, yeah, we're excited aboutthat.
William (29:09):
I have an interesting thought Well, not interesting, I
think it's kind of a dismalthought really but a lot of
times, many, many companies,before they will go out and they
will buy a platform to do athing, they have to try it on
their own.
They have to go and build andlearn a few things the hard way.
(29:30):
Because a lot of times,depending on what, like, say,
you work on on theinfrastructure side of things,
for instance, you, you think youcan build the best
infrastructure.
You don't.
You don't want to, you don'twant help, you don't want to buy
another platform, but a lot ofthe times you don't realize it,
but you you really need it.
And so what that means is you,you basically have some
(29:50):
technical debt that you have totidy up and that technical debt
can ride for years.
Am I is that?
Has that been kind of yourexperience?
And how can?
Is there an easy way to change?
I guess that's perspective in asense.
But is there an easy way tochange perspective there?
Ryan (30:09):
Well, there's always a conversation to build versus buy
right and to the decisions thatcome into play when you're
discussing that is time tomarket is the amount of
technical debt you're willing toget on board, the expertise
that you have in house that'savailable for this?
Those are always the type ofquestions that you're going to
bring up when you do buildversus buy.
(30:29):
At least my philosophy, atleast my philosophy with
platformers specifically, isthat we are not giving you
technical debt.
From an outside vendor'sperspective, our only outcome is
100% configured AWS servicesand let AWS manage the technical
debt for you with their featureupgrades, with their service
improvements, and then a lot ofthat then requires education on
(30:54):
making sure your team is up tospeed on how to use those
services, going right out on thegate and buying that.
I've always told customers thatyou know a technology solution
has about a three to five yearlife cycle now between something
dramatically changing comingout that's going to make it
irrelevant.
So it only invests as much asyou can when you can get that
(31:15):
return on investment over afive-year period of time.
Otherwise, you're going to haveto move to another platform,
another solution, another tool,whatever that ends up being.
You need to be able toreevaluate it.
Those customers that have beenon the same platform, the same
tool, for 10, 15 years.
They're not doing themselvesany benefits there because end
up, uh, not taking advantage ofthe latest, you know, innovation
(31:36):
technology, so forth.
Especially looking right nowlike gen ai is everywhere, and
if there's a tool that doesn'thave gen ai on it, you start
re-evaluating pretty quick sothis is true.
William (31:46):
Yeah, ai is in every coming you know freshly minted
william from reinvent um ai, ai,ai.
Everywhere, actually, everyevent that I think I've been to,
uh, every event that I'veprobably been to this year,
there's been some sort of themeor rebrand towards ai.
Ryan (32:05):
Yeah, when, when we were looking at raising uh funds for
a platformer, every single oneof our investor um pitches.
Their questions was how do youuse the AI?
Where is it in your title?
Where is it your documentation?
It was obviously the, theanswer they were all looking for
.
William (32:25):
Oh, I was on mute there .
Sorry about that.
I'll have to rephrase.
I have to like look for thatline and then come back to it.
So one, one question I have aswell.
So a lot of the you know justkind of looking at what
Platformer is doing, you knowyou have a focus with AWS and
there's an outcropping of toolsand platforms and some are
(32:47):
geared towards single cloud,some are geared towards, you
know, taking on other clouds aswell.
So do you have a multi-cloudfuture or do you want to stay
like zoned in, specifically withproviding value to the AWS
ecosystem?
Ryan (33:01):
So have you been talking to my investors?
Is that why you bring up thatquestion?
William (33:06):
So to kind of like back that up, I actually work for a
company, a network platform,that builds infrastructure, and
we do so for kind of like whatyou all would do with your area
of expertise.
We do for networking, and we doit across multiple clouds now,
so I usually lead with thatquestion.
Ryan (33:26):
So right now my team's expertise is in AWS.
My support system is in AWS,whether it's partners and
customers, whether it's the AWSleadership.
So we have more momentum withinthe AWS world right now.
I think obviously their theirTAM SAM SOM if I just looked at
(33:50):
AWS is quite large on the numberof customers that I can onboard
into a platformer.
I also will get more fundingopportunities from AWS if I say
I'm AWS only.
So there's a lot of reasons whytoday I am saying I'm a single
cloud solution.
Now what I'm hoping for is, asexpansion comes, as I get a
(34:12):
critical mass of customers inAWS and I end up being the go-to
answer for Greenfield customersgoing to AWS on its migrations
or Visual Native, or for thosemodernization clients that are
looking to fix their cloudgovernance, then it will start
looking into Azure and maybeeven GCP.
But that'll be down the road.
(34:34):
That'll be when I don't needAWS funding to help me scale,
because once I say I'mmulti-cloud, I lose a lot of the
individual funding per cloud.
So, yes, it's coming in thefuture, but only time will tell
when.
That is yeah and I'll have tohire some leadership that are
more familiar with the otherclouds.
I was an Azure partner back inthe day, but then I quickly
(34:57):
switched to AWS, I think in 2012, and then never looked back
after that.
William (35:03):
Yeah, well, it's funny.
I think I remember I was naiveat one point when I was working
for a company that was one cloudand and I learned that cloud
fairly well it was AWS, and thenwe went multi-cloud and the
multi-cloud decision wasn't mydecision, of course, but I was
(35:25):
overconfident, I think, at thetime, in our ability to actually
set up the governance, thewhole scaffolding of that second
cloud.
You just don't know, until yougo and you try to do it, you
think things, kubernetes,platforms between clouds, and
they're very different, evenlike the network buckets that
(35:58):
you place them in, how they spanand how they scale across
regions and availability zonesand all these things.
There's so many differences andthey're tiny differences, but
all those tiny littledifferences they add up to just
change, you know, entirelychange the architecture really.
So, yeah, it's definitely andyou threw I've met a few folks
(36:21):
out there that are very deep inmore than one cloud like very
deep, like great expertise, butit's a lot, especially if you're
looking beyond one tight.
You know multiple services,infrastructure and you bring in
more things.
It's definitely a hugechallenge.
Ryan (36:38):
So that's usually a hill I will die on is when I give
advice to customers.
When they always ask me, shouldI be multi-cloud?
And they have a choice from dayone, I usually will say no, go
single cloud only.
The benefits of going singlecloud far outweigh the benefits
of being multi cloud, unlessthere's a really good reason,
whether it's a compliance reasonor because you're getting half
(37:02):
a million dollars in funds fromAzure and they want you to put
something on Azure or AWS.
I've never regretted sayingthat to customers.
If you have a choice, I'd gosingle cloud.
That piggybacks off my laststatement, though, of saying but
if you get so far into theweeds and you end up backing
yourself into a corner, youalways have to reevaluate that
(37:22):
decision in the future, and soit's never a one-time decision
to move on.
You always have to rethink that.
But the investment you have ineducating your staff, the
partnership that you give withcloud whether it's AWS or Azure
or GCP the support that they'llgive you to be on that single
cloud Coming from theperformance pillar expertise the
(37:44):
deeper you go into a technology, the more you know how
something in cloud native works,the better performance is going
to be, the less costly it'sgoing to be, the more secure
it's going to be.
If you try to baseline, like,normalize your technology stack
like Kubernetes is a greatexample.
So you can put it theoreticallyfrom AWS to Azure to on-prem,
you're going to increase all ofyour costs, you're going to
(38:06):
decrease all of your performanceand you're going to make it a
little less secure because ofthat.
So it dumbs down all of yourbenefits when you go multi-cloud
.
William (38:16):
Yeah, I remember there was some big hype around
Kubernetes and I think it waslike DR.
This was like years ago, Evenat some of the companies I
worked for.
Like there was this thoughtthat, you know, a containerized
workload can just be placedanywhere.
So we want the best diversitypossible, so we're going to have
an app that lives in one cloudin one region and then for that
(38:37):
other region it's going to be adifferent cloud in a region.
And you know, really the rightway to do that is to do, you
know, span across availabilityzones, of course, and then do
regional DR with a single cloudprovider.
Like usually taking a singleapplication and running that
across multiple clouds doesn'tmake much sense.
(38:57):
Well, I don't think it wouldever make sense, unless maybe
someone if you're out there andthis makes sense and you've done
something valuable with it,reach out, we would love to have
you on.
Yeah, that's yeah.
Ryan (39:08):
I've helped a few enterprise companies be
multi-cloud for the sole purposeof disaster recovery and
typically the complexity thatthat adds, because in the end,
you still have the single pointof failure, which is typically
your DNS management, yourrouting, network routing, and a
long time is during those gamedays where you test out your
disaster recovery solution.
(39:29):
You end up figuring, you end upfinding, coming to the
conclusion you're like huh, howdo we take care of this?
Because, for example, in AWS,if their US East 1 region goes
down, which is their controlplane, it's where they manage
all of their services.
If that goes down, there's noway for me to manage Route 53,
even if I need to point it toAzure, Azure.
(39:51):
And then if I end up moving toa third-party DNS round or low,
underlying are those third-partyDNS?
Is it on-prem, Is it hosted byAWS or Azure behind the scenes?
It's so hard to be trulyredundant across the board and
so sticking with one cloudprovider, being multi-region,
having air gaps in place formultiple accounts, is your best
(40:12):
bet.
And because, as you said, ifyou're not building an
application that uses that cloudnative, there's so many
disadvantages of making itobjective, of making it
standalone and not dependent onthe cloud services.
You're losing so much value outof that that you would only
really see the value of that ifyour environment goes down.
(40:35):
Again and again and again youend up using that disaster
recovery environment.
Eyvonne (40:39):
Well, dependency mapping has always been a
challenge, right, and especiallydependency mapping over time,
because you may have yourdependency maps built out in the
very beginning, but thenservices move around and you
don't always completely redoyour dependency map, right?
I mean, we ran into this in theearly days of virtualization,
(41:00):
right, where you would have a,you would have a domain
controller that was hardwarebased, but then at some point it
was like well, everything'svirtualized, now let's just
virtualize these remainingdomain controllers.
Then, all of a sudden, you havea virtualization outage.
Oh, by the way, now your domaincontrollers are down and you
can't authenticate anything.
Right, like this is a15-year-old problem that has not
(41:21):
gotten better.
That's actually gotten worsewith the cloud, those dependency
mappings, and you're absolutelyright If you lose identity, if
you lose DNS, nothing elsematters.
I think so.
The thing I've seen customers dothat I think works really well
is you select a primary cloud.
That's where the vast majorityof your workloads go.
Undifferentiated services aregoing to run in that cloud.
(41:44):
It's your primary.
And then if you have adifferentiated service that you
need to run in another cloud,sure, you can do that and that
may make sense.
But you're absolutely right onthe contractual pieces, the
discounting the cloudrelationship, and and I've seen
organizations who have tried totake a um unopinionated view of
(42:08):
cloud um, and it just doesn'twork.
Well, it's, it's very expensive.
You end up with services thatrun in a million different
places, that are managed by amillion different people, and
and then how do you govern that?
Right?
And so, while I might argue fora different public cloud to be
your primary cloud, I still verymuch agree that that you need a
(42:32):
primary cloud to run yourservices in, and that's what's
going to make organizationalsense for you, and to not make
that decision is really, frankly, a failure of leadership for
your organization.
Ryan (42:43):
Yeah.
What I have found, though, isback to the original topic of
cloud governance, is some ofthose questions, and guidance is
still missing out there in theindustry in general.
It's saying pick a primary cloudfor most of your control plane,
for your identity, for your DNS, for your services that are
kind of singletons like that andthen this is how to back into a
(43:04):
multi-cloud strategy, or thisis how to back into a disaster
recovery in a single cloudenvironment.
So there's still a lot of, I'dsay, missing industry best
practices that are from acentral source or from an
authority at some level, and sothat's really where I think the
future of cloud is going to goover the next few years.
Looking at the Amazon servicesor the, even the Azure services
that have been released in thelast three years so many more of
(43:26):
them are now at the governanceletter level at this that it's
just now.
This industry is just nowstarting to bring up this more
broader topic, just like thisyear.
Up until now, it was trying tosolve issues from the bottom up,
and I think we're just now ableto get from the top and start
going down now.
William (43:44):
Yeah, that's a great way to put it.
I think I'm fresh.
I'm fresh out of questions.
What about you, Yvonne?
Do you got anything else youwant to hit on?
Eyvonne (43:51):
No, I think it's been a great conversation.
William (43:52):
Yeah, I think it's been a great conversation.
Yeah, I think we're hitting ourtime cap.
Which good timing.
But if the audience wants tofind you, ryan, where can they
find you at?
Ryan (44:02):
Well, you can find me on LinkedIn If you search for my
name, ryan Kimgear, or you canfind me on the platformercloud
website, and that's no E beforethe last R, so platformercloud.
William (44:16):
I love that.
By the way, that is just areally uh you know, it's so hard
to find a name that is likedifferent, that stands out,
that's not overly complicated orjust something random, and it
is like true, to kind of likewhat you're doing.
But yeah, that's a really coolname.
So kudos on the brain architectbehind the name and the brand.
Ryan (44:38):
So, to bring this back to the beginning, I think I'm going
to try to make that a Gen Zslang word, so people just start
naturally saying it in the inthe everyday language.
William (44:47):
I dig it.
The well-elected framework is really a good tool for
looking at one workload at atime.
Right.
A workload is a set ofcomponents that make up an
application.
If a company has 15 workloads,they're doing 15 well-elected
reviews.
Well, that's great at theworkload level, but what is it
at the organization level thatgives the whole organizational
kind of governance and bestpractices across all 15 of those
(00:21):
workloads?
William (00:34):
Hello world.
I am your host, william, andI'm here to bring that main
character, energy, no cap.
And with me is my co-host,yvonne Sharp, one of the
greatest minds in deductivereasoning and literally slaying
that cheesecake game daily.
She's so based, it's actuallyunhinged.
(00:57):
How are you doing today, yvonne?
Eyvonne (01:00):
I have no idea what you just said.
You're trying to be the coolkid on the block and you need a
new crowd because it's over myhead, man.
William (01:12):
So for the audience, my you know again, my son plays a
travel sport.
So I'm in this locker room withall these eight, nine and 10
year olds and they talk in adifferent language and I'm
trying very hard to learn someof that language, but it's
honestly like learning acomplete new language.
It's pretty wild.
Eyvonne (01:29):
When we were children, all you had to say was something
was bad, which actually backthen meant it was good, and our
elders gave us the eye roll, andI feel like that challenge has
increased, or that dynamic isjust growing exponentially.
(01:49):
Like they're not even words now.
William (01:52):
So Agreed, yeah, joining us today is Ryan
Cummingdeer, ceo at Platformer.
So, first of all, thanks forjoining us today, ryan, and how
are things going?
Did you?
Do you have all the Christmasshopping done?
Ryan (02:07):
I do have all the Christmas shopping done.
This year we jumped ahead alittle bit before Thanksgiving
to take care of a lot of thosethis year.
William (02:16):
Talk about prepared.
I love it.
That's awesome.
Ryan (02:20):
We actually opened Christmas gifts a little bit
already.
So my kids, can you know, whilethey're out of school, spend
the whole Christmas breakplaying with their toys.
Eyvonne (02:31):
Awesome.
William (02:32):
I wish my parents would have done that with me growing
up.
Thank you again for joining us.
I think we both had theopportunity to be at reInvent
this last year and just kind oflooking through.
A lot of your experience hasbeen in cloud, or at least your
more recent experience.
But let's go back maybe alittle bit further first.
(02:52):
You know, do you want to giveus just kind of a quick overview
of your background, Like, wasit always grounded in software
or how did you get to where youare today?
Ryan (03:02):
Sure, long story short, I took my first programming class
in seventh grade, loved it eversince.
So I was in app development andprogramming from the mid to late
90s, all the way until today,did a lot of consulting, a lot
of application building, mobileapps, web apps, enterprise like
(03:23):
B2B apps as well.
But, yeah, I got introduced tothe cloud and I think 2008.
At that time I had a datacenter where I hosted all of my
websites that I built and thatdata center went down while I
was on vacation and I had todrive all the way back into town
.
I was like a six hour drive inthe middle of the night to work
(03:43):
on my servers and I thinkshortly after that I said where
can I put these that are not inmy closet anymore?
So I think 2008 is when Istarted looking at AWS at that
time.
So I've moving all my serversup to EC2s.
And then after that it was kindof a history from AWS's
perspective.
I joined AWS on every one ofthe services they started
working on for the last 15 yearsand have never looked back.
Eyvonne (04:07):
It's got to be a better way.
Moment.
When we were hostinginfrastructure right Years ago,
I worked for an engineering firmand the cooling apparatus that
was in our data center wouldfrequently go out and there were
no windows.
There was no, and you know, Iremember, in the middle of the
dice storm, the power went out.
(04:28):
Driving to the office andtrying to like skate up the
frozen driveway to get in thebuilding, to open the door, to
set up, you know, to try andcool it, with no power in the
building other than thegenerator power that was running
the systems but not the coolant.
And uh yeah, we've, we've allbeen like there's got to be a
(04:49):
better way yeah, not having toworry about that infrastructure
is is pretty a pretty big dealyeah, that's exactly what I was
gonna say is, for those of usthat love the software side of
things, uh, dealing with thehardware and the infrastructure.
Ryan (05:03):
Was that necessary evil that we were happy to get rid of
?
So?
William (05:07):
absolutely yeah.
Even with if you think aboutjust uh, things, things in the
past that were so hard like ifyou had, like, multiple data
centers, you have to make sureyour, your application is highly
available.
You know, the bigger thecompany means you probably have
some dr to look after as well,and having to build out your
(05:28):
high availability in DR acrossmultiple data centers for a
highly distributed application,versus doing it in cloud, it is
much different and much easier.
Ryan (05:40):
I think, as we say, the undifferentiated heavy lifting
that every company has used todo by doing disaster recovery
environments, by doinginfrastructure management, is
now mostly removed at some leveland as far as the full-time
jobs that require that specialtyknowledge, now you've
transitioned to more of thatcloud specialty knowledge and
hopefully have that opportunityto scale more.
William (06:03):
Yeah, so let's talk.
I mean, one of the things youhave experience with is the AWS
Well-Architected Framework, orat least what I could see from
some of the work that you'vedone.
If you had to, I guess, if youhad to explain what this
framework is to you know maybesomeone in a coffee shop that
doesn't know tech as well as youdo how would you explain it?
Ryan (06:27):
Um, I would probably start with why I even looked at the
well-actuated framework um andwhy I started there.
Um, so, as I had built up mycompanies over the last 15 years
, um, I I was helping a lot, Iwas a consultant and I was
helping a lot of customers overand over and over again, most of
them in that startup to smallto medium size and they were
(06:47):
asking for a softwaredevelopment company to come in
and help them out.
But what they really needed wasa CTO to kind of tell them how
to manage their technology, howto look at everything from
security of the software toreliability of the software, to
the cost Make sure that the costof the goods sold is matching
what the revenue model lookslike for their customers.
So more and more of thosecustomers started leaning on us
(07:09):
to give them more than justtechnology what they said
technology, software developmentguidance, but really kind of
business guidance.
And so I kind of built my ownlittle internal framework back
in like 2012, just for like achecklist of things that I think
I talked to the customers about.
But then when Amazon came outwith that well-elected framework
that replaced mine and it wasby far the most holistic kind of
(07:32):
business checklist of how youshould look at technology, how
to manage as far as like, bestpractices things, questions.
You should ask yourself whetheryou are outsourcing your IT
team, whether you have anin-house IT team, whether your
technology is in the cloud orwhether your technology is
on-prem.
It asks you all the rightquestions to at least think
through what matters to thebusiness.
And so I started working, Ithink, as a beta partner for the
(07:55):
Well-Contributed team in like2016.
And then when it launched, Ithink me personally did more
well-experienced reviews thanany other solutions architect
over like a four-year period, soI really enjoyed it.
As I told other, my job titleat the time was a CTO and as I
(08:15):
told other CTOs, like, if youwant to be a good CTO, you've
got to memorize awell-experienced framework.
It gives you this framework,this lane to stay in to say this
is what good looks like, but ithelps you kind of communicate
that to the other costdepartments, security
departments, operations, thatproduct owners for usability and
performance.
(08:35):
So it helps you translate fromjust writing the code and
getting the job done to actuallywhat matters to business.
So it was kind of my CTO Bible,I guess you can say, for a long
time.
I sold my company in 2020.
And then, after I sold mycompany, I went and joined that
Lockdown team.
So I became a pillar lead forthat Lockdown team.
Just because I loved it so muchand I wanted to kind of keep
(08:58):
seeing it mature and grow andget to more of the customers,
get to more of the lessonslearned.
I was like okay, well, whatdidn't the walkthrough framework
cover?
What pain points was a surpriseto the customer?
Because they went through thisand we had a gap.
And so I wanted to kind ofstart filling in some more of
those gaps on the walkthroughframework and I really enjoyed
(09:19):
working on those best practicesand understanding how it impacts
customers.
William (09:24):
That's awesome.
I love how they have.
For those of you that don'tknow, there's six pillars.
Which pillar did you work withspecifically?
Ryan (09:35):
I was in charge of the performance pillar, which by far
is the most technical pillar,and it was probably because of
my application developmentbackground.
William (09:44):
I know that, like there's so like I had the
opportunity to go through and dosome things with this framework
as well, like in a, you know,within a real company.
And one of the things that Ithought was interesting just
because you have these, thiswell-architected framework, it
doesn't mean that it makes thework any easier.
It doesn't mean that it makesthe work any easier or that you
(10:07):
know, if you don't underunderstand your applications,
that you're there's some likeeasy button, you still there's a
lot of work to do and a lot oftimes what tends to happen is
you end up bringing in someprofessional services or
something like that to assist inthis journey, because there's
going to be a lot of timesthere's things that a company, a
(10:29):
big company, is ready for, butthen there's a lot of things
that that company may not beready for.
So I guess where am I goingwith this?
So do you have any like uh, isthere any misconceptions that
you've seen over the years thatare maybe common with companies
as far as, like, adopting thisframework?
Like, oh, we think weunderstand this, but then you
(10:49):
start, you know the wheels startturning and you start doing
things and it's like, oh wait,we.
Ryan (10:54):
We didn't understand this as well as we thought um yeah,
so, um, as you said, it has sixpillars, um, and to repeat what
those pillars are, you haveoperations, which is always a
good place to start because itreally is an underlying pillar
across all those other fivepillars.
You've got security, you've gotcosts, you have performance,
(11:15):
you have sustainability and youhave reliability.
And what I have seen as far asmisunderstanding or even
misusing that well-actuatedframework is the well-actuated
framework team at AWS, at Azure,at GCP.
They try to make it anobjective best practices and
(11:36):
recommendations, and what I havefound after doing hundreds of
these well-educated reviews isthat the two biggest outcomes of
going through that is one,education of what best practices
look like, but number two isprioritizing your risks that are
contextual to your business,and that is, I think, the
biggest struggle that companieshave, or that AWS has trying to
(11:59):
use a blockchain framework forcustomers is trying to make an
objective across all companieswith the same level of risk
based on the same best practices, and I found that that's not
the case.
A startup has a different levelof acceptance of a risk, such as
disaster recovery, than anenterprise company does, and so,
even though the long-shadedframework might say, because you
(12:22):
don't have a good DR plan inplace, that might be a high risk
for you.
Well, that's not necessarilytrue at a startup company when
they are trying to do time tomarket, when they're trying to
prove out a market pain point,whereas opposed to the
enterprise company where everyminute downtime is an extra
$10,000 an hour right orwhatever that ends up being with
the cost level.
So that was probably the biggestfriction that the Wellic
(12:45):
framework has is that it is notsubjective to based on your
company profile.
Framework has is that it is notsubjective to base it based on
your company profile.
One of the initiatives that Itried to start at the Wellick
when I was on the Wellick teamwas creating a business profile
that would show or hidedifferent best practices based
on where we thought you werecoming from.
So a startup company that isgoing digital native from day
(13:08):
one is a completely differentlist of best practices and risks
than an enterprise company thathad a lift and shift migration
two years ago and is running a$1 million annual indie dress
spend.
So that was probably thebiggest friction that I've seen
customers experience with thatwell-intended framework and I
think and I hope that thewell-intended team is, and if
(13:31):
they're listening today.
I hope they are taking some ofthat and trying to figure out
how to adapt it to companies.
Eyvonne (13:38):
So so, as you, as you look at those frameworks and I
think you know I've worked withcustomers, I was a customer,
I've worked with customers for along time you know they often
want a prescriptive answer.
And how do you, how do youguide customers when, yeah,
you've got a framework, but butthe framework isn't a turn by
(14:02):
turn map for how to get whereyou want to go.
It's, it's a framework.
It's like well, you, you, youknow if you're, if you're in
Kentucky and you're driving toOregon, you know people need to
go, you know north and west, butit's not a turn by turn guide.
How do you help fill in thoseblanks for customers who you
know really what they reallywant is a turn by turn.
Ryan (14:26):
So that's a great question and a topic and I believe all
the cloud providers are going tohead those directions.
So, out of the well-optinatedframework about 60% of the best
practices you can be fairlyprescriptive on the
recommendation.
And because you can beprescriptive on the
recommendation, that leads tothe question of then why can't
(14:47):
that be an automatedrecommendation?
And why can't we have thatbuilt into our cloud consoles to
say now go fix it.
If you can automaticallyidentify this as a problem and
you're recommending it to me,why can't you just automatically
fix it for me?
And there are a lot of thirdparty companies out there trying
to do that.
There's also AWS.
Specifically, I think thetrusted advisor team was
(15:22):
starting to work with thewell-elected framework team
saying if you're recommendingthat all of our servers have an
encrypted EBS volume, then whenwe find one, we'll make an easy
button for the customer to saythis is your prescriptive
remediation.
For that, you know, is the isthe reality that every company
has a snowflake solution outthere.
Uh, with different tech stocks,different business priorities,
um, different recovery timeobjectives, different security
compliances, and it's reallyhard to create a
one-size-fit-all um that isinexpensive and um appropriate
(15:46):
for every company out there.
So there's always going to besome need for either
professional services companiesor for education for the
developers to come in and do itfrom the ground up.
William (15:59):
Yeah, so earlier you were talking about being on the
performance pillar, which isgreat.
Many or a lot of conversations,I think these days, at least
that I'm in, tend to resolve orrevolve around cost optimization
, you know, but sometimes itfeels like it's competing with
(16:19):
performance and there's just alot of confusion there.
Is there some like balance orsweet spot to be found, you know
, between cost and performance?
Ryan (16:30):
Absolutely, and I think that depends on your business
goals, right.
So if you have a website thatis loading after doing a page
load after 10 seconds, you haveto look at that opportunity loss
that you are experiencing withthose customers, right, that
they just can't sit around andwait and look at what that could
be if you sped that website upto less than a second type of
(16:52):
page load, would that increaseusability?
Would that increase yourexpansion of your product?
Would that include morecustomers coming on board?
You always have to look atthose third-party numbers on
what makes sense for yourcompany and for your technology
product there.
But yeah, a lot of times on theperformance, you can get bigger
servers, faster servers, fasterIOPS and that does result in an
(17:18):
instantly higher cost.
But if you can now offset thatwith more on-demand, not
reserved kind of compute for allthe times that you might need
to be running that server, soit's more scaling as your
customers scale, there's alwayskind of those offsets you can
run there.
But that was a constantconversation while I was having
(17:44):
is me and the cost pillar hisname was Ben at the time sitting
down side by side and sayinghow can we get both faster and
cheaper at the same time, and alot of times.
Then you always have theunderlying requirement of, and
we have to meet the securityrequirement, no matter how fast
and how cheap we go, and thatwas.
It's always that naturalfriction, which is why it's not
one size fits all as aremediation.
Eyvonne (18:07):
Well, and there's the.
We need the fastest performancewe can get side of the coin.
The enterprise we need comesfrom the enterprise world, which
is really where, where williamand I cut our teeth, there's
this we're going to deploy thebiggest, fastest thing there,
(18:27):
just in case, right.
And so there isn't, there isn'tmuscle memory and there aren't
skills built around determiningwhat exactly do I need.
You know, like, what does thisapplication require?
And how do I determine that sothat I'm not over deploying
(18:48):
right, because I see so manycustomers who end up upside down
in a cost scenario because theydidn't really interrogate what
kind of performance theirapplication needed and they just
over deployed because they feltlike they could and because
they have that old muscle memoryaround.
Just give me the fastest,because I've already bought it
all anyway.
Right, they're not used to, youknow, paying by the slice.
(19:10):
As an example, they're likejust give me a whole pizza.
So how do you handle that sideof it?
Ryan (19:16):
Well, the cloud providers, so AWS specifically.
They are introducing more andmore services and tools that
will help you identify thatquickly.
In the past 10 years there'sbeen a lot of companies that
have been filling that hole ofshowing you your unused CPU or
disk space or IOPS and networkusage.
But AWS now has a costoptimization dashboard that
(19:39):
really highlights for you, say,here's your unused resources and
your opportunity to shrinkthose down.
So those are the easy,low-hanging identification and
recommendations that you couldautomate that prescriptive
solution for the customers on.
There's always those exceptions,especially in the enterprise
(20:00):
world.
Virtual memory manager isalways the gotcha when you're
trying to reserve those big EC2s, those big servers where you
need memory more than you needCPU.
And so right off the bat thoseenterprises were like, well, I'm
not going to look at the memoryoptimized instance classes, I'm
(20:22):
going to just look at thegeneral ones, and because that
one has got 32 gigs of memory,that's what I'm going to use.
And then they end up having 90%of unused CPU.
So you end up getting morespecialized later down the road
into more of that memoryoptimized because of the Java
memory manager.
But yeah, aws is trying to helpthose customers.
That's one thing I actuallyreally love about AWS is they
(20:43):
are so customer obsessed.
They are willing to figure outhow to save the customer money,
even though it's going to getthem less revenue in the door,
because they believe thatcustomer is going to stick
around and use that budgetelsewhere on innovation and
growth.
William (20:56):
Great answer there, which I guess I wanted to sort
of split this up.
So I did want to talk about thewell-architected framework and
we've talked about a lot of goodthings, but what I really
wanted to talk to you about,honestly, was you know you in
2023, you co-founded Platformerwith Bill Stock.
So, first of all, was there anyparticular inspiration behind
(21:22):
going off and starting thiscompany?
Ryan (21:24):
Yeah, absolutely, and you've actually helped me kind
of talk a little bit aboutalready.
So the well-elected frameworkis really a good tool for
looking at one workload at atime, right.
A workload is a set ofcomponents that make up an
application, and so if a companyhas 15 workloads, they're doing
15 well-elected reviews.
(21:45):
Well, that's great at theworkload level, but what is it
at the organization level thatgives a whole organizational
kind of governance and bestpractices across all 15 of those
workloads?
And that's really why westarted Platformer.
We saw that companies now hadsome guidance from the
blockchain framework team on howto make one software run really
(22:06):
well and meets best practices.
They introduced the cloudcenter of excellence idea and
team for a governing group ofpeople at a enterprise company
or a midsize company to definewhat cloud best practices look
like.
But there's no tools.
There's no.
The industry is just nowmaturing to the point where now
we can start looking at thebigger company management
(22:27):
company governance across all oftheir cloud usage, and that's
why we actually startedPlatformer is some of these
services that AWS has releasedover the last four years have
just now started making itpossible to start automating
more of the organizationalgovernance where it hasn't been
existing in the past.
And so we saw that companiescoming on board AWS were still.
(22:50):
The only option they had wereprofessional services, were
consultants that gave companieskind of snowflake solutions and
their own unique spin based ontheir experiences on how to set
up company governance, to thenlook at all 15 of your workloads
, making sure they have the samegovernance for operations, for
security, for cost, forliability, to meet those
(23:13):
business requirements.
So that is the fundamentalreason why we built Platformer
was to elevate it from aworkload level up to the company
level and say let's look atthis holistically.
William (23:23):
And I'm guessing by the name Platformer.
It is a platform so kind oflike an as-a-service platform
that you would plug your as acertain kind of like an as a
service platform that you wouldplug your stuff into and begin
working on.
Is that a correct assumption?
Ryan (23:35):
It is a good.
This is a good, a goodassumption.
Um, it is a platform for cloudops.
We're for cloud governance.
Um, what we, uh our philosophyhere is um, you know Bill Stock,
my co-founder.
He's been.
He was a AWS pro serve forabout six years.
I ran a consulting company forabout 15 years.
We are taking all of ourprescriptive guidance on how to
(23:57):
build cloud governance as wellas how to manage workloads
within AWS and making that intoa product and a platform.
The number one thing thatcustomers want is just a
prescriptive answer, as you saidearlier.
It's like okay, I have aWordPress website.
Well, how do I host a WordPresswebsite on AWS?
If you go look at AWSdocumentation, they'll say
here's 30 different ways to doit, but we know as a consultant
(24:21):
there's really only one or twoways to do it right that meet
most of those businessrequirements out there.
Sorry, I picked up WordPress.
It's probably one of the leastboring or the most boring topics
of hosting technology on awebsite, but that's an example
of saying let us be a veryprescriptive push button.
Go configure AWS for you basedon your workload type and based
(24:42):
on your business requirements.
William (24:44):
That's great and you're absolutely right, building on
AWS is like is like building ahouse, like you can go to Home
Depot and say, hey, I need tobuild a house.
I'm going to say like, there'sthe nails, there's the concrete,
there's all your stuff.
Have fun, yeah, it'd be a blast, but there's got to be some
middle ground to where you dohave, you know, sort of these
platforms that bring a lot ofthings together for you and they
(25:07):
still allow you to have theflexibility of what you want
your outcome to be and, you know, sort of tie back into your
organizational structure, yourorganizational policies,
compliance and all these things.
So you still get theflexibility to choose how
something is done, but a lot ofthe tedious, the you know, all
this work under that layer iskind of abstracted to you, which
(25:31):
is great?
Ryan (25:33):
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, amazon uses the analogyof Lego blocks, right?
So Amazon's got more than 220different services, so 220
different types of Lego blocksthat they give the customers and
they kind of just say here,have fun, and you can create a
mess out of those Lego blocks ifyou really wanted to.
Where we are trying to say no,we know how to build this Lego
(25:53):
dinosaur.
Really well, let's build it foryou.
We're going to ask you a fewquestions like what color do you
want?
Some basic things that anycompany would be able to dictate
to a consulting company, andthen, 90% of the times, we're
just going to build everythingelse out behind the scenes and
take care of that for thecustomer.
Yeah, and that's where we'rereally excited to head out.
(26:14):
We're taking that.
So I see this cloud governancespace as kind of three different
areas.
You have your organizationalgovernance, which is like your
security compliance across theboard, your operations across
the board, so your standardoperating procedures for each
workload type, where usuallyeach department needs to follow.
And then your cost, your budgets, budgets, your cfo, that's
(26:35):
saying here's all my budgetsacross all my workload types.
So you have your organizationalgovernance.
And then you have yourdevelopment team or your I, your
it team's governance and, um,the the term platform
engineering has come out in thelast few years.
Um, that's kind of been builtoff of the devops, uh, role, um,
and we're taking a lot of thattoo and say now we have the
(26:55):
company governance, we're movinginto platform engineering so we
can help out your developmentteams and your product ownership
teams.
And then the final thing wewant to do is now help your
support team and understand thehealth of both your company and
your workload types, because, inthe end, that support team,
your internal security team,your IT team, your SREs they
need to understand how to definehealth between not only the
(27:18):
company but also each workloadtype that you're managing.
Eyvonne (27:22):
One of the I love the Lego analogy.
By the way, one of the thingsI've said and I believe a lot of
this is a maturity curve withpublic cloud Like it's, you know
it's just.
We are just now getting enoughinfrastructure in the public
cloud getting it's, you knowit's just.
We are just now getting enoughinfrastructure in the public
cloud, getting large enoughorganizations in there where we
realize, you know, wait, we needgovernance.
(27:43):
It used to be for me thatthings like governance, program
management, all of that weredirty words, but at the end of
the day you've got to have somestructure for how things get
done.
But the analogy that I've usedoften is that customers want a
Millennium Falcon right, theywant the Lego Millennium Falcon
(28:03):
and they want that to sit ontheir shelf and look at, and
often what they get handed is abag of gray Lego blocks without
instructions and frameworks.
Governance best practices arethe difference between that bag
of gray Lego blocks and aconstructed thing that actually
(28:25):
delivers what you want it to.
Ryan (28:29):
Yeah, I think.
I think you're absolutely right.
So, in my own words, william, Ithink platformer is the
evolution of where well-actuatedframework will go.
I think well-actuated frameworkis at a workload type, and I
think AWS has released what'scalled their cloud foundations,
best practices, which is reallythat governance at the top level
, and that's where we are tryingto start with and get ahead of
(28:52):
the customers to say there'seasy answers to this Go find
your Lego masters, your masterbuilders Is that what it's
called?
Your master builders?
And let us build out those Legosolutions for you at a time,
and you just press the go button.
So, yeah, we're excited aboutthat.
William (29:09):
I have an interesting thought Well, not interesting, I
think it's kind of a dismalthought really but a lot of
times, many, many companies,before they will go out and they
will buy a platform to do athing, they have to try it on
their own.
They have to go and build andlearn a few things the hard way.
(29:30):
Because a lot of times,depending on what, like, say,
you work on on theinfrastructure side of things,
for instance, you, you think youcan build the best
infrastructure.
You don't.
You don't want to, you don'twant help, you don't want to buy
another platform, but a lot ofthe times you don't realize it,
but you you really need it.
And so what that means is you,you basically have some
(29:50):
technical debt that you have totidy up and that technical debt
can ride for years.
Am I is that?
Has that been kind of yourexperience?
And how can?
Is there an easy way to change?
I guess that's perspective in asense.
But is there an easy way tochange perspective there?
Ryan (30:09):
Well, there's always a conversation to build versus buy
right and to the decisions thatcome into play when you're
discussing that is time tomarket is the amount of
technical debt you're willing toget on board, the expertise
that you have in house that'savailable for this?
Those are always the type ofquestions that you're going to
bring up when you do buildversus buy.
(30:29):
At least my philosophy, atleast my philosophy with
platformers specifically, isthat we are not giving you
technical debt.
From an outside vendor'sperspective, our only outcome is
100% configured AWS servicesand let AWS manage the technical
debt for you with their featureupgrades, with their service
improvements, and then a lot ofthat then requires education on
(30:54):
making sure your team is up tospeed on how to use those
services, going right out on thegate and buying that.
I've always told customers thatyou know a technology solution
has about a three to five yearlife cycle now between something
dramatically changing comingout that's going to make it
irrelevant.
So it only invests as much asyou can when you can get that
(31:15):
return on investment over afive-year period of time.
Otherwise, you're going to haveto move to another platform,
another solution, another tool,whatever that ends up being.
You need to be able toreevaluate it.
Those customers that have beenon the same platform, the same
tool, for 10, 15 years.
They're not doing themselvesany benefits there because end
up, uh, not taking advantage ofthe latest, you know, innovation
(31:36):
technology, so forth.
Especially looking right nowlike gen ai is everywhere, and
if there's a tool that doesn'thave gen ai on it, you start
re-evaluating pretty quick sothis is true.
William (31:46):
Yeah, ai is in every coming you know freshly minted
william from reinvent um ai, ai,ai.
Everywhere, actually, everyevent that I think I've been to,
uh, every event that I'veprobably been to this year,
there's been some sort of themeor rebrand towards ai.
Ryan (32:05):
Yeah, when, when we were looking at raising uh funds for
a platformer, every single oneof our investor um pitches.
Their questions was how do youuse the AI?
Where is it in your title?
Where is it your documentation?
It was obviously the, theanswer they were all looking for
.
William (32:25):
Oh, I was on mute there .
Sorry about that.
I'll have to rephrase.
I have to like look for thatline and then come back to it.
So one, one question I have aswell.
So a lot of the you know justkind of looking at what
Platformer is doing, you knowyou have a focus with AWS and
there's an outcropping of toolsand platforms and some are
(32:47):
geared towards single cloud,some are geared towards, you
know, taking on other clouds aswell.
So do you have a multi-cloudfuture or do you want to stay
like zoned in, specifically withproviding value to the AWS
ecosystem?
Ryan (33:01):
So have you been talking to my investors?
Is that why you bring up thatquestion?
William (33:06):
So to kind of like back that up, I actually work for a
company, a network platform,that builds infrastructure, and
we do so for kind of like whatyou all would do with your area
of expertise.
We do for networking, and we doit across multiple clouds now,
so I usually lead with thatquestion.
Ryan (33:26):
So right now my team's expertise is in AWS.
My support system is in AWS,whether it's partners and
customers, whether it's the AWSleadership.
So we have more momentum withinthe AWS world right now.
I think obviously their theirTAM SAM SOM if I just looked at
(33:50):
AWS is quite large on the numberof customers that I can onboard
into a platformer.
I also will get more fundingopportunities from AWS if I say
I'm AWS only.
So there's a lot of reasons whytoday I am saying I'm a single
cloud solution.
Now what I'm hoping for is, asexpansion comes, as I get a
(34:12):
critical mass of customers inAWS and I end up being the go-to
answer for Greenfield customersgoing to AWS on its migrations
or Visual Native, or for thosemodernization clients that are
looking to fix their cloudgovernance, then it will start
looking into Azure and maybeeven GCP.
But that'll be down the road.
(34:34):
That'll be when I don't needAWS funding to help me scale,
because once I say I'mmulti-cloud, I lose a lot of the
individual funding per cloud.
So, yes, it's coming in thefuture, but only time will tell
when.
That is yeah and I'll have tohire some leadership that are
more familiar with the otherclouds.
I was an Azure partner back inthe day, but then I quickly
(34:57):
switched to AWS, I think in 2012, and then never looked back
after that.
William (35:03):
Yeah, well, it's funny.
I think I remember I was naiveat one point when I was working
for a company that was one cloudand and I learned that cloud
fairly well it was AWS, and thenwe went multi-cloud and the
multi-cloud decision wasn't mydecision, of course, but I was
(35:25):
overconfident, I think, at thetime, in our ability to actually
set up the governance, thewhole scaffolding of that second
cloud.
You just don't know, until yougo and you try to do it, you
think things, kubernetes,platforms between clouds, and
they're very different, evenlike the network buckets that
(35:58):
you place them in, how they spanand how they scale across
regions and availability zonesand all these things.
There's so many differences andthey're tiny differences, but
all those tiny littledifferences they add up to just
change, you know, entirelychange the architecture really.
So, yeah, it's definitely andyou threw I've met a few folks
(36:21):
out there that are very deep inmore than one cloud like very
deep, like great expertise, butit's a lot, especially if you're
looking beyond one tight.
You know multiple services,infrastructure and you bring in
more things.
It's definitely a hugechallenge.
Ryan (36:38):
So that's usually a hill I will die on is when I give
advice to customers.
When they always ask me, shouldI be multi-cloud?
And they have a choice from dayone, I usually will say no, go
single cloud only.
The benefits of going singlecloud far outweigh the benefits
of being multi cloud, unlessthere's a really good reason,
whether it's a compliance reasonor because you're getting half
(37:02):
a million dollars in funds fromAzure and they want you to put
something on Azure or AWS.
I've never regretted sayingthat to customers.
If you have a choice, I'd gosingle cloud.
That piggybacks off my laststatement, though, of saying but
if you get so far into theweeds and you end up backing
yourself into a corner, youalways have to reevaluate that
(37:22):
decision in the future, and soit's never a one-time decision
to move on.
You always have to rethink that.
But the investment you have ineducating your staff, the
partnership that you give withcloud whether it's AWS or Azure
or GCP the support that they'llgive you to be on that single
cloud Coming from theperformance pillar expertise the
(37:44):
deeper you go into a technology, the more you know how
something in cloud native works,the better performance is going
to be, the less costly it'sgoing to be, the more secure
it's going to be.
If you try to baseline, like,normalize your technology stack
like Kubernetes is a greatexample.
So you can put it theoreticallyfrom AWS to Azure to on-prem,
you're going to increase all ofyour costs, you're going to
(38:06):
decrease all of your performanceand you're going to make it a
little less secure because ofthat.
So it dumbs down all of yourbenefits when you go multi-cloud
.
William (38:16):
Yeah, I remember there was some big hype around
Kubernetes and I think it waslike DR.
This was like years ago, Evenat some of the companies I
worked for.
Like there was this thoughtthat, you know, a containerized
workload can just be placedanywhere.
So we want the best diversitypossible, so we're going to have
an app that lives in one cloudin one region and then for that
(38:37):
other region it's going to be adifferent cloud in a region.
And you know, really the rightway to do that is to do, you
know, span across availabilityzones, of course, and then do
regional DR with a single cloudprovider.
Like usually taking a singleapplication and running that
across multiple clouds doesn'tmake much sense.
(38:57):
Well, I don't think it wouldever make sense, unless maybe
someone if you're out there andthis makes sense and you've done
something valuable with it,reach out, we would love to have
you on.
Yeah, that's yeah.
Ryan (39:08):
I've helped a few enterprise companies be
multi-cloud for the sole purposeof disaster recovery and
typically the complexity thatthat adds, because in the end,
you still have the single pointof failure, which is typically
your DNS management, yourrouting, network routing, and a
long time is during those gamedays where you test out your
disaster recovery solution.
(39:29):
You end up figuring, you end upfinding, coming to the
conclusion you're like huh, howdo we take care of this?
Because, for example, in AWS,if their US East 1 region goes
down, which is their controlplane, it's where they manage
all of their services.
If that goes down, there's noway for me to manage Route 53,
even if I need to point it toAzure, Azure.
(39:51):
And then if I end up moving toa third-party DNS round or low,
underlying are those third-partyDNS?
Is it on-prem, Is it hosted byAWS or Azure behind the scenes?
It's so hard to be trulyredundant across the board and
so sticking with one cloudprovider, being multi-region,
having air gaps in place formultiple accounts, is your best
(40:12):
bet.
And because, as you said, ifyou're not building an
application that uses that cloudnative, there's so many
disadvantages of making itobjective, of making it
standalone and not dependent onthe cloud services.
You're losing so much value outof that that you would only
really see the value of that ifyour environment goes down.
(40:35):
Again and again and again youend up using that disaster
recovery environment.
Eyvonne (40:39):
Well, dependency mapping has always been a
challenge, right, and especiallydependency mapping over time,
because you may have yourdependency maps built out in the
very beginning, but thenservices move around and you
don't always completely redoyour dependency map, right?
I mean, we ran into this in theearly days of virtualization,
(41:00):
right, where you would have a,you would have a domain
controller that was hardwarebased, but then at some point it
was like well, everything'svirtualized, now let's just
virtualize these remainingdomain controllers.
Then, all of a sudden, you havea virtualization outage.
Oh, by the way, now your domaincontrollers are down and you
can't authenticate anything.
Right, like this is a15-year-old problem that has not
(41:21):
gotten better.
That's actually gotten worsewith the cloud, those dependency
mappings, and you're absolutelyright If you lose identity, if
you lose DNS, nothing elsematters.
I think so.
The thing I've seen customers dothat I think works really well
is you select a primary cloud.
That's where the vast majorityof your workloads go.
Undifferentiated services aregoing to run in that cloud.
(41:44):
It's your primary.
And then if you have adifferentiated service that you
need to run in another cloud,sure, you can do that and that
may make sense.
But you're absolutely right onthe contractual pieces, the
discounting the cloudrelationship, and and I've seen
organizations who have tried totake a um unopinionated view of
(42:08):
cloud um, and it just doesn'twork.
Well, it's, it's very expensive.
You end up with services thatrun in a million different
places, that are managed by amillion different people, and
and then how do you govern that?
Right?
And so, while I might argue fora different public cloud to be
your primary cloud, I still verymuch agree that that you need a
(42:32):
primary cloud to run yourservices in, and that's what's
going to make organizationalsense for you, and to not make
that decision is really, frankly, a failure of leadership for
your organization.
Ryan (42:43):
Yeah.
What I have found, though, isback to the original topic of
cloud governance, is some ofthose questions, and guidance is
still missing out there in theindustry in general.
It's saying pick a primary cloudfor most of your control plane,
for your identity, for your DNS, for your services that are
kind of singletons like that andthen this is how to back into a
(43:04):
multi-cloud strategy, or thisis how to back into a disaster
recovery in a single cloudenvironment.
So there's still a lot of, I'dsay, missing industry best
practices that are from acentral source or from an
authority at some level, and sothat's really where I think the
future of cloud is going to goover the next few years.
Looking at the Amazon servicesor the, even the Azure services
that have been released in thelast three years so many more of
(43:26):
them are now at the governanceletter level at this that it's
just now.
This industry is just nowstarting to bring up this more
broader topic, just like thisyear.
Up until now, it was trying tosolve issues from the bottom up,
and I think we're just now ableto get from the top and start
going down now.
William (43:44):
Yeah, that's a great way to put it.
I think I'm fresh.
I'm fresh out of questions.
What about you, Yvonne?
Do you got anything else youwant to hit on?
Eyvonne (43:51):
No, I think it's been a great conversation.
William (43:52):
Yeah, I think it's been a great conversation.
Yeah, I think we're hitting ourtime cap.
Which good timing.
But if the audience wants tofind you, ryan, where can they
find you at?
Ryan (44:02):
Well, you can find me on LinkedIn If you search for my
name, ryan Kimgear, or you canfind me on the platformercloud
website, and that's no E beforethe last R, so platformercloud.
William (44:16):
I love that.
By the way, that is just areally uh you know, it's so hard
to find a name that is likedifferent, that stands out,
that's not overly complicated orjust something random, and it
is like true, to kind of likewhat you're doing.
But yeah, that's a really coolname.
So kudos on the brain architectbehind the name and the brand.
Ryan (44:38):
So, to bring this back to the beginning, I think I'm going
to try to make that a Gen Zslang word, so people just start
naturally saying it in the inthe everyday language.
William (44:47):
I dig it.
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