And Vijay Says…

It was August 9, 1999 when I left my home in a train for Mumbai with a suitcase I borrowed from my aunt . I was home sick within about twenty minutes into that two day train ride, but also very excited to join TCS as a trainee in their Borivali campus – called the “Nortel building”. Twenty years later – yesterday, in an elementary school auditorium in Casa grande, AZ – Dhanya and I, along with 245 other immigrants from 53 countries became proud US Citizens !

As the day of the naturalization ceremony was coming up, a lot of memories have been flooding through my mind.

Few months after I joined TCS, I interviewed with a client in Colorado Springs, CO to be a developer on an SAP project. A couple of weeks later – I was on my first international flight ever ; BOM-LHR-JFK , with the $200 TCS travel desk gave me, and with practically no knowledge of how things worked on this side of the globe. But I was sure I could do a decent job at work – and till date I think the three months of training I got from TCS was the most valuable experience in my life. I also made some life long friends from that time.

My first two experiences in this country were two extremes. The first was a guy outside JFK who tried to convince me that the taxi fare to Laguardia was $200 . He ran for his life when I walked over to a cop to verify the fare :). The second was a very kind lady who realized quickly that I was lost (and stressed out)  in the Denver airport – and took it on herself to call my manager and get directions on where I should go next. She yelled at him on the top her voice on the phone (he would tease me for a long time on what I did to him) , and then bought me a coffee and then walked away before I could even say a proper thank you. Till this day I believe she was an angel !

Most people who know me also know that I love Indian food. I have driven through snow storms for several hours in strange countries to find an Indian restaurant . When I first landed in Denver, I did not know how to cook – nor did I know how to find an Indian restaurant.  I was miserable. A fellow Malayalee who was a senior to me in TCS invited me home and his wife fed me an amazing mallu dinner. Angels come in different forms !

I also remember a colleague in Kansas City when I was working for Cap Gemini Ernst & Young . She had heard about the convenience shop owner who would go stand near his gun chest and stare at me every night I picked up a TV dinner on my way back from work. She started driving me there – paying no attention to my protests – and would stand there staring at the shop owner. Did I say angels come in many forms ?

When I started in consulting, there were not a lot of partners who looked like me that I could learn from . But then two senior partners – Ken Englund and the late John Leffler – took me under their wings and I eventually got to the executive ranks as well.

All those angels – these folks I called out above and many many more – far out number the evil I have encountered in my life. I have lived and worked in three continents, and this has been true everywhere.  I think these very kind folks are the primary reason I firmly believe in the idea of “Paying it forward” , loosely along the lines of what the principle of “Karma” teaches us. I don’t know if I will ever come anywhere close to what others have done for me – but I intend to keep trying.

For the first 6 years or so of living here – we had no intention of settling down here for good. The idea was just to make some money, gain some cutting edge tech experience, see a few places , and go back and live in India. But then the country grew on us. We had our daughter, our first dog, We bought a house, we made a lot of friends and IBM applied for my Green card. Just my luck – my application went into a lot of audits (including a court battle between the law firm that filed it with USCIS which they thankfully won). It took five or six years to get the Green Card. Another five years – more fur kids, changing houses and so on – we applied for Citizenship and finally got it yesterday. The legal immigration path is long and complex and it tests your patience. We respected the process and went through it – like many others – and it all worked out. I still need to figure out SSN updates, passport change and how to get an OCI card. But then again – I am sure the patience I gained through this long process will come to help 🙂

I am very proud of the country where I was born and raised. My love for my family in India, the schools and colleges I went to – and the teachers and class mates I had , my belief that there is no better cuisine than Indian food, my life long craze for Ilayaraja’s music, my conviction that Malayalam literature deserves more global recognition than it gets….none of that is ever going away.

I grew up in Trivandrum – where a the city center has a Hindu temple, a Church, a mosque and a fish market all right next to each other. I was born a Hindu. I attended a Hindu primary school, a Christian high school, a Muslim engineering college and a government run Business School. I am fairly sure if I ever counted – I have more Muslim and Christian friends than Hindu friends. Consequently – I am very secular in my belief system and certainly have no doubts that no religion is morally superior to any other. The idea that we are all equal and have the same rights – that is a deep rooted belief that India has ingrained in me.

Most years I get a chance to go to India for work and/or vacation. There is no feeling like landing in TRV airport seeing the shore line and endless coconut palms as the plane descends. I try to visit the local schools and colleges when I am there and share my thoughts, and engage in debates – something that I enjoy doing in US as well. I have some investment in India and I pay taxes for it. And like many other Indians who live outside India – I have always done what I can to contribute to help educate the children, fight poverty and help with disaster help whether it is in India or USA. Borders are important but ideally they belong to maps – they should not get in the way of doing the right thing.

When I finished my engineering college and B School – employment opportunities were scarce in India. That is not the case now. India is now a happening place and a fast growing part of global economy – even my sleepy old home town is buzzing these days. I often wonder if I would have ever caught that train to Mumbai if I got a good local job after college. If I grew up in the current Trivandrum – I probably would have never left . But that was not the reality when I was job hunting a couple of decades ago. And when I look back at the time I have lived in USA, it has been a huge net positive and fulfilling experience. So if I rewind the clock – I still think I would have taken that flight to JFK without a doubt !

The judge who presided over our naturalization ceremony asked us to stand up when each of our 53 countries were called out – and answer proudly one last time before we took the oath. It was a very emotional moment for me to stand up when I heard the clerk announce “India” – and I have no shame in admitting that tears ran down my face for a good few minutes. Later, after he declared us as Citizens,  he added “This is a diverse and plural country – you should be proud to continue your traditions and continue to speak your language as you live as US Citizens”. I believe those words were also from an Angel !

Thank you India, and Thank you America – you both made me what I am today, and I will be grateful forever !

Post Script 

Many thanks to all of you who sent your good wishes to Dhanya and me yesterday on social media – We really appreciate it !

I saw that some folks from India – none of whom I know from before, and only a small percentage of those who commented – got very offended on Linkedin that I said I am proud to be a US citizen . It is unfortunate that they leaped to an unkind point of view that my post meant that I am not proud of my Indian heritage, even though I said no such thing. Please be assured – that is not at all the case !

I also want to point out that I totally respect their right to voice their opinion – just as I have a right to express mine.  Thankfully the constitutions of both India and USA guarantee that right . I am not sure that calling me a Jackass is covered by the right to free speech though . I made my post in public domain, and I did it fully knowing that some folks who read it might not have empathy for the topic. There is a humorous and ironic side to the criticism as well – many of the “You are not a REAL Indian” crowd are employed at American companies like Apple, Amazon, 3M etc 🙂

 

 

This is one of those topics where my employer IBM has a vested interest and consequently I need to state upfront that what I say below is strictly my own views from my limited view of the large enterprise world. My personal experience over the last couple of decades has been in the very large company space. I have not spent enough time in small and medium companies to know their situation first hand. So please take what I say with a pinch ( or pound ) of salt . Also to preserve friendships that I value, I am not going to make any statements on specific cloud vendors. 

For once, customers led and vendors followed . 

I know several commentators on social media call proponents of multi cloud as snake oil salesmen. What they conveniently forget in this case is that multi cloud is a reality and vendors woke up to it late and smelled the coffee. In the large company space I am familiar with (granted it is a small set – but also the set that everyone else eventually tends to follow in enterprise IT)  – I cannot think of even one that does not have several cloud vendors they work with at some scale. Most common pattern that I have seen is their own private cloud, one major public cloud and then a few others at negligible scale (often brought in via developers trying out new things). In a few cases, I have seen two public clouds used at scale – commonly as the result of some corporate M&A activity .

In short, multi cloud is a reality today – not some futuristic idea. As Eagles crooned – You can stab it with your steely knives, but you just can’t kill the beast. Every company struggles to manage it (Most cannot even monitor – let alone do some active management) and that is why vendors are on the job trying to solve it.

I don’t know why, but now I am now humming We didn’t start the fire 🙂

Multi cloud for Bursting / cost arbitrage – no one does it well…yet

While in theory – a lot of people would like to be in an ideal world where workloads can be sent intelligently to execute wherever it is cheapest to execute, that is still enterprise utopia. Even in the simplest case of your own private cloud and just one public cloud – seamlessly moving most of your apps from one to another is not easy to pull off . The two common use cases are when peak compute is required – like when month end closing happens, or thanksgiving sales happen , and when disaster recovery happens and you want massive fail over to happen to a different public cloud . You can do both  for well engineered applications today – but that is a very tiny part of the overall landscape, and won’t buy you much.

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave !

(Sorry – the Eagles song just keeps playing in my brain in a loop).

In an enterprise with multiple clouds – the normal scenario is that data and algorithms don’t sit next to each other . One will need to move to meet the other when it is needed. Moving data is expensive – mostly because companies love to create data, and no one likes to delete anything . Unfortunately some data cannot move for legal or cost reasons, and some algorithms may not move because its vendor has no incentive to expose it elsewhere.

It is already true that you will need to do one-off extremely high business value solutions that need multiple clouds. It will only become more and more true in future. As an example, say five years from now (may be less)  – you may need a multi cloud scenario where a specialized solution that needs quantum computing from one provider, AI APIs from another and some good old algorithms from your own private cloud to manage enterprise risk.

The one off solutions usually don’t come with a lot of governance. So others will build little apps on all these clouds for other one-off solutions . Proliferation is more or less a given.

That was a long winded way of saying – multi cloud is very useful in adding significant business value ( since no one party will ever be the lone innovator) and hence you will use it. But once you are there – you are better off learning to live with it peacefully than just fight it all the time.

Containers are awesome – but only when used as intended 

Everyone wants to work like Netflix and Amazon. But the reality is that they all have massive baggage of applications that were built when cloud was not a thing. There is a massive fascination in the field when it comes to containers. I am a big fan myself. But if you look at how the move to containers look like today – you don’t need to be a genius to realize it is not used as designed. Most of the time there is no systematic refactoring done. Docker and Kubernetes are not silver bullets. I have lost count of how many times dev teams have overlooked security, performance etc in the quest to containerize everything.  Forget all of that – look at the docker image sizes in modernization projects and you will probably see a lot of them represented in GB and not MB ( and I bet you there are posters pasted all around the building saying lightweight images are what we are going for). If that is the trend –  the end result won’t look much better than just outsourcing your data center.

Got it – but what if we build our own management layer ?

Some companies have the ability to make significant investments in people and tech. They can of course attempt to solve the multi cloud management issues by building their own management layer. While it might help the first wave of hand picked applications to achieve utopian status – it is not without some long term pain.

The most obvious one is talent. There are only so many top engineers in the ecosystem and you need to recruit and retain them for a long time. And while top engineers love to build great new stuff, they don’t always fancy the maintenance of those cool things. So you will need to invest additional $ to keep it running and enhanced with high quality .

Then there is the problem of each cloud being unique. Over time better standards will evolve – but for now, if you want to build a framework yourself – you need to assume there is a relatively small set of common functionality that you can make use of. The rest you need to build into your custom layer, or offload to applications to do so themselves. I will leave it your imagination and level of optimism to extrapolate what happens next in each case.

So how does one proceed with multi cloud?

1 Invest in refactoring the tech, and be realistic on time lines. 

On an average – most large companies have only ten or twenty percent of their workloads that are cloud ready if you ask the question today. And that only means ready – it does not mean optimized for cloud. The best thing you can do is to invest the engineering effort to get your applications cloud ready.

2 Refactor the organization for the (multi) cloud world 

People are the make or break part of any transformation. Ask the hard questions – like can you manage DevSecOps that include your current private cloud and also one or more public cloud ? Have your governance process been refactored and will it be audit ready ? Have you budgeted for frequent re-skilling and attrition management? Does your platform team and apps team know what each other does and are there clear rules of engagement ? etc

3 Be a minimalist and work with the ecosystem 

As of today, I don’t think there is a pragmatic way to move to a low chaos multi cloud landscape without close partnerships with the ecosystem – including some partners you may fondly(?) call as “legacy”. On the other hand – you cannot work with everyone and get some place any time soon. So the practical way to do this is to choose a couple of partners to go deep with and try your best to influence their roadmaps and tooling to suit your goals. If you can resist the temptation – I would urge you to not go down the path of building your own management layer with great sophistication.

Parting shot

Every large company CIO that I know personally is a realist when it comes to cloud. Some may not admit their true beliefs in public – which is not uncommon, and not just about cloud either.  So I am an optimist when it comes to where multi cloud is headed.

I had a chance to catch up with an old friend this weekend whose retirement party I unfortunately couldn’t attend . He was a senior partner in a law firm .

He told me a story which I want to share here . This happened some 35 years or so ago when he was just hired .

As he walked into the office, he saw that all the partners were in a conference room with a very serious look on their faces . After an hour or so they called the office manager – a middle aged woman who had spent all her career in that firm – inside . She came back with a big file in her hand – and she was crying . She left office almost immediately , still crying . His first thought was that she was fired !

He ran into her at the train station that weekend and she told him what had happened . He bought her and her kids some ice cream and she explained the reason why she was crying that day .

She had an abusive stay at home husband who was blaming her for all his problems, and she couldn’t afford a divorce . Apparently one of the partners came to know about this from his secretary and he called everyone else into this meeting . At the end of it – all of them wrote personal checks of $1000 each (which was a lot of money at that time) for her , and gave it to her saying “You gave your whole life to this firm and you are family for us . We have this covered and we will represent you in your divorce case etc . Go take your kids on a vacation for a couple of weeks and come back and we will figure out what’s next”.

Some years passed and my friend was nearing his own partnership at the firm . The trouble was that while he was good at his job – he just didn’t get the kind of visibility to the three senior partners . He went to this lady for some advice – by then she was supporting one of the senior partners as his secretary .

She pretty much coached him through the process – including apparently what to wear , what restaurants to eat, what jokes to crack and so on . She also helped him get some opportunities to be part of important work that got him the right attention . In two years he made partner .

She retired soon after – and at her farewell party, she told his fiancé (and now wife ) “I will never forget your boy friend buying ice cream for my daughters as we waited for the train – it’s the nicest thing anyone had done to them till then”.