Jeff DeVerter CTO at Rackspace on Multi-Cloud Environments
Welcome to the tech deep dive podcast where we let our inner nerd come out and have fun getting into the weeds on all things tech. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better, searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. Hi. I'm Max Clark, and I'm talking with Jeff DeVerter, who is the CTO of solutions and services at Rackspace. Jeff, thanks for joining.
Jeff:Max, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me on on your show.
Max:I'm actually been looking forward to this one. So, Jeff, you know, looking at your background or you know, you've you've started cable and operations, and you move into banks and financial services. And, you know, from there, I won't plug 1, but I use it and I love it. But, you know, from there, you end up at Rackspace and and you escape a little while and and and boomerang back. So you've you've kinda you've kinda been around the horn here from, you know, physical infrastructure to cloud infrastructure to physical to cloud.
Max:And, you know, I'm I'm kinda curious just to start off talking about what what that's been like for you and how this has evolved over
Jeff:the years. Sure. So, yeah, it does the resume does look a little, curious, when you look at at at how it strung altogether. But as I look back on it, there there's some common threads of what caused a lot of it. So so when I jumped into technology, and by the way, before that, I actually had a pre career in music, but that's a whole another podcast we'll we'll visit about at some point.
Jeff:But when I jumped into it, I was really focused on predominantly from a technology perspective was the Microsoft stack. It was very initially, you know, helping build very large server environments that that ultimately the US government used as part of military readiness from a medical perspective, a super interesting project. And from there, you know, I did what a lot of folks in technology do, and that is you get into a job, it's going really well, you learn something new and that creates an opportunity. And off you go to that opportunity. So I was stuck in this cycle there for a little while where, every couple of years I was there was a hop involved and it was always off to something interesting and different.
Jeff:So, you know, I was over into into banking, but, yeah, obviously in the technology aspect of it where I was, you know, leading a team. And that's where I really started to dip my toe less from an infrastructure perspective and now in the collaboration suites. Specifically Microsoft SharePoint was the technology of the day, and that caused me to then make another move. And off I went to, another company there in San Antonio, still in the financial services sector and, and went a whole lot deeper in the SharePoint space. And that created additional opportunity.
Jeff:And that's where I joined Rackspace. That was in 2,008. And for the, you know, couple of 3, 4 jobs before that, it was every, you know, year, 9 months, 2 years, there was a there was a jump involved. And I realized once I made it to Rackspace and I went there to launch an offering for them around single tenant or what we call dedicated dedicated racks or dedicated SharePoint offering for customers. And, and I was about two and a half years into that job and I went home from work one day and I said, hey.
Jeff:I talked to my wife and I said, Michelle, you know how I leave jobs every 2 years, because I get bored or I get an itch and there's an opportunity? I forgot to get bored and I'm having too much fun, so I'm not going anywhere for a while. And it wasn't until 10 years later that I had made a little change just because it was I really felt like I fell into a great place. And that great place, you know, Rackspace was great about investing in what we call Rackers, the individuals. And I had such opportunity to build there.
Jeff:And that's why I love to do it. I love to build things, love to build, organizations, love to build support teams, love to to build new offerings. And so initially, it was SharePoint. Then it was, an exchange offering, a single tenant exchange offering. And then what was Skype at the time?
Jeff:And then then it was the private cloud offering and the public cloud offering and then CTO stuff. And, you know, again, I'm about 10 years into it and till I'd gotten to a point where I wanted to make another change. But that change was driven because where Rackspace was at the time, I didn't have a chance to build anymore, just in its evolution and its leadership and what was going on. So I did an opportunity pop up and off I went for another year 9 months, which was going fun and it was great. But I did something I've never done before and that was go back.
Jeff:I boomerang back to Rackspace because I had an opportunity. Actually, I got the call. I was on a business trip and I called my wife and she goes, you're never you're never gonna believe who just called me about a job. She says, who? And I say, it's Rackspace.
Jeff:And she goes, well, what's the opportunity? By the way, you're crazy, but what's the opportunity? And I explain, it's the CTO of the organization that builds all the services and products that we provide to our customers. And that means that as CTO, I get to, you know, cast the vision for what the next couple of years is going to mean to Rackspace and collaborate with teams and really cast and put that vision together and dream it. Now there are other people who are detail oriented folks who are gonna make all that become a reality.
Jeff:And she goes, that sounds perfect for you. And I said, yes, it does. When do I start? So back beginning part of January, right after the holiday break, back to Rackspace, I came. And boy, am I glad I'm back.
Max:So as the CTO of solutions and I mean, you said products and services, but really solutions and services now. Right?
Jeff:That's right. Thanks for correcting me. How much of
Max:this is visionary? How much of this is implementation? How much of this is product design? Like, what what is, like, your day job, you know, in this role with Rackspace? And and and what do you have oversight over?
Jeff:So super a super question. And when I came in, it was really meant to the first job I was given was to create the vision deck that we would use for the next 2 years of everything. You know, it would be presented from the CEO all the way down. I actually started working on it the week before I started with the company, which was a first for me as well. But not long after I got in and working with the company about 3 weeks in, there was an opportunity to, that they needed to help shore up what we call the offer management process.
Jeff:And so while the job initially was all visionary type stuff, it was all not just looking for the opportunity or problems and creating a solution and then getting consensus around that, which is the heart of what the CTO role was. It was around then also the offering management process, which is how we take products and services and solutions through the process of institutionalizing it at Rackspace so that the entire company can then deliver on that capability, which was very different than the whole vision thing because this was a detail oriented job. This was making sure that i's were dotted, the t's were crossed, that we had alignment not just from is this the right technology to can we support the technology? Are we aligned from a legal perspective? Are we aligned and trained from a sales perspective?
Jeff:All the way through all aspects of the company, not just not just here in the US, but but all around the world in our EMEA region and and APJ. And this was a, I was meant to come in and just help shore this thing up, create a new structure for it, what its vision would be, and then build a team that could then carry it, which is what I've done and handed it off to an extraordinarily talented individual inside
Max:of the company. And now he runs that. And now I'm back to just
Jeff:the day, John, individual inside of the company. And now he runs that. And now I'm back to just the day job of CTO, which is really where I wanted to be in the first place. So to answer your question, it is predominantly vision type work, but it's also about building consensus, which is I find the hardest thing to do because I like to go around and I like to think I can tell somebody something once and they're going to know it and remember it. But as we know, humans don't necessarily work that way.
Jeff:So there's a lot of repetition. There's a lot of roadshows. There's a lot of team meetings, but that's all great. Love to talk to people.
Max:I mean, you touched on this. I mean, Rackspace is a large global company. And when you talk about institutionalizing and maintaining consistency, you know, Rackspace has operationalized and scaled its teams globally. And, you know, and that does really 2 things for you. Right?
Max:I mean, in the one side, it makes you a little bit less flexible in terms of, like, customization in some regards. But the other side of it is and when a customer calls in at any time of the day and talks to anybody anywhere in the world at anything, you know, the support experience is is very uniform and consistent. And so and that meant that's in many cases, a better trade. You know, you get to a situation where now Rackspace is also known as I mean, you know, the company started as a bare metal or dedicated server company, and it's evolved up. And I wanted to I mean, we're here to talk about this evolution now into public cloud and clouds.
Max:Right? Mhmm. And so, you know, can you give me a little bit history of Rackspace's approach to public clouds? And I I think it'll it'll be good to talk about, you know, where this started and and where it is today.
Jeff:Sure. Sure. So Rackspace, this sounds, really funny to some people today. And Rackspace built a multibillion dollar business on the fact that they could turn a server on for a customer in 14 days. We cringe at the thought of that today.
Jeff:14 days. Can you imagine? But back in, you know, 2005, 2000, the fact that you could get a server at all was impressive or rent a server. I mean, that's the that's the whole concept of a managed hoster, which which is what we were in the beginning. It's what we invented.
Jeff:We've invented that whole market. But we could turn on a a server or or a whole environment for a customer in 14 days. And that's a that would be an environment that would have all the right firewall stuff in front of it, all the all the infrastructure that we would design custom for them, and all the storage that would be behind it, and a support team that would wrap around them 247 to be able to solve any of the problems they had around that infrastructure. And, and obviously, there was a huge gap in the market from a from a maturity is not even the right word, but even from an awareness of what was needed. So think about a big organization because this actually lends to a really important point as the cloud world came along.
Jeff:And that is in a large organization, you had an IT team and that IT team's goal or mission was to provide a consistent level of ex of experience for their computing infrastructure for the rest of the business, whatever that business might be. Selling, you know, high style wingtip shoes, it might be. Let's call it that. So it's a shoe company. And they wanted to do it consistently.
Jeff:They didn't want the phone to ring on the weekend. They wanted it to work. They wanted single vendors, but they were wrapped around by a procurement team because large enterprises leave all the procurement to a dedicated people who can get the lowest get the best product for the lowest price. You know, if you're inside of marketing and all you're trying to do is get a website up so that you can talk about how great your company is, your individual products are inside of your your department. And now you gotta go to IT and you gotta follow their checks and and fill out their forms.
Jeff:And IT then has gotta order infrastructure. And then that means it's gonna be dealt with by procurement. Procurement's gonna go find some gear and eventually it's gonna get shipped by some company, Dell, HP, whomever, and it's gonna show up in a data center. Well, they've got a backlog of things. Who knows when it's gonna get out of a box and get into a rack?
Jeff:And once it's in the rack, it goes on to the Kik team and the Kik team's gonna put an OS on there. And then it's gotta get hardened for the company standards who are so unique and so special. And you get the point. It just take forever for infrastructure to get online until people found Rackspace. And that was the opportunity that we found.
Jeff:And that was, you know what, we could get a server online faster. We could support it in a way that met their outcomes, their needs, and make it available to them. And that scratched a niche in the industry. And we grew, grew, grew. And we had some huge competitors at the time.
Jeff:Now if you remember back, this so this company started in 98. Remember beginning of 2000s, there's a bit of an economic downturn and we saw a lot of our competitors go away. The people who were fighting really hard all of a sudden were saying, Hey, you want to buy my company? So we came out of that one with a lot less competitors. Really the ones that were left were some pretty big telcos who had bought up a lot of our our regional competitors.
Jeff:But then in 2008, here comes another economic downturn. And we came out of that super strong because this is a great industry to be in when, when things get hard, because either companies are looking for better, more economical ways to make it happen. And we were able to do that. But it was also about this time the bookseller became a web seller. You know, we think about Amazon in this context.
Jeff:And I remember the CEO at the time was walking around handing out a printout of what Bezos was up to with with, AWS. And he said, this is something we're gonna have to pay attention to. So that was in 2010, 2009. I guess that conversation happened. So we didn't pay a whole lot of attention up until the point we thought, you know what?
Jeff:Maybe we need our own cloud. Rackspace built a cloud. We built in fact, we built it with NASA, which is really kinda cool. When Rackspace does something big, they do it really big. I mean, it's just awesome.
Jeff:So off we go to to find NASA. We find NASA. We we build our 1st public cloud. We build this thing called OpenStack, and, we take a very revolutionary approach to it, making it open to the world. We consume this thing.
Jeff:We're also part of the consortium that runs it. But at this point, we are squarely competing with public cloud vendors. Microsoft is starting to think about what Azure might be. AWS is all in, and we are competing with those guys. It's not a great company to compete with because they I mean, logistical geniuses and, and let's just call them well funded.
Jeff:And I was there, and it was it it was a really interesting thing happening at this point in the evolution of the company. And that was first thing that happened was that when the company started, they built all their own servers. So literally ordering components, white boxes, they would order the racks that they went on originally. They were bread drying racks from bakeries because they could lay them flat and they found they could get the most of them in there because they didn't have rack rails. You know?
Jeff:They didn't have any of that stuff. It was just a white box like what you would have under your desk. And so then they decided, all right. We're getting out of the building our own department and and partnered up with I think it was Dell at the time. And so now we're buying servers.
Jeff:And a thing happened in a Racker's brain that, oh, maybe it wasn't me putting memory sticks in this thing that made it special, but we'll go with another company. But something's different here. So we go with with with a Dell to provide the infrastructure, and then we build our own public cloud. And we started to have people in pockets of the company saying, look, it's not the infrastructure that makes us unique and special. It is what rackers do with that infrastructure that solves customers' business problems.
Jeff:We should support Amazon. We should support Microsoft. We should support what would become Google. And those were some fights. I mean, I think there may still be some some hardcore folks in the back corner going, I like our servers better.
Jeff:But people had a lot of problems with that because it was scary because Rackspace made a decent margin on that infrastructure because we would have to change everything about what we did from a costing model, from a delivery model, from, the teams that would support it and the way that we would support it. The biggest thing I'll I'll tell you, Max. The biggest concern people had was, how can we provide an SLA on infrastructure we can't we can't control? How do you do it?
Max:I mean, that's a constant IT, you know, question. Right? I mean, it's it's it's it's funny. I'm laughing listening to you talk and explain this because, you know, all infrastructure at some point becomes commoditized. You know?
Max:Who do you say? Like servers. Servers become commoditized. At that point, it just becomes scale and margin. How can you compete at high scale, very low margins?
Max:We're seeing network becoming commoditized right now and with these white box networking devices coming out at the same time. And and for a lot, you know, if you look at public cloud, public cloud is commoditized. You know, there's differentiators and there's different options. But to some degree, you know, people don't think about it so much in terms of, you know, I need this logo. I think about it, like, I need this mini compute.
Max:I need this much RAM. I need this many functions to execute. I need this kind of storage. Right? There's I think that mentality is changing, but still supporting and operating these things at scale.
Max:And all the time, that becomes that becomes very interesting. And it's also become a very big shift for an enterprise and how they manage their IT infrastructure. When you go into a public cloud environment, things are very different. You know? And years ago, Rackspace was a lot more inflexible about how it approached and supported people.
Max:Right? And and that was, I think, the the dipping the toes. And now when we talk about Rackspace support and how you actually layer offerings to people, that's become a lot more flexible. You know? And and and you're a little bit more like, what do you need from us?
Max:And we'll we'll plug those holes for you. Right? Like, it's a it's a slightly different approach.
Jeff:Well, the phrase that became really popular once once we realized, okay. We had some customers in AWS, we've got some customers in Microsoft, the world didn't end. Our business is still growing. And then we decided to really run after it. The phrase that we used as the kind of the calling card around Rackspace was up the stack and out of the rack because just like you said, the infrastructure was commoditized.
Jeff:We just can't care about it as much. We have to care that it works, but we can't hang our head on that's the end all be all. If you go back to the beginning of the story, we could provide a server with literally nothing on it but an operating system in 14 days and that had value. If I just provide a server today, that has no value. We've got to have security around that.
Jeff:We've got to have all kinds of other things naturally baked into the whole story. And it can't just be about the server. It has to be about the customer outcome on the other end. You see, even now, like in the early days here's a little secret. In the early days, we would sign a customer to a 1, 2, or 3 year contract.
Jeff:And it wasn't a stated goal, but what ultimately happened was a lot of times, you know, we would respond to stuff, but there wasn't a lot of proactive reaching out to a customer because not a lot would happen on that infrastructure in the intervening 1, 2, or 3 years. Just not that much changed. I mean, all the development cycles were waterfall. They barely saw updates. Those updates rarely needed more infrastructure.
Jeff:Customers' account bases weren't growing so fast that they had to throw tons of things at. We had a few customers who were and we just added more servers. But generally, we didn't talk to customers all that often. Today, we have to talk to them every day. Let me rephrase that.
Jeff:We get to talk to them every day because we designed into the whole process now as opposed to just, you know, here's an architectural design. We're gonna deploy the servers. Have fun storming the castle. We'll see you in a few years. It's now we're gonna design into that the optimization process from the very beginning part of the conversation.
Jeff:Because if you're gonna deploy out into the cloud, whether you change or not, that cloud is evolving underneath your feet on a literal moment by moment basis. And what awesomeness we deploy today may actually be out as out out of, not not as as perfect as it could be tomorrow just because the cloud got better underneath it and there's a better way.
Max:We shouldn't talk about this in terms of a specific cloud because you are cloud agnostic. I mean, you have a practice around Amazon. You have a practice around Google. You have a practice around Azure. Right?
Max:So it doesn't matter where the customer wants to be. And you still have and you still maintain your your own private cloud practices. I mean, that's that's
Jeff:Which are growing, interestingly enough.
Max:So, I mean, as it relates to enterprise transitions to public cloud or an enterprise is already in a public cloud and they come and they say, okay. We need to do things differently. I mean, what what is Rackspace? I mean, how do you how do you explain this in a short span? Like, what is it that Rackspace is doing for these companies?
Max:And let's start, like, broaden, and let's get into the weeds.
Jeff:Yeah. So it's great that you mentioned that. It's great that you very correctly say, you know, when when you go into that environment, how do we have a conversation with them around what the future looks like? Because when you in the old days when we would, you know, have to do an upgrade at some point, it was think about it going from VMware x to VMware y or, you know, this old piece of hardware to this new piece of hardware. It's a very waterfall event.
Jeff:But when you adopt a cloud, again, fill in the blank on cloud of choice, when you adopt cloud, you're not adopting just a real estate location. In some cases, you're not even doing that. You are adopting a methodology. To say I am cloud or I have cloud infrastructure, then what you're saying is you are adopting a more frequent update process. You are adopting a commitment to upgrading your application to utilize more efficient mechanisms, and we'll define what efficiency means in a minute, for, for how that compute happens, whether you get down to the point of containers or even serverless, how your storage works.
Jeff:You know, in the old days at Rackspace, when someone would say, I want redundant storage across multiple data centers, you know, you just you're just 2xing or 3xing your cost because not only do you have to double literally double the the physical infrastructure that's holding the storage in 2 different locations, you gotta get special software to make it stay in sync before between them. Now it's just an extra line in a script or a checkbox in a in an interface to say, replicate this into 3 or 4 or 27 different locations and make it available for fill in the blank number of days, weeks, months. And so Rackspace has to take all of that into account. And here's the other thing Rackspace has to do, and this is very different, is the move to the cloud transition to and again, that's not just real estate. It's methodology.
Jeff:Is one that if if a service provider like Rackspace doesn't go into it with eyes wide open, that we have to continually show value even after that architecture is in place and it's been built and the customer's been moved in, we'll lose that customer because it just sort of chokes along and works. And the amount that they would need a Rackspace involved becomes less and less, which is why Rackspace now focuses a lot more on applications and even application development and teaching customers how to become air quotes for those of you who can't see them, because it's not video to become cloudy. And that's that's ultimately the goal. So we talk about that in cloud maturity. We talk about multi cloud.
Jeff:We talk about, all these sorts of things.
Max:So cloud is cloud maturity and being cloudy. Right? I mean, this is more than just taking and virtualizing infrastructure in your office or in your data center and then putting it into a public cloud. Right? And That's right.
Max:And when we look at the different public cloud platforms themselves, you have, you know, base infrastructure. So you have compute, you have storage, you maybe you know, you you have these building blocks, and then they all offer managed services on top of it, whether or not it's, you know, a managed day to day service or a managed object store or managed, you know, a a, you know, columnar storage or something along those lines. Right?
Jeff:Right.
Max:And people don't, I think, understand where they're actually spending money in their clouds and what actually causes pain for them as they're making these migrations. I mean, the comparison I've I've always asked, you know, should I run this method of compute in Amazon, or is it cheaper in Google? And the answer is it's it's it's almost negligible. And who cares? Because that's not where you're spending money.
Max:You're spending money in your support infrastructure and supporting that cloud. You're spending money in your egress costs to move data in and out of that cloud. You're moving data in you know, you're you're spending money in your in your data science or or machine learning, you know, pipelines. Yeah. These things become very expensive, but not necessarily is it cheaper to run this compute here, this compute there, this compute in this other place.
Max:And this is something that Rackspace, you guys help a lot of people with these decisions and also, maybe optimizations or or, what's the word I'm looking for? You know, migration of workflows off of one environment to another to optimize that.
Jeff:So we think about we think about, cost optimization a little bit differently. So as a customer as a company goes down the road into cloud and cloud evolution from a maturity perspective, you know, they have a decision to make. And I've been having a similar conversation, the same conversation, for about the past 4 years. And that's when somebody says, you know, should I be worried I hate this conversation. Should I be worried about vendor lock in?
Jeff:Everybody's worried about vendor lock in, and it's sort of right. You know, if you're all committed on, you know, Dell and Dell raises their hardware, then, you know, how easy or hard is it to move over to HP or whatever it might be? But when you think about vendor lock in from a cloud perspective, what this does so so what they're what they're wanting to do is if all of a sudden favorite cloud provider of choice raises their rates, they could easily move to another cloud provider. But what this does first of all, nobody's gonna raise their rates like they're afraid of. But what it does is it forces them to the lowest common denominator of capability.
Jeff:If their only concern is lowering costs through being concerned about vendor lock in, then they are they should absolutely go back and buy servers and put them in their data center or come to Rackspace for private cloud technologies because they're not going to evolve. So if you only are focused on that, then you're not going to use the higher order things. You rightly said it before, and that is that the cloud now is more than just infrastructure and there's all sorts of things that clouds are building on top of it. When you talked about how Rackspace, you know, was dealing with commoditized infrastructure, they realized that the VM is a commoditized piece of infrastructure. And so what they've done is they've done 2 things.
Jeff:They've, 1, found ways to make a VM non commoditized. Think about your your high compute machines, your, you know, if you've got GPUs in them that'll do special stuff. So they have specialized things they can charge a handsome price for. But for the other stuff, they don't care. They just want your stuff, your storage into there, especially if they get your data, then they've got you.
Jeff:But once you're in, if you start to peel away those monolithic applications that you originally moved in and start to use the higher order things, what it does is it gives your business power. It gives your business, put your business back in the driver's seat because IT no longer is sitting there hand in hand with procurement going, Where can I find the cheapest cloud? Because I had been in those conversations and they're miserable. But now you're in a conversation where IT is working hand in hand with the business to help direct them to create a technology suite which serves them and puts them in the driver's seat from a cost governance perspective, from a technology governance perspective. For instance, if a customer is able to take their application and break it down into serverless.
Jeff:And what serverless does for them in this scenario is they don't have to think about the infrastructure. The cloud provider does all that. It patches it. They make it available. They make it redundant.
Jeff:They do all the things. And what they do is then they charge you by the drink to use that service. Well, what that means then is IT can now very much measure how many transactions to do one order of function. Let's say it's a marketing comes along and says, hey, mister IT. I wanna I wanna put up a Super Bowl ad.
Jeff:And we we're putting up we're not wanting to. We're putting up a Super Bowl ad and you need to put up this page to capture all of our awesome viewers who are gonna come look at it. Well, they can deconstruct that web page and know how many transactions are gonna be involved, and they can measure that against what they're being charged by the cloud provider for those transactions and now turn back to the business and say, it is going to cost you x number to actually do that. Is that worth it to you to make this decision? See, it actually puts control back in where they wouldn't have even had any idea what it would take from an infrastructure to put online to be able to answer the call from a Super Bowl ad type of a scenario.
Jeff:So I think it's a long way to answer your question to say as a company evolves and they stop thinking about infrastructure and start thinking about capabilities and the cloud that they're in, or choose a cloud not on who has the cheapest VM, but who has the technology and the reach, geography, that meets their ultimately meets their needs, and then go all in. My recommendation is to go all in.
Max:Conversation I have often relates to core infrastructure, building blocks, you know, versus managed services. You know, example, Kafka. Right? Are you gonna run Afka on your own infrastructure? Are you gonna run, Kinesis?
Max:Right? Are you gonna run, you know, Cassandra or, you know, the various distributed database tools, or are you gonna run something that's managed for you, you know, DynamoDB? And and, you know, the way that I relate it now in a lot of ways is more about velocity. You know, there's there's and I and I had a a CTO that was much smarter than I years ago explained this to me in a sense of, you know, if you have finite resources in terms of of usually, it's people. You have finite resources and people that can implement processes for your business.
Max:Do you spend money in trying to bring more people into the environment? Or do you take a shortcut and you go buy something off the rack? You know, and this was you know, so you're talking this build versus buy decision always. And clouds do a really good job of providing this infrastructure and saying, oh, you don't have to figure out how run Kafka. You can just turn it on and run it.
Max:And, you know, year and a half down the road when you realize it's costing you a lot of money, well, maybe then you're ready to operationalize it and move it back into your infrastructure. But these are all decisions also an enterprise would have to make. But with a partner like Rackspace, it could be, hey. We're gonna run a managed service from the cloud. And, okay, we've we've now identified this as something that we don't wanna run anymore.
Max:So can you operate this for us and adjust how we're getting billed from, you know and maybe that's we don't want a per transaction. We want predictable monthly spend. You know, we wanna know that's gonna cost us $40,000 a month every month the rest of the year, and then we can scale it up or scale it down. I mean, that's that adds a lot of value. You talk about value creation.
Max:I mean, you know, helping people make these things definitely adds a lot of value.
Jeff:Yeah. So Rackspace is filled with a ton of smart people, but some of the smartest, in my opinion, are what we call sales engineers or sales architects. And so think about the, you know, break down the whole delineation of, you know, who's all involved in that whole sales and support structure. You've got somebody on the front end who's going to, you know, be that smiling person who is the the front end salesperson, but they are 100% supported by those sales engineers. And it's the sales engineer's job to sit with the customer and listen to their business challenges.
Jeff:What is the customer trying to solve for? And we'll try to and we'll also ask, you know, what what's your favorite technology along the way? But they've chosen a cloud. Even people who say they haven't chosen a cloud, they have a favorite. And we'll wrap them with a sales engineer who knows that cloud inside and out.
Jeff:And here's, I think, one of the massive pieces of value that Rackspace brings to the table. And that is that on a day to day basis, we are architecting and designing with the latest cloud technologies and staying ahead on what those latest cloud technologies, those solutions for the customer, because it's impossible for a customer, any customer on size, to be able to really stay abreast of everything that an AWS is deploying on a day to day basis or either of the other 2 providers. And, but these guys do, and they stay trained and they're self organized and they're doing some amazing work. And so they actually can help make those low level type of decisions. Well, what are the goals for your data storage and, you know, help decide, do we need to architect some data storage that that will meet those needs or can we use it as a service and let that kind of happen?
Jeff:And just as they're super smart people on that sales engineer side to architect the stuff, they're handing those workloads off to a professional services team to do the build, and then they're handing that work off to a support team to then manage on a day to day basis. Now I can see you about to raise your hand, Max, and go, but it's in the cloud. What do you have to manage? Doesn't doesn't, you know, Amazon or Microsoft take care of all of that? Well, they're gonna make sure the infrastructure's running, but we will make sure that the application, the solution, stays functional, current, secure, all those sorts of things.
Max:So that's a good segue because you talk about, you know, what infrastructure support comes from the cloud vendor. In a lot of cases, especially as you get larger as a in in consumption, the cloud provider will force you into support agreements with them. But that's not necessarily, like, a golden ticket into support resolutions with the cloud vendor. So in an engagement with Rackspace, I mean, Rackspace staff and support are triaging and managing and troubleshooting and doing sort of doing everything that needs to happen before escalating into and saying, okay. We know this is an infrastructure problem, Amazon or Google or whatever.
Max:We need you to fix this for our customer. But you have leverage and scale now because by by the time you talk to AWS, you call you know, you you you call them up on the phone. It's like, okay. We know you've already done all these other things. You you know, you can skip a lot of lines.
Max:You know, what is that like with that infrastructure controls shifted? Right? You're not talking about go to the data center and go touch a box. Now it's escalate into an infrastructure provider. But that is a value, and that is something that you do offer and and people do need.
Jeff:Yeah. And it's a it's a very much a different angle. Now granted, they, a couple of the providers are now starting to offer a managed service. And let's just define real quick what managed service means. It means that that you're going to pay a company, maybe even the infrastructure provider, some money a month, however they decide to to charge for that.
Jeff:And what that means is they're going to do some sort of extra service on top of the infrastructure that's that's just not part of when you go and buy it. In some cases, it means, something as simple as you can get to a higher level technician, not coming in through tier 1, but you're maybe just coming in through tier 4. And if you're super big or you pay a ton of money, then you maybe even have a dedicated person or a technical account manager who is somewhat familiar with or aware of what your infrastructure is trying to do and becomes a good touchpoint to then rally all the different people inside of that cloud provider to fix whatever the problem might be. But a lot of times, Max, where they're drawing the line is, oh, that's your application? I can't touch your application.
Jeff:My infrastructure works. Or I think that your VM is misconfigured in this way and they're not actually allowed to log into your VM. VM. You will still have to go and effect that change. When we go with a provider like a Rackspace, you know, this is actually regard if we strip out the infrastructure, you know, we loved our white boxes in the early days and we loved our own servers.
Jeff:But in the early days, the value is the fact that while we provided that server, we provided and made sure that that server, in some cases, the application itself had a guaranteed uptime. And when you called and said it doesn't work or we sensed that it didn't work, then we were already on it and making that change and ensuring that not just that the disk is spinning or the C prompt is blinking, but that your application was doing what it was designed to do. We would we would implement monitoring techniques that would do transaction or synthetic type monitoring to make sure it was, 1, behaving, 2, behaving in a timely manner, and things along those lines.
Max:So, I mean, if you have SAP HANA. Right? I mean, that's an application that's that's pretty understood in terms of support delivery, and you guys can operationalize SAP HANA pretty pretty straightforward. When you're talking about a customer who's written their own application and in theory has a a CICD pipeline and is doing regression testing and and, you know but I mean, even still, that environment's gonna change pretty frequently. That changes your operational structure in order to support that application.
Max:I mean, how do you operationalize a customer's application to help them support themselves in whatever environment it's in?
Jeff:So that's a really good question. I'm gonna answer it in a couple of parts. The first is how we have done that. And there's a couple of ways that we've done it. 1, we have gotten really involved, when a customer is a mature customer like that.
Jeff:And by
Max:the way, if they've got
Jeff:a CSCD pipeline and they're doing daily, week, daily, minutely, whatever the timeline is, builds. This is an advanced company in the grand scheme of cloudy type companies, and we have an offering that actually can come alongside of them and provide support along that way and support the pipeline and understand the code. Now that is to be transparent, those are people being involved in your process and your technology. But, Max, that's not gonna scale. You used the word before and I wrote it down on my piece of paper because I wanted to come back to it.
Jeff:And that was the word velocity. In the early days, speed was enough for Rackspace. Server on in 14 days. Good. It wasn't that just didn't get any more complex than that.
Jeff:But today, speed without direction may just send you into a brick wall. And that's what, of course, philosophy is, is speed with direction. And that's where our focus is, is how do we help a company accelerate their digital transformation, their corporate transformation through the use of technology? And we are actively working on projects right now for what will happen in the next 3 years. I was watching something by, Microsoft earlier today and that was, they were talking about application.
Jeff:It was an application development thing. And the short story is the future of Rackspace is to be embedded and involved in the customer's custom development lifecycle, in providing a CICD pipeline, in being involved and connected into theirs from a monitoring awareness perspective, applying data models to that, being, applying a machine learning algorithm to that and helping them understand what good deployments are programmatically so that we can get to a point to where AIOps really does become a reality. Because the amount of applications that we're gonna be faced with in the next 5 years is stunning. The explosion that's happening. You can look at it a couple of different angles.
Jeff:One would be the amount of storage. I think we're going from 75 zettabytes to a 157 zettabytes by or 175 zettabytes by, 2025. So you look at it from a data perspective. The same thing holds true from a device perspective. I don't remember the exact numbers.
Jeff:But the stat I heard this morning, which was in a Microsoft broadcast by the way, but it was they were citing a Gartner statistic and that was in the next 5 years, more applications will be written than were written in the previous 40 years. Think about supporting that. There there aren't enough humans on the planet for us to be able to manage those the way we've done them in the past, and it's gonna have to be done automated.
Max:Hi. I'm Max Clark, and you're listening to the Tech Deep Dive podcast. At ClarkSys, we believe tech should make your life better, searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. With thousands of negotiated contracts, ClarkSys has helped hundreds of businesses source and implement the right tech at the right price. You're looking for a new vendor and wanna have peace of mind knowing you've made the right decision?
Max:Visit us at clarksys.com to schedule an intro call. So a few years ago, I had a a CTO tell me I mean, basically, he was, he was at a company, and he had to travel a lot. And so he was constantly on a plane between where he lived and where his office was with the corporate parent. You know, it wasn't a long plane flight, maybe, you know, 4 or 5 hours. But he recognized a certain degree of stress.
Max:Every time he was on a plane, what was happening with his infrastructure running in a cloud provider? Was it serving traffic? Were they able to conduct, you know, commerce and serve their customers and onboard? And and, you know, everything that comes along with, you know, we have a business connected to the Internet, and what are we doing with it? Right?
Max:What he was looking for at that time was he was looking for a partner that could help manage his environment. Not necessarily do application development, but manage and make sure that things were running. Like who was responsible for keeping everything running? And that partnership ended up becoming with part you know, with with Rackspace. It's been very successful for them.
Max:And this leads me to a question about how you actually implement and what service blocks are and how people make decisions because there's a lot of options now from Rackspace. And what used to be this all or nothing kind of one size fits everybody forced approach has now become a very flexible, nimble, here's all the different pieces that we can offer you. Which ones do you want? And so how do you actually layer? What is a service block?
Max:How does this layer together? And and how do people understand, I want these things, but I maybe don't need this other thing right now?
Jeff:Yeah. So in the earliest days of Rackspace, we had our support model was what we call the denial of support model. We didn't answer the phone. It was not good. This is the 1st couple of years.
Jeff:And at one point, one of the original founders had accidentally answered the phone when it was a customer who had been down for several days. This customer was livid. And through that highly energetic conversation, this founder realized he hung up the phone and he and he slammed his hands down on their card table because this was not a fancy company at the time. It's very early days Rackspace, 1st couple of years. And he said, we have got to get fanatical about customer service.
Jeff:This was against everything in the previous couple of years because it was these were techies. These were these were, these were technical geeks. And they were like, if you can't run a server, you shouldn't we shouldn't sell you a server. But they realized that they had to support it. And what that meant over years has evolved.
Jeff:We now call it fanatical experience. But deep, deep, deep in our DNA as a rapper at Rackspace is the fact that we will do whatever it takes to serve that customer and make sure they have an amazing outcome. In the early days, our support, the way we charge for it was built into the cost of the server. You just paid for it. And then when cloud came along, we adopted a similar fashion.
Jeff:And I talked about this earlier. And that was we have to continue at Rackspace to figure out how to provide value. Because here's the hint. In the early days, we didn't figure that out and we had some customers leave us. Because after they were deployed and things were just working, you know what?
Jeff:Cloud provider had monitoring. You know what? Cloud provider has backup. You know what? Cloud provider, I could probably eventually get on the phone and help me and serve it.
Jeff:And while they did still see some value in Rackspace, maybe they didn't see the value for everything we were charging them for. And so along come service blocks. All we did was we blew up the whole support model. And, it was one of the smartest things I think Rackspace has ever done. And what they did was instead of saying, alright.
Jeff:If you're gonna you're gonna go buy a $100 worth of infrastructure, I'm gonna charge you $20 a month to support it. A fixed, you know, variable model based on how much you consume. And as opposed to that and then saying, oh, okay. Everything that we would normally do for a customer, we're gonna break down into these, I call them bite sized or fun sized bits of of service and support that you can add and remove without penalty from Rackspace. So when you're going through that that the initial move out into Rackspace, that whole advise and design, that's a service block.
Jeff:You consume that, you get a tangible deliverable, and that feeds into the migration work. It's another service block. You buy that service block to get the migration stuff. As your cloud starts to come online, you have foundational capabilities. We call it foundation services to be able to do the the blocking and tackling of having managing things in the cloud, the the monitoring, ticketing, these sorts of just very basic stuff, helping you with tagging strategies, but not doing a lot proactively, very reactive.
Jeff:But the more embedded you want Rackspace to be involved in that process, there's a service block for that. And you can make, as a customer, that decision. You will not be given, in our cloud based environments, you will not be given a fixed fee services managed services capability. You'll be able to tailor that from a capability perspective to best meet what it is that you wanna do. You get to a point where things are just sort of working and you've got other things to focus on in your business, scale some of that stuff back down.
Jeff:Get it to where it makes sense. Keep us doing the base stuff. As soon as you need to go deeper with this, you can scale that back up. Again, all without penalty, which is which is unheard of.
Max:Something that Rackspace does as part of your foundational services that I don't think people understand is you include cost monitoring, optimization, and governance tools that are automated. I mean, this is something that's very sophisticated intellectual property around these things. But anybody who's ever tried to dig into their AWS bill and figure out what they're actually paying and how much and why and what for and our things, you know, and this and and people talk about it and, like, oh, is this VM running or is it the right size? I mean, that's that's the really sophisticated stuff. There's, like, basic things of, like, oh, I disconnected a a VM, but I didn't get rid of block storage for it.
Max:And so I have all these EBS volumes that are still around. And these things pile up, and all of a sudden you're like, well, that's a significant amount of money each month. So, you know, with your foundational services, you do include software. You do include a systems to allow people to actually better understand what they're spending. Do they wanna set thresholds?
Max:They wanna set alerts on these things. They wanna set notifications. So, hey. Oops. Somebody spun something up and forgot to turn it down.
Max:We get an alert before the bill comes at the end of the month. Or do we have a security policy set up properly? And is this being tracked? And is being you know, are things changing that shouldn't change? And and even within that, if you look at what it would cost to acquire that technology and that capability outside of it, I mean, a lot of that cost I mean, it's it's it's incredible that it's included.
Max:And you really should talk about it more because people need that. I mean, it's and there's some resistance to it from the whole stance of, oh, you know, you're gonna help me figure out how to go into reserved instances, or you're gonna help me figure out, you know, instance resizing, but I can't do it. So, like, that's not really a value. But the flip of it is actually having reporting and data and trend analysis
Jeff:against Awareness alone. Yep. Exactly. And the fact that those tools were cross cloud as well so that if you are a multi cloud customer, you're able to get visibility and and that same kind of of response and reporting across all of those clouds.
Max:It's so interesting that you mentioned tag strategies. And anybody who's been in public cloud for any, you know, amount of time and then actually wants to come back and be able to do divisional billing or reporting, all of a sudden you start talking about tagging. And then how do you actually roll out tagging? And and that's something of of Rackspace's onboarding of helping people go through and say, okay. Here's a tagging strategy, and how do we actually tag resources?
Max:And actually, you know, because that influences what is your billing structure? How do you support all this other thing? How do you report against it? How do you say, you know, hey, I'm the IT department. I'm managing this stuff.
Max:I'm not expensive. Marketing had a Super Bowl commercial. It was really expensive last month. It wasn't my fault. Right?
Max:You know, that's you know, these are all things I don't think, you know, a lot of places think about until after the fact. And going into a process with Rackspace where you're bringing this up at the beginning of it and really trying to help drive into an operational excellence, these are all good places for the enterprise.
Jeff:Well and another thing they don't necessarily think about is a lot of companies I mentioned earlier before where a strategy to help from vendor lock in is they will they will have, okay. We're gonna make we're gonna make 2 clouds available to the enterprise. Go. Now what ultimately what happens immediately? Factions formed.
Jeff:You got the AWS camp. You got the you got the Microsoft or Google camp over here. And, you know, they may sit next to each other in the lunchroom, but that's as friendly as they're gonna be. God forbid they would actually agree on tagging strategy on on or even any of the other architectural elements unless it's a super large organization that can really heavy heavy handed do it. But what Rackspace realizes this is a challenge and we're in the process of creating some new technology, which I am spending a majority of my time on these days and I'm so excited about.
Jeff:But what it's going to do is it is going to operationalize multi cloud for customers. It's not going to so Rackspace today, we do that by force. And we do that just through sheer human will and common account teams who connect the dots and that, you know, transparency here, they're doing it manually. But what we're in the process of creating right now is a commonality across clouds for customers, not to where we want you to use a common cloud management portal. We don't want to homogenize the cloud experience.
Jeff:We want to homogenize all of the things that you have to solve for that really have nothing to do with how do I make a server run better? How do I make my application run better? Think of it like tagging is a huge one. Cost governance is a huge one. Usage governance is a huge one.
Jeff:Backup, how do we ensure that I've come in backup and monitoring across everything and be able to look at all that stuff from a single pane of glass or have API access to that that I can adjust that and deal with it in my own internal systems? So that's the next piece that Rackspace is working on where we we've got the MVP under construction at the moment, and it'll start to see the light of day in the next few months.
Max:Multi cloud is a huge consistent topic. And I think every serious public cloud deployment ends up in some version of multi cloud. And I I feel like that conversation starts with, we're gonna have redundancy against cloud vendors. And then it shifts very quickly to, you know, we have so much ingrained application in one that that that we can't effectively go multi cloud because shifting data and synchronizing data between environments becomes the the the complicated piece of it. But it's it's I'm on cloud vendor a, and cloud vendor b has a very interesting application that I wanna run.
Max:You know? And and the first ones that we really saw this a lot with was the machine learning pipelines. You know, running to you know, taking out of Redshift and going into going into Google in order to run BigQuery and TensorFlow. Right? You know, that'd be, like, huge popular thing.
Max:Now, I mean, AWS would argue that if the application was reimplemented, that Redshift would be just as efficient. And what's red Redshift is doing now would be, you you know, even easier. And that's that's a different conversation. Right? That comes into, like, architectural decisions and application pipeline and all these different things that you guys can help with as well.
Max:But what do you see multi cloud going over the next you know, let's call it 2 years. Right? Because I think that's a long enough horizon we can have, like, a a serious chat about. I mean, what what is the reality of multi cloud?
Jeff:So the reality of multi cloud is is everybody will be multi cloud. And in the early days, unless you're a really large company I actively tried to dissuade companies from utilizing multiple clouds because you have to solve for so many things every time, all the stuff that I just mentioned, and not to mention the internal expertise that you have to maintain and train and hire for and manage and all the above. But at this point, we're at a point where companies are big enough, clouds are mature enough, interoperability is is good enough that, the world will be multi cloud. Even if you think of it as something as simple as I'm using Office 365 over there, but, GCP is my data cloud of choice, and I'm putting all of my other, compute and web pacing properties over in AWS. That is a very real scenario that's happening over and over and over again and and out in the wild.
Jeff:And it's only gonna get worse because more things are going to be cloud based. Less and less will we see infrastructure being used and less and less will we see companies, I believe, just dedicated to how can I do it all in one? Now, if you are a smaller company, I highly recommend you find a cloud and hold on close and find one that can serve you all the way across. And that really is going to that's going to narrow you down more on when I say all the way across, I mean, from collaboration to end user tools to your cloud based things. You know, you really have 2 choices here.
Jeff:It's Google. It's going to be Microsoft. But as you get larger, you can you can think about multi cloud. And the other thing I think that's going to drive multi cloud story all the more is, our containers because containers are the great democratizer in my opinion. Because it because it's this thing I can pick up and I can move and it's gonna run the same, you know, on my on my on my laptop.
Jeff:It's gonna say run the same in my dev farm. It's gonna run the same out in the wild in a bunch of servers, and it can be built into the CICD pipeline. And that can blow broadcast a brand new application stack every single time in cloud of choice. I think that's gonna be a huge driver of multi cloud.
Max:Containers are awesome. It's an awesome piece of technology. If you've ever done application development and trying to figure out what your what your production release cycle looks like, containers make your life a lot easier. And for portabilities, you said they make your life a lot easier. But question for you.
Max:As more and more enterprises come into the fold with it with containers, are they already behind, you know, behind the trend a little bit? I mean, has containers already been jumped into serverless? Should we be talking and focusing on application deployment in the serverless infrastructure as opposed to container application development into, you know, get whatever your container orchestration is?
Jeff:Right. So I don't think so all companies are behind right now. That that's just that's a starting block. 2nd piece is, it depends is my other answer because if vendor lock in is a concern and I I throw a lot of rocks at vendor lock in, but containers are a good way to actually get around that. The other piece is that it is a great way in my opinion to deconstruct monolithic applications into the next logical building block.
Jeff:So I can take a VM and now I can start to containerize applications And it does you get economies of scale. Let's be real about that. You there are benefits to utilizing them from a cost perspective, from an availability perspective. Even if you're thinking about on prem private clouds or to Rackspace private cloud or bursting or utilizing resources out in a public cloud. So it is, in my opinion, a logical stepping stone to serverless.
Jeff:But while I do believe that some workloads will remain and make sense to leave in a VM type construct, More of them will be left in a container construct, but then still tons will be will be in the the serverless world. And the other explosion from it and it's it's it's to come at the conversation, Max, from a different direction. So we're thinking about these big applications and how do I turn them and make them cloudy? Well, think about what's happening and the evolution that is happening right now in the low codeno code application suite. All of that is a 100% enabled by serverless.
Jeff:So they get to completely bypass the whole VM world because, you know, they're utilizing, you know, an application suite or a cloud provider of choice, but they're they're completely circumventing the whole, you know, VM container conversation and going straight to things that are enabled through serverless technologies in the cloud.
Max:I got into the Internet originally with a modem. So, like, everything that is happening in the world, ever on a on a constant basis, it just never ceases to amaze me. And, I mean, you know, I mean, we're spoiled. I mean, we have a LTE cell phone modems that are insanely fast in certain cities and all the I mean, all these things. But, you know, when you when you look at what's available and we can get into, like, really deep tech conversations, but I go back what you were saying a lot in the beginning of this, which is how do you enable an organization to do whatever it is that that organization needs to do?
Max:Right? It's like tech choices. We can get into battles, and you can have cloud a versus cloud b or server vendor a versus b or network vendor or this or, you know, or container versus serverless. But, you know, we really still have to connect all this back to what is the company what is the organization actually trying to do? Like, what is its mission?
Max:How is it serve its customers? Whether you know, I mean, that's and I feel like that that does get lost a lot. You know, people get in you know, you know, fall into the tech and and they and they lose sight of what is actually the goal of all this of all this stuff.
Jeff:Well, folks like you and I love to get lost in the tech. That's just what we've done forever. I mean, you probably, you know, bound 2 different phone lines with modems just to get a little faster than 566 or 144 if you remember those days or 9600. But that's the thing. When a company goes through this transition, it's not about the technology.
Jeff:Technology is one of the 3 legs of the stool. It's people, it's process, and then it's technology. And the easiest piece of this is the technology. We get an Amber by it because we like the shiny tech bits, but the people in the process is the hardest thing. And the I I love using the word because I think it really applies here.
Jeff:And that's the revolution that's happening inside of large enterprises. And it's happening there first because they can afford it. And what they're doing to enable and this is I don't know if it's Microsoft Word, but I sure am using it the most. And that is the citizen developer. And they've got some great tools in their power, apps platform to be able to do this.
Jeff:But but Gartner's number I obviously just watched a webinar earlier today. But Gartner's number is that 65 in the next, 4 years, 65% of enterprise apps will move to no code, low code. And that is a massive transformation of what's hap the only way that they can do that, by the way, is you can't use developers. You have to use the business analysts. You have to use the people who have been in the business forever and understand the business.
Jeff:And the tools are sophisticated enough that you can literally drag and drop a story or just write a couple lines of T SQL to get what you need out for a report, to be able to create a meaningful solution that will never touch corporate IT. Can you believe that? Never touch corporate IT. The other quote that I've heard is that is just stunning is that Ford Motor Company now has more computer engineers and coders than they have mechanical engineers. Car companies aren't car companies anymore, and we know that from Tesla's perspective, but the other ones.
Jeff:And that revolution is happening everywhere, and that's what's exciting about being in tech right now.
Max:And you get to sit in an interesting intersection with all this. Right? Because companies that are not tech companies, they have to figure out how to become tech companies or need to figure out how to operate tech for their companies. Or maybe it's a further extreme that wanna in a position where they don't wanna be tech companies at all, and they just wanna partner to support, enable their business. Right?
Max:I mean, that this becomes an intersection. You know, Rackspace originally was a logistics company dominantly. Right. Could you buy equipment and build it and put it into a facility and connect it to the Internet? And how efficient were you at performing those steps?
Max:Right. And then yeah. Could you answer the phone and support people and help them log in and change their passwords or install an application or whatever? You're still to the most part, you you know, you still have that logistics kind of, you know, brain going in, but now it's less about server infrastructure and more about applications and where applications are running, how the businesses actually interact with them.
Jeff:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you look at the evolution and it was from we have our own servers. Happy with that. Then, okay, on demand computing is probably gonna be a thing.
Jeff:We'll build our own server so you can come on demand compute with Rackspace or on cloud. And then it was, well, it really the servers don't make us special. Rackers make us special in what we do for customers. So let's go support things on on the public clouds. And then it wasn't just, well, we're supporting the infrastructure.
Jeff:If the infrastructure is so god so darn important, then, maybe those applications are. So we got really deep in SAP and Oracle and Salesforce. So supporting specific applications as deep as we did everything else. And then Rackspace's latest pivot, it just looks to where we're going, is when we acquired Anika, announced it last fall, finalized it this spring, and that's all around custom development. It's around how do we help companies do go through that transformation, not just from a technology perspective, but from a people and a process perspective.
Jeff:Some companies just hire us to come in and be referees, if you can believe that, to help help grow them in their capabilities and help make sure that they like each other at the end of the day.
Max:Jeff, this is fantastic. Thank you so much for your time. I promise, if you're willing to do it, I'd love to have another one where we can get into, the religious debate of monolithic versus microservice based application development. Oh, yes. And then whether or not that should be deployed in containers or serverless, I think we could probably but I I will I will you know, we'll have to have to give ourselves a lot of time to get into that chat.
Jeff:No kidding. Hey. I really appreciate being on today. Max, thank you so much. We really appreciate, your partnership.
Jeff:We appreciate, you've just being part of of the Rackspace larger family, and everything that that, you know, we get to get to do together.
Max:Oh, thank you, Jeff. Talk to you soon. Bye. Thanks for joining the Tech Deep Dive podcast. At Clarkesys, we believe tech should make your life better, searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before.
Max:We can help you buy the right tech for your business. Visitus@clarksys.com to schedule an intro call.
