Speaker: Tony Simopoulos, Director of Technology, Entegral
What problem were you solving for with Google Cloud?
Tony Simopoulos: Before moving to Google Cloud most of our technology platform was on premise. We had a dedicated team who managed procurement, maintenance and deployments to our fixed infrastructure. Provisioning resources for new production artifacts was a heavy burden. At the same time, we were rounding the corner on a significant re-architecture of our key products into microservices. We recognize that we were not going to reap the rewards of our new architecture and successfully deliver our next generation products if we remained committed to our existing on-prem infrastructure and practices. Simply put, we needed to move our business to the cloud and we were looking for the right partner.
How would you describe Google Cloud?
Tony Simopoulos: The first word that I would use is comprehensive. There is no shortage of available basic compute resources and critically for us where they're geographically located. Furthermore, there are hundreds of manage services, either through Google directly or through partners available on the platform. There's nothing we need that we can't find available in the Google Cloud marketplace. Second word I'd use a scalable. We can scale our compute and service consumption up or down and choose our level of system resiliency. Leading edge. We know we will always have available to us the required technologies upon which our business relies. We also know that we can experiment with new technologies and contribute to ongoing innovation both at Google Cloud and within our own industry.
Any tips for future customers?
Tony Simopoulos: Moving to any cloud environment is not a simple lift and shift. We were fortunate that Google supported us through our transition, including introducing us to professionals that could guide us through it. We understood the changes that needed to take place. We planned a phased approach and our partners helped us all along the way. I recommend taking the time to plan your transition and to ensure that your teams acquire the skill sets they will need for success.
How did Google Cloud affect your business?
Tony Simopoulos: Google Cloud Platform and more importantly, the Google Kubernetes Engine allowed us to realize the full potential of our microservice containerized architecture. We adopted Dev Ops practices across the majority of our teams. This reduced or eliminated wait states with our former infrastructure team and automated deployment, scaling and management of our containerized applications. In short, our ability to deploy new artifacts to production increased tenfold.
Why did you choose Google Cloud?
Tony Simopoulos: Google's commitment to the developer community and its key contributions to open source cloud native technologies form the basis for our trust in Google Cloud Kubernetes was our choice for managing our containerized production artifacts. We believed, and still do believe that Google Kubernetes Engine is the best manage Kubernetes environment on the market. We have the technology we need to move forward, and pricing is transparent and competitive. Furthermore, Google Cloud is always releasing new products and services that we find valuable. For us, Anthos and the promise of a fully managed multicloud Kubernetes experience is next.
