Building bridges to connect divergent cloud systems | #reInvent With the options offered by cloud service providers diversifying as each provider attempts to set itself apart from the rest of the market, the choice of which one to choose is appearing increasingly daunting to customers who want to make sure they won’t lock themselves out of future viability. But those schisms are generating yet another market, as some companies look to bridge the gaps between clouds so their users won’t have to worry about it. In Las Vegas, NV, at this year’s AWS re:Invent conference, Shashi Kiran, chief marketing office of Quali, and Chief Executive Lior Koriat joined Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE (* disclosure below), from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about their experiences in adapting to the new cloud systems possibilities, how customers are responding and what they see coming on the horizon. Infrastructural core Early in the conversation, Koriat made sure to emphasize the point that “Quali, since the beginning, was all about infrastructure,” and that it has carried that focus into its latest projects. Going into further detail on what the company’s current work entails, Kiran pointed out that “modernizing of applications” is where they’re finding a lot of significant movement in today’s tech. Working to make the transitions of companies into new infrastructures and environments as beneficial as possible is the point into which Quali fits. A big part of that, he added, was concentrated in the tasks of taking complex environments, standardizing them and making them DevOps friendly. “Hybrid sandboxes,” or hybrid-cloud environments in which virtualized environments can be used for testing applications and configurations before putting them into live practice, have been a large help both for Quali and its customers to realize operational goals. Capsules and crossroads Giving a bit more detail on the usage of these virtual sandboxes, Kiran noted, “In many cases, the application needs to be rearchitected … so the stack itself changes as you move to architecture as a service. … Part of the challenge is it’s hard to predict how the application is going to behave in a new environment altogether, and that’s really the challenge we’re trying to solve.” By targeting its user approach to the DevOps teams, it has been able to get some of its services’ biggest appeal across most easily, including the ability to “encapsulate an uber-container of the entire environment,” for testing which would otherwise cause heavy disruption in the established structure of an enterprise, Koriat said. And looking forward, Koriat anticipates that, at least for the next few years, private cloud will be the main reality, “but we love that public cloud is there to [introduce] our customers” to the possibilities of cloud environments. Kiran agreed, noting that they were seeing many customers at “a crossroads,” as they were faced with decision of evolving their existing data centers or looking at a hybrid deployment, with AWS and public clouds offering further branching of options. But for Quali, Kiran stated, any of those choices by its customers would be fine. “You choose whatever environment you want, and we will help you. … That is actually making sure they don’t get locked into any decision,” he said. #reInvent #theCUBE