This week we have a very special guest on the Meet the Architect Series. Veeam EMEA Principal Cloud Architect Luca Dell’Oca aka Mr. Cloud Connect!
Geoff: Hi Luca, First of all I want to thank you for taking the time to do this interview!. I say this with no exaggeration, You are a legend in the Veeam world, especially for Service Providers! Your Cloud Connect book made many people look good in front of their bosses! Like me :). How did you get started in IT and what led you to Veeam?
Luca: Hi Geoff, first of all, thanks so much for the kind words. The VCC book started as a 30 pages paper at the times of VBR v8 and I never planned it to be like it's today, but now that it exists like this I'm happy that after almost 10 years it is still useful to people. That's always been its goal.
Funny enough, VCC was one of the reasons I joined Veeam. I started in IT in 2000, after a failed attempt to study Medicine. As many of my age IT was self-learned with home computers since high school, my first being an Amiga 500. This lead me to work in a small system integrator near my home town, that lead me to work in Switzerland in a newly created service provider. We did everything there, I even saw the place being built, and this gave me a 360° view on datacenter IT and even physical infrastructure: racking, cooling, cabling, networking, storage, and obviously virtualization (I've been a vExpert for the first 11 years of that program). We started to use Veeam when it was v4 or v5 I think, and I had as everyone questions and answers, so it was natural for me to write (a lot, admittedly) on the Veeam forums. In 2013 I wrote an idea about some solution to ship backups across public networks using tunneling (sounds familiar? I'm sure if we dig into the forums that post may still be there...), When later in the year I was at VMworld I met with Anton Gostev and we sat on a table to discuss it, literally on a napkin 😄 I found out that Veeam was also working on something similar (I'd never claim to be its inventor!!), and that concept became the tunneling system we all know now as Cloud Connect. I found out about VCC once I joined Veeam (I remember I said something like "So you did it!!"), as I got an offer right after that meeting. And since then service providers have always been my focus. btw the story is not totally new, I wrote about it ten years ago here: https://www.veeam.com/blog/welcome-veeam-cloud-connect.html
Geoff: Wow Luca that is an incredible story. I know that for many of us who have worked so much and so closely with this technology learning these types of facts about how it all began is fantastic. Not long ago on our Object First Aces call Ratmir Timashev gave a fireside chat and we heard similar stories about how all of it began in relation to Veeam. Cloud Connect was and is a huge success. For someone who worked at a service provider with Veeam both before and after Cloud Connect believe me I am speaking without an ounce of empty praise. It truly was revolutionary. This leads me to my next question. Ideas often get written down on napkins as you said, but so many then just get thrown away into the recycling bin and are never seen again. What in your opinion is the secret to actually transforming great ideas into real things that people actually use?
Luca: That's true, the world is full of ideas but only a bunch of them become something real. I read once that "ideas without execution are just dreams" and in ten years here at Veeam I've witnessed it first hand. I see two main points why we transform these ideas: we listen, and we have a very flat and quick organization. We all know our forums where every Veeam user can post questions, ideas, suggestions, and you get responses and feedback directly from our top product managers. And even if we are more than 4000 people now, it's always very simple inside the company to get in touch with pm and devs and have a call to talk about something we have in mind.
And I really love the fact that we are trusted (even if not being part of the pm team) because of who we are and what we proved to be able to bring, regardless the position we have in the company. After all this time (if I count also the time before I joined), being still engaged as an expert on the providers topics when it come to develop new solutions is one of the best parts of my job, I even love the heated discussions (I also have some fireside chats on this, but they cannot really be shared hahaha) with product managers, cause it helps Veeam to shape the products by heavily and deeply brainstorming, breaking, and reassembling the ideas, defending them from the "NO" you get every time at first, cause they want us to prove the thought process being behind it.
Geoff: It is fascinating to hear about how these processes work on the inside. As an outsider I have to admit that one of the things that I loved with Veeam was your flexibility and the ability to quickly adapt. I had worked with another big backup software vendor before Veeam and always felt that feature requests and questions were sent directly to /dev/null. When I found the Veeam forums I had to pinch myself at first to believe what I was seeing, but lets get back to cloud connect. What were your favorite features of Cloud Connect? Also what were the features that you got the most positive feedback about?
Luca: Well, for its story for sure my favorite feature is the Network Extension Appliance. We spent a lot of time thinking this L2overL3 design to overcome networking issues like VPNs, overlapping subnets and the will to avoid re-ip operations on vm's, and also how to control the NEA from VBR, and the final result is so brilliant in its apparent simplicity. I was so excited at the time that I did a "Deep Deep dive" about it at a Veeam event in London in 2016 where I probably shocked some people by showing even the Linux command happening behind the scenes or the change in packets TTL! 😱
The other one I love is the tunneling systems itself, having one single secured port for all the communications between the different components was cool, for some time I hoped it would be used for the whole VBR.
Those are actually also the features that people like the most usually, together with the abstraction of the cloud repository probably, and the capability to write VM's natively into Cloud Director, so that VCC also became a migration and onboarding tool for IAAS systems.
Geoff: I would have to agree. The tunnelling made the solution an easy one to sell as a Service Provider. I had to deal with other solutions and getting all the different VPNs working with customers was always I huge time and effort commitment. Cloud Connect made it easy, just port 6180 TCP, and if you wanted replication then UDP as well. By they way I have heard some people say that they wished Cloud Connect had been made to look a bit different as many people saw it as a different solution from VBR, what is your take on that? Also I wanted to ask if there are any new "not secret" goodies coming our way in future cloud connect versions? I understand if you can't really tell us but.. 😁
Luca: I understand the reason why some would like to have VCC as a dedicated product, but I prefer it to be as an extension of VBR, or "VBR with a different license" if you want. In this way, VCC has immensely benefited from all the innovations brought to VBR, without the need for a dedicated team to develop the same features twice, that would have slow down the innovation on VCC itself. Think about the move to PostgreSQL and the savings in licensing for providers, or Linux Hardened Repository, or the support now for Object Storage and the cool things VCC can do like Direct2Object.
For the future, sorry but I don't have any news to share, at least not specifically for VCC. We will all have to wait some months to find out.
Geoff: Those are very good points. One of the biggest reasons why people loved and continue to love Veeam is because as you said the innovations. The fact that these could be brought in so quickly on the Cloud Connect side have had huge benefits for Service Providers. Ok, how about now I ask a broader question about the future of IT in general. Right now the big trend is AI as you know, literally everywhere you turn AI is staring you in the face. What are your thoughts on AI? Is it a threat to our jobs as IT admins? What else do you see on the horizon when it comes to IT in general?
Luca:
Oh, AI, yeah it wouldn't be an IT discussion without talking about it, right? 🙂
Well, In my view it's not for now what it says, even if they put "intelligence" in the name doesn't mean it is, that's just the marketing department trying to make money out of it. For now I see a lot of hype, like any new technology at the beginning. It's an incredibly powerful statistical algorithm, that can do amazing things, but as of now it's totally without context, leading to some weird results. I don't know if or when we'll be able to make it really "intelligent", but for now it's a great support tool and nothing more. We'll see. Like a razor, it can help a surgeon or kill someone, depends on its use. It can for example help me write a script in no time, and with great results, but still it needs me to tell it what do I need.
Another topic I think we can't avoid when talking about IT is ESG. The planet is not in good shape, and what we are doing is not enough sadly, while many don't even care. IT can do a lot to help, but we should maybe stop building gigantic datacenters for storing pics of kittens, memes, or videos no one but the author cares about, and focus on other more pressing problems 😉
There are many hot topics in this area like home automation (I can bore people to death if you ask me about home assistant or my all-electric house :D), autonomous vehicles, renewable power sources, electrification of energy creation, automated agriculture, all these new businesses need IT even more than before. If I was in my twenties looking for a job I'll probably look into these business.
Geoff: I think you have hit the nail on the head in relation to AI! ESG is a great topic and I think one that will hopefully become for focused on in the future. One thing that I am constantly hearing from people in IT and Backup Architects as well is the high level of stress that they have to deal with. I am sure that you also have had to deal with this (writing a book a lone I have been told is very stressful venture!) So as I a final question I wanted to ask you what you do for stress relief and what you recommend others to do?
Luca:
Ah-ha, yes the book has been quite an effort, and in fact each time it's about time to update it I start to procrastinate. But I promise by the end of this year we'll have 12.1 version. 🙂
For the stress, first I think you need to find your own balance, which can be different for everyone and even changing from time to time. and not be scared or wait too long for doing changes if they are needed, because wasted time is not coming back. Work in general can be absorbing and stressful, so it has to be as nice as it can be to make it fun, and remember at the end that "it's just work" (not the "it just works" of old Veeam claim 😄 ).
My stress relief is very simple: I use my free time with analog and offline activities, the main ones being biking, reading books (most of the times "the old way" on paper) and listening to music. I love heavy metal.
Geoff: Excellent. Thank you again Luca for this interview. I am sure our readers will Love it and we wish you all the best going forward at Veeam and especially with work with Cloud Connect!
