Thread by @swardley

X : What is cloud native?
Me : Containers and buy our kubernetes, give us money or you won't be cool but we also mean serverless but maybe build your own serverless on kubernetes and DevOps, it's got to be be open source, you're not really hip are you? What was the question?

X : What sort of definition is that?
Me : It's not about definition, it's a way of thinking, it's culture, it's ... buy some of our stuff, we've added new and improved microservices.
X : You're just making this up.
Me : It's fluid, you've got to be in the zone, it's anti-fragile.

X : This is hopeless.
Me : See cloud. Not the concept of providing compute as a utility but the term. Do you want some stickers?
X : Stickers?
Me : I've got some old "cloud" stickers for your data centre. I could scribble on "native" in biro if you like?

X : You're not a fan of cloud native?
Me : Serverless 1st, Consume component services 2nd. Infrastructure as a service 3rd. Sweat existing assets 4th and build your own 1,497th.
X : Serverless is part of cloud native.
Me : So are containers. It's not very helpful as a term.

X : You find the term problematic?
Me : Would you like to join my Do Good Stuff Foundation?
X : What does that mean?
Me : Whatever I want it to mean, whenever I want it to mean something. I'll define "Do", "Good" and "Stuff" later as needed. Yep, terms matter.

X : Serverless before consuming component services?
Me : Well, that depends upon the context. You need to map it first. I wouldn't rebuild a utility service that already exists but I would use serverless to build new things. Map it first, challenge the map.

By way of example -

X : What's wrong with building your own? My data centre is as cost effective as AWS.
Me : Another budget.
X : Eh?
Me : Everytime some corp says this, I ask for the figures and then go "where's the electricity cost?" ... guess what the response is?
X : Another budget.
Me : Yep.

... I too can make a corporate data centre look as efficient as AWS by ignoring electrcity, air conditioning, opportunity loss, buildings, staffing and 80% of the cost whilst making grand assumptions on utilisation and load. Hardware is about 20% of the cost of running a utility.

X : But what about the cost of migration?
Me : That will only increase over time. When you add stuff to your data centre you need to account for the cost of it going in, the inefficiency of operating (after you stop ignoring costs) and the added cost to any future migration plan.

X : Any advice?
Me : Shut the door on the data centre. No new stuff goes in. You've got enough toxic IT to manage without adding more to it.
X : Toxic?
Me : Legacy if you wish, but the sort of legacy that you're ashamed of and don't want to look at too hard.

X : But the data centre is already depreciated. It's effectively free.
Me : No, it's not. You're ignoring the operating costs and the additional migration burden you're adding. You're borrowing from the future, pretending there is no cost and claiming it's free. Bad idea.

X : We can't just simply shut the doors on the data centre, it would take time to plan this.
Me : Good thing you've had 14 years to prepare. It took Netflix about seven years to get off its "data centre" habit and now you've got the added benefit of serverless.

X : Do you think everything will go cloud?
Me : Eventually, when we stop talking about it i.e. we forget there's a difference.
X : How long will that take?
Me : For the laggards, about 30+ years. They're still just getting used to the internet hence digital transformation.

X : Serverless != Lambda. There are component services you use.
Me : Serverless Architecture > Serverless