On theCUBE at EMC World 2014, Dave Vellante began his interview with the Apollo Group’s  Charles Preston and Christian Lewis by asking  how they came into their roles as cloud architects. Preston responded that a few years ago, they noticed a shift in the IT world: “Whatever kind of silo you were in wasn’t going to last.” While figuring out how to “get out” of their silos, Preston and Lewis realized that “what was happening in the public cloud space at the time was very exciting and interesting.”

Vellante wondered how the movement towards the cloud and DevOps emerged, whether the CIO came to them for help, or they requested their new roles. Preston replied, “both.” The CIO came to them to understand service assurance and the developers needed assistance when it came to managing the workload. The first step, according to Preston, was to drive converge teams. Then, “someone introduced DevOps in the marketplace” and Preston and Lewis began to align their business with those concepts. The result was a DevOps organization with a simple focus: “Do it fast. Make sure it works.”

The switch to the public cloud

Curious about the edict that drove their converged services strategy, Vellante asked whether the original goal was to “try to replicate the value, the agility, the economics of the public cloud internally.”

Lewis replied that what had originally attracted them to the public cloud was “the ability to present useful IT services to our customers […] in a self-service, on-demand model,” but they wanted those features “for [their] legacy environments.”

They wanted to learn from DevOps and “provide that same kind of service to our traditional waterfall legacy application development team.” They accomplished this, Lewis explained, by consolidating onto the Vblock system and replicating the “cloud-like experience in the confines of our data center.”

Vellante wondered, “How close did you get?” Both Preston and Lewis agreed they had not only achieved their goal, but surpassed it. Lewis recounted their experience with their first customer, a “small marketing department” that “got onto the platform” and “had applications up and running on it in multiple environments in a matter of minutes.”

• Predictable cost advantages 

Curious as to what exactly had driven the Apollo Group away from the public cloud, Vellante asked, “Was it expensive, was it too hard to control, was it hard to align the security-compliance edicts?”

Preston replied that cost had been their main driver, and that after migrating to a private cloud, they realized that “the more we use it, the more we get out of it.”

The public-to-private migration process

To gain some perspective on their process of migrating, Vellante asked what types of workloads the Apollo Group was running on the public cloud. Preston explained that they were running all of their workloads on the public cloud, including “databases, application servers, web servers, things that were student-facing, things that were involved in delivering our primary mission.” Lewis added, “they were java-based, custom or packaged, SQL, Oracle, NoSQL.”

Vellante’s next question was, “How complicated was it to move all those apps back in? And the data?” Preston responded that because they had already learned to “operate in a cloud-like way,” the process was less complicated: “We were migrating back from a public cloud and a specific set of services back to a private cloud where we also had defined a specific set of services.”

• Converged Infrastructure made the switch possible

Asking whether Preston and Lewis felt as though they had turned back from the public cloud at just the right moment, Vellante asked, “Do you feel like had you gone too far down the path that it wouldn’t have been achievable?”

In response, Preston expressed his belief that the industry is coming out with more tools the make switches like theirs possible: “Today, we’re heavy users of vCloud Automation Center. There weren’t tools like that three, or four, or five years ago that you could pick up from a company as large as VMware.” Lewis underscored his fellow cloud architect’s point, saying “the tooling has improved significantly, but what that tooling has enabled us to do is open up these services to our customers  so they can consume them on-demand […] So what we’ve enabled on a Vblock platform has fostered innovation within those development teams and within the business community to increase speed to market and improve agility.”

Bouncing off his interviewees appreciation for the tools that enabled their switch to the private cloud, Vellante asked, “Could you have done this without a Vblock or a converged infrastructure platform? Preston and Lewis both responded that their migration would not had been possible “in the time [they] did it” without said tools, and that they would not had been able to “focus on the additional value-ad services.”