The grass is greener in the cloud than on-premises — for greenfield applications. A quick-and-dirty lift-and-shift to the cloud can leave legacy applications homesick for hardware, according to Rishi Yadav (pictured, right), founder and chief executive officer of Zettabytes Inc.

“Nobody’s talking about that,” Yadav said. The persnickety requirements of diverse apps are lost in endless conversations about infrastructure and data. “Every other company in the Bay Area is a backup and restore company,” he added.

Cloud-native is held out as the sorcerer’s wand to modernize companies in the time it takes to complete the migration. “And then clients say, ‘Yes, but I already invested $500 million in applications in the last 10 years — what’s going to happen to them?” Yadav stated.

Yadav and Bart Hickenlooper (pictured, left), senior vice president of business development and client services at Zettabytes, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warrren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd, during an interview at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. (* Disclosure below.)

Yadav and Hickenlooper are quick to point out the merits of cloud in appropriate doses, i.e., for well-suited apps. It is not just about cost savings anymore, but rather the “innovation engine” cloud agility and services provide, Hickenlooper pointed out.

“Getting there from their legacy platforms is a little tricky. They need a development cycle that works in a hybrid fashion to really go cloud-native with those applications,” he said.

From hardware safe zone to serverless bleeding edge

Zettabytes’ platform combines a hardware appliance with software and Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud capabilities. The method to the muddle is optimization of all types of apps from the most legacy-grounded to microservice-built cloud-native. AWS Lambda serverless compute platform and AWS Kineses data streaming engine are ready to go in Zettabytes out of the box.

“You can write microservices that consume those services in addition to your traditional storage and compute and really get cloud-native,” Hickenlooper said. Legacy transactional apps built around relational databases may not be a good fit for modern cloud services like Lambda, he said. However, the power of serverless to collapse and simplify processes for agile development is extremely useful to others, particularly data analytics apps.

“Converting what may be a traditional [Apache Spark big data framework] job into a Lambda function is really something people are raising their eyebrows about,” Hickenlooper concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Zettabytes Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Zettabytes nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE