As open-source, cloud-native technologies continue to grow, companies are asking for particular things. And trends continue to grow around open source as a service — speeding up the process, scale and flexibility. And as companies continue to embrace these technologies, the way they create their teams and structure for handling technology is vitally important to meet market demands.

“Generally, people are trying to get off of their enterprise solutions and evolving into an open-source space,” said Adrian Cockcroft (pictured), vice president of cloud architecture strategy at Amazon Web Services Inc. “So that’s kind of the evolution from one trend, custom or enterprise software to open source to as a service. What I’m hearing from customers is that that’s what they’re looking for. They want it to be easy to use; they want it to scale; they want it to be reliable and work.”

Cockcroft spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Lauren Cooney (@lcooney) at the KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU event in Copenhagen, Denmark. They discussed current customer trends and effective team structures for implanting source and cloud-native technology. (* Disclosure below.)

Open source as a service, small team structure

Companies in general have three phases of adoption for the cloud, according to Cockcroft. The first phase that companies want is speed of implementation. “I want machines in minutes instead of months … and that speeds everything up so you get something done quickly,” he said.

The second phase is starting to scale using cloud-native. “You really need to have elastic services,” Cockcroft added. “You can scale down as well as up; otherwise, you just end up with a lot of idle machines that cost you too much. And it’s not giving you the flexibility.”

The third phase Cockcroft sees is complete data center shutdown. “If you look at investing in a new data center or data center refresh or just opening an AWS account, it really doesn’t make sense nowadays,” he said. “We’re seeing lots of large enterprises either considering it or well into it. When you shut down the data center, all of the backend core infrastructure starts coming out. So we’re starting to see sort of mainframe replacement and the really critical business systems being replaced.”

So how can companies keep up with such demand? Since Amazon is a prime example of how to grow quickly, Cockcroft pointed out that it’s really the small team structures that makes this effective for Amazon. These small teams work independently, which helps them scale more quickly.

“That’s something other engineering organizations have trouble with. They build hierarchies that slow down,” Cockcroft explained. “We have a really good engineering culture where every time you start a new team, it runs at its own speed. We’ve shown that as we add more and more resources, more teams, they are just executing. In fact, their accelerated, they’re building on top of other things. We get to build higher and higher level abstractions to layer into.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU. (* Disclosure: Some segments are sponsored by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to support editorial coverage. Neither the CNCF nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE