The cloud comes of age, the wild years of discovery are over

The first article in my new LinkedIn series about the cloud looks at our partnership with Amazon Web Service (AWS) and its impact on technology and organisation. Nowadays, entire ecosystems have formed and modularity is the order of the day. Public clouds have undergone rapid development and offer thousands of building blocks to make innovation faster, easier and cheaper.

The possibilities they provide are changing the way IT is developed and operated. Swisscom, too, is developing consistently and wherever possible according to the cloud-native principle as its next development step. In June 2021 we announced our partnership with Amazon Web Service (AWS). From 2022, we will be moving selected internal IT and telecoms applications into AWS’s public cloud and relying on the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region. We are thus switching to a hybrid cloud model for our applications. We are leveraging the innovation and scale benefits of the public cloud while continuing to invest specifically in the development of our Swisscom cloud services. In the medium term, we plan to move the majority of our workload into this hybrid cloud model. I consider this to be a hugely important step for Swisscom, especially for the IT, Network & Infrastructure unit because cloud native will set the transformation pace in the coming years. Our ambition at Swisscom is to be at the forefront of this development.

This trend is not new. Many companies are moving their applications to public clouds and pursuing cloud-native development. In our case, we are moving not only IT workloads to the public cloud, but also telecommunication workloads, in particular 5G. In recent years, no stone has been left unturned in the telecoms environment. Whilst for decades, telecoms depended on monolithic systems, IT models have now firmly taken hold. Here, too, virtualisation is superseding hardware and, together with my management team, we are driving this across all appropriate teams. Highly specific telecoms hardware has been replaced by software in the data centre. The energy savings of 5G, for example, are essentially achieved by virtualising network functions. But these developments also play an important role in operational tasks, which is my personal area of focus at the moment. We are therefore also reducing complexity by virtualising and simplifying the infrastructure and are able to detect potential errors more quickly.

"Cloud native will set the transformation pace at Swisscom in the coming years."

The big challenge however, especially in the context of our transformation, is the merging of these different worlds into a standardised cloud environment on the basis of standard building blocks. After all, this is where everything comes together: bare metal, IaaS, PaaS, CaaS and the two different worlds of IT and telecommunications. Or, in other words: infrastructure that has grown organically over the years is slowly becoming uniform and standardised. So, just as a PDF cannot instantly transform a printed brochure into a digital application, the migration of these very applications is far from simple. One-to-one mapping is simply not possible. We have analysed several hundred applications and decided how to migrate each of them according to the 6R model:

• Retain: these applications cannot be moved to a public cloud for various reasons, for example regulatory. That is why we continue to operate them in our own data centres.
• Retire (phase out): we no longer need the application in this form.
• Repurchase (drop & shop): we still need the function of the application and are looking for a cloud-native replacement, e.g. a SaaS solution.
• Refactor (rewrite & decouple): we rewrite the software to better support the cloud environment and decouple it from the previous system.
• Replatform (lift & reshape): we move the application that is now already containerised or cloud native. We adapt it slightly to the AWS conditions if necessary; for example, by including specific services that we currently operate ourselves.
• Rehost (lift & shift): we move an application without any significant adjustments.

In our case, we focus on migrating only optimised applications. This means that we avoid simply ‘rehosting’ as we expect too little benefit from this. We become really efficient when we look at our applications critically and, as a minimum, run them as highly scalable containers on AWS. The aim is to standardise as much as possible, thereby simplifying operation and making the services more robust.

“Cloud native brings everything together. But it would be na?ve to believe that it can be used to solve all challenges.”

We have set up two teams for the implementation. One for the IT side, and one for the telecom side. On the IT side, we divided the migration group into six streams:

• Landing Zone stream: The Landing Zone stream manages the technical integration of AWS, giving internal DevOps teams the best possible support with onboarding to AWS and at the same time ensuring that Swisscom’s security and compliance requirements are met.
• Cloud Roadmap stream: The Cloud Roadmap stream defines requirements for this landing zone with a focus on the various applications and gains important insights with pilot projects that will later benefit all projects.
• Operating Model stream: This stream is responsible for the integration of processes into our existing IT landscape, e.g. for incident and change management.
• Cloud Mastery stream: The goal of this stream is to ensure the best possible training and development of our employees with regard to the AWS Cloud Portfolio.
• Tech strategy: We clarify which technologies we wish to deploy in this new hybrid setup.
• Data: This stream has a specific focus on our Big Data platform and how it can benefit from AWS’s service offerings in the area of machine learning.

This sounds relatively simple in theory – but, as is so often the case, the reality is different. Firstly, there are a great many dependencies between the applications. Secondly, the move to a cloud-native company has enormous implications for the way we develop and collaborate – namely, DevOps. It is hugely important to me that we closely accompany this transformation together in the IT, Network & Infrastructure management team. We are proceeding cautiously with this, because a strict, top-down approach would be wrong for such a fundamental change and would be doomed to failure from the outset. We decided to go cloud native gradually throughout the organisation and the teams – starting with our software development teams. To monitor progress and address new topics in an agile manner, we hold a monthly Inspect & Adapt meeting at which specialists, leaders and management exchange information about learning and adaptation. I am always fascinated by the energy and motivation of the employees who work proactively to shape our future – a true inspiration. And so we continue along our journey to the cloud and write our next chapter. We started with agile transformation in 2015, launched the DevOps model in 2018 and now, in 2021, we are focusing on cloud native. I have already written about this:

• The evolution of New Work at Swisscom – Part 1
• Increased customer focus thanks to value streams – Part 2
• A home port for employees – Part 3

“Working on the culture is evident in behaviour, not in PowerPoint slides. Cloud native only works if we also invest in people and culture."

The transition of Swisscom’s workloads to cloud-native architectures requires new skills and also means a major investment in the training of the company’s own employees. AWS is supporting Swisscom in embedding a cloud-native culture, with a view to successfully managing the transformation to the AWS Cloud and to fostering innovation. A silo mentality means that failure is inevitable. It is imperative that we approach such a project transversally, with the involvement of all units. Our engineers can hardly wait for the integration of AWS, which is pleasing for me as it confirms the decisions we have made. However, they have high expectations in terms of automation and ease of operation. We are therefore currently investing many resources in our Cloud Mastery programme, in which we are working with AWS to set up extensive training programmes and tutorials for our engineers. Those involved at AWS are professionals and are very familiar with such migration projects.

A major challenge is that we are pushing ahead with other projects alongside the AWS migration and have reached different phases of the transformation depending on the topic. It is helpful in this instance to proceed step by step, taking on board and incorporating new requirements – this is agility in action and it helps us progress.

“The challenging part of solution development is the application itself. How to actually translate the added value of technology into business applications.”

Our business customers also benefit from this knowledge building. We are currently the only Microsoft partner in Switzerland with?Azure MSP Expert status. By moving the internal workload to AWS, we will very quickly build up additional knowledge that we can successfully offer on the market. Swisscom B2B has also been able to offer customers services from two hyperscalers for some time now in addition to our proven dedicated solutions and our own cloud products.

By joining forces with AWS, we are driving forward our cloud-native transformation. Cloud native is our next big development step after Agile and DevOps. A simplified and homogeneous technology ecosystem allows us to focus even more on business value, to concentrate, for example, on how 5G in combination with data, IoT or cloud brings business benefits for our customers.?Because if there is one thing we can learn from many technology topics such as IoT, 5G, data or cloud, it’s that the challenging part of solution development is not the technological implementation, but the application itself – the development of business value. The more straightforward the technological implementation, the more focus remains for business value.

My most important takeaways

• Starting in 2021 we are moving part of our workload to AWS Europe (Zurich) region and will also be developing our Swisscom cloud further. This applies for both telecoms and IT workloads.
• No half measures: we’ll be migrating only optimised applications and avoiding simply rehosting, as we expect too little benefit from this. We’ll become more efficient when we run our applications as highly scalable containers on AWS as a minimum.
• We’re setting up different streams with a clear focus.
• We started with agile transformation in 2015, launched the DevOps models in 2018 and now, in 2021, we are focusing on cloud native.
• We are investing a great deal in the training, ways of working and onboarding of our employees. For us, it’s all about the culture!

Many thanks to all Swisscom employees and AWS who are making this possible.

What do you think about cloud and cloud native – what is your stance on this development ?I look forward to your comments.

Digital greetings, Christoph

#christophaeschlimann #swisscom #telecommunications #joinswisscom

Want to carve out a career with Swisscom? Are you looking for a new challenge with the freedom to shape it as you wish? We are looking for DevOps Engineers, Product Owners & Managers, Solution Managers, Release Train Engineers and other talents. Are you interested in the?ICT and telecommunications industry? Do you value an agile way of working, which allows you to help shape the future of a company? You can find out more about working at Swisscom here:?swisscom.com/jobs.?We are also looking for DevOps experts in Rotterdam,?find out more here?- and in Riga,?find out more here.

Christoph Aeschlimann, CTO and CIO Swisscom. My passions include the latest technologies such as 5G, Cloud, AI and everything to do with software – modern forms of collaboration such as agility and DevOps also fascinate me. These allow teams to become more involved and autonomous when working towards achieving a common?goal.