Rob Fry On Why You're Doing Cloud Wrong

Rob Fry is CTO of Armorblox and board member of Macrometa. Rob has a storied career in Silicon Valley having been at several noteworthy startups like Jask (acquired by Sumo Logic) and prior to that one of the architects of Netflix at a critical time in its life as it transitioned from a DVD by mail business to the global streaming giant that we know of today. Every time you netflix and chill - you can thank Rob for the experience.

You are doing public cloud wrong.

While all the research says companies are accelerating migration to public cloud ($355B globally by 2022), what’s lost in the noise is how companies are inefficient at building infrastructure once they get there. Flexera’s enterprise study from 2020 has validated the customer’s pain. The study reveals the frustrating customer story as more and more loads are moved into public cloud. Highlighted in the study is how customers need help to deal with cost issues, optimization needs for cost savings, and expertise and technology to deal with complexity. To add to customer angst, as companies desire to move more loads into public cloud, they additionally want to do so with more than one cloud service provider to commoditize and diversify the services but increases the challenges mentioned above.

One of the paralyzing realities in customers' daily lives is an inability to hire people with cloud expertise to help solve these issues. Even though public cloud has been around for over a decade, this extended period of time has not translated to providing a sufficient supply of experienced people to meet the business need for proper public cloud adoption.

In the years since I left Netflix, I’ve seen the customer struggles first hand and experienced them myself at companies I’ve led. Working at Netflix was an opportunity that showed me how to leverage public cloud ‘right’.

Netflix adopting public cloud was an evolutionary step as a primary business model for a company. Similarly, today’s evolution in public cloud technology can help be a driving force for companies to be successful in building cloud-based architectures. Typically taking the form of a Platform-as-a-Service (Paas), these solutions abstract away complexity to provide optimized technical architectures that span globally across different public cloud providers while reducing costs and filling in the void of missing technical expertise.

Earlier this year, I was introduced to one such team & technology. At first glance, their technology seemed to be an improvement and more easily implementable approach to what is commonly referred to as Edge Computing. As I spent time with the co-founders and the technology, I realized the noticeable separation of their offering compared to the competition. If you’ve spent any time studying the Edge Computing space, you’ll quickly come to realize this term has different definitions depending on the use case and customer. However, this company had technology that could solve all of them with an impressive and broad set of exceptional customers to validate them.

With the excitement of realizing the potential for both the team and the technology, I’m delighted today to be part of the public announcement of the DNX Ventures lead in the seed+ round investment in Macrometa for the next stage of growth for this successful edge computing platform.

It has been such a pleasure working with the Macrometa team. Co-founders Chetan Venkatesh (CEO) and Durga Gokina (CTO) are the right mixes of intelligence, creative passion, understanding of strengths and weaknesses in the space, with high-achieving results. Watching their impressive traction and the vision of what this company could accomplish in the space will be fun to watch.

Now is the right time for the Macrometa team and their technology. Public cloud growth is increasing. Businesses desire to handle the challenges in front of them better and require optimization and reduction of costs. All will drive adoption in the edge computing space. The expertise Macrometa brings to supplement existing engineering initiatives along with Macrometa’s technologies capability of simplifying architectures for faster innovation at a lower cost will be a few of their keys to success.

And in the future, I think we will look back at the year 2020 as the beginning of a transformative change in what it means to build and efficiently leverage the public cloud.

I am excited to join this team as a board member and enjoy contributing to Macrometa’s journey to make edge computing ubiquitous.