different leadership and put them all in the same
location in open cubes. That was your cloud con-
struction team and we thought that was a pretty
good approach. What did it take to have the organiza-
tion give up those resources? How did you pull that off?
Dowds: You reference our cloud construction team,
often referred to in the industry as the cloud engi-
neering team by many cloud providers. What did it
take to pull off our cloud engineering team to actu-
ally behave in a DevOps way? It took 8, 10 or 12 months
of working the other way and being somewhat inef-
fective. To make the move to public cloud, we had to
pull critical resources from at least three organiza-
tions: our security organization, our traditional data
center organization and our CTO organization. To get
those three groups pulling the rope the same way
was difficult. Those three groups reported up to their
own chain of command, so we recognized the chal-
lenges of three separate organizations.
We made a decision after 8 or 10 months to put a full
stack team in place. We gave the leader of the organi-
zation the decision rights on all the things we needed
to do to get to public cloud. It was a game changer for
Vanguard. All of a sudden we had everyone pulling
the rope the same way. We had Cloud Technology
Partners to pursue concepts like the Minimum Viable
Cloud approach and to get our initial workloads into
the cloud. The progress we were able to make in
building out our landing zones on the public cloud
was just tremendous. It was an important decision we
made early, and the impetus for it was failing by stay-
ing in a siloed organization.
CTP: We work with a lot of clients who don’t do that,
and what happens is people still have this other part
time job, and stuff just takes forever because no one
is really focused.
Dowds: I’ll mention one other thing. We can refer to
our cloud engineering team as a DevOps approach to
building out our cloud landing zones. At Vanguard,
we are trying to bring that same approach to all our
delivery teams. Our cloud engineering team is maybe
50, 60 or 70 people, but we have 2,000 people in our
delivery shops who we’re trying to get working in a
42 | THE DOPPLER | WINTER 2018
similar matter—going full stack, focusing on business
outcomes and embracing these other concepts and
behaviors associated with DevOps. What we try to do
with the cloud engineering team is to be the gold
standard for how to work that way, because we’re
promoting all of our delivery shops to work in a simi-
lar fashion. Our DevOps journey started with our
cloud engineering team, but we’re in the process of
trying to transform another 2,000 software engi-
neers to work in a similar manner.
CTP: Impressive stuff! So the last question is, what
would your advice be to someone in a leadership role
who is starting their public cloud journey? Where
should they start and what should they focus on?
Dowds: I think the keyword you said there is public
cloud. When we started our journey, we didn't have
public cloud knowledge and talent. So how do we
solve that problem? You go pick the rockstars out of
your organization that you know can learn new things
rapidly and you start to build this talent base of inter-
nal people you want to join you on the journey. Then
we did some very selective and very vital outside hir-
ing to complement our internal people. But even that
is not enough. You still need to find some external
assistance; a partner who’s made that journey with
other firms, who will guide you along. Obviously in
our case, it was Cloud Technology Partners. An out-
side partner who knows what they’re doing and has
an approach to get to the public cloud, combined with
some really strong external hiring of public cloud
knowledgeable people, and then assimilating them
with your own internal rockstars—that’s what ended
up as the nucleus of our cloud engineering team. The
advice I have is to form that dream team of very tal-
ented people from the inside and the outside, and
partner with someone who knows what they are
doing. Then embrace that minimum viable cloud
approach, which means work quickly to get your first
workload running as soon as possible.
Jeff Dowds presented alongside CTP's VP of
Global Cloud Delivery, Robert Christiansen, about
Vanguard’s journey to the cloud at AWS re:Invent
2017. Watch the entire presentation at cloudtp.
com/vanguard-reinvent.