Madoc: 0:00

One of the hotels. We have 16 hotels across the UK but they're big hotels and we offer short breaks for adults. So it's slightly different from a normal hotel where you've just gone and booked a room for a night, go in, have a sleep, leave, maybe have breakfast. This is very different. You'll book entertainment packages. It's exclusively for adults. We have stately hotel all the way through the castles. I love a castle, I'm Welsh.

William: 0:38

So that's a bit of a bias for me. Hello world, Welcome to another episode of the Cloud Gambit, where we unravel all of technology's craziest and wildest problems With me. As always, is my co-host, Yvonne. How are you doing today, Yvonne?

Eyvonne: 0:54

I'm good. It is a rainy dreary day here, so hoping that before the weekend gets here we get a little sunshine.

William: 1:01

But at least it's warming up, so yay for spring gets here, we get a little sunshine, but at least it's warming up, so yay for spring. Yeah, we went through like all these rainy well, we went straight from like blizzards and ice to like a rainstorm. For like a whole week, just torrential downpour, and then we got like a week of a week of sunshine. You know, pretty a nice week like 78 degree weather, and now it's back to the doom and gloom in kentucky lots of, uh, rain clouds. But that's why we're inside recording a podcast instead of outside recording a podcast, which I don't think I've ever done. But anyway, today we have a special guest with us and that's matic batters um, and matic has worked throughout the years on a lot of digital transformation initiatives, cloud adoption. He brings just a wealth of expertise. You know net sec ops, fin ops and various you know technologies. So, matic, how's it going today?

Madoc: 1:59

it's going great. Yeah, and thanks for thanks for inviting me onto your podcast. And yeah, yvonne and Will, you're brilliant. Yeah, it's, it's bright outside here. It's approaching the weekend here in Oxford in the UK.

Eyvonne: 2:15

And you're closer to the weekend than we are.

Madoc: 2:18

Yeah, yeah, more. So I'll tell you what it's like when we get there.

Eyvonne: 2:21

Okay, we'll live vicariously.

William: 2:24

So you've been. You've been kind of on the speaking trail lately kind of doing some tech evangelism, but I guess not to get too far ahead. Do you want to just give us sort of a background? How did you get into technology, getting into cloud and just sort of your journey upwards, of getting to where you're at today with morning leisure yeah sure, um, it's quite a long journey.

Madoc: 2:49

I was 55 um this week, so I'm getting on a bit now, but my journey started when I was 11, I think. Um, I was um very keen on the on the home computers. Um, I went out and asked for a computer. It was a ZX81, hence the 81. For my parents, my birthday present, they went what do you want one of those daft things for? So I thought I need to get one. So I went out and washed a hundred cars and earned the money to get that computer. And that's where my love of computers and networks and all things technology started, way, way back then.

Eyvonne: 3:28

I think that story is true for a lot of us. I know for me, I got my first computer when I was 10. It was an Apple IIe with the Color Dot Matrix printer and we had the print shop and we'd make the big banners and play the games and learn to write loops and basics. So I think for a lot of us of a certain generation, getting that first computer in the 80s was really what kick-started it off.

William: 3:52

Yeah, similar experience here.

Madoc: 3:55

Yeah, very exciting times back then.

William: 3:57

So you I mean I know that tech leaders the higher you get up the org chart, I guess, the less technical that you know leadership a lot of times becomes, and it doesn't seem like you've been that way. You seem like you know you have the leadership side and direction and transformation. But also you've got a ton of certifications, like hard ones too, over the years, like ccie, uh, quite a few aws certs and I think there are some security ones as well. You know what's your. What are your thoughts on that? Is that helpful to keep those up and to just to keep learning and studying, or how do you see that?

Madoc: 4:37

so I I think I had a little bit of a different direction than most I. I contracted for 20 years. So in the in the contracting game, certifications were really, really important and I think I just got into a habit. Like with everything, you get into a habit of doing something, it just becomes a little bit easier. So, studying for certifications, learning, learning everything around them and um, just going through that whole process was just something that seemed quite normal. And yeah, I, yeah, I love learning every day's, every day's learning day and why not do a certification at the same time seem to make sense. And yeah, I love a personal challenge as well yeah, same here.

William: 5:20

I still keep the home lab and I'm constantly tinkering and experimenting, just so I can. It changes so fast.

Madoc: 5:28

I feel like if I don't have a good grasp on what's actually going on, I cease to be valuable in my day to day everything now back in the day when I was studying for my ccie, that was buying cisco routers and switches off ebay, isdn simulators and doing all that, but it's that the barrier for entries. A lot easier now, I think, with the virtualization and you know to to learn how to go out and buy, buy books, physical books. That was the only way you couldn't download the books. There wasn't many blogs or any podcasts or anything you could learn for videos. That was the only media you could really do. So it was a lot of learning, playing and um using physical equipment yeah, the physical equipment.

William: 6:17

You know, it's funny like this. Last year actually I got I held on to like a lot of that stuff when I was studying for my CCIE many years ago and I finally got rid of it all, which was really a big day for my wife and freeing up a lot of space, because I had a big 42U rack in the basement and actually getting that thing out of the house was quite the challenge. I totally forgot how I got it in. I had to disassemble it into pieces. It was like why did I do this? But hey, that's how you learn right, yeah, yeah.

Madoc: 6:49

Learn by doing still the most effective way of learning.

William: 6:52

Yeah so, like organizations everywhere. Now, you know, yvonne and I talk about this a ton this whole digital transformation thing, shift left all these different things that big companies they're trying to, you know, put a name and then, you know, put these things into action, but they they run into hurdles. It's not, it's not easy to take a company maybe that's been around for a while and, you know, bring it into the future, bring it into the now and then also think about what the future holds and how to get there. But, you know, based on your experience, these are some of the things that you work on and that you spearhead. You know, with your background, do what are like some big, I guess, like misconceptions or common challenges. You see, maybe teams or organizations face, you know, when they try to, you know, go down this path, like what are the big things that you know they try to? You know, go down this path, like what are the big things that you know make it so hard?

Madoc: 7:49

humans. Humans just always make it so hard. At the end of the day, it's, it's the organizational structure, it's the culture. You know, people are used to doing things the way they've always done it. We have siloed teams. It's all about ease of flow of communication between teams and and how, how the company operates. And quite a lot of the time you've got to try and reinvent from the inside, create a new division, create new teams, um, form a new company, uh organizational structure which is different from the existing, and it's almost almost like creating it inside and just breaking it out into it, almost like a new company, until that new company becomes bigger than the existing company that it was spawned from. So, yeah, a lot of it is culture. It's just teaching new culture.

Madoc: 8:45

I remember when I started first at um, warner slash born, so born leisure was our overarching company who had a number of brands, warner being one of them. But when I first started, we, we went into a change management meeting and there's probably about 40 people in that room. We're all talking about the changes that were being proposed for the next few days. We're talking about the changes that had failed, but it it came. We are really apparent that everybody was very change reversed, you know if.

Madoc: 9:15

If there was a failed change, they basically grilled why that change had failed and that that made them very resistant to having new changes in the future. People would save up their changes into a big change so they can try and dump it in, keep their fingers crossed that it worked, rather than having many, many small changes, which, as we know now, are a much better way of doing it. But yeah, of that first day I thought that is something we've we've got to change. We've got to change the way we do, change that. That was the first thing that we had to break down.

Eyvonne: 9:47

You talk about creating an organization inside of an organization, basically, that you're having to, you know, re-envision and recreate Really certainly the IT organization, maybe even more than that, in order for to be able to, to transform and I know that that word, digital transformation, has been overused.

Eyvonne: 10:14

The folks that I see are the most successful about this in a transformation effort is that they have a leader, who, who really understands what, what they're doing and why they're doing it, because ultimately, everybody will start the project and everybody will be excited and it'll be something new.

Eyvonne: 10:35

And then you'll get, you know, three, six, nine months into it, you start running into technical hurdles. There are things that you didn't consider, there are new challenges that pop up, you lose some talent or you realize you need talent that you didn't have. And the organizations that are successful that I've seen are those that, yes, do start to rebuild the organization, but then they push through those times, and the only way to get through those times is to have a clear picture of why you're doing it and where you want to get to. On the other side, and I think sometimes folks will have a like oh well, we want to transform, like this is the new cool thing to do, but they don't understand why they're doing it. Have you seen that? What have you seen with customers in trying to figure out, you know not only their why, but what do they need to stick with it to be able to get through to the other side.

Madoc: 11:39

Yeah, you really do need to clearly sort of understand what value it can bring you. After that transformation, you know, it's like you know, I, I'm a runner, I, I like, I like doing a lot of. I do trail running, long distance running. You've always got to focus on, you know, the reward at the end of that race or at the end of that run.

Madoc: 12:00

So you need to know what that value is For. So you need to know what that value is For us. One of the main values was having that ability of having high-velocity changes, reducing the amount of human error and failures that we had when we had changes, and just being in a place where we can be really agile, where we can try new things out, we can innovate, we can do multiple cadences of testing out new services without having to spend, you know, a lot of capex to be able to deploy stuff on-prem. We can then do it in the cloud. So the whole move was you know, we are going to be a cloud first architecture company. We are going to move our on-prem into the cloud, and that would that was the main driver. It was coming away from on-prem to the cloud.

Madoc: 12:49

A lot of companies are obviously doing this and I think we just we just plowed through. It just wasn't wasn't really ever an option not to stop. We were going to migrate our main systems into the cloud and then move all the supporting systems along with it, and I think so one of the main decisions we had is, instead of picking off a small, small system to move first, we decided to move our largest, which is our booking system, our main booking system. So we moved that as a lighthouse project. It was the biggest, most integrated, dare I say, oldest organically grown system that we had. Some of the components hadn't been turned off for years. We were quite worried about about removing some of the parts of it, but it was. You know, it was a. It's a big challenge and, yeah, we we did come up across a lot of obstacles, but we just just kept going. We just had to go until we hit that finish line.

Eyvonne: 13:54

I'd love to hear more about what drove the decision to choose your most complex system as to get started. Typically, you know, we see folks pick a system that they're not super dependent on, that they can migrate, that can accept some downtime and some risk, and to sort of as an organization, build some muscle memory and understand all of the you know the cloud, native primitives and all those things. So what was it that drove you to make what to me seems like a really bold move, to move this you know, mission critical, complex system and to start there?

Madoc: 14:39

I think it was the size of the values, the size of the prize at the end of it. You know you move a smaller system. You know you're going to confirm that, that you know, does work, that pattern does work.

Madoc: 14:52

But again, you know, know the value is or lower, and I think you know to sell it, to sell it to the board, you know we have to go in and say, look, we are moving. You know, the biggest system that we have, this is the value that you're going to get. You know this, this system was, you know it. It had had a, had a lot of issues, um, had a lot of downtime. We had to reset it every now and again. It we couldn't affect change on it because we were, we were scared, scared of what we would do if we turned it off and, uh, or reset it or we had to do an upgrade. We were running on very old versions, so we were, we were going down a path that was just not going to get better. So so you know, the decision was you know we've got to do this. The sooner we do it, the better. At the end of the day, and what was your?

Eyvonne: 15:44

how would you describe your degree of like cloud capability at the time that you made the decision? Were you, as an organization, relatively new or had you been deploying in the cloud for a while? Like what did you look like organizationally when you made that bold move? Relatively new, or had you been deploying in the cloud for a while? Like what? What did you look like organizationally when you made that bold move?

Madoc: 15:59

yes, that's really interesting. So we had we before. I started five years ago, so before that, the company had a cloud migration into Azure. So a lot, a lot of systems were migrating to Azure. They engaged a third party to do that and that third party subsequently moved on, left what they had moved.

Madoc: 16:22

They probably didn't do it in the best pattern possible. It was done within the console, it was done with ARM templates, it was done with scripts, it was done with all sorts of ways. It wasn't one consistent way to deploy it and there wasn't a lot of documentation. Um, so the idea was we didn't have any aws at that time. The idea was let's start completely fresh, because we we've got an on-prem, we've got a cloud at the moment, but we don't have a lot of documentation on it. We'd like to be able to start properly, so we know exactly what we're building and how we can build upon it. So the decision was we're going to go with AWS and we're going to build it with infrastructure as code, semantic documentation. We know exactly how it's going to be deployed because it matches the code. So that's the direction we went in. We stood up all the new organizational structure, all the accounts. That was all codified and put into pipelines and yeah, we started from there.

William: 17:31

Awesome. Yeah, I have a few questions about the pipelines and the shift left aspect of it, but I wanted to kind of we probably should have done this at the beginning, but whenever I first heard of like warner hotels I just thought, oh, it's like hilton or it's like a you know, just like a hotel chain. And then I I remember looking at pictures and I was like, oh no, this isn't any like any hilton I've ever seen in my life. Um, can you give us just a background about um warner hotels and just kind of the experience and the you know one could expect if they took holiday there?

Madoc: 18:06

yeah, yeah. So warner hotels. We have 16 hotels. There's going to be a couple more coming online um across the uk. We're uk only. We don't have anything outside the uk, but they're big hotels and we offer short breaks for adults.

Madoc: 18:23

So it's it's slightly different from a normal hotel where you just go and book a room for a night, go in, have a sleep, leave, maybe have breakfast. This is very different. You'll you'll book um entertainment packages um could be anything from from golf to to um shows in the evening to to dinner and um this, yeah it's, it's exclusively for adults, so that there's there's no kids running around. So if you've got kids, they've got to stay at home. Um, that may be a good or a bad thing, but yeah, a lot of our customers really, really enjoy that and we have super high occupancy rates, far higher than most hotels do in the industry.

Madoc: 19:09

We have customers that come and stay with us. They love it so much They'll book again for next year as they're leaving they just want to come back. Sometimes they'll book the same rooms and all all our properties are really pretty big, so we have stately hotels um all the way through the castles. I love a castle on welsh so it's a bit of a bias for me, but, um, yeah, yeah, some some lovely places had said they have their own golf courses.

William: 19:37

They got several hundred acres, some of them they're um, there's some great locations yeah, if you're listening and you have the opportunity to maybe visit or just take a look at the pictures, it's. These are really sprawling, just beautiful, beautiful properties, really really incredible. So one thing I just one of the topics I really wanted to touch on was you know, devsecops is, like so important Because I think one of the problems that you started to see happening which probably led to a lot of startups, which did lead to a lot of startups, led to a lot of startups, which did lead to a lot of startups is, um, companies out there said, hey, we, we just want to rush to the cloud as fast as we can. You know, we're maybe not going to think it through as good as we should. We just want to show that we did a thing.

William: 20:27

And you had, like this lift and shift movement.

William: 20:29

You weren't optimizing for the you knownative design patterns and that technical debt just kind of spirals, because not only is it an expensive endeavor to make that happen and you're running it much more expensive than you would on-prem, and then cost spirals out of control.

William: 20:49

And then you have to go back and start doing refactors and projects to really modernize what you were trying to modernize, to use infrastructure as code to get more, uh, ephemeral, to try to shift security left. But you know one one thing that stands out to me just from from what I know about you, your style of leadership and you know some things that you've talked about is the whole shift left paradigm with security and ops and even cost, because even cost, like you know, devs don't work in spreadsheets. They they could care less and when you, there's a lot of tools out there that can actually incorporate and show you the cost and the build pipeline when you're deploying stuff, so it becomes a little more real like you're speaking in the same language that like devs might. But can you, can you just kind of explain what shift left means to you and your team and just how you view the, the implementation and practices?

Madoc: 21:47

yeah, I, I think you well, I think you've hit the nail on the head with. Devs don't care less about security and cost. I'm I'm sure they're conscious about it and uh, but the the main thing is is, is that their, their um, their goals and what they're rewarded on isn't isn't to keep the cost down, isn't to keep the security up. Um, it is to is to deliver um features, is to deliver more, more robustness to their services and applications. So what we do with the shifting left is we try and build in that security and the FinOps. So it's right in front of them when they're doing their PRs. So we'll build this into their GitHub Actions workflow.

Madoc: 22:36

When they're raising a PR With the Terraform plan, it'll show exactly, obviously, what you're going to deploy as a resource before it's deployed. But at the same time, it'll also go through and it'll show if there's any insecurities, if you need to do some changes in your PR, and also it'll go through and tell you exactly what the cost is going to be before it's deployed. We've also gone another step further in that is where you're deploying a resource, we'll go pull that into a Lambda That'll integrate into trusted advisor within AWS or have a little bit of Gen AI melding up together and it'll come up with suggestions of what they can do with those resources to make it more cost efficient when they're deploying it. One of the key things is just to make sure that these cost of security changes are front and center when they're already doing a change, because if you ask them to do an additional change which is just cost focused or just security focused, it'd be pushing the bottom of the pile.

Madoc: 23:48

It will never get done unless you come back around and try and put some pressure on that being done. Then you know that. Then you have conversations. Everybody falls out with each other about priorities. So it's, it's getting it. I always say it's almost like the developers have got a, a plate, a meal that they're they're delivering. You know we put a little bit of broccoli on the side of that, which is either security or fin ups, so they can do it at the same time they're doing the change awesome and yeah, like all this stuff is so critical and like one thing that some, some folks may, you know, fail to understand is, like you know, monitor.

William: 24:32

You know cloud is one side of the it's just it's one piece of a large puzzle. And I know one thing that you've been busy with modernizing is Warner's network infrastructure and it's kind of like certain tools and platforms out there, like some, maybe you know, some of the older legacy technologies are not friendly to automation, they're not friendly to cloud, they're really not future friendly. They were just invented and they were built at a different time, much long ago. So you've teamed up with some pretty innovative solutions out there and partnered with some companies, with some companies but I'm pretty familiar with your bringing on solutions like Alkira, for instance, for network infrastructure as a service to kind of connect everything up. Can you just speak to the? You know what led you down that path? Because networking is one of the things that usually is like the last thing that anybody wants to touch. It's like, hey, it's working, just don't touch it. Just, everybody, hold your breath, you know. So why was revamping the network just a priority, in tandem with the cloud stuff?

Madoc: 25:46

um I. I think one of the directions I've always wanted to take is now we codify the infrastructure within the cloud. We started then codifying and run Terraform to deploy some services, some of the security services we deployed. We used HashiCorp to do our privileged access management as well. We run a few other services that use Terraform, but the thought is, why can't we use Terraform to deploy the network as well?

Madoc: 26:21

Luckily, I bumped into Alkira at the AWS Summit and, yeah, it was exactly what I was looking for. I'd worked in networking for many years and I left networking for cloud because all the innovation was in cloud. But now it seems like the networking is now linked up with the advances that we have in cloud. We can deploy it the same way, so networks and cloud resource deployment can be done within a similar pipeline. So that reduces cognitive load on your teams. You know we, we can now have our teams deploy cloud resources, network resources and do security functions all within similar pipelines at the same time, which just just makes it a lot, lot easier, um, for getting getting talent in to be able to work with us, and you don't have to have a thousand different skills. Let's focus on these core, more modern cloud-native skill sets that we can apply this to all different areas.

William: 27:29

Looking ahead. So you've again you've really dealt in this transformational type. You know, taking something that's there, maybe been there for a while, and really pulling it in the future. You know we've got Gen AI, mcp, a2a, all this AI stuff now, and who knows honestly what all this is going to look like in three to five years? So I guess my next question is like do you see any any big emerging trends that really excite you that you're, you know, just super excited about? And sort of how do you think about, okay, like I know what I'm doing now it's transformational, but how do you get in that mindset of being ready for the next round of transformation and approaching, like, instead of waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting, until you build up technical debt and it's really hard to move Like how do you keep that transformation train continuously going?

Madoc: 28:25

Yeah, it's hard to define the strategy. I think we're in the fastest moving time ever. It's hard to define the strategy. I think we're in the fastest moving time ever. You know, what you may put in your strategy for six months can be something completely different three months down the line. I don't think it's slowing down either. I think that cadence is going to get even shorter and shorter. So it's really key you keep your eye on what's going on. Keep in touch with a lot of these newer companies coming out. Um, yeah, I'm looking forward to aws summit at the end of this month, where I'll be.

Madoc: 28:55

I don't usually go to a lot of talks. I usually go around all the booze asking all the companies that I don't recognize, their logos, what they're doing, why they're doing it, what value you bring. So it's understanding the direction of all these companies and and finding out you know, what we should be looking at as well. Um, but yeah, what's getting me excited at the moment? A lot of gen ai. So there's been lots of talking about gen ai. A lot of people aren't actually doing it.

Madoc: 29:22

So I think for me you can boil it down to be really, really simple. To me it's two. One is to make sure that your teams can work more efficiently your internal teams, and the other one is to make it easy for your customers to buy your services and products. That's that. That's that's it, bold. They're really simply for me. So you know, we we've started deploying that for our internal teams within the pipelines to help them. You know, save for our internal teams within the pipelines to help them save on costs when we're deploying network resources. We're surfacing in the next couple of weeks we're surfacing an internal Gen AI. We're going to link that into some of our knowledge bases internally so it allows our teams to be able to access information a lot quicker. Quite, compostable. We can switch foundational models, so we're using AWS Bedrock so we could move there. So whenever you have a new technology come out or a new LLM, we can just move it over. It's very easy for us to do and pivot.

Eyvonne: 30:25

But there's a whole load of other initiatives that we're doing for get to know your customer, find out hyper-personalization make sure that we can offer things that they're interested about when you start on a transformation effort are what are the next technologies that are coming around the corner that you'll be able to leverage more effectively because you've already started right? So the fact that you have cloud infrastructure that's driven by infrastructure is code. You already have a modular mindset where you can deploy code. You're in the cloud, you can use LLMs and you can swap those LLMs out on the back end as the technology grows and improves. That puts you at a credible advantage over a competing organization that's still running everything on-premises, that doesn't have the velocity of being able to deploy. You know these new technologies in a way that allows you to rapidly determine what's right for your business.

Eyvonne: 31:57

Because right now, with AI, like we all know, it's amazing, we all see it doing really cool stuff. We don't yet exactly know the forms it's going to take in our day-to-day lives, like that's still what we're figuring out, and so it's super important to be able to rapidly deploy and test, and the work that you've done over the last few years has really put you in a great position to be able to do that, and I think that's the challenge sometimes is like not only are we innovating for what we know, we're innovating for what's coming that we don't yet know about, to be in a good place to be able to take advantage of that, whatever it is.

Madoc: 32:41

Yeah, you're exactly right, Yvonne. I think you've got to get these foundational ways of working in cloud native have the pipelines, your infrastructure as code. It's being able to enable your company to have that velocity, to be able to pivot fast and change. But to have that velocity you need to empower your teams, which comes back to the human element again. You really do need the culture to be able to drive this forward, because without giving your teams that empowerment and trust, you can't distribute your change. You can't make all those other parts like fin-ups and security a team game. You need a team game because traditional small silo teams just don't have the numbers to be able to move fast. So you need to allow everybody to have a part of that skill set so everybody can implement and work towards that sort of branch on its own.

William: 33:45

So kind of, we're getting towards the end of the hour, but I had a few rapid fire questions, I guess, just kind of what, just things that I thought were interesting. But your personal tagline I think it was on the thing. It was on session knives maybe, but it was a silver lining. The cloud, yes, I like it, but what? What is that phrase? Does it mean something very specific to you, or is there like a lot of it Catchy? I like it, but what is that phrase? Does it mean something very specific to you, or is there like a story behind it?

Madoc: 34:17

I think when I moved out of the cloud about nine years ago, it was quite mature, but there's so many new things coming out in the cloud. I just wanted to make sure that we were using and utilizing the best of the cloud. So I'm always looking for, you know, what can make it better, and that's the silver lining is to bring out the shine on what you're doing. Make sure it's optimized, make sure you're using the newest and greatest, not just because it's you know, I'm an engineer. I love to play and tinker, but it's something that brings the value to a business. Make sure that you understand what technology comes out, what value it can bring to your business.

William: 35:00

Awesome and I think next is your. So you mentioned earlier your did you say ultra marathon, or have you done ultra marathons?

Madoc: 35:09

Yeah, I've done about 30 ultra marathons over the years. Yeah.

William: 35:15

That's wild, that's a lot. What's the longest you've ever ran? Just?

Madoc: 35:20

about. I've still got my own knees. Longest I've ever run is 105 miles. That took me 35 hours. I ran through two nights. That was in the Lake District in the UK. We started on the Friday evening and finished on Sunday morning.

William: 35:42

Wow, my brother-in-law does this as well. He did a 100-miler a few years ago. At the end, I guess your mind is just a powerful thing, but he got to the end and his body started breaking down. He got that room of um, whatever, where you're the potassium and the kidneys and everything just starts, you know, shutting right, though, is that yeah, exactly, and he was in the hospital for like over a week.

William: 36:08

It was terrible, they almost lost him, but he, he said he felt, you know, it was just towards the end. He's like at the very end, when my mind started, you know, I realized I was coming to the end. I felt like something is seriously wrong and then he just stopped, you know, right at the finish line and just started, you know, throwing up and you had to be carried out. It was pretty, pretty bad. But yeah, the importance of that is, I guess, training yourself up and because I think he went from the, the most he had done before that was like 50 miles, but he'd done so much of that, like over the years, that he's like I can do this 100 miles.

Madoc: 36:44

It's not, it's that big of a deal. Yeah, it's a big step up to that. I've done a few like 60, 70 milers as well, but yeah, the step, but it's, it's not big of a deal. Yeah, it's a big step up to that. And I've done a few like 60, 70 miles as well, but yeah, the step, but it's, it's not twice as hard, it's multiple times. Yeah, difficult and um, but yeah, I've got, I've got a great photo at the end when I finish that hundred it.

Madoc: 37:03

It's a great advert to show people why not to do a hundred mile run. I I look absolutely terrible in it. My whole face is is drained, drained of life at the at the end of it. But yeah, what? Yeah, what an amazing achievement. And if you imagine, imagine a marathon, it's like going, going for a run, hitting hell and then finishing the race in an ultra marathon. You'll hit hell, come out of it, hit it again. Come out of it, hit it again. Um, but it's again, it's. It's repetition the more you do it, the more you used to it. In 80 of it, I'd say about 80 of it is is in the mind. So I've, you know, I've got lots of great friends who are fantastic runners, but but sometimes you've got to go through that hell to make sure you know you're coming out the other side.

William: 37:54

Well, I mean, doing anything for 36 hours, doing anything for 20 hours or 15 hours straight is like a really long time to sit. I can't even sit through a movie, you know it's crazy. That's just a long time to be doing something. It's a huge, yeah, it's a huge mental. It's kind of almost like I mean, doing that long of a run over 100 miles is almost like you know what climbers you know want to summit Everest. You know it's a huge. It's a big deal. You have to condition, you have to acclimate and there's so much training and so much mental that goes into the whole thing. Congratulations, that's pretty awesome.

Madoc: 38:35

Thank you. I was hallucinating the second night I was seeing aliens, lion faces on rocks, tree houses that were there. It's crazy how your mind reacts when it's had no sleep.

Eyvonne: 38:49

I feel like there's a how to prepare for digital transformation story there. It's like you know run 100 miles and then you're ready.

Madoc: 38:59

Well, yeah, I suppose it builds up resistance to pain, doesn't it? That's right. Yeah, you've got to push through and get to the end.

William: 39:07

So which one is harder? Harder digital transformation or that 100 miler?

Madoc: 39:12

definitely, definitely the 100 miler.

William: 39:14

Yeah, definitely, that's good, that's good to know, yeah you don't need to run an ultramarathon to do a transformation yeah, well, matic, this has been a really insightful conversation, a lot of good learned experiences and just great advice and just a great attitude and a great approach to technology in in 2025. Um, we really appreciate, uh, your time. Did you have anything else? Avon, by the way?

Eyvonne: 39:40

good.

William: 39:41

No, I think this has been great awesome, yeah, so if anybody wanted to find you, I'm going to link your sessionessionize and your LinkedIn in the show notes. But if anybody wanted to find you or connect, how can they find you?

Madoc: 39:54

Yeah, find me on LinkedIn Again, sessionize as well. And if anyone's at the AWS Summit at the end of this month, I'll be there. Come and say hi. I'm also in San Diego in June the FinOpsX, so if you're over in San Diegogo, um, yeah, love to meet up and chat.