Jake Burns

AWS Enterprise Strategist

"Training your team and giving them the opportunity for hands-on experience is the key to succeeding with cloud."

-- Jake Burns

Jake Burns, AWS Enterprise Strategist

Getting to know

Jake Burns, AWS Enterprise Strategist

Jake's AWS goals

As an AWS Enterprise Strategist, Jake works with enterprise technology executives to share experiences and strategies for how the cloud can help them increase speed and agility while devoting more of their resources to customers.

Jake's beginnings

Throughout his career, Jake has led large-scale IT transformations, which today are the basis for his firm belief that any enterprise can successfully adopt the cloud and save money at the same time. While he was VP of IT Operations at Live Nation, he led a large data center consolidation project that was heavily focused on cost reduction. That experience paved the way for when, a few years later, the Live Nation CEO kicked off a modernization effort across the company, which included a mandate to go “all in” on AWS. Jake reoriented his team to form a new Cloud Services function at the company, and successfully migrated 118 applications, 668 servers, and 1PB of storage to AWS in 17 months. The migration reduced IT costs by 48% in the first year and a half—all without any migration bubble costs.

Jake's expertise

For Jake, a critical element for a successful migration to the cloud is focusing on people to ensure that teams have the necessary skills to get the job done well. When Jake first started the Live Nation migration to the AWS, he had no budget for additional resources, increased headcount, or outside help. To get there with his current team, he needed to upskill them—and quickly—so they could be confident enough to migrate all corporate IT to AWS, including a few very challenging systems that were less compatible with cloud infrastructures. For that reason, he focused on training his people (and himself) on the new skills they’d need. The experience taught him that the cost of cloud migration is directly proportional to the expertise your team has with the cloud, a lesson he shares with customers today.

Jake's advice

Another important career lesson for Jake is a bias for action. Getting his people equipped early with new skills freed them to get started trying and learning about the cloud. Today he advises customers not to wait (because your competitors never do) and just start trying new things. At the same time, he reminds customers that failure is a normal part of learning. He likens the innovation process to what’s involved in capturing the perfect, eye-catching photo for the cover of National Geographic. Most photographers will take hundreds of photos (and discard them) before they land on that perfect shot. The goal for customers today is to get through those 100 experiments (and failures) quickly so they can find that one successful innovation that works—in weeks, not years. The way Jake sees it, that kind of agility can only happen when organizations experiment quickly at low cost and with low risk.

Jake's hobbies

Outside of work, Jake applies the same thirst for learning and trying new things to his hobbies (he considers himself a “knowledge junkie”). When choosing a new pastime, he has two criteria: one, they must be tough enough that he’s forced to grow, and two, their difficulty must force him to concentrate completely on the activity—a condition he finds meditative, as it quiets his mind. That philosophy has led him to learn Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, non-competitive motorcycle racing, becoming a licensed airplane pilot, and, most recently, working towards earning a helicopter license.

Jake's career

Podcasts

Listen to our "Ask the AWS Strategists" mini-series within our Conversations with Leaders podcast, where Jake Burns, Ishit Vachhrajani, ,and Bryan Landerman discuss what they're hearing around the industry and common questions they get from customers.

 

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  • Podcast

    Cloud Migration and Modernization Lessons Learned

    A conversation with AWS Enterprise Strategists Jonathan Allen and Jake Burns

    This podcast features AWS enterprise strategists Jonathan Allen and Jake Burns discussing cloud migration insights. Drawing from their own extensive experience, they offer actionable guidance for organizations at any stage of migrating to the cloud. Key lessons include starting promptly, securing workforce buy-in, and maintaining simplicity. They dispel myths about migration complexity and emphasize speed's role in risk reduction. Technical advice covers efficient tool usage and minimal refactoring approaches. Practical tips include clear goal communication, strategic outsourcing, and starting with low-risk workloads.

    Listen now

  • Vodcast

    From Lagging to Leading: Navigating AI Adoption Challenges

    AWS Enterprise Strategists provide a roadmap for organizations who may feel they've missed the first-mover advantage with generative AI

    In this episode, AWS Enterprise Strategists provide a roadmap for organizations who may feel they've missed the first-mover advantage with generative AI. They share practical advice on overcoming common barriers like analysis paralysis, managing risk, and upskilling teams.

    Listeners will learn how to unlock the true potential of generative AI by starting small, lowering the cost of failure, and leveraging the scalability and flexibility of the cloud, and get insight into a realistic, action-oriented perspective for organizations determined to catch up and thrive in the generative AI era.

    Watch now

     

  • Podcast

    Calculating the Cost and ROI of Generative AI

    Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize industries and organizations, but how much will it cost you, and how do you measure return on that investment? In this episode, get practical guidance on estimating the costs of generative AI adoption, from model selection to infrastructure requirements. Learn how to quantifying the productivity gains and efficiency improvements enabled by generative AI, strategies for upskilling your workforce, and advice on driving organization-wide adoption of generative AI capabilities.

    Featuring three AWS Enterprise Strategists: Jake BurnsHelena Yin KoepplChris Hennesey

Listen to more episodes of Conversations with Leaders podcasts »

Blogs

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  • 3P Article

    What are some steps I can take to improve organizational resilience?

    by Jake Burns, AWS Enterprise Strategist

    Jake is an Enterprise Strategist at Amazon Web Services. In this role, Jake works with enterprise technology executives to share experiences and strategies for how the cloud can help them increase speed, agility, and customer centricity. In his previous role as VP of Cloud Services at Live Nation/Ticketmaster, Jake was responsible for enterprise-wide IT strategy and oversight of the infrastructure and support teams in North America, and led the company's cloud transformation including a successful all-in migration to AWS resulting in a 48% savings in total cost of ownership of IT.

    Learn tips from Jake to improve organization resilience.

  • Blog

    How to Go Fast

    by Jake Burns, Enterprise Strategist, AWS

    Everyone who works in IT at Live Nation is familiar with the phrase “go faster than what is comfortable.” It was our CEO’s message to us when he called an IT leadership meeting in 2015 and shared his vision for how he wanted to modernize the company—a meeting that sparked a transformation of IT and gave me my mandate to get us out of the datacenter business by going all-in with AWS.

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  • Blog

    The Power of Constraints

    by Jake Burns, Enterprise Strategist, AWS

    A constraint is a limitation that’s placed upon us. In this post we’ll look at three different types of constraints—time constraints, resource constraints, and guardrails—and explore how each of them can be used to drive innovation, speed, and efficiency.

    Read more »

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Videos

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