Podcasts about finops foundation

In this Screaming in the Cloud Summer Replay, we revisit our conversation with Dann Berg. At the time, he was a Senior Cloud Analyst at Datadog, but he now provides community support for the FinOps Foundation. Dann and Corey go into the weeds of cost optimization, and each of them bring their respective experiences forward. Dann's offers his take on multi-cloud and how Datadog is tackling its customer needs there. But the talent doesn't end there, Dann is also an emerging thinker and influencer in the space, and to boot, an accomplished writer and playwright. Two of his plays have been produced in NYC and China. Check out their conversation!Show Highlights:(0:00) Intro(1:02) Duckbill Group sponsor read(1:36) Transitioning to Senior Cloud Ops Analyst(5:12) The composition of Dann's team(6:54) Cloud cost optimization in the regular business cycle(10:43) Helping customers understand their cloud bills(17:42) Paying attention to pricing changes(21:06) The psychology of cloud economics(23:20) Working with multiple clouds(25:02) Duckbill Group sponsor read(25:46) Spending too much money to save too little money(31:12) The dangers of relying on third-party tools(34:01) Pricing woes(36:25) Where you can find DannAbout Dann BergDann Berg currently works part-time with FinOps after spending more than a decade in the industry. He is also an active member of the larger technical community, hosting the monthly New York City FinOps Meetup, and has been published multiple times in places such as MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, and others. When he's not saving companies millions of dollars, he's writing plays, and has had two full-lengh plays produced in New York City and China., Dann is the Director of Community at Vantage. Previously, first FinOps Practitioner at Datadog and FullStory. Host of the NYC FinOps Meetup for almost three years. He also writes plays.Links:Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.comPersonal Website: https://dannb.orgLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannberg/Twitter: https://twitter.com/dannbergMonthly newsletter: https://dannb.org/newsletter/Previous SITC episode with Dann Berg, Episode 51: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/episode-51-size-of-cloud-bill-not-about-number-of-customers-but-number-of-engineers-you-ve-hired/Original Episode:https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/that-datadog-will-hunt-with-dann-berg/Sponsor:The Duckbill Group: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/

Neste episódio do LowOpsCast, temos o prazer de receber Paula Santos (https://www.linkedin.com/in/paula-santos-/), uma verdadeira inspiração no mundo da tecnologia e além! Paula compartilha sua trajetória fascinante, desde suas origens e educação até os desafios e vitórias que marcaram sua carreira.

Neste episódio do LowOpsCast, temos o prazer de receber Paula Santos (https://www.linkedin.com/in/paula-santos-/), uma verdadeira inspiração no mundo da tecnologia e além! Paula compartilha sua trajetória fascinante, desde suas origens e educação até os desafios e vitórias que marcaram sua carreira.

Summary – Finops X In this conversation, Joe Daly and Rob Martin from the FinOps Foundation discuss the latest developments in the FinOps space and Finops-X. They talk about the evolution of FinOps practices, the growth of the FinOps community, and the importance of the Focus project, which aims to standardize billing data from different cloud providers. They also discuss the adoption of FinOps practices by SaaS companies and the future of the FinOps space. The conversation covers the updates and changes in the FinOps framework, including the addition of allied personas and the simplification of domains and capabilities. It also discusses the upcoming Finops-X conference and the value it provides for attendees, including deep and concrete content, networking opportunities, and career advancement.  Keywords FinOps, FinOps Foundation, FinOps X conference, podcast, cloud providers, Focus project, billing data, cloud-agnostic, tool agnostic, open source project, SaaS companies, FinOps framework, allied personas, domains and capabilities, Finops-X conference, deep content, networking, career advancement, Finops-X Europe Takeaways FinOps practices have evolved to focus on making processes more operational and improving decision-making in businesses. The FinOps Foundation has seen significant growth, with over 100 members, including major cloud providers. The Focus project, an open billing standard, aims to consolidate billing data from different cloud providers and enable more effective cost allocation. The adoption of FinOps practices by SaaS companies is increasing, with a focus on consumption-based licensing management. The future of the FinOps space includes expanding the Focus project to include sustainability data and additional usage-based data. The FinOps framework has been updated to include allied personas and simplified domains and capabilities. Finops-X conference provides valuable content, networking opportunities, and career advancement for attendees. Finops-X Europe conference in Barcelona offers a focused event for the European market. The conversation also mentions the importance of small businesses attending the conference and the success stories of attendees. Sound Bites “How do I make these processes much more operational? How do I affect the broader decision-making going on in my business?” “The Focus project… will consolidate or specify how billing data should come from the different cloud providers.” “The Focus project… essentially handles the data ingestion problem that has plagued a lot of organizations early on.” “The two big changes that happened this year were the addition of a lot of allied personas.” “We’ve simplified those down into four key domains.” “What other things are you guys excited about for Finops-X?” About Joe Daily & Rob Martin Joe Daly is a Director of Community for the FinOps Foundation, which is kind of like sitting at the largest lunch table in Middle School, but with less vaping.  He's had illustrious careers as a CPA (the Statute of Limitations has past for all tax returns he prepared and he has let his CPA expire), Corporate Taxation, IT Finance & Accounting, IT Portfolio Management, a regrettable stint as

Leverage FinOps in Azure to optimize your cloud spend and drive accountability across your organization. With Microsoft Cost Management, gain complete visibility into your cloud costs, track spending by department or project, and forecast future expenses. Utilize management groups, subscriptions, and tags to organize costs and allocate resources efficiently, ensuring alignment with organizational priorities. Make informed decisions with proactive cost reduction recommendations from Azure Advisor and architectural best practices like Azure Landing Zones. Operationalize FinOps practices with centralized management focus and continuous evaluation through the FinOps Review assessment. Azure expert, Matt McSpirit, shows how to improve your organization's capability and operational agility with FinOps on Azure.   ► QUICK LINKS: 00:00 - Improve control on Azure through FinOps 01:01 - Gain visibility and accountability over Cloud spend 02:11 - Track and report spending 03:28- How to track costs 04:14 - Tagging resources 05:57 - Optimized efficiency07:02 - Maintain FinOps practices 08:05 - Wrap up   ► Link References How to implement FinOps on Azure at https://aka.ms/FinOps Leverage Cloud Adoption Framework guidance at https://aka.ms/C-A-F-Tagging Click-through demos at https://aka.ms/finops/guides FinOps Review assessment at https://aka.ms/finops/review Start using Microsoft Cost Management at https://aka.ms/CostManagement   ► Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics?  As Microsoft's official video series for IT, you can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at Microsoft. • Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries • Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog • Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast   ► Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: • Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics  • Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ • Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ • Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics  

This month we talk about the FinOps Framework. The Framework has been vastly improved and updated to match what FinOps practitioners are doing, in the tranches. Who better than Rob Martin to guide us into the Framework?  No-one. And we like him so much that he is the first returning interviewee. --- In this episode, we (SteveO and Frank) interview Rob Martin from the FinOps Foundation to discuss the recent updates to the FinOps framework. We talk about the process of updating the framework, the changes made to the domains and capabilities, and the importance of simplifying the language. We also discuss the first steps for organizations and individuals new to FinOps, including using the framework sub-site and conducting a maturity assessment. The conversation also touches on the significance of visibility and transparency in building trust within the organization, the different personas involved in FinOps a new type of persona called 'allies'The conversation also touches on the upcoming changes to the framework, including updates to the certifications and training. We introduce some of the FinOps upcoming events, including the Members' Summit, FinOps X, and FinOps XE.

In this episode, Steve Trask, VP of Marketing at the FinOps Foundation, discusses the State of FinOps report and the insights gained from four years of research. They explore topics such as team structure, automation, executive buy-in, and the evolving priorities of FinOps practitioners. They also touch on the challenges of measuring the value of the FinOps team and the growing importance of sustainability in cloud operations. The conversation highlights the need for focus and prioritization in FinOps practices and the impact of economic factors on cloud optimization. The conversation explores the challenges of budget allocation and accountability in large organizations, particularly in the context of cloud spending. It highlights the difficulty of breaking down budgets and creating visibility at the team level. The speakers discuss the gap between accountability and responsibility for spend and the struggle to implement changes as organizations scale. They also touch on the importance of cultural change and the need for champions within the organization to drive FinOps practices. The conversation concludes with a discussion of upcoming events and the global adoption of FinOps.KeywordsFinOps, State of FinOps, team structure, automation, executive buy-in, priorities, sustainability, focus, economic factors, cloud optimization, budget allocation, accountability, cloud spending, team level breakdowns, cultural change, champions, upcoming events, global adoptionAI generated.

Join Jon Myer in this captivating episode of his podcast as he delves into the State of FinOps 2024 with Erik Carlin, the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at ProsperOps. In a detailed 20-minute breakdown, they explore the pivotal findings from the FinOps Foundation's 2024 survey, discuss key priorities and changes from 2023, and offer expert insights into optimizing cloud services, the power of automation, and the future of financial operations in tech. Whether you're a FinOps practitioner, involved in cloud management, or just keen on the evolving landscape of tech finance, this episode is packed with valuable takeaways. Timeline: 0:00 - Introduction to the Episode 0:48 - Welcoming Erik Carlin 1:02 - Initial Thoughts on FinOps Survey 2:34 - The Influence of ProsperOps and Trading Places 3:07 - Discussing Key Priorities for 2024 6:08 - Shift in Priorities and Importance of Optimization 7:40 - Increased Priorities and the Role of Automation 13:30 - Challenges in Optimizing Across All Services 18:37 - The Evolution of Automation in FinOps 22:38 - Closing Thoughts and Episode Wrap-Up **Key Highlights:** - Insightful discussion on the shift in FinOps priorities from 2023 to 2024 - The significant role of automation in enhancing efficiency and reducing waste in cloud spend - Expert analysis of the survey data and its implications for the future of FinOps Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell to stay updated with more insightful episodes from Jon Myer's podcast.

Join Jon Myer in this captivating episode of his podcast as he delves into the State of FinOps 2024 with Erik Carlin, the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at ProsperOps. In a detailed 20-minute breakdown, they explore the pivotal findings from the FinOps Foundation's 2024 survey, discuss key priorities and changes from 2023, and offer expert insights into optimizing cloud services, the power of automation, and the future of financial operations in tech. Whether you're a FinOps practitioner, involved in cloud management, or just keen on the evolving landscape of tech finance, this episode is packed with valuable takeaways. Timeline: 0:00 - Introduction to the Episode 0:48 - Welcoming Erik Carlin 1:02 - Initial Thoughts on FinOps Survey 2:34 - The Influence of ProsperOps and Trading Places 3:07 - Discussing Key Priorities for 2024 6:08 - Shift in Priorities and Importance of Optimization 7:40 - Increased Priorities and the Role of Automation 13:30 - Challenges in Optimizing Across All Services 18:37 - The Evolution of Automation in FinOps 22:38 - Closing Thoughts and Episode Wrap-Up **Key Highlights:** - Insightful discussion on the shift in FinOps priorities from 2023 to 2024 - The significant role of automation in enhancing efficiency and reducing waste in cloud spend - Expert analysis of the survey data and its implications for the future of FinOps Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell to stay updated with more insightful episodes from Jon Myer's podcast.

En el episodio 85 del podcast de Entre Dev y Ops hablaremos sobre FinOps con Ferran Grau. Blog Entre Dev y Ops - https://www.entredevyops.es Telegram Entre Dev y Ops - https://t.me/entredevyops Twitter Entre Dev y Ops - https://twitter.com/entredevyops LinkedIn Entre Dev y Ops - https://www.linkedin.com/company/entredevyops/ Patreon Entre Dev y Ops - https://www.patreon.com/edyo Amazon Entre Dev y Ops - https://amzn.to/2HrlmRw Enlaces comentados: LinkedIn Ferran - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ferran-grau-horta-29922413/ FinOps Foundation - https://www.finops.org/ AWS Cloud Financial Management - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/management-and-governance-guide/cloudfinancialmanagement.html Cloud FinOps: Collaborative, Real-Time Cloud Financial Management - https://www.amazon.es/Cloud-FinOps-Collaborative-real-time-management/dp/1492054623 CloudHealth - https://cloudhealth.vmware.com/ AWS Cost Explorer - https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-cost-explorer/

The FinOps Foundation defines FinOps as "an operational framework and cultural practice which maximizes the business value of cloud, enables timely data-driven decision making, and creates financial accountability through collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams."  Sounds good! So why are many organisations still not doing it well?This week Dave, Sjoukje, and Rob talk to Kunal Agarwal, CEO and Co-founder, Unravel Data on the requirement for finops, what is it and why do you need it, if the Finance Depts are getting involved, what good practices looking, how 'inform, govern, optimise' fit in and why you should measure everything!TLDR:01:03 Why do people still use weak passwords?06:20 Cloud conversation with Kunal Agarwal32:34 Top Cyber Trends 202437:20 Cars, cars, cars! GuestKunal Agarwal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kunalkunal/ HostsDave Chapman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapmandr/Sjoukje Zaal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sjoukjezaal/Rob Kernahan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-kernahan/ProductionMarcel Van Der Burg: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcel-van-der-burg-99a655/Dave Chapman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapmandr/SoundBen Corbett: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-corbett-3b6a11135/Louis Corbett:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/louis-corbett-087250264/

An episode about FinOps in 2023. What are the themes that shaped FinOps and Cloud? What events, big or small, are defining what we will see in 2024?We talk about client behaviour and why repatriation is a thing. We dive into the strategic decisions made by cloud vendors in 2023 and their impact on the market, including price increases, and changes in products. We cover the incredible progress of FinOps and the FinOps Foundation in 2023. And, as everyone else, We talked about AI (a little). The ending is a hopeful prediction that sustainability will take off in 2024. We (Frank Contrepois and Stephen Old) needed some help, so we called in the incredibly knowledgeable Lucas Partore to provide some credibility :) 

Why FinOps Now? CUDOS, FOCUS, and AWS joining the party

Why FinOps Now? CUDOS, FOCUS, and AWS joining the party

Episode 32 FinOpsPod at the DC FinOps Roadshow Joe asks attendees at the DC Roadshow "What FinOps thing have you learned this year?" You're never too experienced to learn something new, or learn something over again.FinOps X 2024Upcoming FinOps RoadshowsLearn more and join the FinOps Foundation at www.FinOps.org.

In this episode of the podcast, Grizz sits down with Cortney Stauffer (Head of UX Practice) & Chuck Danielsson (Head of Practice, Web/UI), both from Adaptive. They talk about UX, UI, FDC3, and why things should just work. Cortney Stauffer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cortstauffer/ Chuck Danielsson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuck-danielsson-2141b058/ NYC November 1 - Open Source in Finance Forum: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 2022 State of Open Source in Financial Services Download: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.finos.org/state-of-open-source-in-financial-services-2022⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ All Links on Current Newsletter Here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.finos.org/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - more show notes to come A huge thank you to all our sponsors for Open Source in Finance Forum New York ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠that will take place this November 1st at the New York Marriott Marquis This event wouldn't be possible without our sponsors. A special thank you to our Leader sponsors: Databricks, where you can unify all your data, analytics, and AI on one platform. And Red Hat - Open to change—yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And our Contributor and Community sponsors: Adaptive/Aeron, Connectifi, Discover, Enterprise DB, FinOps Foundation, Fujitsu, instaclustr, Major League Hacking, mend.io, Open Mainframe Project, OpenJS Foundation, OpenLogic by Perforce, Orkes, Percona, Sonatype, StormForge, and Tidelift. If you would like to sponsor or learn more about this event, please send an email to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠sponsorships@linuxfoundation.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Grizz's Info | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarongriswold/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠grizz@finos.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ►► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Visit FINOS www.finos.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ►► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Get In Touch: info@finos.org⁠

In this episode of the podcast, Grizz sits down with Jon Gottfried, Co-Founder of Major League Hacking. They talk about hackathons in finance, and developer/engineering talent, from both the individual and hiring manager perspectives. Jon Gottfried: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmarkgo/ MajorLeagueHacking: https://sponsor.mlh.io/ NYC November 1 - Open Source in Finance Forum: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 2022 State of Open Source in Financial Services Download: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.finos.org/state-of-open-source-in-financial-services-2022⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ All Links on Current Newsletter Here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.finos.org/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - more show notes to come A huge thank you to all our sponsors for Open Source in Finance Forum New York ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠that will take place this November 1st at the New York Marriott Marquis This event wouldn't be possible without our sponsors. A special thank you to our Leader sponsors: Databricks, where you can unify all your data, analytics, and AI on one platform. And Red Hat - Open to change—yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And our Contributor and Community sponsors: Adaptive/Aeron, Connectifi, Discover, Enterprise DB, FinOps Foundation, Fujitsu, instaclustr, Major League Hacking, mend.io, Open Mainframe Project, OpenJS Foundation, OpenLogic by Perforce, Orkes, Percona, Sonatype, StormForge, and Tidelift. If you would like to sponsor or learn more about this event, please send an email to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠sponsorships@linuxfoundation.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Grizz's Info | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarongriswold/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠grizz@finos.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ►► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Visit FINOS www.finos.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ►► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Get In Touch: info@finos.org

In this episode of the podcast, our FINOS COO, Jane Gavronsky sits down with Adrian Dale of ISLA and David Shone of ISDA to discuss the associations contribution and backing of the FINOS CDM, Common Domain Model to the FINOS open source community. CDM: https://cdm.finos.org/ On GitHub: https://github.com/finos/common-domain-model Adrian Dale, Head of Regulation & Markets, ISLA - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrian-dale-27942314/ David Shone, Director of Product - Data & Digital, ISDA - https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-shone/ Jane Gavronsky, COO, FINOS - https://www.linkedin.com/in/janegavronsky/ NYC November 1 - Open Source in Finance Forum: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 2022 State of Open Source in Financial Services Download: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.finos.org/state-of-open-source-in-financial-services-2022⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ All Links on Current Newsletter Here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.finos.org/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - more show notes to come A huge thank you to all our sponsors for Open Source in Finance Forum New York ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠that will take place this November 1st at the New York Marriott Marquis This event wouldn't be possible without our sponsors. A special thank you to our Leader sponsors: Databricks, where you can unify all your data, analytics, and AI on one platform. And Red Hat - Open to change—yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And our Contributor and Community sponsors: Adaptive/Aeron, Connectifi, Discover, Enterprise DB, FinOps Foundation, Fujitsu, instaclustr, Major League Hacking, mend.io, Open Mainframe Project, OpenJS Foundation, OpenLogic by Perforce, Orkes, Percona, Sonatype, StormForge, and Tidelift. If you would like to sponsor or learn more about this event, please send an email to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠sponsorships@linuxfoundation.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Grizz's Info | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarongriswold/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠grizz@finos.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ►► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Visit FINOS www.finos.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ►► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Get In Touch: info@finos.org

Episode 31 Jason Fuller - Lessons From 10 Years of FinOps Jason Fuller, Head of Cloud at HERE Technologies, talks with Mike Fuller, CTO of the FinOps Foundation and looks back at lessons learned from doing FinOps since long before it was called FinOps.Jason Fuller | LinkedInLearn more and join the FinOps Foundation at www.FinOps.org.

In this episode of the podcast, Grizz sits down with Peter Smulovics, Executive Director at Morgan Stanley about.. well, just about everything. We hit his developer journey, metaverse, XR, spatial computing, Big Boost Mondays, autism hackathons, and painting fences. He is currently Executive Director for Windows and .NET develop practices and spatial computing and metaverse development practices at Morgan Stanley, and co-chair for Open Source Readiness ( https://osr.finos.org ) and Emerging Technologies ( https://zenith.finos.org ) at The Linux Foundation / FINOS. He will be speaking at the Open Source in Finance Forum on November 1st in New York: ⁠⁠⁠https://sched.co/1PzH7⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Peter Smulovics LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/smulovicspeter/ FSI Hack for Autism - 2023: https://fsi-hack4autism.github.io/ Zenith Emerging Technologies: https://zenith.finos.org/ Open Source Readiness: https://osr.finos.org/ NYC November 1 - Open Source in Finance Forum: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 2022 State of Open Source in Financial Services Download: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.finos.org/state-of-open-source-in-financial-services-2022⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ All Links on Current Newsletter Here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.finos.org/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - more show notes to come A huge thank you to all our sponsors for Open Source in Finance Forum New York ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠that will take place this November 1st at the New York Marriott Marquis This event wouldn't be possible without our sponsors. A special thank you to our Leader sponsors: Databricks, where you can unify all your data, analytics, and AI on one platform. And Red Hat - Open to change—yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And our Contributor and Community sponsors: Adaptive/Aeron, Discover, FinOps Foundation, instaclustr, mend.io, Open Mainframe Project, OpenJS Foundation, OpenLogic by Perforce, Orkes, Red Hat, Sonatype, and Tidelift. If you would like to sponsor or learn more about this event, please send an email to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠sponsorships@linuxfoundation.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Grizz's Info | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarongriswold/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠grizz@finos.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ►► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Visit FINOS www.finos.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ►► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Get In Touch: info@finos.org

In this episode of the podcast, Grizz sits down with Anna McDonald, Technical Voice of the Customer at Confluent to talk about her OSFF talk: "Enabling Real Time Regulatory Compliance with Kafka Streams and Morphir". We talk about Kafka Streams, Morphir, Open Regulation, and what it's like to figure out your passion for coding at 5 years old. She will be speaking at the Open Source in Finance Forum on November 1st in New York: ⁠⁠https://sched.co/1PzH7 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Anna McDonald LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jbfletch/ NYC November 1 - Open Source in Finance Forum: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 2022 State of Open Source in Financial Services Download: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.finos.org/state-of-open-source-in-financial-services-2022⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ All Links on Current Newsletter Here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.finos.org/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - more show notes to come A huge thank you to all our sponsors for Open Source in Finance Forum New York ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/⁠⁠⁠⁠that will take place this November 1st at the New York Marriott Marquis This event wouldn't be possible without our sponsors. A special thank you to our Leader sponsors: Databricks, where you can unify all your data, analytics, and AI on one platform. And Red Hat - Open to change—yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And our Contributor and Community sponsors: Adaptive/Aeron, Discover, FinOps Foundation, instaclustr, mend.io, Open Mainframe Project, OpenJS Foundation, OpenLogic by Perforce, Orkes, Red Hat, Sonatype, and Tidelift. If you would like to sponsor or learn more about this event, please send an email to ⁠⁠⁠⁠sponsorships@linuxfoundation.org⁠⁠⁠⁠. Grizz's Info | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarongriswold/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠grizz@finos.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ►► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Visit FINOS www.finos.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ►► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Get In Touch: info@finos.org

In this episode of the podcast, Grizz sits down with Brian Douglas, CEO, of OpenSauced to talk about his OSFF talk: "Data-Driven Decisions: Uncovering the Key Metrics Shaping Success in OSS". We talk about his developer evangelist journey, open source project analytics, accessing talent, and a little Steph Curry. He will be speaking at the Open Source in Finance Forum on November 1st in New York: ⁠https://sched.co/1PzGI ⁠⁠⁠ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianldouglas/ OpenSauced: https://opensauced.pizza/ Podcast & Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@OpenSauced/videos NYC November 1 - Open Source in Finance Forum: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/⁠⁠⁠⁠ 2022 State of Open Source in Financial Services Download: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.finos.org/state-of-open-source-in-financial-services-2022⁠⁠⁠⁠ All Links on Current Newsletter Here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.finos.org/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - more show notes to come A huge thank you to all our sponsors for Open Source in Finance Forum New York ⁠⁠⁠https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/⁠⁠⁠that will take place this November 1st at the New York Marriott Marquis This event wouldn't be possible without our sponsors. A special thank you to our Leader sponsors: Databricks, where you can unify all your data, analytics, and AI on one platform. And Red Hat - Open to change—yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And our Contributor and Community sponsors: Adaptive/Aeron, Discover, FinOps Foundation, instaclustr, mend.io, Open Mainframe Project, OpenJS Foundation, OpenLogic by Perforce, Orkes, Red Hat, Sonatype, and Tidelift. If you would like to sponsor or learn more about this event, please send an email to ⁠⁠⁠sponsorships@linuxfoundation.org⁠⁠⁠. Grizz's Info | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarongriswold/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠grizz@finos.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ►► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Visit FINOS www.finos.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ►► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Get In Touch: info@finos.org

This week on DisrupTV, we interviewed Rahul Ponnala, Co-founder and CEO of Granica, Mike Fuller, CTO at the FinOps Foundation and William Eggers and Donald Kettl, Authors of Bridgebuilders. DisrupTV is a weekly Web series with hosts R “Ray” Wang and Vala Afshar. The show airs live at 11:00 a.m. PT/ 2:00 p.m. ET every Friday. Brought to you by Constellation Executive Network: constellationr.com/CEN.

In this episode of the podcast, Grizz sits down with Varsha Sundar, VP of Cloud FinOps at Chubb Insurance to talk about her OSFF talk: "Cloud Financial Management Strategy". We talk about her journey, what FInOps is, and why it's important. She will be speaking at the Open Source in Finance Forum on November 1st in New York: https://sched.co/1Q2n3 ⁠ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/varsha-sundar-b751b326/ FinOps Foundation: https://www.finops.org/ All Links on Current Newsletter Here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.finos.org/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠ - more show notes to come NYC November 1 - Open Source in Finance Forum: ⁠⁠⁠https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/⁠⁠⁠ 2022 State of Open Source in Financial Services Download: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.finos.org/state-of-open-source-in-financial-services-2022⁠⁠⁠ A huge thank you to all our sponsors for Open Source in Finance Forum New York ⁠⁠https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/⁠⁠that will take place this November 1st at the New York Marriott Marquis This event wouldn't be possible without our sponsors. A special thank you to our Leader sponsor: Databricks, where you can unify all your data, analytics, and AI on one platform. And our Contributor and Community sponsors: Adaptive/Aeron, Discover, FinOps Foundation, instaclustr, mend.io, Open Mainframe Project, OpenJS Foundation, OpenLogic by Perforce, Orkes, Red Hat, Sonatype, and Tidelift. If you would like to sponsor or learn more about this event, please send an email to ⁠⁠sponsorships@linuxfoundation.org⁠⁠. Grizz's Info | ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarongriswold/⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠grizz@finos.org⁠⁠⁠⁠ ►► ⁠⁠⁠⁠Visit FINOS www.finos.org⁠⁠⁠⁠ ►► ⁠⁠⁠⁠Get In Touch: info@finos.org

In this episode of the podcast, we break down the newly released schedule from the Open Source in Finance Forum (OSFF). Plus - we return to our FINOS Debrief episodes that wrap up the past month in the FINOS Ecosystem - and look forward to the next month and beyond. All Links on Current Newsletter Here: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.finos.org/newsletter⁠⁠⁠ - more show notes to come NYC November 1 - Open Source in Finance Forum: ⁠⁠https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/⁠⁠ 2023 State of Open Source in Financial Services Survey: https://www.research.net/r/NX3VVXM⁠ 2022 State of Open Source in Financial Services Download: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.finos.org/state-of-open-source-in-financial-services-2022⁠⁠ A huge thank you to all our sponsors for Open Source in Finance Forum New York ⁠https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/⁠that will take place this November 1st at the New York Marriott Marquis This event wouldn't be possible without our sponsors. A special thank you to our Leader sponsor: Databricks, where you can unify all your data, analytics, and AI on one platform. And our Contributor and Community sponsors: Adaptive/Aeron, Discover, FinOps Foundation, instaclustr, mend.io, Open Mainframe Project, OpenJS Foundation, OpenLogic by Perforce, Orkes, Red Hat, Sonatype, and Tidelift. If you would like to sponsor or learn more about this event, please send an email to ⁠sponsorships@linuxfoundation.org⁠. Grizz's Info | ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarongriswold/⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠grizz@finos.org⁠⁠⁠ ►► ⁠⁠⁠Visit FINOS www.finos.org⁠⁠⁠ ►► ⁠⁠⁠Get In Touch: info@finos.org

In this episode of the podcast, we discuss the formation of a new major project in FINOS around common cloud controls for financial services. Get involved now here: https://www.finos.org/common-cloud-controls-project Read the Press Release here: https://www.finos.org/press/finos-announces-formation-of-common-cloud-controls US Dept of Treasury Cloud Report: https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Treasury-Cloud-Report.pdf UK HMT Critical 3rd Party Finance Sector Policy Statement: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/critical-third-parties-to-the-finance-sector-policy-statement European Council DORA: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022/11/28/digital-finance-council-adopts-digital-operational-resilience-act/ Monetary Authority of Singapore Cloud Advisory: https://www.mas.gov.sg/-/media/MAS/Regulations-and-Financial-Stability/Regulatory-and-Supervisory-Framework/Risk-Management/Cloud-Advisory.pdf All Links on Current Newsletter Here: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.finos.org/newsletter⁠⁠⁠ - more show notes to come NYC November 1 - Open Source in Finance Forum: ⁠⁠https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/⁠⁠ 2023 State of Open Source in Financial Services Survey: https://www.research.net/r/NX3VVXM⁠https://www.research.net/r/NX3VVXM⁠ 2022 State of Open Source in Financial Services Download: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.finos.org/state-of-open-source-in-financial-services-2022⁠⁠⁠ A huge thank you to all our sponsors for Open Source in Finance Forum New York ⁠https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/⁠that will take place this November 1st at the New York Marriott Marquis, especially to our Leader sponsor: Databricks. And our Contributor and Community sponsors: Adaptive/Aeron, Discover, FinOps Foundation, instaclustr, mend.io, OpenJS, Open Mainframe Project, Perforce, Red Hat, Sonatype, and Tidelift. Registration is now open and early bird pricing is available till August 18th. Join us in NYC! If you would like to sponsor or learn more about this event, please send an email to ⁠sponsorships@linuxfoundation.org⁠. Grizz's Info | ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarongriswold/⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠grizz@finos.org⁠⁠⁠ ►► ⁠⁠⁠Visit FINOS www.finos.org⁠⁠⁠ ►► ⁠⁠⁠Get In Touch: info@finos.org

In this episode of the podcast, we return to our FINOS Debrief episodes (now monthly) that wrap up the past month in the FINOS Ecosystem - and look forward to the next month and beyond. All Links on Current Newsletter Here: ⁠⁠https://www.finos.org/newsletter⁠⁠ - more show notes to come NYC November 1 - Open Source in Finance Forum: ⁠https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/⁠ 2023 State of Open Source in Financial Services Survey: https://www.research.net/r/NX3VVXMhttps://www.research.net/r/NX3VVXM 2022 State of Open Source in Financial Services Download: ⁠⁠https://www.finos.org/state-of-open-source-in-financial-services-2022⁠⁠ A huge thank you to all our sponsors for Open Source in Finance Forum New York https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/that will take place this November 1st at the New York Marriott Marquis, especially to our Leader sponsor: Databricks.And our Contributor and Community sponsors: Adaptive/Aeron, Discover, FinOps Foundation, instaclustr, mend.io, Open Mainframe Project, Red Hat, and TideliftIf you would like to sponsor or learn more about this event, please send an email to sponsorships@linuxfoundation.org. Grizz's Info | ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarongriswold/⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠grizz@finos.org⁠⁠ ►► ⁠⁠Visit FINOS www.finos.org⁠⁠ ►► ⁠⁠Get In Touch: info@finos.org

Welcome to the Jon Myer Podcast, where we bring you the latest insights and trends in the dynamic world of cloud technology and finance. Today, we have two extraordinary guests joining us, J.R. Storment, the Executive Director of the FinOps Foundation, and Mike Fuller, the CTO of the FinOps Foundation. These remarkable individuals are not only authors of the groundbreaking book, "Cloud FinOps," but also pioneers in reshaping how organizations optimize their cloud resources and drive maximum value. In the past few years, FinOps has experienced a seismic shift driven by the COVID cloud acceleration and economic concerns. Astonishingly, 90% of Fortune 50 companies, with 45 out of 50 participating, are actively engaged in FinOps programs. We're eager to explore the journey of FinOps, from its cultural discipline to the emergence of new tools and platforms, its integration into cloud provider offerings, and the industry's recognition and certification. But first, let's address the burning question on everyone's mind: Is FinOps really fun?

Welcome to the Jon Myer Podcast, where we bring you the latest insights and trends in the dynamic world of cloud technology and finance. Today, we have two extraordinary guests joining us, J.R. Storment, the Executive Director of the FinOps Foundation, and Mike Fuller, the CTO of the FinOps Foundation. These remarkable individuals are not only authors of the groundbreaking book, "Cloud FinOps," but also pioneers in reshaping how organizations optimize their cloud resources and drive maximum value. In the past few years, FinOps has experienced a seismic shift driven by the COVID cloud acceleration and economic concerns. Astonishingly, 90% of Fortune 50 companies, with 45 out of 50 participating, are actively engaged in FinOps programs. We're eager to explore the journey of FinOps, from its cultural discipline to the emergence of new tools and platforms, its integration into cloud provider offerings, and the industry's recognition and certification. But first, let's address the burning question on everyone's mind: Is FinOps really fun?

With the economic conditions in 2023 calling for great attention to be paid to costs, along with cloud hitting a point of adoption maturity, FinOps is central to the cloud conversation right now.  Whilst Cloud should not predominantly be seen as cost saving exercise, there are often opportunities and even if cost saving is not top priority, ensuring your Cloud footprint is optimised is always critical.In this special LIVE episode from a FinOps event, sponsored by Apptio & Capgemini in London on 26 April 2023, Dave, Sjoukje & Rob talk with Alison McIntyre, UK Ambassador for the FinOps Foundation, about the work of the FinOps foundation, the evolution of FinOps as a discipline, the importance of consumption forecasting and why that is different to a financial forecast.Finally, in place of this weeks trend, we take some audience questions and amongst other things, talk about the link between FinOps and sustainability.TLDR:00:37 Intros02:30 Cloud conversation with Alison McIntyre34:15  Audience questions40:50 Safari!Further Reading:https://www.finops.org/introduction/what-is-finops/

A fantastic episode with our friend Deana Solis, a senior FinOps Engineer who is heavily involved in the FinOps Foundation and Women in FinOps. She tells the story of "Woman" in FinOps and also her career in general.A really down to earth individual, Deana lets us in to the realities of her journey and why the linear career isn't the most interesting!

TelCo is a Sector where Cloud based software defined networks are driving customer expectations combined with potentially providing huge operational efficiencies.  Telcos are increasingly moving their networks to the cloud, recognizing the significant advantages this can provide – 31% of global network capacity is being serviced by cloud today, and this is expected to increase to 46% in the next 3 to 5 years.Dave, Sjoukje & Rob talk with Geoff Hollingworth, CMO of Rakuten Symphony about their experience as a Cloud Native Telco, and what we can learn by looking at what is possible on the other side of cloud transformation.  The team explore what a telco cloud transformation is (is it different from cloud transformation in other sectors?), the operational differences between a Cloud Native and traditional Telco and cloud transformation progress and nuances in the sectorFinally, in this weeks Trend, we talk about the FinOps Foundation and the misconception of FinOps being just about saving money.TLDR:00:52 Intros02:07 Cloud conversation with Geoff Hollingworth35:30 The FinOps Foundation 39:51 Getting some sleep!Further Reading:https://www.capgemini.com/insights/research-library/cloudification-of-networks

EKS on Snow Devices On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team highlights the new Graviton3-based images for users of AWS, new ways provided by Google to pay for its cloud services, the new partnership between Azure and the Finops Foundation, as well as Oracle's new cloud banking, and the automation of CCOE. A big thanks to this week's sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week's highlights

Today Frank and Steve are joined by TJ (Anthony Johnson), Cloud Business Manager at Box.  TJ talks to us about the new working group he's launched as part of the FinOps Foundation, Social Aspects of FinOps, as well as walking us through his journey and experiences to date.  We also briefly touch on Unit Economics which TJ has promised to come and do another episode on. As part of the relaunch of the Podcast under "The FinOps Guys", we'll now do two types of episodes, ones covering the news that listeners are used to, and by popular demand, special guest episodes.  Stay tuned for more of both types of episodes coming up!

In this week's episode of the SD Times "What the Dev?" podcast, editor-in-chief David Rubinstein discusses FinOps and how to keep your cloud costs from spiraling out of control. His guest is J.R. Storment, the executive director of the FinOps Foundation. The FinOps Foundation will be taking part in KubeCon coming later this month. 

On the podcast this week, guest Joe Daly tells Stephanie Wong, Mark “Money” Mirchandani, and our listeners all about FinOps principles and how they're helping companies take advantage of the cloud while saving their bottom lines. He describes FinOps as financial DevOps, making financial decisions in an effective and optimized way. With his experience in finance and tax accounting, Joe has developed a special knack for navigating the sometimes confusing world of cloud finance policies, and his contributions to the FinOps Foundation have been many. For starters, collaboration with various business departments is important for developing a plan that leverages the benefits of the cloud but keeps the company using resources wisely, Joe explains. He talks about the FinOps Foundation and their focus on creating community for knowledge sharing. By fostering collaboration among different company roles and promoting financial education, companies are better able to determine financial goals while making sure each facet of the company reaps all the benefits of cloud participation. Following the FinOps cycle is the easiest way for community members to get started. The three steps, Joe tells us, are inform, optimize, and operate. The inform phase involves clarity in spending so teams understand how much money is being spent. In the optimize phase, benefits of spending are matched with expenditures to ensure resources are being used to their full potential. Finally, in the operate phase, engineers and finance managers come together to understand why solutions were chosen and understand if these tools are offering the right answers for the company. Every company is different but the sooner it's possible to start the FinOps journey the easier it will be to maintain in the future. Joe gives us examples of how companies are using the principles for successful strategies and the challenges that some of them have faced. The Foundation has monthly summits that offer perspectives from these companies as well as partner presentations. The FinOpsX conference is coming up soon as well. To wrap up, Joe offers other resources from the FinOps Foundation, including his podcast. Joe Daly Joe set up two FinOps teams at Fortune 100 companies. He joined the FinOps Foundation and has been setting up the ambassador program, supporting meetup groups, and producing FinOpsPod. Cool things of the week AlloyDB for PostgreSQL under the hood: Columnar engine blog GCP Podcast Episode 304: AlloyDB with Sandy Ghai and Gurmeet “GG” Goindi podcast How Google Cloud is helping more startups build, grow, and scale their businesses blog Automate identity document processing with Document AI blog Interview FinOps Foundation site FinOpsX site FinOpsPod podcast Cloud FinOps: The Secret To Unlocking The Economic Potential Of Public Cloud whitepaper Maximize Business Value with Cloud FinOps whitepaper Unlocking the value of cloud FinOps with a new operating model whitepaper Hosts Stephanie Wong and Mark Mirchandani

Episode 6 Jason Rhoades - Attribution, Tags & Labels . . . OH MY! It's the episode about tags, labels, account structures - how you attribute your cloud usage and spend to information that is important to you! Learn how to start, evolve and mature your attribution strategy with insights from Jason Rhoades, Development Manager at Intuit. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasongrhoades/ (Jason Rhoades | LinkedIn) https://www.finops.org/framework/capabilities/cost-allocation/ (Cost Allocation (Metadata & Hierarchy)) Learn more and join the FinOps Foundation at www.FinOps.org.

Episode 5 FinOps Careers: Beginning the FinOps journey The FinOps career path continues to evolve. Hear the perspectives of three practitioners, Vijay Karthavya Kudithipudi, Kate Ferguson and Hector J. Meneses Jr., who have recently started their FinOps career journeys. What is similar to your path? What is different? Register for FinOpsX: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/finops-x/ (X.FinOps.Org) https://hbr.org/2021/02/stop-telling-women-they-have-imposter-syndrome (Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome) https://www.linkedin.com/in/hectorjm/ (Hector J. Meneses Jr. | LinkedIn) https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathleen-ferguson1/ (Kate Ferguson | LinkedIn) https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijaykarthavya/ (Vijaya Karthavya Kudithipudi, PMP® | LinkedIn) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0iuFU7qh8M&t=974s (FinOps March 2022 Summit - More State of FinOps Data - YouTube) https://events.linuxfoundation.org/finops-x/ (FinOps X | Linux Foundation Events) - Registration and information for FinOps X Learn more and join the FinOps Foundation at www.FinOps.org.

Episode 4 Kim Wier - FinOps as Product Part 1 Kim Wier, Director of Efficiency Engineering at Target, joins the show and shares her career path, how she has built her team, leveraging Target's culture and commitment to learn. We also dive into the why and how Kim's team are building their own FinOps toolset. You do not want to miss this conversation! Register for FinOpsX: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/finops-x/ (X.FinOps.Org) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0iuFU7qh8M&t=974s (FinOps March 2022 Summit - More State of FinOps Data - YouTube) https://www.linkedin.com/in/kim-wier-2a31bb3/ (Kim Wier | LinkedIn) https://www.cio.com/article/304895/target-cio-mike-mcnamara-technology-is-too-important-to-outsource.html (Target CIO Mike McNamara: Technology is too important to outsource | CIO) Learn more and join the FinOps Foundation at www.FinOps.org.

"Une des pistes c'est tout simplement de faire le ménage" Le D.E.V. de la semaine est Antoine Lagier, Cloud Expert & Consultant chez Timspirit, membre du conseil technique de la FinOps Foundation et principal animateur du Meetup France FinOps et du référentiel finops.world. Avec les plateformes cloud qui offrent de plus en plus de possibilités, de services "on-demand" et d'élasticité, la facture du fournisseur devient plus volatile et peut avoir tendance à augmenter par manque d'expertise et de gouvernance. De manière assez logique est donc apparue le FinOps, qui a pour objectif de comprendre puis maîtriser ses coûts. Antoine vient nous expliquer les principes d'une démarche FinOps, et nous donne aussi de précieux conseils pour commencer. Nous parlons aussi de l'avenir du FinOps avec l'émergence du serverless et de l'importance d'une consommation maîtrisée dans le cadre d'une démarche GreenOpsLiens évoqués pendant l'émissionFinOps FoundationFInOps WorldMeetup france finops **Continuons la discussion**@ifthisthendev (https://twitter.com/ifthisthendev)@bibear (https://twitter.com/bibear)@cas42itLinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/if-this-then-dev/)LinkedIn de Antoine LagierDiscord (https://discord.gg/FpEFYZM)** Plus de contenus de dev **Retrouvez tous nos épisodes sur notre site https://ifttd.io/Nous sommes aussi sur Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, Twitch ** Essayez Masteos **Masteos c'est l'API de votre investissement immobilier ! Et grâce à IFTTD, ils vous offrent 6 mois de gestion locative** Cherchez l'équipe de vos rêves **Si vous avez envie de changer de job, testez My Little Team qui vous permet de choisir une équipe qui vous ressemble plutôt qu'une entreprise sans trop savoir où vous arriverez !https://www.mylittleteam.com/ifttd** La Boutique IFTTD !!! **Affichez votre appréciation de ce podcast avec des goodies fait avec amour (https://ifttd.io/boutique/) ou affichez clairement votre camp tabulation ou espace.** Soutenez le podcast **Ou pour aller encore plus loin, rejoignez le Patréon IFTTD.** Participez au prochain enregistrement !**Retrouvez-nous tous les lundis à 19:00 pour assister à l'enregistrement de l'épisode en live et pouvoir poser vos questions pendant l'épisode :)

Episode 3 FinOps Foundation in the U.K. Join the FinOps Foundation staff on their trip to the United Kingdom! Listen to clips of the London Roadshow and experience connecting with FinOps peers with Noel Crowley. Then get an overview of the staff offsite in Edinburgh. Register for FinOpsX: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/finops-x/ (X.FinOps.Org) London Roadshow presenters: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-daley-6b063239/ (Natalie Daley) https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhirani/ (Bhups Hirani) https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjay-apte-0b398811/ (Sanjay Apte) Learn more and join the FinOps Foundation at www.FinOps.org.

2 Ben de Mora - The Chaos Is To Be Embraced Ben de Mora may be the newest staff member at the FinOps Foundation, but he is absolutely not new to the Foundation at all. Ben has been a FinOps Instructor for years and he shares his experiences teaching the FinOps Certified Practitioner course. The conversation goes in a number of different directions - architecture, sustainability, estimated cloud costs and banjo. As Ben reminds us, the chaos is to be embraced. Key Moments 06:52 - FinOps Certified Practitioner Course 11:08 - FinOps & Architecture 18:52 - Implications of preemptible compute and sustainability 24:57 - Cost estimates while launching infrastructure https://x.finops.org/ (FinOps X, June 20-21, Austin, Texas) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lefCU2ptsio&t=558s (FinOps NYC Meetup Jan 2022: Ali Khajeh-Hosseini, co-founder Infracost - YouTube) https://learn.finops.org/ (FinOps Training & Certification) https://www.linkedin.com/in/bendemora/ (Ben de Mora | LinkedIn) https://www.allmusic.com/song/new-shoes-mt0003036295 (New Shoes - Eric Bibb | Song Info | AllMusic) - Song that Ben's father plays banjo on. Be sure to follow FinOpsPod to catch the latest episodes. Learn more about the FinOps Foundation at FinOps.org.

Joe Daly, Director of Community at the FinOps Foundation, joins the pod to discuss his FinOps journey, tackling cloud molehills before they become mountains and his top picks for a Scottish FinOps playlist.This episode was recorded in late 2021 whilst Joe was in his previous role as Director of Cloud Optimization at Nationwide USA.As an accountant by training, Joe approaches FinOps from a financial, rather than developer, background and took his first FinOps related role as Manager of Cloud Cost Optimisation at Cardinal Health back in 2016 - showing that the need for FinOps has been growing for a long time in Cloud computing terms!“I'm not a technical engineer by training, I'm a tax accountant by training…that grew into a FinOps position pretty naturally”.Joe understands that the benefits of cloud can be a double edged sword - its agility and its accessibility are what causes it to be a pain. Similarly, whilst conversations within businesses about the value of cloud often come down to cost reduction Joe argues that this is the wrong approach to long term value: “FinOPs should be leading you to driving value…cost control is often the entryway to FinOps but it's not the end goal”.Savings means ‘I can reduce your budget' (budget line item which can be removed)Cost avoidance - avoidance of future expense Value - means different things for different people in different companies. Cloud value is a combination of performance, execution and savings but is ultimately in the eye of your customer - what do they find valuable, what improved their experience?Finally, Joe talks about why more non-developers should join the FinOps Foundation, particularly why he would love to see more procurement professionals join the Foundation as procurement is a huge part of the public cloud: “When you're in the public cloud every engineer has just become a procurement professional”.Connect with Joe on LinkedInAbout the hostsAled Sage (VP Engineering at Cloudsoft) brings 20 years of experience developing distributed applications, mostly in the enterprise sector. Particular areas of interest include devops, automation, cloud, concurrency and distributed systems.Connect with AledAlasdair Hodge (Principal Engineer and Solutions Architect at Cloudsoft) is a leadingauthority in cloud, software applications and automation across all major cloud platforms, he has been engaged in the design and optimisation of cloud services in banking and finance.Connect with AlasdairAbout CloudsoftCloudsoft specialise in applications, automation and the cloud. Our top-down, application-centric approach is what sets us apart and empowers our customers to tame their IT estates and drive real business value.Our public cloud IT transformation expertise is embedded our Tempo cloud services, helping our clients to transform faster and exploit the benefits of cloud. We're an active contributor to the Apache Brooklyn open source project, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with Well-Architected, Microsoft Workloads, DevOps Competencies, a FinOps Foundation Member and a FinOps Certified Service Provider.Our flagship AMP software is a Digital Platform Conductor, enabling customers in Banking, Defence and other heavily regulated industries to cut through the complexity of their estates. and maximise value from their technology investments, drive down costs and reduce risks.

Episode 1 Deana Solis - Building Trust & FinOps Culture FinOps Pod launches for the first time with guest is Deana Solis, Sr. FinOps Engineer at Smarsh. Deana has been an active practitioner member of the FinOps Foundation since early 2020 and has been an active contributor to working groups in the foundation. During the interview, Deana goes over the importance of community, diversity and how to build trust when implementing a FinOps culture. Key Moments: [10:46] - Thinking about people when designing policies and process [15:18] - Culture clashes between new and experienced workers when implementing change [20:08] - Finance vs Engineering culture clashes [23:06] - Diversity in styles of work [32:11] - "Not Savings Plans for RDS" Relevant Links https://www.linkedin.com/in/solisdeana/ (Deana Solis LinkedIn Profile) https://www.linkedin.com/in/noelcrowley/ (Noel Crowley LinkedIn Profile) https://www.linkedin.com/in/stacy-case/ (Stacy Case LinkedIn Profile) https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-daly-52789220/ (Joe Daly LinkedIn Profile) https://www.finops.org/projects/identifying-shared-costs/ (FinOps Foundation Shared Costs Working Group - Guide to Spreading Out Shared Costs) Learn more and join the FinOps Foundation at www.FinOps.org. Music by https://pixabay.com/users/skilsel-22933514/?tab=audio&utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=audio&utm_content=8303 (Skilsel) from https://pixabay.com/music/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=music&utm_content=8303 (Pixabay)

About DannDann Berg is a Senior CloudOps Analyst at Datadog, and has nearly a decade of experience working in the cloud and optimizing multi-million dollar budgets. He is also an active member of the larger technical community, hosting the monthly New York City FinOps Meetup, and has been published multiple times in places such as MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, and others. When he's not saving companies millions of dollars, he's writing plays, and has had two full-lengh plays produced in New York City and China.Links: Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com Personal Website: https://dannb.org LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannberg/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/dannberg Monthly newsletter: https://dannb.org/newsletter/ Previous SITC episode with Dann Berg, Episode 51: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/episode-51-size-of-cloud-bill-not-about-number-of-customers-but-number-of-engineers-you-ve-hired/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats v-u-l-t-r.com slash screaming.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking databases, observability, management, and security.And - let me be clear here - it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build.With Always Free you can do things like run small scale applications, or do proof of concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free. No asterisk. Start now. Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. If there's one thing that I love, it is certainly not AWS billing, but for better or worse, that's where my career has led me. Way back in Episode 51, I had Dann Berg, the CloudOps analyst at Datadog. And now he's back for more. Things have changed. He's now a senior CloudOps analyst, and I'm hoping my jokes have gotten better. Dann, thanks for being bold enough to come out and find out.Dann: Yeah. I'm excited to see if these jokes have gotten better. That's the main reason for coming back.Corey: Exactly. Because it turns out that death, taxes, and AWS bills are the things that are inevitable and never seem to change.Dann: Yeah. They just keep coming. They never stop, and they're always slightly different than you expect. I guess, just like death and taxes.Corey: So, when we spoke back in, I want to say 2019 is when it aired, so probably that—ish—is when we had the conversation, if not a little bit before that, you were effectively a team of one, and as mentioned, had the CloudOps analyst title. Now, you're a senior CloudOps analyst, which I assume just means you're older. Is the team larger as well? What does that process look like? How has it evolved in the last couple years?Dann: Yeah, it's been interesting, especially being a single organization and that organization being Datadog, that to be able to grow the team a little bit. So, as you said, it was just me. Now, it's a total of four people, including myself, so three others. And, yeah, it's been interesting just in terms of my own professional development, being able to identify what needs to be done, how much capacity I have, and being able to grow it over time, especially in this fairly new space of being specifically focused on cloud cost billing. So, kind of that bridge between engineering and finance, which itself is kind of a fairly new space, still.Corey: It is. And my favorite part of having these conversations with folks who have no idea what this space is, is learning—when I was starting—out how to talk about this in a way that didn't lead down weird paths. It's, “Oh, you save money on Amazon bills? Can you help me save money on socks?” It's like, “No. Well, yes. Get the Prime card, it gives you 5% off. But no.” And yeah, I talk about camelcamelcamel and other ways of working around the retail side, but that's not really what I do.It's similar to back when I was doing SRE-style work. I made it a point never to talk about being someone involved in working in tech, or suddenly you're the neighborhood printer repair person. Similarly, you have, I guess, gone in a strange direction because you weren't, to my recollection, someone who had a strong SRE background. That's not where you came from in the traditional sense, is it?Dann: No, not an SRE background at all. Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. So, talking about this space, I mean, people are calling it a lot of different things, cloud economics, the term FinOps—financial operations—is being used a lot, now—Corey: Cloud financial management is another popular one. Oh, swing a dead cat, you'll hit 15 different words, and I give—my advice on that, even though I hate some of the terms is, cool. If people are going to pay you to have a title, even if you think it's ridiculous, you can take the money or you can die on a petty naming hill and here we are.Dann: Yeah. And it's interesting because the role that I was hired for at Datadog was very much this niche, very specific role that I didn't realize was a niche, very specific role at the time. So previously, I was at a company and I was building out their data centers, so I was working with vendors, buying servers, sometimes going on-site, installing, racking those, dealing with RMAs. And I was getting more involved as their cloud usage was growing and bringing some of those hardware capitalization cost procedures to the cloud. And so I found myself in this kind of niche role in my previous company.And a Datadog, they basically had the exact same role that was dealing with all of the billing stuff around the cloud—kind of from an engineering perspective because it was on the engineering team—but working closely with finance, and I was like, “Oh, these are the skills that I have.” And it kind of fit perfectly. And it wasn't until after I got to Datadog and was doing more research about this specific space that I discovered just how wide open it was. And I mean, meeting you was one of the earliest things that I did in the industry. Discovering the FinOps Foundation and a few other things has kind of like opened my eyes to this as an actual career path.Corey: It's an expensive problem that isn't going away anytime soon, and it is foundational and core to the entire rest of how companies are building things these days. My argument has been for a while that when it comes to cloud, cost and architecture are the exact same thing. You don't have the deep SRE architect background, but you're also now a member of a four-person team. Does everyone in the team have the same skill set as you, or do you wind up effectively tagging in subject matter experts from different areas? How is the team composed? People love to ask me this question, and I strongly believe there's no one way to do it. But what's your answer?Dann: Yeah, I mean, the team works very much in terms of everybody kind of taking on tasks that they need to do, but we did hire for specific skill sets when we tried to find people. So, the first person that we hired, we wanted them to have more of a developer engineer type background, writing code, stuff like that. The third hire, we were looking for somebody that was more of a generalist. I've seen myself more as a generalist in the space; anything that's going on, I can pick it up and make some progress on it and build something out. And then the fourth person, we were lacking some of the deeper FP&A or FinOps experience, and so we found somebody with more of that kind of background and less of the engineering experience, but they were eager to, kind of, move from finance into more of an engineering role. And I feel like this is the perfect role for that because I feel like there are a lot of non-engineers that want to break into engineering and don't really know how to do it. And if you are in finance, in FP&A, finding one of these more cloud-cost-optimization-specific roles is the great way to bridge that gap, I feel.Corey: The last time we spoke, I was independent, doing this all myself, and it turns out that taking all of the things that make me and trying to find those in other people is a relatively heavy lift, even if you discount the things like ‘obnoxious on Twitter.' So, how do you start decomposing that? Well, now we're a dozen people and we've found ways to do it. But by and large in our experience, for the way that we interact—and I want to get to that in a second—is that it's easier for us to teach engineers how finance works than it is the opposite direction. And there are exceptions to that, and as we scale, I can easily see a day in the near future where that is no longer the case.However, we also have two very specific styles of engagement. We do our cost optimization projects, where we go into an environment and, “Oh, fix this. Turn that thing off. Do you really need eight copies of those four petabytes of data? Oh, you didn't realize they were there. Great, maybe delete it.” And we look like wizards from the future and things are great.The other project that we do is contract negotiation with AWS, especially at large scale. It's never as simple as people would have you believe because, “Oh, you're doing co-marketing efforts, and you have a very specific use case, and there are business partnerships on 15 different levels, and that all factors into how this works.” It's nuanced and challenging, and of course, because it's a series of anecdata, I can't really tell too many stories in public about that. But those are the two things that we wind up focusing on. You are focusing on a very different problem.You're not moving from company to company, basically reimplementing the same global problem, solving it locally for them. You are embedded in an account for the duration, almost four years now by my count. And, “Okay, I guess I could just do a whole bunch of cost optimization projects on a quarterly basis in an environment like that,” doesn't seem like it solves the problem in any meaningful way. What does your team do?Dann: Yeah. Well, I mean, that's such an interesting question. Just in terms of—yeah, if you're doing consulting, you're starting from square one every time you get a new contract, a new engagement, and being at the same company for, like you said, about four years, going on four years now, you really have a chance to dive in and think about, “Okay, what does it mean to work cloud cost optimization into just the regular business cycle of how it works?” Because I mean, you have the triangle that everybody's familiar with: things can either be cheaper, faster, efficient and at different stages in the product lifecycle, you want to be focusing on these areas, more or less. And so, on our team, the different things that I'm thinking about is, first is visibility, is you want to provide engineers visibility into their cost. And not just numbers, right? Actionable visibility where if something needs to change, they need to do something, they know what that is.And a lot of the times, that means not just costs, but also efficiency. So, these are the metrics that this particular application should be scaling against. As this application grows, as usage grows, are we remaining as cost-efficient? Then there's also the piece—as you're saying—like discovering things within the infrastructure that, “Hey, if we make this change, or if you turn this off, if we do things this way, we'll save a bunch of money. Let's do those.”There's things like reservations, committed use discounts for GCP, all of those kinds of things we manage. And then dealing closely with verifying our bill, working with finance—FP&A—on cost modeling forecasting, both short-term—like, within a month; like, what are we going to be at the end of this month and it's the 10th right now?—and also, what does our next quarter look like? What are our next two years look like? And that bleeds into the contract negotiations, those kind of things as well.So, I mean, it's setting up the cycles of how do you prioritize this work? What is the company focusing on at the time? And what can you do when the company is not focusing explicitly on deciding to save money?Corey: One of the more interesting aspects of my work that I didn't expect is, whenever I wind up starting an engagement, or even in the prospect stage, I love asking the dumbest possible questions I can think of because it turns out they're not. And the most common one that I always love to start with is, “Oh, okay. Your AWS bill is too high. Why do you care?” And that often takes people aback, but once you dig down underneath the surface just a little bit, it becomes pretty clear that the actual goal is not that it's too much money—because spoiler, payroll always cost more than infrastructure—instead, it's, “How do I think about this? How do I rationalize what the additional costs are going to be per thousand monthly active users or whatever metric it is you're choosing to use?”And how do you wind up forecasting that because the old days of data centers where you—“Well, we're going to spend a boatload of money, and then we'll have capacity for the next, ehh, two years, maybe down to eighteen months, depending on growth,” that's easier for companies to rationalize around, rather than this idea of incremental cost on a per-unit basis, but not exactly because it also turns out that architecture changes, problems of scale, AWS pricing changes from time to time, all tend to impact that. What I think is not well understood in this space is that yeah, if you have a 20% overage this month, people are going to have some serious questions, but they're also going to have those same questions if you're 20% low.Dann: Yeah. I mean, understanding why people care about the cost is definitely the first step because with a single company, so it's just constantly looking at the numbers rather than understanding exactly what motivations a company has to contact somebody like you, like a consultant, right? Because usually, I imagine that it's going to be a bill, maybe two bills, three bills come in, and they keep going up and up and up, and they need to go down. And they're going to have an explicit reason why it needs to go down; finance is going to say, “Margins are x, y, and z,” or, “Revenue has done this; our costs can't do this.” There's going to be explicit reasons because if there aren't reasons, then they shouldn't necessarily be focusing on costs at that moment in time.What you want to do is have—I mean, this is way more complicated than just saying it out loud, but have a culture of cloud cost mindfulness, where people aren't just spinning up resources willy nilly. But also, my goal is for people not to have to really think about cost that much other than just in a way that helps them do their work. Because I mean, I want engineers to be able to build stuff and build stuff fast—that's what the cloud is all about—but I also want to be able to do it in a way that isn't inappropriately high in cost.Corey: I have my thoughts on this, and I've shared them before and I'll dive into them again, but how do you approach that? If Datadog makes a grievous error and hires me to write code somewhere as an engineer, what is the, I guess, cost approach training for me as I wind up going through my onboarding as part of an SRE team or an application team?Dann: I mean, this feels so basic as to not even be the right answer, but honestly, visibility is the easiest and best thing that you can give people, and so we've built out some visibility reports that engineers get on a regular basis. We also meet with our top—what is it—ten or fifteen spending internal engineering teams on a monthly basis to go over those costs so that they understand what they're looking at so that we understand the context behind it, so that we can understand what's on the roadmap going forward so that when things in the cost happen, we're aware. And then we're just staying on top of things. And if we have questions, we have an open dialogue with engineers and things like that.In an ideal space, it would be great to have cost, I guess, more fit into the product development lifecycle in a more deeply ingrained way, but at the same time, I really don't want to serve as a gatekeeper. Our goal is not to stop any sort of engineering process. And we haven't needed to do anything like that although I guess every company is going to be different in terms of what their needs are. But yeah, I'm totally happy to being a little bit more reactionary in terms of looking at the numbers and responding, and then proactive just in terms of the regular communication with people.Corey: I tend to take the perspective that engineers need to know enough about cost to maybe fill an index card at most because you don't want them, I guess, over-fixating on it. Left to my own devices in my personal account, I'll see a $7 a month bill and, “Oh, I'm going to spend two weeks knocking that down to $4.” And of course, I can do it, but is that the best use of my time? Absolutely not.Very often what is a lot of money to an engineer is absolutely not to the business. And vice versa when you bring in a data science team; it's, “Oh, yeah, we need at least four more exabytes of data because we never learned to do a join properly.” Yeah, maybe don't do that. Understanding the difference between those two approaches is key. But I've always been of the mindset that I would rather bias for letting developers build and experiment and have things that catch outsized things quickly, then trying to wind up putting a culture of fear around cost because I'd much rather see whether the thing they're trying to build is possible to build, then go back and optimize it later, once that's proven out. But again, this is a nuanced thing.Everyone seems to think I have this back pocket answer that will apply to all companies. And you've been doing this at Datadog for almost four years with a team of people. I am an outsider; I see the global trend, I see what works in different ways in different companies, but the idea that I can sit down and say, “Oh. Well, clearly the thing you're doing is completely wrong because that's not how I think about it,” is the hallmark of a terrible consultant. There are reasons that things are the way that they are and it's generally not that people are expecting to do a terrible job today. You know, unless they work in the Facebook ethics department, which is neither here nor there.Dann: Yeah, I mean, like I said, the product lifecycle, when you're building something new, you want to go as fast as possible. When you're launching it, you want it to be as reliable as possible. Once you're launched, once you're reliable, then you can start focusing on costs is, kind of like, not the universal rule, but kind of the flow that I tend to see. So, as you're at a company that is regularly innovating, creating new products, going through that cycle, you're going to have these kind of periods.As well as you have the products that have been around. There's a lot of legacy code, there's a lot of stuff going on, that maybe isn't the best, or some efficiency work that has been deprioritized for whatever reason, that maybe it's time to start considering doing this. So, keeping track of all of that. And like I said, if for whatever reason the business wants to focus on cloud cost efficiency, or a team has decided that in a particular quarter or for a particular reason they want to focus on that, being able to assist as much as you can, being able to save all that work so that there's kind of like a queue that you can go to when it is time to focus on cost efficiency stuff.Corey: So, here's a fun one for you. As of the time of this recording, it's a couple weeks old, but if you're anything like what we do here for some of our more sophisticated clients, we do occasionally build out prediction models, models of economics that wind up defining how some architectural patterns should be addressed, et cetera, et cetera. What's always fun is the large clients who have this significant level of spend on an outlier service. Every once in a while—it was great that we got to do a deep dive into the Washington Post's use of Lambda because normally, Lambda is a rounding error on the bill; they had a specific challenge and they did a whole blog post on this for the AWS blog. I believe the Monitoring Tools blog, but don't take that at face value; I never remember which AWS blog is which because AWS doesn't speak with a single voice on anything.But yeah, most of the time is block, tackle, baseline stuff that is the big driver of spend, but a few weeks ago, they change the pricing dimensions for S3 intelligent tiering, where there's no longer a monitoring charge for objects that are smaller than 128 kilobytes, and there's no 30-day minimum. So, the fact that those two things went away removed almost every caveat that I can picture for using S3 intelligent tiering, which means that for most use cases, that should now be the default. I imagine you caught that change as well, since that's one of those wake up and take notice, no matter what time of the world [laugh] it is where you are when that gets dropped. How did that change your modeling? Or did that not significantly shift how you view any of this?Dann: No, I mean, I think part of our role within the organization is to pay attention to stuff like that, and then you just have those conversations with the teams that I know were either exploring intelligent tiering. We do some pricing modeling for different products, S3 storage for different types, so updating those and being like, “Hey, this might be something we want to actually use and explore now.” Similar and I guess, more of something that I actively worked on that I consider in the same category is when Amazon announced savings plans as replacing convertible reservations. Because at first they announced, and being like, “Okay, well, it's going to automatically rebalance between… different instance families across regions, too”—which convertible RIs could never do it—“And it's going to be the exact same price for a compute savings plan as a convertible RI.” And we were kind of like, what's the catch? And we spent a few weeks doing a deep dive working with our data science team, kind of like being, “Where is the catch here?”Corey: Yeah, the real catch is that you can't sell it on the secondary market if it—Dann: Yeah.Corey: —turns out you bought the wrong thing, which if that's your Plan A, then good luck.Dann: Yeah. We definitely don't use that secondary market. I don't have as much experience there, although I'm sure some people can use it to their advantage.Corey: Almost no one does. In fact, the reason that it exists—my pet theory—is that once upon a time, companies would try and classify some of the reserved instance purchases as capital expenditures, which there has since been guidance from regulatory authorities not to do that. But at the time, the fact that you could sell it to a third-party on the secondary market would help shore up that argument. If you're listening to this, and you're classifying some of your RIs as CapEx, please don't do that. Feel free to reach out to me, I can dig out the actual regulation and send it to you. There are two of them. It's a nuanced topic. If you're listening to this and have no idea what I'm talking about, God, do I envy you.Dann: [laugh]. Yeah, definitely don't do that. [laugh].Corey: There was a lot that was interesting about savings plans. When I was read in the month or so in advance of them being announced, it was, “Great. I want to see this and this and these other things, too.” And some of those things came to pass. It was extended to work with Lambda.Now, I don't believe that is financially useful in almost every case, but it doesn't need to be because so much of cloud economics from where I sit is psychological in nature, where, “Oh, we have this workload that lives on EC2 instances and we want to move it to Lambda, but we already bought the reserved instances so we're not going to do it because of sunk cost fallacy.” Which is not much of a fallacy when it's that kind of money, in some cases. Okay, great. Now, if it can migrate to Lambda and still wind up getting the discounts you've paid for it, you have removed an architectural barrier. And that's significant.Now, I want to see that same thing apply to oh if you move from EC2 to RDS, or DynamoDB or anything else, that should be helpful, too. But whatever you do, don't do what SageMaker did and launch their own separate savings plan that is not compatible with the compute savings plans, so effectively, it's great; you're locked-in architecturally to one or the other because machine learning is, once again, a marvelously executed scam to sell pickaxes into a digital gold rush.Dann: I mean, I like savings plans a lot and we've been slowly, as convertible RIs have expired, replacing them with savings plans. And I think that it is pushing the other cloud providers forward—because we're definitely multi-cloud—and so that's really useful and I hope more people will take on the compute savings plan type model, just because it makes our lives so much easier. Or it makes my life so much easier in terms of planning it, selling the commitment internally, just everything about it has made my life easier. So, I mean, how many years later are we? I definitely haven't found any big gotchas, I guess, from the secondary market. But that doesn't really impact me.Corey: Yeah, I spent a lot of time looking forward, too, doing deep analyses of okay, for which instance classes in which regions is there a price discrepancy? And I finally got someone to go semi on record and say, “Yeah. There should not be any please ping us if you find one.” “Oh, okay, great. That is enough for me to work with.”Dann: Exactly, we got that, too. I didn't believe it so we were downloading price sheets and doing comparisons, doing all that stuff.Corey: Oh, trust but verify. And when we're talking this kind of money, I don't trust very far. They make mistakes on billing issues from time to time. And I get it; it's hard, but there are challenges here and there. I am glad you mentioned a minute ago that you are multi-cloud because my position on that has often been misconstrued.I think that designing something from day one to work on multiple cloud providers is generally foolish. I think that unless you have a compelling reason not to go all-in on one cloud provider, that's what you should do. Pick a cloud—I don't care which—and go all-in. Conversely, you have a product like Datadog where your customers are in multiple clouds, and first, no one wants to pay egress to send all the telemetry from where they are into AWS, and secondly, they're not going to put up, in many cases, with their data going to a cloud provider they have explicitly chosen not to work with, so you have to meet your customers where they are. In your case, it is absolutely the right thing to do. And Twitter often gets upset and calls me hypocrite on stuff like this because Twitter believes that two things that take opposite visions cannot possibly both be true, but the world is messy.Dann: Yeah. And I mean, the nice thing about us being in multiple clouds is we are our own biggest user. And that's actually one of the reasons why I love working at Datadog is because I get to use Datadog all the time. And not only that, Datadog is on everything and we have all of our products. I'm very spoiled [laugh] with all of this. But I mean, we are running in these different cloud providers; we are using Datadog in those different cloud providers, and that is just helping everything overall, too. In addition to supporting customers that are in each cloud because that is a huge reason as well.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by something new. Cloud Academy is a training platform built on two primary goals. Having the highest quality content in tech and cloud skills, and building a good community the is rich and full of IT and engineering professionals. You wouldn't think those things go together, but sometimes they do. Its both useful for individuals and large enterprises, but here's what makes it new. I don't use that term lightly. Cloud Academy invites you to showcase just how good your AWS skills are. For the next four weeks you'll have a chance to prove yourself. Compete in four unique lab challenges, where they'll be awarding more than $2000 in cash and prizes. I'm not kidding, first place is a thousand bucks. Pre-register for the first challenge now, one that I picked out myself on Amazon SNS image resizing, by visiting cloudacademy.com/corey. C-O-R-E-Y. That's cloudacademy.com/corey. We're gonna have some fun with this one!Corey: One of the problems that I keep running into across the board is that with things like Datadog—and again, not to single you out; every monitoring vendor to some extent has aspects of this problem—it's that when I'm a customer and I'm hooking my accounts up to Datadog, I want you to tell me about things that are going on, but the CloudWatch charges can be so egregious on the customer side, where it is bizarre and, frankly, abhorrent to me when I wind up paying more for the CloudWatch charges than I am for Datadog. And let's be clear here; I am, in fact, a Datadog customer. I pay you folks money. Not a lot of money, but I pay you money because I have certain things that I need to know are working for a variety of excellent reasons.And the problem that I keep smacking into on this is—it's not your fault; there's not anything you can do. In fact, you are one of the better providers as far as not only not being egregious with the way that you slam the CloudWatch endpoints, but also in giving guidance to customers on how to tune it further. And I really wish that more folks in your space would do things like that. It always bugs me when I wind up using a tool that tries to save money that in turn winds up costing me more than it saves.Dann: Yeah. Yeah, it's tricky there. I have less experienced myself setting up Datadog and running it in my own infrastructure as I'm more digging deep into the cost stuff and us using the cloud, so I can't speak to that specifically. But yeah, you're not the first person that I've heard have that experience. [laugh].Corey: And again, it's not your fault at all. I've been beating up the CloudWatch team for years on this, and I will continue to do so until I'm safely dead, which—depending on Amazon's level of patience—might be in mere minutes.Dann: In the larger-picture-wise, we have to remember that we're super early in the cloud adoption, even looking at the cloud economics FinOps cloud cost optimization world. I feel like most businesses at this stage in their journey are still in data centers and they're dealing with the problem of how do we move to the cloud and do it cost-efficiently? How do we set everything up? And that's where the world is right now.And I think that dealing with, “Okay, we are one hundred percent running in the cloud. What are the processes that we have in place? How do we think of finance and the finance organization not through the lens of ‘we once had data centers and now we don't,' but how do we look through that in the lens of ‘okay, we are cloud-native from day one? What does the finance department look like?'” And dealing with those problems is really interesting because Datadog has never been in a data center. We are cloud-native from the very beginning, and so it was interesting for me to join the company and build up a lot of these processes because it is different than what a lot of other people were dealing with and doing. And it presents some really interesting problems and questions that I think are going to be the foundation for the next decade of building companies and operating in the cloud.Corey: I always love having conversations with folks who are building out teams to handle these things because usually the folks I keep talking to, or who want to have conversations like this are building tools themselves to solve this problem through the miracle of SaaS, where they will bend over backwards to avoid ever talking to a customer. And we're all dealing with the same AWS APIs; there's not that much of a new spin you can put on most of these things. But understanding what customers are actually trying to do instead of falling down the rabbit hole trap of, “Hey, turn off those idle instances that are all labeled ‘drsite' because you probably don't need them,” is foolish. And after a few foolish recommendations, tooling doesn't get there. I am a big believer that tools can assist the process and narrow down what to look at.I believe they shouldn't have to exist; I think that the billing dashboard should be a hell of a lot better natively than having to pay a third party to make sense of it for me. But by and large, I do believe this is a problem that is best solved from a consultative approach. When I started this place, I was planning to build out some software, tried doing it—called DuckTools—and wound up mothballing the whole thing because what we were building was not what the industry claimed to want and, frankly, educating people into a position where then they see the value and only then will they buy is never been a game that I wanted to play.Dann: Yeah, I really liked that article that you guys published about exploring that product and the reason why you decided not to pursue it. But it's super interesting in terms of where the industry is going and building out those tools because I found that there isn't really any new thing that you can do with the tools. All the tools that exist for looking at your costs are largely the same. The main differences that I've seen is that the UI is slightly different and they have different sales teams. And if the sales teams are better, they're going to get more of the market share. And if the sales teams are not as good, it's going to be a smaller market share. And it's weird, too, be in this industry for as long as we have been, and seeing okay, well, Andreessen Horowitz just funded this new company, and this other company got invited into Y Combinator, or all of these things that are happening, and I'm kind of like, okay, but what is this tool really doing differently? And there are a few of them that are; that are doing something innovative and different, but there's also a few that are just like, this is a space where people are in, there's money here, we're doing the same thing, but we got our sales team, and we'll carve out our little corner, and then we'll get acquired, and that'll be that. Although I guess we're just at that stage of innovation in this space, I guess.Corey: Yeah, I have no earthly idea what the story is around how these companies plan to differentiate because it seems to me that they're directly attempting to compete with Cost Explorer, which—Dann: Yeah.Corey: —it's taken some time for that thing to improve to the point where it is now and it'll take further time for it to improve beyond it, but long-term, I don't think you're going to outrun AWS on a straight line like that.Dann: Yeah, I mean, when you work for one of these third-party cost tooling things, and you're working with one of your customers, and they're like, “How do I view this?” And it's kind of like, that is the easiest thing to find in Cost Explorer as well, it's—I can't imagine being like, “Well, you should pay me thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to view it here,” when Cost Explorer is free. And I think Cost Explorer, it doesn't do everything, but it's gotten a lot better at what it does, and it could probably solve 90% of people's problems without using a third-party tool.Corey: You are at significant scale in multiple clouds, so the answer that these companies always give is, “Ah, but we provide a single dashboard so that you can look at costs across multiple providers in one place.” Is that even slightly useful to you?Dann: Man, if you need dashboards, get a dashboard tool. Don't get this crazy cost analysis tool. I mean, there are some great dashboard solutions that you can get where you can connect your detailed billing, cost and usage report—whatever cloud provider is calling it, but, like, that really detailed gigabytes per hour report—and then visualize it, build reports, do all that kind of stuff because that's not something that the tooling does well right now, in terms of building out cost dashboards and stuff. But that's also right now. It could in the future.Corey: Yeah. If you're a BI tool, wind up passing out templates that normalize these things? I am so tired of building it all from scratch in Tableau myself. If you're Tableau, sell me a whole bunch of things that I can use to view this stuff through, so I don't have to wind up continually reinventing that particular wheel.Dann: Yeah.Corey: Oh, I like your approach. I didn't know the answer when I was asking the question. I was about to learn something if you'd gone the other direction, but nope, but it's good to know that my impressions remain intact.Dann: Yeah, I mean, I've used different tools in the past. Again, I hesitate to name any of them, but there's a few in this space that I feel like everybody—if they're in this space, they know which tools I'm talking about—Corey: Yes, we do.Dann: —and… yeah, I've used them. They're okay—a few of them are okay, a few of them are better than others, but I mean, I was trying to evaluate the value-add over me manually setting some things up and having some sort of visualization, and just the value-add in terms of what they were charging, even if it was like a significantly smaller percent of the bill because that alone, like, percent of bill is such a difficult cost model—Corey: Oh—Dann: —to do.Corey: I hate that. Pricing is hard. Let's start there.Dann: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.Corey: I hate the percent of bill because then it's, “Let me get this straight. I'm paying you a percentage of things like data transfer charges that I know are fixed, that I can't optimize? I'm paying you a percentage of my AWS enterprise support subscription? I'm paying you a percentage of the marketplace?” And so on and so forth. And it doesn't work. At some point of scale as well it's, I could hire a team of 20 people and save money versus what you're charging me. The other side of it though, “Ah, we'll charge you percentage of savings.” Well, then you wind up with people doing a whole bunch of things like before they bring you in, they'll make a bunch of ill-advised reserved instance purchases or savings plan purchases you have to then unwind after the fact. When I was setting this place up, I looked long and hard at different billing models and the only thing I found that worked is fixed fee. The end. Because at that point, suddenly everyone's on board with, “Hey, let's solve the problem and then get out as soon as possible.” We're not trying to build ourselves a forever job nestled in the heart of your company. And it's the only model I found that removes a whole swath of conflicts of interest. And that's the hard part. We have no partners with anyone in this space—including AWS themselves—just because as soon as we do, it becomes extremely disingenuous when we suggest doing something for your sake that happens to benefit them, such as, “Maybe back that S3 bucket up somewhere.” Well, okay, if we're partnered with them, does that mean we're trying to influence spend in the other direction? And it just becomes a morass that I never found it worth the time to deal with.Dann: Yeah, I—Corey: But that doesn't work for SaaS.Dann: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I haven't actually thought about pricing model for consulting in this space that closely, but I mean, when you're charging a percent of bill or percent of savings, you have the opportunity to screw the customer, right, through all the things that you were saying. If you charge a fixed fee, you have the possibility of undervaluing yourself, which the only one that's screwed in that case is you, potentially, and if you're okay with that risk and you're okay with those dollars, that's great. Because yeah, if you're able to be like, “Okay, here's the services that I do, here's the fixed costs.” “Done.” “Done.” That just sets everybody's expectations for the relationship in a much better way that you're not constantly worried about, like, upsells and other things that might happen along the way that screws the customer.Corey: And that's the hardest part, I think, is that people lose sight of the entire customer obsession piece of it. That's one of the things Amazon gets super right. I wish more companies embrace that. Dann, I want to thank you for taking so much time out of your day to suffer my slings, and arrows, and half-formed opinions. If people want to learn more about who you are and what you're up to, where can they find you?Dann: Yeah, I have a website you guys can go to that links everywhere else. It is dannb.org. And I spell my name with two ns, so D-A-N-N-B dot org. And I have LinkedIn, I have Twitter, I have a monthly newsletter that is not really about FinOps or anything, but I really enjoy it; I've been doing it for a year, now, that you should sign up for.Corey: And links to that will, of course, be in the [show notes 00:36:26]. Dann, thanks again for your time. I really appreciate it.Dann: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me again. It's been a blast.Corey: It really has. Dann Berg, senior CloudOps analyst at Datadog. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a comment featuring a picture of several corkboards full of post-it notes and string, and a deranged comment telling me that you have in fact finally found the catch in savings plans.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team's collective brain power got a boost from guest hosts Rob Martin of the FinOps Foundation and Ben Garrison of JumpCloud. Also, AWS releases Data Exchange, Google automates Cloud DLP, and Azure Synapse Analytics is available for pre-purchase.  A big thanks to this week's sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.  This week's highlights

Mike Fuller speaks with us about the issues addressed by the FinOps Foundation and FinOps at large. We talk about how users and members get their footing, how it differs from org to org, and the types of tooling (and solutions) people use to get a handle on their cloud financial awareness.

In this episode, we cover: 00:00:00 - Introduction  00:03:15 - FinOps Foundation and Multicloud  00:07:00 - Costs  00:10:40 - John's History in Reliability Engineering  00:16:30 - The Actual Cost of an Outages, Security, Etc. 00:21:30 - What John Measures  00:28:00 - What John is Up To/Latinx in Tech Links: Palo Alto Networks: https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/ FinOps Foundation: https://www.finops.org Techqueria.org: https://techqueria.org LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmartinez/ TranscriptJohn: I would say a tip for better monitoring, uh, would be to, uh turn it on. [laugh]. [unintelligible 00:00:07] sounds, right?Jason: Welcome to the Break Things on Purpose podcast, a show about chaos engineering and operating reliable systems. In this episode we chat with John Martinez, Director of Cloud R&D at Palo Alto Networks. John's had a long career in tech, and we discuss his new focus on FinOps and how it has been influenced by his past work in security and chaos engineering.  Jason: So, John, welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you? Where do you work? What do you do?John: Yeah. So, John Martinez. I am a director over at Palo Alto Networks. I have been in the cloud security space for the better of, I would say, seven, eight years or so. And currently, am in transition in my role at Palo Alto Networks.So, I'm heading headstrong into the FinOps world. So, turning back into the ops world to a certain degree and looking at what can we do, two things: better manage our cloud spend and gain a lot more optimization out of our usage in the cloud. So, very excited about new role.Jason: That's an interesting new role. I'd imagine that at Palo Alto Networks, you've got quite a bit of infrastructure and that's probably a massive bill.John: It can be. It can be. Yeah, [laugh] absolutely. We definitely have large amount of scale, in multi-cloud, too, so that's the added bonus to it all. FinOps is kind of a new thing for me, so I'm pretty happy to, as I dig back into the operations world, very happy to discover that the FinOps Foundation exists and it kind of—there's a lot of prescribed ways of both looking at FinOps, at optimization—specifically in the cloud, obviously—and as well as there's a whole framework that I can go adopt.So, it's not like I'm inventing the wheel, although having been in the cloud for a long time, and I haven't talked about that part of it but a lot of times, it feels like—in my early days anyway—felt like I was inventing new wheels all the time. As being an engineer, the part that I am very excited about is looking at the optimization opportunities of it. Of course, the goal, from a finance perspective, is to either reduce our spend where we can, but also to take a look at where we're investing in the cloud, and if it takes more of a shift as opposed to a straight-up just cut the bill kind of thing, it's really all about making sure that we're investing in the right places and optimizing in the right places when it comes down to it.Jason: I think one of the interesting perspectives of adopting multi-cloud is that idea of FinOps: let's save money. And the idea, if I wanted to run a serverless function, I could take a look at AWS Lambda, I could take a look at Azure Functions to say, “Which one's going to be cheaper for this particular use case,” and then go with that.John: I really liked how the FinOps Foundation has laid out the approach to the lifecycle of FinOps. So, they basically go from the crawl, walk, run approach which, in a lot of our world, is kind of like that. It's very much about setting yourself up for success. Don't expect to be cutting your bill by hundreds of thousands of dollars at the beginning. It's really all about discovering not just how much we're spending, but where we're spending it.I would categorize the pitting the cloud providers against each other to be more on the run side of things, and that eventually helps, especially in the enterprise space; it helps enterprises to approach the cloud providers with more of a data-driven negotiation, I would say [laugh] to your enterprise spend.Jason: I think that's an excellent point about the idea of that is very much a run. And I don't know any companies within my sphere and folks that I know in the engineering space that are doing that because of that price competition. I think everybody gets into the idea of multi-cloud because of this idea of reliability, and—John: Mm-hm.Jason: One of my clouds may fail. Like, what if Amazon goes down? I'd still need to survive that.John: That's the promise, right? At least that's the promise that I've been operating under for the 11 years or so that I've been in the cloud now. And obviously, in the old days, there wasn't a GCP or an Azure—I think they were in their infancy—there was AWS… and then there was AWS, right? And so I think eventually though you're right, you're absolutely right. Can I increase my availability and my reliability by adopting multiple clouds?As I talk to people, as I see how we're adopting the multiple clouds, I think realistically though what it comes down to is you adopted cloud, or teams adopt a cloud specifically for, I wouldn't say some of the foundational services, but mostly about those higher-level niche services that we like. For example, if you know large-scale data warehousing, a lot of people are adopting BigQuery and GCP because of that. If you like general purpose compute and you love the Lambdas, you're adopting AWS and so on, and so forth. And that's what I see more than anything is, I really like a cloud's particular higher level service and we go and we adopt it, we love it, and then we build our infrastructure around it. From a practical perspective, that's what I see.I'm still hopeful, though, that there is a future somewhere there where we can commoditize even the cloud providers, maybe [laugh]. And really go from Cloud A to Cloud B to Cloud C, and just adopt it based on pricing I get that's cheaper, or more performant, or whatever other dimensions that are important to me. But maybe, maybe. We'll remain hopeful. [laugh].Jason: Yeah, we're still very much in that spot where everybody, despite even the basics of if I want to a virtual machine, those are still so different between all the clouds. And I mean even last week, I was working on some Terraform and the idea of building it modularly, and in my head thinking, “Well, at some point, we might want to use one of the other clouds so let's build this module,” and thinking, “Realistically, that's probably not going to happen.”John: [laugh]. Right. I would say that there's the other hidden cost about this and it's the operational costs. I don't think we spend a whole lot of time talking about operational costs, necessarily, but what is it going to cost to retrain my DevOps team to move from AWS to GCP, as an example? What are the underlying hidden costs that are there?What traps am I going to fall into because of that? It seems cool; Terraform does a great job of getting that pain into the multiple clouds from an operations perspective. Kubernetes does a great job as well to take some of that visibility into the underlying—and I hate to use it this way but ‘hardware' [laugh] virtual hardware—that's like EC2 or Google Compute, for example. And they do great jobs, but at the end of the day we're still spending a lot of time figuring out what the foundational services are. So, what are those hidden costs?Anyway, long story short, as part of my journey into FinOps, I'm looking forward into not just uncovering the basics of FinOps, where is what are we spending? Where are we spending it? What are the optimization opportunities? But also take a look at some of the more hidden types of costs. I'm very interested in that aspect of the FinOps world as well. So, I'm excited.Jason: Those hidden costs are also interesting because I think, given your background in security—John: Mm-hm.Jason: —one of the challenges in multi-cloud is, if I'm an expert in AWS and suddenly we're multi-cloud and I have to support GCP, I don't necessarily know all of those correct settings and how to necessarily harden and build my systems. I know a model and a general framework, but I might be missing something. Talk to me a bit more about that as a security person.John: Yeah.Jason: What does that look like?John: Yeah, yeah. It's very nuanced, for sure. There are definitely some efforts within the industry to help alleviate some of that nuance and some of those hidden settings that I might not think about. For example, CIS Foundations as a community, the foundations of benchmarks that CIS produces can be pretty exhaustive—and there are benchmarks for the major clouds as well—those go a long way to try and describe at least, what are the main things I should look at from a security perspective? But obviously, there are new threats coming along every day.So, if I was advising security teams, security operations team specifically, it would be definitely to keep abreast into what are the latest and go take a look at what some of the exploit kits are looking for or doing and adopting some of those hidden checks into, for example, your security operations center, what you react to, what the incident responses are going to be to some of those emerging threats. For sure it is a challenge, and it's a challenge that the industry faces and one that we go every day. And an exploit that might be available for EC2 may be different on Google Compute or maybe different on Azure Compute.Jason: There's a nice similarity or parallel there to what we often talk about, especially in this podcast, is we talk about chaos engineering and reliability and that idea of let's look at how things fail and take what we know about one system or one service, and how can we apply that to others? From your experience doing a wide breadth of cloud engineering, tell me a bit more about your experience in the reliability space and keeping—all these great companies that you've worked for, keeping their systems up and running.John: I think I have one of the—fortunate to have one of the best experiences ever. So, I'll have to dig way back to 11 years ago, or so [laugh]. My first job in the cloud was at Netflix. I was at Netflix right around the time when we were moving applications out of the data center and into AWS. Again, fortunate; large-scale, at the cusp of everything that was happening in the cloud, back in those days.I had just helped finish—I was a systems engineer; that's where I transitioned from, systems engineering—and just a little bit of a plug there, tomorrow is Sysadmin Day, so I still am an old school sysadmin at heart so I still celebrate Sysadmin Day. [laugh]. But I was doing that transition from systems engineering into cloud engineering at Netflix, just helped move a database application out from the data center into AWS. We were also adopting in those days, very rapidly, a lot of the new services and features that AWS was rolling out. For example, we don't really think about it today anymore, but back then EBS-backed instances was the thing. [laugh].Go forth and every new EC2 instance we create is going to be EBS-backed. Okay, great. March, I believe it was March 2011, one of AWS's very first, and I believe major, EBS outages occurred. [laugh]. Yeah, lots of, lots of failure all over the place.And I believe from that a lot of what—at least in Gremlin—a lot of that Chaos Monkey and a lot of that chaos engineering really was born out of a lot of our experiences back then at Netflix, and the early days of the cloud. And have a lot of the scars still on me. But it was a very valuable lesson that I take now every day, having lived through it. I'm sure you guys at Gremlin see a lot of this with your customers and with yourselves, right, is that the best you can do is test those failure scenarios and hope that you are as resilient as possible. Could we have foreseen that there was going to be a major EBS outage in us-east-1? Probably.I think academically we thought about it, and we were definitely preaching the mantra of architect for failure, but it still bit us because it was a major cascading outage in one entire region in AWS. It started with one AZ and it kept rolling, and it kept rolling. And so I don't know necessarily in that particular scenario that we could have engineered—especially with the technology of the day—we could have engineered full-on failover to another region, but it definitely taught us and me personally a lot of lessons around how to architect for failure and resiliency in the cloud, for sure.Jason: I like that point of it's something that we knew theoretically could maybe happen, but it always seems like the odds of the major catastrophes are so small that we often overlook them and we just think, “Well, it's going to be so rare that it'll never happen, so we don't think about it.” As you've moved forward in your career, moving on from Netflix, how has that shaped how you approach reliability—this idea of we didn't think EBS could ever go down and lead to this—how do you think of catastrophic failures now, and how do you go about testing for them or architecting to withstand them?John: It's definitely stayed with me. Every ops job that I've had since, it's something that I definitely take into account in any of those roles that I have. As the opportunity came up to speak with you guys, wanted to think about reliability and chaos in terms of cloud spend, and how can I marry those two worlds together? Obviously, the security aspect of things, for sure, is there. It's expecting the unexpected and having the right types of security monitoring in place.And I think that's—kind of going back to an earlier comment that I made about these unexpected or hidden costs that are there lying dormant in our cloud adoption, just like I'm thinking about the cost of security incidents, the cost of failure, what does that look like? These are answers I don't have yet but the explorer in me is looking forward to uncovering a lot of what that's going to be. If we talk in a year from now, and I have some of that prescribed, and thought of, and discovered, and I think it'll be awesome to talk about it in a year's time and where we are. It's an area that I definitely take seriously I have applied not just to operational roles, but as I got into more customer-facing roles in the last 11 years, in between advising customers, both as a sales engineer, as head of customer success, and cloud security startup that I worked for, Evident.io, and then eventually moving here to Palo Alto Networks, it's like, how do I best advise and think about—when I talk to customers—about failure scenarios, reliability, chaos engineering? I owe it all to that time that I spent at Netflix and those experiences very early on, for sure.Jason: Coming back to those hidden costs is definitely an important thing. Especially I'm sure that as you interact with folks in the FinOps world, there's always that question of, “Why do I have so much redundancy? Why am I paying for an entire AZs worth of infrastructure that I'm never using?” There's always the comment, “Well, it's like a spare tire; you pay for an extra tire in case you have a flat.” But on some hand, there is this notion of how much are we actually spending versus what does an outage really cost me?John: Right. We thought about that question very early on at another company I worked at after Netflix and before the startup. I was fortunate again to work in another large-scale environment, at Adobe actually, working on the early days of their Creative Cloud implementation. Very different approach to doing the cloud than Netflix in many ways. One of the things that we definitely made a conscious effort to do, and we thought about it in terms of an insurance policy.So, for example, S3 replication—so replicating our data from one region to another—in those days, an expensive proposition but one that we looked at, and we intentionally went in with, “Well, no, this is our customer data. How much is that customer data worth to us?” And so we definitely made the conscious decision to invest. I don't call it ‘cost' at that point; I call that an investment. To invest in the reliability of that data, having that insurance policy there in case something happened.You know, catastrophic failure in one region, especially for a service as reliable and as resilient as S3 is very minuscule, I would say, and in practice, it has been, but we have to think about it in terms of investing. We definitely made the right types of choices, for sure. It's an insurance policy. It's there because we need it to be there because that's our most precious commodity, our customers' data.Jason: Excellent point about that being the most precious commodity. We often feel that our data isn't as valuable as we think it is and that the value for our companies is derived from all of the other things, and the products, and such. But when it comes down to it, it is that data. And it makes me think we're currently in this sort of world where ransomware has become the biggest headline, especially in the security space, and as I've talked with people about reliability, they often ask, “Well, what is Gremlin do security-wise?” And we're not a security product, but it does bring that up of, if your data systems were locked and you couldn't get at your customer information, that's pretty similar to having a catastrophic outage of losing that data store and not having a backup.John: I've thought about this, of course, in the last few weeks, obviously. A very, very public, very telling types of issues with ransomware and the underlying issues of supply chain attacks. What would we do [laugh] if something like that were to happen? Obviously, rhetorically, what would we do? And lots of companies are paying the ransom because they're being held at gunpoint, you know, “We have your data.”So yeah, I mean, a lot of it, in the situation, like the example I gave before, could not just the replication of, for example, my entire S3 bucket where my customer data is thwarted a situation like that? And then you think about, kind of like, okay, let's think about this further. If we do it in the same AWS account, as an example, if the attacker obtained my IAM credentials, then it really comes down to the same thing because, “Oh, look it, there's another bucket in that other region over there. I'm going to go and encrypt all of those objects, too. Why not, right?” [laugh].And so, it also begs the question or the design principles and decisions of, well, okay, maybe do I ship it to a different account where my security context is different, my identity context is different? And so there's a lot of areas to explore there. And it's very good question and one that we definitely do need to think about, in terms of catastrophic failure because that's the way to think about it, for sure.Jason: Yeah. So, many parallels between that security and reliability, and all comes together with that FinOps, and how much are you—how much do we pay for all of this?John: Between the reliability and the security world, there's a lot of parallels because your job is about thinking what are the worst-case scenarios? It's, what could possibly go wrong? And how bad could it be? And in many cases, how bad is it? [laugh].Especially as you uncover a lot of the bad things that do happen in the real world every day: how bad is it? How do I measure this? And so absolutely there's a lot of parallels, and I think it's a very interesting point you make. And so… yeah so, Jason, how can we marry the two worlds of chaos engineering and security together? I think that's another very exciting topic, for sure.Jason: That is, absolutely. You mentioned just briefly in that last statement, how do you measure it?John: Yep.Jason: That comes up to something that we were chatting about earlier is monitoring, and what do you measure, and ensuring that you're measuring the right things. From your experience building secure systems, talk to me about what are some of the things that you like to measure, that you like to get observability on, that maybe some folks are overlooking.John: I think the overlooking part is an interesting angle, but I think it's a little bit more basic than that even. I'll go to my time in the startup—so at Evident.io—mainly because I was in customer success and my job was to talk to our customers every day—I would say that a bunch of our customers—and they varied based on maturity level, but we were working with a lot of customers that were new in the cloud world, and I would say a lot of customers were still getting tripped up by a lot of the basic types of things. For example—what do I mean by that? Some of the basic settings that were incorrect were things just, like, EC2 security groups allowing port 22 in from the world, just the simple things like that. Or publicly accessible S3 buckets.So, I would say that a lot of our customers were still missing a lot of those steps. And I would say, in many of the cases, putting my security hat on, the first thing you go to is, well, there's an external hacker trying to do something bad in your AWS accounts, but really, the majority of the cases were all just mistakes; they were honest. I'm an engineer setting up a dev account and it's easier for me, instead of figuring out what my egress IP is for my company's VPN, it's easier for me just to set port 22 to allow all from the world. A few minutes later, there you go. [laugh]. Exploit taken, right? It's just the simple stuff; we really as an industry do still get tripped up by the simple things.I don't know if this tracks with the reliability world or the chaos engineering world, but I still see that way too much. And that just tells me that even if we are in the cloud—mature company or organization—there's still going to be scenarios where that engineer at two in the morning just decides that it's just easier to open up the firewall on EC2 than it is to do, quote-unquote, “The right thing.” Then we have an issue. So, I really do think that we can't let go of not just monitoring the basics, but also getting better as an industry to alert on the basics and when there are misconfigurations on the basics, and shortening that time to alert because that really is—especially in the security world—that really is very critical to make sure that window between when that configuration setting is made to when that same engineer who made the misconfiguration get alerted to the fact that it is a misconfiguration. So. I'll go to that: it's the basics. [laugh].Jason: I like that idea of moving the alert forward, though. Because I think a lot of times you think of alerts as something bad has happened and so we're waiting for the alert to happen when there's wrongful access to a system, right? Someone breaks in, or we're waiting for that alert to happen when a system goes down. And we're expecting that it's purely a response mechanism, whereas the idea of let's alert on misconfigurations, let's alert on things that could lead to these, or that will likely lead to these wrong outcomes. If we can alert on those, then we can head it off.John: It's all the way. And in the security world, we call it shifting left, shifting security all the way to the left, all the way to the developer. Lots of organizations are making a lot of the right moves in that direction for embedding security well into the development pipeline. So, for example, I'll name two players in the Infrastructure as Code as we call it in the security space. And I'll name the first one just because they're part of Palo Alto Networks now, so Bridgecrew; so very strong, open-source solution in that space, as well as over on the HashiCorp side where Sentinel is another example of a great developer-forward shift-left type of tool that can help thwart a lot of the simple security misconfigurations, right from your CI/CD pipelines, as opposed to the reaction time over here on the right, where you're chasing security misconfigurations.So, there's a lot of opportunity to shorten that alert window. And even, in fact, I've spent a lot of time in the last couple of years—I and my team have spent a lot of time in the last couple of years thinking about what can the bots do for us, as opposed to waiting for an alert to pop up on a Slack message that says, “Hey, engineer. You've got port 22 open to the world. You should maybe think about doing something.” The right thing to do there is for something—could be something as simple as an alert making it to a Lambda function and the Lambda function closing it up for you in the middle of the night when you're not paying attention to Slack, and the bot telling you, “Hey, engineer. By the way, I closed the port up. That's why it's broken this morning for you.” [laugh]. “I broke it intentionally so that we can avoid some security problems.”So, I think there's the full gamut where we can definitely do a lot more. And that's where I believe the new world, especially in the security world, the DevSecOps world, can definitely help embed some of that security mindset with the rest of the cloud and DevOps space. It's certainly a very important function that needs to proliferate throughout our organizations, for sure.Jason: And we're seeing a lot of that in the reliability world as well, as people shift left and developers are starting to become more responsible for the operations and the running of their services and applications, and including being on call. That does bring to mind that idea, though—back to alerting on configurations and really starting to get those alerts earlier, not just saying that, “Hey, devs, you're on call so now you share a pain,” but actually trying to alleviate that pain even further to the left. Well, we're coming up close to time here. So, typically at this point, one thing that I like to do is we like to ask folks if they have anything to plug. Oftentimes that's where people can find you on social media or other things. I know that you're connected with Ana through Latinx in Tech, I would love to share more about that, too. So.John: For sure, yeah. So, my job in terms of my leadership role is definitely to promote a lot of diversity, inclusion, and equity, obviously, within the workspace. Personally, I do also feel very strongly that I should be not just preaching it, but also practicing it. So, I discovered in the last year—in fact, it's going to be about a year since I joined Techqueria—so techqueria.org—and we definitely welcome anybody and everybody.We're very inclusive, all the way from if you're a member of the Latinx community and in technology, definitely join us, and if you're an ally, we definitely welcome you with open arms, as well, to join techqueria.org. It is a very active and very vibrant community on Slack that we have. And as part of that, I and a couple of people in Techqueria are running a couple of what we call cafesitos which is the Spanish word for coffees, coffee meetings.So, it's a social time, and I'm involved in helping lead both the cybersecurity cafecito—we call it Cafecito Cibernético, which happens every other Friday. And it's security-focused, it's security-minded, we go everywhere from being very social and just talking about what's going on with people personally—so we like to celebrate personal wins, especially for those that are joining the job market or just graduating from school, et cetera, and talk about their personal wins, as well as talk about the happenings, like for example, a very popular topic of late has been supply chain attacks and ransomware attacks, so definitely very, very timely there. As well as I'm also involved—being in the cloud security space, I'm bridging, sort of, two worlds between the DevOps world and the security world; more recently, we started up the DevOps Cafecito, which is more focused on the operations side. And that's where, you know, happy to have Ana there as part of that Cafecito and helping out there. Obviously, there, it's a lot of the operations-type topics that we talk about; lots of Kubernetes talk, lots of looking at how the SRE and the DevOps jobs look in different places.And I wouldn't say I'm surprised by it, but it's very nice to see that there is also a big difference with how different organizations think about reliability and operations. And it's varied all over the place and I love it, I love the diversity of it. So anyway, so that's Techqueria, so very happy to be involved with the organization. I also recently took on the role of being the chapter co-director for the San Francisco chapter, so very happy to be involved. As we come out of the pandemic, hopefully, pretty soon here [laugh] right—as we're coming out of the pandemic, I'll say—but looking forward to that in-person connectivity and socializing again in person, so that's Techqueria.So, big plug for Techqueria. As well, I would say for those that are looking at the FinOps world, definitely check out the FinOps Foundation. Very valuable in terms of the folks that are there, the team that leads it, and the resources, if you're looking at getting into FinOps, or at least gaining more control and looking at your spend, not so much like this, but with your eyes wide open. Definitely take a look at a lot of the work that they've done for the FinOps community, and the cloud community in general, on how to take a look at your cloud cost management.Jason: Awesome. Thanks for sharing those. If folks want to follow you on social media, is that something you do?John: Absolutely. Mostly active on LinkedIn at johnmartinez on LinkedIn, so definitely hit me up on LinkedIn.Jason: Well, it's been a pleasure to have you on the show. Thanks for sharing all of your experiences and insight.John: Likewise, Jason. Glad to be here.Jason: For links to all the information mentioned, visit our website at gremlin.com/podcast. If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Break Things on Purpose podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform. Our theme song is called, “Battle of Pogs” by Komiku, and it's available on loyaltyfreakmusic.com.

Cost is often one of the main drivers for adopting the cloud, but it's not always plain sailing once you get there. Cloud bills are complicated, so it can be a challenge to understand where your money is being spent, never mind how to manage and optimise that spend to get the biggest bang for your buck! Luckily, our guest is here to help!  Ashley Hromatko, Senior FinOps Manager at Pearson, joins Aled and Alasdair to discuss cloud, costs and cultural change. Ashley is a founding member of and currently serves on the Technical Advisory Council for FinOps Foundation, and so is the perfect guest to talk about the financial impetus towards cloud, what FinOps is and how it's helped Pearson to grow and the importance of accountability and visibility when it comes to understanding your cloud costs. Ashley is recognised as a leader in the emerging discipline of FinOps and is responsible for building Pearson's Global FinOps practice which spans 600+ AWS accounts. Pearson is one of AWS largest public sector customers, so Ashley has a huge amount of practical experience (and advice) for those looking to migrate to cloud and understand their costs better.We also get an insight into what 'good cloud' looks like with Pearson's FinOps team and some of the struggles and successes the team has faced to reach its current level of maturity.FinOpsConnect with Ashley  and learn more about FinOps Principles.About the hostsAled Sage (VP Engineering at Cloudsoft) brings 20 years of experience developing distributed applications, mostly in the enterprise sector. Particular areas of interest include devops, automation, cloud, concurrency and distributed systems. Prior to joining Cloudsoft, Aled was Chief Architect at Enigmatec Corporation. He holds a PhD (Computer Science) from the University of St Andrews.Connect with Aled Alasdair Hodge (Principal Engineer and Solutions Architect at Cloudsoft) is a leadingauthority in cloud, software applications and automation across all major cloud platforms, he has been engaged in the design and optimisation of cloud services in banking and finance and other service-based sectors such as telecoms, electronic design and supply-chain automation for over 12 years.Connect with Alasdair About CloudsoftCloudsoft specialise in applications, automation and the cloud. Our top-down, application-centric approach is what sets us apart and empowers our customers to tame their IT estates and drive real business value.Our public cloud IT transformation expertise is embedded our Tempo cloud services, helping our clients to transform faster and exploit the benefits of cloud. We're an active contributor to the Apache Brooklyn open source project, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with Well-Architected, Microsoft Workloads, DevOps Competencies, a FinOps Foundation Member and a FinOps Certified Service Provider.Our flagship AMP software is a Digital Platform Conductor, enabling customers in Banking, Defence and other heavily regulated industries to cut through the complexity of their estates. This maximises value from their technology investments, drives down costs and reduces risks. Cloudsoft AMP is the only product which strategically manages applications throughout their lifecycles across hybrid infrastructures, regardless of environment or location.We're based in Edinburgh, UK, but work with clients around the world. 

Links: Cloud FinOps: https://www.amazon.com/Cloud-FinOps-Collaborative-Real-Time-Management/dp/1492054623 FinOps Foundation: https://www.Finops.org/ AWS cost management blog: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cost-management/ Mastering AWS Cost Optimization: https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-AWS-Cost-Optimization-operational/dp/965572803X TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Pete: Hello, and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I am Pete Cheslock.Jesse: I’m Jesse DeRose.Pete: Wow, we’re back again. And guess what? We have even more questions. I am… I am… I don’t even know. I have so many emotions right now that are conflicting between a pandemic and non-pandemic that I just—I’m just so happy. I’m just so happy that you listen, all of you out there, all you wonderful humans out there are listening. But more importantly, you are going into lastweekinaws.com/QA and you’re sending us some really great questions.Jesse: Yeah.Pete: And we’re going to answer some more questions today. We’re having so much fun with this, that we’re just going to keep the good times rolling. So, if you also want to keep these good times rolling, send us your questions, and we’ll just—yeah, we’ll just roll with it. Right, Jesse?Jesse: Absolutely. We’re happy to answer more questions on air, happy to let you pick our brains.Pete: All right. Well, we got a couple more questions. Let’s kick it off, Jesse.Jesse: Yeah. So, the first question today is from Barry. Thank you, Barry. “New friend of the pod here.” Always happy to have friends of the pod. Although I do feel like that starts to get, like, Children of the Corn, kind of. I think we started that, and I also am excited about it, and also upset with myself for starting that.Pete: That’s all right. Friend of the pod. Friend of the pod.Jesse: “New friend of the pod here. I work in strategic sourcing and procurement and I was curious if there are any ways that you recommend to get up to speed with managing cloud spend. This is usually closely monitored by finance or different groups in product, but I can see a significant potential value for a sourcing professional to help, also.” And that’s from Barry, thank you, Barry.Pete: Well, I’m struggling not to laugh. “This is usually closely monitored by finance or different groups in product.”Jesse: Yeah…Pete: But I mean, let’s be honest, it’s not monitored by anyone. It’s just running up a meter in a taxi going 100 miles an hour.Jesse: Yeah, that’s the hardest part. I want everybody to be involved in the cloud cost management practice, but there’s that same idea of if it’s everyone’s responsibility, it’s no one’s responsibility. And so this usually ends up at a point where you’ve got the CFO walking over to the head of engineering saying, “Why did the spend go up?” And that’s never a good conversation to have.Pete: No, never a good one. Well, Barry because you’re a friend of the pod, we will answer this question for you. And honestly, I think it’s a great question, which is, we actually have been working with a lot of larger enterprises and these enterprises still have their classic sourcing and procurement teams. That’s not an expertise that is going away anytime soon, but like most teams within the company that are adopting cloud, it’s obviously going to evolve as people are moving away from, kind of, capital intensive purchases and into, honestly, more complex, multi-year OpEx style purchases, with cloud services and all the different vendors that come with it. It’s going to just get a lot harder.I mean, it’s probably already a lot harder for those types of teams. And so there’s a bunch of places I think that you can go that can help level up your skills around cloud spend. And I would say the first place that I personally got to dive in a little bit more—I mean, my history has been using Amazon cloud and being a person who cared about how much my company spent on it, but when you—joining Duckbill, you need to dive into other areas around the FinOps world. And the book, the O’Reilly book, Cloud FinOps is actually a really great resource.Yeah, I think it’s really well written and there’s a lot of great chapters within there that you can kind of pick and choose based on what you’re most interested in learning about. If you’re trying to learn more about unit economics, or you’re trying to learn more about how to monitor and track things like that, it’s a great book to dive into, and becomes a really great reference that you can leverage as you’re trying to level up this expertise within yourself or your team.Jesse: It’s a really, really great resource. The other thing to think about is any kind of collaborative social spaces where you can be with like-minded individuals who also care about cloud costs. Now, there’s a number of meetups that exist under the FinOps title that may be worth looking into. Obviously, we’re recording this during the pandemic so I don’t recommend doing those in person. But as you are able to, there may be opportunities for in-person meetups and smaller local groups focusing on cloud cost management strategies together. But also check out the FinOps Foundation. They have a Slack space that I would love to tell you more about, but unfortunately, we’re not allowed to join. So—Pete: Yep.Jesse: —I can’t really say more about it than that. I would hope that you’re allowed to join, but they have some strict guidelines. So, I mean, the worst that can happen is they say no; it’s definitely worth signing up.Pete: Yeah, and they have to us. [laugh].Jesse: Yeah.Pete: I think when you get into the FinOps Foundation, you should angrily say that we should have more FinOps experts in here like the great Jesse DeRose should be a member of this one because right now, he’s just framed his rejection notice from there, and—Jesse: Oh, yeah.Pete: —while it looks beautiful on the wall, while I’m on a Zoom with him, I want more for you, Jesse.Jesse: I want more for me, too. I’m not going to lie.Pete: So, I don’t know this might sound a little ridiculous that I’m going to say something nice about AWS, but they have a fantastic cost management blog. This is a really fantastic resource, really incredible resource, with a lot more content more recently. They seem to be doing some great work on the recruiting side and bringing on some real fantastic experts around cost management.I mean, just recently within the past few months they talk about unit economics: How to select a unit metric that might support your business, talking more about unit metrics in practice. They start at the basics, too. I mean, obviously, we deal a lot in unit economics and unit metrics; they will start you off with something very basic and say, “Well, what even is this thing?” And talk to you more about cost reporting using AWS organizations for some of this. It’s a really fantastic resource.It’s all free, too, which is—it’s weird to say that something from AWS is free. So, anytime that you can find a free resource from Amazon, I say, highly recommend it. But there are a lot of blogs on the AWS site, but again, the Cost Management Blog, great resource. I read it religiously; I think what they’re writing is some of, really, the best content on the blog in general.Jesse: There’s one other book that I want to recommend called Mastering AWS Cost Optimization and we’ll throw links to all these in the [show notes 00:07:30], but I, unfortunately, have not read this book yet, so I can’t give strong recommendations for it, but it is very similar in style and vein to the Cloud FinOps book that we just mentioned, so might be another great resource to pick up to give you some spot learning of different components of the cloud cost management workflow and style.Pete: Awesome. Yeah, definitely agree. I’d love to see, again, more content out here. There’s a lot of stuff that exists. And even A Cloud Guru has come up with cost management training sessions.Again, we’d like to see more and more of this. I’d love to see more of this come from Amazon. I’d love to see—you know, they have a certification path in all these different areas; I’d love to see more of that in the cost management world because I think it’s going to become more complex, and having that knowledge, there is so much knowledge, it’s spread so far across AWS, helping more people get up to speed on it will be just critical for businesses who want to better understand what their spend is doing. So, really great question, Barry, friend of the pod. We should get some pins for that, right? Friend of the pod pins?Jesse: Oh, yeah.Pete: And yeah, really great question. Really appreciate you sending it and hopefully that helps you. And if not, guess what? You can go to lastweekinaws.com/QA, and just ask us a follow-up question, Barry. Because you’re a friend of the pod. So, we’ll hopefully hear from you again soon.Jesse: Thanks, Barry.Pete: Thanks.Announcer: If your mean time to WTF for a security alert is more than a minute, it’s time to look at Lacework. Lacework will help you get your security act together for everything from compliance service configurations to container app relationships, all without the need for PhDs in AWS to write the rules. If you’re building a secure business on AWS with compliance requirements, you don’t really have time to choose between antivirus or firewall companies to help you secure your stack. That’s why Lacework is built from the ground up for the cloud: Low effort, high visibility, and detection. To learn more, visit lacework.com.Pete: All right, we have one more question. Jesse, what is it?Jesse: “All right, most tech execs I speak with have already chosen a destination hyperscaler of choice. They ask me to take them there. I can either print out a map they can follow, procedural style, or I can be their Uber driver. I could be declarative. I prefer the latter for flexibility reasons, but having said that, where does one actually start?Do you start with Infrastructure as a Service and some RDS to rid them of that pesky expensive Oracle bill? Do we start with a greenfield? I mean, having a massive legacy footprint, it takes a while to move things over, and integrating becomes a costly affair. There’s definitely a chicken and egg scenario here. How do I ultimately find the best path forward?” That question is from Marsellus Wallace? Thank you, Marsellus.Pete: Great question. And I’m not just saying that. I guess I have a question. Or at least, maybe we have different answers based on what this really looks like. Is this a legacy data center migration?The solution here is basically lift-and-shift. Do it quickly. And most importantly, don’t forget to refactor and clean up after you shut down your old data center. Don’t leave old technical debt behind. And, yeah, you’re going to spend a lot, you’re going to look at your bill and go, “Holy hell, what just happened here?”But it’s not going to stay that way. That’s probably—if you do it right—the highest your bill is going to be because lift-and-shift means basically just moving compute from one location to another. And if you’re—as we spoken about probably a million times, Jesse and I, if you just run everything on EC2 like a data center, it’s the most expensive way to do the cloud stuff. So, you’re going to then refactor and bring in ephemerality and tiering of data and all those fun things that we talk about. Now, is this a hybrid cloud world?That’s a little bit different because that means you’re not technically going to get rid of, maybe, physical locations or physical data centers, so where do you start? It’s my personal opinion—and Jesse has his own opinion, too, and guess what it’s our podcast and we’re going to tell it like it is.Jesse: [laugh].Pete: [laugh]. You know, my belief is, starting with storage is honestly a great way to get into cloud. Specifically S3. Maybe even your corporate file systems, using a tool like FSX. It’s honestly why many businesses start their cloud journey, by moving corporate email and file systems into the cloud.I mean, as a former Microsoft Exchange administrator, I am thoroughly happy that you don’t have to manage that, really, anymore and you can push that in the cloud. So, I think storage is honestly a great way to get started within there: Get S3 going, move your file systems in there, move your email in there if you haven’t yet. That’s a really great way to do it. Now, the next one that I would move probably just as aggressively into and, Marsellus, you mentioned it: RDS, right? “Should we move into RDS, get rid of expensive Oracle bills?”Yeah, anytime you can pay ol’ Uncle Larry less money is better in my mindset. Databases are, again, another really great way of getting into AWS. They work so well, RDS is just such a great service, but don’t forget about DMS, the database migration service. This is the most underrated cloud service that Amazon has in there, it will help you migrate your workloads into RDS, into Amazon Aurora. But one thing I do want to call out before you start migrating data in there, talk to your account manager—you have one even if you don’t think you have one—before starting anything, and have them help you identify if there are any current programs that exist to help you migrate that data in.Again, Amazon will incentivize you to do it, they will provide you credits, like map credits or other investment credits, maybe even professional services that can help you migrate this data from an on-premise Oracle into AWS, I think you will be very pleasantly surprised with how aggressive that they can be to help you get into there. The last thing that I would say is another great thing to move in our data projects. So, let’s say you want to do a greenfield one, greenfield type of project into Amazon, data projects are a really great way to move in there. I’m talking things like EMR, Databricks, Qubole, you get to take advantage of Spot Fleets with EMR, but also Databricks and Qubole can manage Spot infrastructure and really take advantage of cloud ephemerality. So if, like I said, you started by pushing all your data into S3, you’re already halfway there on a really solid data engineering project, and now you get to leverage a lot of these other ancillary services like Glue, Glue DataBrew, Athena, Redshift.I mean, once the data is in S3, you have a lot of flexibility. So, that’s my personal opinion on where to get started there. But Jesse, I know you always have a different take on these, so where do you think that they should start?Jesse: Yeah, I think all of the recommendations you just made are really, really great options. I always like to look at this from the perspective of the theory side or the strategy side. What ultimately do these tech execs want to accomplish? Is it getting out of data centers? Is it better cost visibility?Is it optimizing spend? Is it better opportunity to move fast, get new R&D things that you can’t get in a data center? What do these tech execs ultimately want to accomplish? And ask them. Start by asking them.Prioritize the work that they want to accomplish first, and work with teams to change their behaviors to accomplish their goals. One of the biggest themes that we see in the space moving from data centers into cloud providers or even just growing within a given cloud provider is cost visibility. Do teams know why their spend is what it is? Do they know why it went up or down month-over-month? Can they tell you the influences and the drivers that cause their spend to go up or down?Can they specifically call out which teams or product usage increased or decreased, and what ultimately led to your spending changing? Make sure that every team has an architecture diagram and they can explain how they use AWS, how data moves from one service to another, both within their product and to other products. Because there’s definitely going to be sharp edges with data transfer between accounts. We’ve seen this happen to a number of clients before; I’ve gotten bit by this bullet. So, talk to your teams, or talk to your tech executives and have those tech executives talk to their teams to understand what do they ultimately want to accomplish?Can they tie all of what they’re trying to accomplish back to business metrics? Maybe a spike in user logins generated more usage? If you’re a photo storage company, did a world event prompt a lot of users to upload photos prompting higher storage costs? Are you able to pull out these specific insights? That’s ultimately the big question here. Can you boil it down to a business KPI that changed, that ultimately impacted your AWS spend?Pete: I think this is a scenario of where you get started. Why not both? Just maybe do both of these things that we’re saying.Jesse: Yeah.Pete: And honestly, I think you’ll end up in a pretty great place. So, let us know how that works out, Marsellus, and thank you for the question. Again, you also can send us your questions, and we will maybe answer these on a future episode; lastweekinaws.com/QA, drop a question in there, put your name, or not or a fake name, or even a joke. That’s fine, too. I don’t know what the text limit is on the name, Jesse. Can you put a joke there? I don’t know. You know what? Test that out for us. It’s not slash QA for nothing. So, give that a little QA, or a question and answer and [unintelligible 00:17:29]. All right. Well, thanks, Jesse, for helping me out answering more questions.Jesse: Thanks, everybody for the awesome questions.Pete: If you enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review, give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us, what would be the last thing that you would move to AWS? It’s QuickSight, isn’t it?Jesse: [laugh].Pete: Thanks, everyone. Bye-bye.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

The most terrifying part of moving to the cloud isn’t security, migration techniques or learning new infrastructure as code tools, it is managing that pesky cloud bill.  To some CFO’s it might even be downright terrifying.  Join Jonathan and Justin as they talk about all things FinOps with Rob Martin from Apptio (formerly Cloudability) where they discuss cost management techniques, getting help via the Finops Foundation and more. A big thanks to TCP-Talks Sponsor: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning, and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

The most terrifying part of moving to the cloud isn't security, migration techniques or learning new infrastructure as code tools, it is managing that pesky cloud bill.  To some CFO's it might even be downright terrifying.  Join Jonathan and Justin as they talk about all things FinOps with Rob Martin from Apptio (formerly Cloudability) where they discuss cost management techniques, getting help via the Finops Foundation and more. A big thanks to TCP-Talks Sponsor: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning, and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.