Podcasts about savings plan

In this episode, Certified Retirement Counselor Miguel Gonzalez breaks down Investment Savings Plans (ISP)—what they are, how they work, and how to create one that fits your financial goals. Cortburg Retirement Advisors is a boutique financial planning firm committed to helping you grow, protect, and preserve your assets from your first job to retirement. We specialize in wealth management, estate and tax planning, group retirement, employee benefits, insurance, and retirement planning to navigate any economic climate.Miguel Gonzalez, a Retirement Specialist with 20+ years of experience, offers expertise in retirement income planning, investment management, and retirement plan design. With an MBA from Columbia Business School, and professional experience with JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, and more, Miguel is a trusted advisor for his clients.#InvestmentSavingsPlan #FinancialPlanning #BuildWealth #MoneyGoals #PassiveIncome #ISP #RetirementPlanning #FinancialAdvisor #CompoundInterest #SmartInvesting #InvestmentStrategy #DiversifyYourPortfolio #WealthBuilding #GoalSetting #RiskTolerance #LongTermInvesting #MoneyTips #CortburgRetirementAdvisors #FinancialFreedom #MoneyManagementWelcome to Cortburg Speaks Retirement Podcast with Miguel Gonzalez, MBA, AIF®, CPFA®, CRC® CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO MIGUEL'S LATEST PODCAST FOLLOW US ON: YouTube->https://m.youtube.com/c/CORTBURGRETIREMENTADVISORS Facebook-> https://m.facebook.com/CortburgInc Twitter-> https://twitter.com/CortburgInc LinkedIn->https://www.linkedin.com/in/miguelxgonzalez/ Website: www.CortburgRetirement.com Email: Miguel@CortburgRetirement.com

The Market has rallied back into bull market territory once again, we hear from Ed Yardeni and why he thinks there is more upside ahead.  We review the jump in Magnificent Seven Stocks, and hear what Warren Buffet and Cathie Wood are buying right now.  Looking for Income?  We review three top Preferred Stock Closed-end funds for high monthly income.  We also show you how to take care of your kids and grandkids with a 529 Savings Plan.

Last week's turbulent stock market wiped out years of college savings for some parents. Wall Street Journal reporter Oyin Adedoyin joins host Julia Carpenter to discuss what this means for parents, future students and their 529 savings plans. Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Making Cents of Money is proud to partner with the Office of the State Treasurer in its latest episode. Treasurer Michael Frerichs shared that 1 in 4 Illinoisans have unclaimed property waiting for them. Want to learn more? Tune in to learn more: link to podcast. Show Notes: Making Cents of Money: Ep. 11 – Saving for College with a 529 Savings Plan https://blogs.uofi.uillinois.edu/view/7550/2145536872 *I-Cash website: https://icash.illinoistreasurer.gov/

Have you ever wondered if your 401k is enough for a secure retirement? In this episode, Abe Abich addresses the pressing concerns many Americans face as they approach retirement. He discusses the importance of having a comprehensive plan that not only includes growth tools like 401ks and IRAs, but also reliable income streams that can replace your paycheck. Abe also highlights the transition from traditional pensions to modern retirement savings plans and the challenges that come with it. He explores strategies for generating dependable income, hedging against inflation, and planning for healthcare in your retirement years. Ready to begin building your retirement plan? Visit TheRetirementKey.com today and get a free copy of Abe’s book The Retirement Mountain: The 7 Steps To A Long-Lasting Retirement when you schedule an appointment!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Making Cents of Money reaches a major milestone in releasing its 100th episode! Join all the co-hosts (past and present) as they reunite to celebrate this achievement, reflect on their favorite episodes, and discuss how the show has evolved through the years. SHOW NOTES: Episode 86: The Illinois Community Reinvestment Act: https://soundcloud.com/idfpr/episode-86-the-illinois-community-reinvestment-act?si=da23db5a5eb54864ac46902a6ef22457&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing Episode 85: The Federal Community Reinvestment Act: https://soundcloud.com/idfpr/episode-85-the-federal-community-reinvestment-act-cra?si=f53b327f41df4d66a308ab44949fb4f9&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing Episode 78: Is Crypto the Wild West?: https://soundcloud.com/idfpr/episode-78-is-crypto-the-wild-west?si=2f70e3f31d1c44659977d0da1a5e7a30&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing Episode 54: Financial Resolutions!: https://soundcloud.com/idfpr/episode-54-financial-resolutions?si=585e0e5ced134bce868e116e3fc4740b&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing Episode 47: The Community Reinvestment Act: https://soundcloud.com/idfpr/episode-47-the-community-reinvestment-act?si=ca8fe23d82f54daf8d0234c7f5c596f8&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing Episode 27: Student Loan Update: https://soundcloud.com/idfpr/episode-27-student-loan-update?si=6b2eb7d9b261485a83d6713fd3fbf3a0&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing Episode 24: Cryptocurrency: https://soundcloud.com/idfpr/mcom-ep24-cryptocurrencyfinal?si=bf3802ea62564039a4e271184589ef6f&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing Episode 15: Credit: https://soundcloud.com/idfpr/episode-15-credit?si=7b887916e593400191676b78a514bae5&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing Episode 13: Investing Basics: https://soundcloud.com/idfpr/episode-13-investing-basics?si=ba6bbf0d5d1643bd81c19f9502dec3c6&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing Episode 11: Saving for College with a 529 Savings Plan: https://soundcloud.com/idfpr/episode-11-saving-for-college-with-529-savings-plans?si=021504277e61467f9aa42c84f754cb4a&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

By Howard Marchbanks - How do I invest in a Spiritual Savings Plan? Though repentance and being fruitful we can build a spiritual savings plan that is fully invested in a relationship with the Father and Jesus Christ.

Gamify Your Bitcoin Savings Plan. @contrarymo #503 Coinbits - Helping you save in #Bitcoin $ BTC 87,751 Block Height 870,122 Today's guest on the show is @contrarymo David Birnbaum from the #Bitcoin savings app @CoinbitsApp How has Dav'es journey through a fiat career in Silicon Valley landed him in the #Bitcoin rabbit hole and applying his skill set to the Bitcoin ecosystem? Why is Time Preference such a critical part of your Bitcoin rabbit hole journey and how are Coinbits helping you understand and leverage that knowledge? Will you be considering how to change your spending habits and how to stack more Bitcoin than you originally thought possible? A huge thank you to Dave and Coinbits for everything they are doing to help more people understand and invest in Bitcoin! ALL LINKS HERE - FOR DISCOUNTS AND OFFERS -  https://vida.page/princey - https://linktr.ee/princey21m Pleb Service Announcements. @orangepillapp That's it, that's the announcement. https://signup.theorangepillapp.com/opa/princey Thank you: @swan @relai_app @BitBoxSwiss @ZapriteApp @mempool @OnrampBitcoin for your trust and support.  Support the pods via @fountain_app  -https://fountain.fm/show/2oJTnUm5VKs3xmSVdf5n  Shills and Mench's: ONRAMP - https://onrampbitcoin.com/?grsf=bitten - Bitcoin Financial and inheritance Services built on Multi-Institutional Custody.  Save $250 using code BITTEN Listen to the Onramp Podcast here - https://fountain.fm/show/fnaiifAYNlixGUPfBwXH  ZAPRITE - https://zaprite.com/bitten - Invoicing and accounting for Bitcoiners - Save $40  ORANGE PILL APP - https://signup.theorangepillapp.com/opa/princey - find your plebs, meet-ups and conferences. SWAN BITCOIN -  www.swan.com/bitten  RELAI - www.relai.me/Bitten Use Code BITTEN BITBOX - www.bitbox.swiss/bitten Use Code BITTEN DECRYPTING MONEY - https://bit.ly/4hgvSfB  MEMPOOL - https://mempool.space/ + https://mempool.space/sponsor BITCOIN ADVISOR - https://content.thebitcoinadviser.com/bitten KONSENSUS NETWORK - Buy bitcoin books in different languages. Use code BITTEN for 10% discount - https://bitcoinbook.shop?ref=bitten  SEEDOR STEEL PLATE BACK-UP - @seedor_io use the code BITTEN for a 5% discount. www.seedor.io/BITTEN STACKING SAT http://stackinsat.com/signup/?r=Bitten SATSBACK - Shop online and earn back sats! https://satsback.com/register/5AxjyPRZV8PNJGlM  HEATBIT - Home Bitcoin mining - https://www.heatbit.com/?ref=DANIELPRINCE - Use code BITTEN. CRYPTOTAG STEEL PLATE BACK-UP https://cryptotag.io -  USE CODE BITTEN for 10% discount.

The Veteran Saves Team brings you a special Veteran-focused mini-series to celebrate Veteran Saves Week, a four-day event encouraging veterans, transitioning service members, and their families or caregivers to do a financial check-in and gain a clear view of their finances. In this episode, Amelia and Krystel focus on the challenge of managing competing financial priorities. From creating an emergency fund to paying off debt and saving for retirement, this episode provides veterans and their families with step-by-step strategies to take control of their finances and build financial security. During the episode, we'll dive into... Introduction to Veteran Saves Week: Veteran Saves Week provides veterans with the tools and support they need to manage their finances with confidence. Each day highlights a different theme, offering guidance on topics like housing, debt, banking, and transitioning from military to civilian life. Today's Theme – Balancing Competing Financial Priorities: This episode is all about helping veterans balance various financial priorities, including saving for emergencies, paying down debt, and preparing for retirement, all while managing everyday expenses. Our goal is to make financial planning more manageable and less stressful for veterans, transitioning service members, and their families. Veteran Saves Program Overview: Veteran Saves supports veterans in achieving financial goals through resources, articles, videos, and reminders. Veterans can also take the Veteran Saves Pledge at VeteransSaves.org, which provides encouragement and guidance for reaching their savings goals. Save or Skip Segment: Scenario: What would you do if you received a $1,000 bonus? Would you put it toward retirement or use it to pay down debt? Takeaway: There's no right or wrong answer—it all depends on personal goals and financial priorities. Steps for Balancing Financial Priorities: Break Down Your Financial Goals: Think of your goals in three categories—short-term, mid-term, and long-term—to help clarify what's most important right now and in the future. Start with $500: Building a $500 emergency fund is a great starting point for financial security. Strategies include automating savings, setting aside portions of VA benefits, and using military discounts to save. Manage Debt Effectively: Consider the snowball or avalanche method to tackle debt in a way that fits your goals and keeps you motivated. Saving Flexibly: Remember, saving is a cyclical process, and it's okay to use your emergency fund when needed. Automatic transfers can help you build back your savings over time. Maximizing VA Benefits: VA benefits can be essential financial tools, offering resources for healthcare, education, and job training. Utilizing benefits like the GI Bill, vocational programs, and financial counseling services can help veterans advance their careers and financial stability without stretching their budgets. Aligning Financial Plans with Personal Values: Reflecting on your core values—such as community support, financial independence, or enjoying meaningful experiences—can help make your financial journey more rewarding and aligned with what truly matters to you. Links Mentioned in This Episode: Veteran Saves Pledge: VeteranSaves.Org/Pledge  Create a Spending and Savings Plan: https://veteransaves.org/resource-center/insights/6-steps-to-establishing-a-spending-and-savings-plan-for-veterans-and-transitioning-military-personnel/  Savings Plan On-Demand Workshop: https://youtu.be/m5ur5tt8JhA  Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Think Like a Saver! We hope you've gained valuable insights into balancing financial priorities and building financial security. Remember, with a solid plan and clear goals, it's possible to manage multiple financial priorities with confidence.

On this episode of DDOD, Michela shares how you can start saving and budgeting for the holidays! Learn quick tips to plan your holiday budget, who you'll buy for, map out expenses, and shop intentionally.  GET RAKUTEN: https://www.rakuten.com/r/MICHEL156676?eeid=28187 OWN YOUR CAREER:  https://breakyourbudget.com/oyc-book FREE FINANCIAL PLAN CRASH COURSE: https://breakyourbudget.myflodesk.com/rojmq2zecg Personal Finance Dashboard: https://breakyourbudget.com/personal-finance-dashboard FREE Recession Guide: https://breakyourbudget.myflodesk.com/recession FREE Personal Finance Starter Kit:  https://breakyourbudget.myflodesk.com/mlncth2n40 All Other Resources:  www.breakyourbudget.com/links

Happy October!  With a new month comes a new episode of "Life in the Tax Lane." The Video Tax News Team is back with another fast-paced 10-minute video. It's packed with essential updates for Canadian tax professionals.Topics:Canada Business Corporation Act – Public RegistryRegistered Education Savings Plan – Contribution Considerations TFSA Excess Contributions – Decline in ValueShareholder Loan Account – Proper BookkeepingInput Tax Credit – Shareholder Purchasing Asset IRS Collection of Canadian Taxes For sources from this episode, click here. Program recorded: September 18, 2024Life in the Tax Lane is for general information purposes only and deals with dynamic, time-sensitive and complex matters that may not apply to particular facts and circumstances. The information provided should not be relied upon as a substitute for specialized professional advice in connection with any particular matter. For more information visit videotax.com/disclaimer. ©Video Tax News Inc. 2024, All Rights Reserved.

We've got another listener question episode for you today! Tune in as Charles answers a few questions from podcast listeners like you. In this week's edition, a listener named Wendy asks if it's okay to have all her 401k money invested in American Funds or if she should diversify into other investments. Charles also tackles a question about how aggressive one's retirement savings goals should be to retire by 60. He explains how these goals can vary depending on your retirement timeline and shares what future factors you would need to consider. While the right savings amount differs for everyone, Charles walks us through the process of setting those goals. Here's some of what we discuss in this episode: 0:07 – Wendy asks “I rolled over a 401k to an advisor a couple of years ago, and he put all the money into something called American Funds. Is that an okay fund, or should I be invested in other things as well? Kind of feels like one thing seems a little weird. What are your thoughts?” 5:07 – Tony asks “I'm 50 years old. Would like to retire before I'm 60. I'm willing to save aggressively to make that happen. How do you determine how much you'll need to save for something like that each month?”   Contact: Phone Number: 480-513-1830 Website: https://pelletoncapital.com/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PelletonCapitalManagement

Welcome to the Santam Insure Your Future Money Bootcamp with Maya Fisher-French and Mapalo Makhu. This series is designed to guide you through essential financial topics, helping you make informed decisions for a secure future.  In this episode we help listeners give up the debt dependency by having a savings plan. We look at why we save and what goals we should be saving towards. We also delve into the concept of an emergency fund—why it's essential and how to build it. Contrary to popular belief, a credit card is not an emergency fund!  We discuss practical strategies for setting up an emergency fund and the benefits of having a financial cushion for unexpected expenses. We look at the different type of accounts to use for your emergency fund and debate whether you should use your mortgage as part of your financial buffer.  We explain how to save for school fees and those daily school expenses as well as how to help your parents build a home without taking on debt. By anticipating these costs and saving in advance, you can avoid the stress of last-minute financial scrambles.

The 340B drug pricing program is designed to give hospitals the flexibility to use their savings toward the types of patient care and support that their communities need the most. How does that work for hospitals that decide to use their access to 340B to provide the discounts directly to patients who cannot afford their drugs? Paul Orth, 340B program manager at University Health Kansas City Truman Medical Center, sits down with us to discuss how his health system's direct drug savings program is helping both uninsured and underinsured patients.How the program worksOrth says his system's direct savings program is built into the system that prescribes medication electronically from its clinics and its hospitals' electronic medical records system. When the prescriptions that generate from those visits are sent to a system pharmacy, 340B eligibility codes are attached that allows the pharmacy to know that they are eligible to receive the drugs at the 340B-discounted price plus a dispensing fee.Underinsured patients also benefitOrth says University Health describes its direct savings model as an uninsured program because that describes the key patient population that benefits from receiving the 340B price. But that assistance also is available for underinsured patients who otherwise would be expected to pay more in prescription drug copays than the 340B price. Drugmaker restrictions are a barrierOrth says this program is the difference between patients receiving a needed medication and going without one, which prevents hospital readmissions and emergency department visits. But he also notes that drug company restrictions limiting 340B pricing to a single contract pharmacy are negatively affecting the program, ultimately adding another barrier for access to care. Resources:340B Health Urges HRSA To Block J&J Plan To Replace 340B Discounts With RebatesJ&J Implements 340B Rebate Model Despite HRSA Opposition340B Health Equity Report 2023

The debut of The Will Wonder Show! (Best viewed via YouTube) Intro DJ Set by Will Wonder Interview with Minute After 8 Musical Performance by Moe Deezy Leaning moment - My 529 Savings Plan

Host Jonathan Hughes talks with Cory Latham, the Director at Fidelity Investments responsibility for managing the MEFA U.Fund 529 College Investing Plan and the Attainable® Savings Plan for individuals with disabilities.

NEWS: SSS unveils savings plan with 7.2% returns | June 13, 2024Subscribe to The Manila Times Channel - https://tmt.ph/YTSubscribe Visit our website at https://www.manilatimes.net Follow us:Facebook - https://tmt.ph/facebookInstagram - https://tmt.ph/instagramTwitter - https://tmt.ph/twitterDailyMotion - https://tmt.ph/dailymotion Subscribe to our Digital Edition - https://tmt.ph/digital Check out our Podcasts:Spotify - https://tmt.ph/spotifyApple Podcasts - https://tmt.ph/applepodcastsAmazon Music - https://tmt.ph/amazonmusicDeezer: https://tmt.ph/deezerStitcher: https://tmt.ph/stitcherTune In: https://tmt.ph/tuneinSoundcloud: https://tmt.ph/soundcloud#TheManilaTimes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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May 4 2024 - Registered education savings plan by VOCM

Join us for a transformative Sunday Service as Pastor Omar Thibeaux delves into the timeless wisdom of Joseph's journey in the Bible. Drawing from the remarkable narrative of Joseph's foresight and preparation during Egypt's years of abundance and scarcity, we uncover profound insights into the power of saving. In a world where financial instability looms large, it's staggering to realize that the average American lacks even $1000 in savings for emergencies. Imagine the impact of just one missed paycheck on countless families. Yet, through Joseph's example, we learn not only the importance of saving but also the divine principles of financial stewardship. Join us as we explore how the word of God provides invaluable guidance on managing our finances wisely. Don't miss this opportunity to gain clarity and practical strategies for navigating today's financial landscape with faith and prudence. Listen to this Sunday's message and embark on a journey toward financial freedom and abundance.

This week's theme on the Retirement Quick Tips Podcast is: 5 Ways To Spring Clean Your Portfolio & Your Retirement Plan Today, I'm talking about scrutinizing your savings plan. If you review your tax return like I suggested in Thursday's episode, you'll hopefully see any missing opportunities for additional savings. 

AWS Morning Brief for the week of March 25, 2024, with Corey Quinn. Links:Amazon DynamoDB now supports AWS PrivateLinkAmazon WorkMail now supports Audit LoggingAWS announces a 7-day window to return Savings Plans AWS CodeBuild now supports custom images for AWS Lambda computeEC2 Mac Dedicated Hosts now provide visibility into supported macOS versionsInvoke AWS Lambda functions from cross-account Amazon Kinesis Data StreamsTraeger Grills's Customer Experience team drives customer satisfaction significantly using Amazon QuickSight Bulk update Amazon DynamoDB tables with AWS Step Functions Simplify cross-account access control with Amazon DynamoDB using resource-based policies How to securely provide access to centralized AWS CloudTrail Lake logs across accounts in your organizationHow to optimize DNS for dual-stack networksIntroducing mTLS for Application Load Balancer 6 foundational capabilities you need for generative AIIt's time to evolve IT procurementAWS and NVIDIA extend their collaboration to advance generative AI

In this episode of The Financial Safari, Coach Pete discusses and debunks common bad financial advice. He emphasizes the importance of planning for taxes in retirement, not assuming that spending will decrease in retirement, avoiding dipping into retirement accounts for emergencies, understanding that a million dollars may not be enough to retire comfortably, and not relying solely on the 60-40 stock-bond blueprint for asset allocation. If you have questions about taxes in retirement, or if you want a second opinion on your retirement plan, contact Coach Pete and the team at Capital Financial at (800) 661-7383.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Join 6 Figure Saver and Save $100k in your Business in 12 months: https://ginaknox.co/6-figure-saver Episode Synopsis: In this episode, Gina Knox discusses the possibility of saving 10K in 30 days and provides three key steps to achieve this goal. She introduces the concept of the cashflow waterfall tool, which is a cashflow management strategy designed for entrepreneurs with variable income. Gina emphasizes the importance of having a savings process in place and creating a spending plan that includes savings as a priority. She also highlights the need to eliminate money blocking thoughts that hinder earning potential. Gina encourages listeners to join her 6 Figure Saver program for additional support and resources.

Technical Program Manager in the Azure Commerce team, Obinna Nwokolo explains exactly what the new Azure Savings Plan is all about and how you can easily take advantage of it via the Portal experience. He digs into the various options for cutting costs in Azure and when the Savings Plan makes sense for you. Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode486.mp3 YouTube: https://youtu.be/Qwt728PUz0U Resources: SP product page - Azure Savings Plan for Compute | Microsoft Azure SP Recommendations 101 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HV9GT9kX6A&list=PLlrxD0HtieHjd-zn7u09YoGJY18ZrN1Hq&index=2&t=15s&pp=iAQB SP Benefit application 101 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZOyh1rl3kU&list=PLlrxD0HtieHjd-zn7u09YoGJY18ZrN1Hq&index=3&t=2s&pp=iAQB   Other updates: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/generalavailabilityofazuremonitormetricsdataplaneapi/

The savings rate in the US has been going up a bit recently but it's still lower than what it should be. Generally speaking, people aren't saving enough money to have financial peace of mind. But when someone does save money there are a host of decisions to be made on how to keep that money. In this podcast we talk all things savings, how to save money and where to keep money you have saved. Resources: Life insurance policy sales and review McFieInsurance.com  Contact: Team@mcfieinsurance.com | 702-660-7000 2:51 Where to save your money 6:24 The problem with saving plans 8:45 What to look for in a savings plan 16:25 How to set up your finances 27:00 Why premium financing isn't used much right now 28:31 Earning a 66% return in whole life insurance Follow along: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wealthtalkspodcast/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igshid=OGQ5ZDc2ODk2ZA==   Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61554798231074   Watch On: YouTube: https://youtu.be/Mhw62bVjAf8  

Education is still the best gift you can give your children. Guardian Rock Wealth Investment Management (561-327-4646) can give you expert financial planning advice so you can build an ample college savings plan for your kids. Learn more by visiting https://guardianrockwealth.com Guardian Rock Wealth Investment Mgmt Inc. City: Palm Springs Address: 3557 Maria Theresa Ave. Website https://guardianrockwealth.com/ Phone +15613274646 Email jbrowning@advocacyinvesting.com

Ogres are like onions... are people like onions, too? Jay's story today explains how his dad's work with behavior analysis stuck with him as a kid. The lessons he overheard guide many of his beliefs today. This particular lesson can help you better understand yourself, your habits, and your values. In the Main Topic, Jay reviews his definition of frugality its opposite. Can frugality really solve everything? Frugality can be used as a core value or virtue to inform our financial habits and decisions. These new decisions and habits can change our HopeFilled financial futures forever! Do you like Jay's definition of frugality? Did any of the stories resonate with you? Is frugality a virtue you want to have yourself? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Please don't forget to like, share, and subscribe! Doing so helps us grow and share HopeFilled financial wisdom. We release a new full episode every Tuesday! Disclaimer: This podcast serves as educational entertainment only. Any and all opinions relating to real estate, law, taxes, insurance, and/or securities investing that may be contained within this podcast should not be interpreted or implemented as recommendations nor advice. The opinions related to these topics – especially those regulated by state and/or federal entities – should never be taken as replacement for advice from a competent, licensed professional. HopeFilled Financial Coaching is not liable for any individual acting on any understanding of topics directly or indirectly related to real estate, legal practice, taxes, insurance, or investing even if an individual in question changed their understanding after listening to this podcast. All listeners are entirely responsible for seeking advice from licensed professionals before taking any action of their own. Our Website: HopeFilledFinancial.com Music: "Take Me Higher" by Jahzzar Music Copyright License: This music is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.

In today's Retail Daily Minute, Nike has unveiled a cost-cutting plan alongside Q2 earnings, aiming for $2 billion in savings over three years while focusing on innovation. The Fed's preferred inflation measure declined in November, edging closer to the 2% target. Rising consumer sentiment and strong employment numbers suggest a positive economic outlook. Fossil introduces a "stackable" virtual try-on experience, letting U.S. customers try on various accessories online, bridging the gap between in-store and digital shopping. Stay informed each morning with Omni Talk's Retail Daily Minute!

There is a lot you need to know about the Registered Disability Savings Plan. Certified financial planner Ryan Chin gives you an overview. From the December 13, 2023, episode.

Whitney hosts Joel Bernardin (DebtFreeJoel) to discuss building wealth within Black communities. In this episode of Impostrix Podcast, they explore the factors contributing to the wealth gap between racial groups and discuss practical strategies to live debt free and build Black wealth. Joel is an expert in finance with lived and learned knowledge on building wealth. Joel brings to this conversation his passion for financial literacy in Black communities, and instilling in others the value and importance of charitable giving.Major themes in this episode include:The Bouncing Dollar:  In communities, wealth is created as the dollar circulates within the community, benefiting its members. Black neighborhoods tend to see money leaving the community because of a lack of Black-owned businesses and investments within the Black neighborhoods. The Importance of Buying Black: Buying Black is so important! Not just to support Black business owners, but to build Black wealth by circulating dollars within the community. This involves being intentional about where money is spent and reinvesting in community through charitable giving and other means.The Power of Budgeting: Joel emphasizes the need for budgeting and living below your means as a crucial step in building wealth. By prioritizing saving and investing, we can secure our financial future without compromising on our quality of life.The Culture of Spending: Whitney and Joel discuss the cultural aspects that sometimes lead to excessive spending. Black culture is often associated with flashiness, but the key is to find a balance between enjoying life and securing financial stability.Pay Yourself First: A fundamental principle of wealth-building is paying yourself first. This means setting aside a portion of your income for savings and investments (and leaving it there) before allocating money for other expenses.Minimize Overspending By Paying With Cash: Joel challenges the convenience of credit cards and encourages using cash to gain better control over your spending. He emphasizes that when you see cash leave your hand, it's a more conscious financial decision.Mental Health and Emotional Spending: Explore the connection between mental health and money. Discover how financial stress and overspending can lead to a cycle of unhappiness and debt.Financial Independence Allowing Flexibility in Career: Financial freedom can be a valuable tool allowing people to leave negative work environments or prioritize mental or physical well-being or other priorities.This episode offers valuable insights and practical advice for people looking to take control of their finances, experience financial freedom and flexibility in career, and contribute to the economic growth of their communities. By implementing these strategies and adopting a new mindset, listeners can start their journey toward financial liberation and wealth creation.Resources:PowerNomics by Claud Anderson (2005)The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clayson(Affiliate links)Connect with Joel for quick tips on building wealth, debt reduction, finance, budgeting, and more. IG @DebtFreeJoelYouTube @DebtFreeJoelFind Whitney on IG @Support the showSUBSCRIBE to the Validating Voice NewsletterSUPPORT Impostrix Podcast

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John Wynkoop, Cloud Economist & Platypus Herder at The Duckbill Group, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss why he decided to make a career move and become an AWS billing consultant. Corey and John discuss how once you're deeply familiar with one cloud provider, those skills become transferable to other cloud providers as well. John also shares the trends he has seen post-pandemic in the world of cloud, including the increased adoption of a multi-cloud strategy and the need for costs control even for VC-funded start-ups. About JohnWith over 25 years in IT, John's done almost every job in the industry, from running cable and answering helpdesk calls to leading engineering teams and advising the C-suite. Before joining The Duckbill Group, he worked across multiple industries including private sector, higher education, and national defense. Most recently he helped IGNW, an industry leading systems integration partner, get acquired by industry powerhouse CDW. When he's not helping customers spend smarter on their cloud bill, you can find him enjoying time with his family in the beautiful Smoky Mountains near his home in Knoxville, TN.Links Referenced: The Duckbill Group: https://duckbillgroup.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlwynkoop/ 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: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. And the times, they are changing. My guest today is John Wynkoop. John, how are you?John: Hey, Corey, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.Corey: So, big changes are afoot for you. You've taken a new job recently. What are you doing now?John: Well [laugh], so I'm happy to say I have joined The Duckbill Group as a cloud economist. So, came out of the big company world, and have dived back in—or dove back into the startup world.Corey: It's interesting because when we talk to those big companies, they always identify us as oh, you're a startup, which is hilarious on some level because our AWS account hangs out in AWS's startup group, but if you look at the spend being remarkably level from month to month to month to year to year to year, they almost certainly view us as they're a startup, but they suck at it. They completely failed. And so, many of the email stuff that you get from them presupposes that you're venture-backed, that you're trying to conquer the entire world. We don't do that here. We have this old-timey business model that our forebears would have understood of, we make more money than we spend every month and we continue that trend for a long time. So first, thanks for joining us, both on the show and at the company. We like having you around.John: Well, thanks. And yeah, I guess that's—maybe a startup isn't the right word to describe what we do here at The Duckbill Group, but as you said, it seems to fit into the industry classification. But that was one of the things I actually really liked about the—that was appealing about joining the team was, we do spend less than we make and we're not after hyper-growth and we're not trying to consume everything.Corey: So, it's interesting when you put a job description out into the world and you see who applies—and let's be clear, for those who are unaware, job descriptions are inherently aspirational shopping lists. If you look at a job description and you check every box on the thing and you've done all the things they want, the odds are terrific you're going to be bored out of your mind when you wind up showing up to do these… whatever that job is. You should be learning stuff and growing. At least that's always been my philosophy to it. One of the interesting things about you is that you checked an awful lot of boxes, but there is one that I think would cause people to raise an eyebrow, which is, you're relatively new to the fun world of AWS.John: Yeah. So, obviously I, you know, have been around the block a few times when it comes to cloud. I've used AWS, built some things in AWS, but I wouldn't have classified myself as an AWS guru by any stretch of the imagination. I spent the last probably three years working in Google Cloud, helping customers build and deploy solutions there, but I do at least understand the fundamentals of cloud, and more importantly—at least for our customers—cloud costs because at the end of the day, they're not all that different.Corey: I do want to call out that you have a certain humility to you which I find endearing. But you're not allowed to do that here; I will sing your praises for you. Before they deprecated it like they do almost everything else, you were one of the relatively few Google Cloud Certified Fellows, which was sort of like their Heroes program only, you know, they killed it in favor of something else like there's a Champion program or whatnot. You are very deep in the world of both Kubernetes and Google Cloud.John: Yeah. So, there was a few of us that were invited to come out and help Google pilot that program in, I believe it was 2019, and give feedback to help them build the Cloud Fellows Program. And thankfully, I was selected based on some of our early experience with Anthos, and specifically, it was around Certified Fellow in what they call hybrid multi-cloud, so it was experience around Anthos. Or at the time, they hadn't called it Anthos; they were calling it CSP or Cloud Services Platform because that's not an overloaded acronym. So yeah, definitely, was very humbled to be part of that early on.I think the program, as you said, grew to about 70 or so maybe 100 certified individuals before they transitioned—not killed—transitioned to that program into the Cloud Champions program. So, those folks are all still around, myself included. They've just now changed the moniker. But we all get to use the old title still as well, so that's kind of cool.Corey: I have to ask, what would possess you to go from being one of the best in the world at using Google Cloud over here to our corner of the AWS universe? Because the inverse, if I were to somehow get ejected from here—which would be a neat trick, but I'm sure it's theoretically possible—like, “What am I going to do now?” I would almost certainly wind up doing something in the AWS ecosystem, just due to inertia, if nothing else. You clearly didn't see things quite that way. Why make the switch?John: Well, a couple of different reasons. So, being at a Google partner presents a lot of challenges and one of the things that was supremely interesting about coming to Duckbill is that we're independent. So, we're not an AWS partner. We are an independent company that is beholden only to our customers. And there isn't anything like that in the Google ecosystem today.There's, you know, there's Google partners and then there's Google customers and then there's Google. So, that was part of the appeal. And the other thing was, I enjoy learning new things, and honestly, learning, you know, into the depths of AWS cost hell is interesting. There's a lot to learn there and there's a lot of things that we can extract and use to help customers spend less. So, that to me was super interesting.And then also, I want to help build an organization. So, you know, I think what we're doing here at The Duckbill Group is cool and I think that there's an opportunity to grow our services portfolio, and so I'm excited to work with the leadership team to see what else we can bring to market that's going to help our customers, you know, not just with cost optimization, not just with contract negotiation, but you know, through the lifecycle of their AWS… journey, I guess we'll call it.Corey: It's one of those things where I always have believed, on some level, that once you're deep in a particular cloud provider, if there's reason for it, you can rescale relatively quickly to a different provider. There are nuances—deep nuances—that differ from provider to provider, but the underlying concepts generally all work the same way. There's only so many ways you can have data go from point A to point B. There's only so many ways to spin up a bunch of VMs and whatnot. And you're proof-positive that theory was correct.You'd been here less than a week before I started learning nuances about AWS billing from you. I think it was something to do with the way that late fees are assessed when companies don't pay Amazon as quickly as Amazon desires. So, we're all learning new things constantly and no one stuffs this stuff all into their head. But that, if nothing else, definitely cemented that yeah, we've got the right person in the seat.John: Yeah, well, thanks. And certainly, the deeper you go on a specific cloud provider, things become fresh in your memory, you know, other cached so to speak. So, coming up to speed on AWS has been a little bit more documentation reading than it would have been, if I were, say, jumping right into a GCP engagement. But as he said, at the end of the day, there's a lot of similarities. Obviously understanding the nuances of, for example, account organization versus, you know, GCP's Project and Folders. Well, that's a substantial difference and so there's a lot of learning that has to happen.Thankfully, you know, all these companies, maybe with the exception of Oracle, have done a really good job of documenting all of the concepts in their publicly available documentation. And then obviously, having a team of experts here at The Duckbill Group to ask stupid questions of doesn't hurt. But definitely, it's not as hard to come up to speed as one may think, once you've got it understood in one provider.Corey: I took a look recently and was kind of surprised to discover that I've been doing this—as an independent consultant prior to the formation of The Duckbill Group—for seven years now. And it's weird, but I've gone through multiple industry cycles and changes as a part of this. And it feels like I haven't been doing it all that long, but I guess I have. One thing that's definitely changed is that it used to be that companies would basically pick one provider and almost everything would live there. At any reasonable point of scale, everyone is using multiple things.I see Google in effectively every client that we have. It used to be that going to Google Cloud Next was a great place to hang out with AWS customers. But these days, it's just as true to say that a great reason to go to re:Invent is to hang out with Google Cloud customers. Everyone uses everything, and that has become much more clear over the last few years. What have you seen change over the… I guess, since the start of the pandemic, just in terms of broad cycles?John: Yeah. So, I think there's a couple of different trends that we're seeing. Obviously, one is that as you said, especially as large enterprises make moves to the cloud, you see independent teams or divisions within a given organization leveraging… maybe not the right tool for the job because I think that there's a case to be made for swapping out a specific set of tools and having your team learn it, but we do see what I like to refer to as tool fetishism where you get a team that's super, super deep into BigQuery and they're not interested in moving to Redshift, or Snowflake, or a competitor. So, you see, those start to crop up within large organizations where the distributed—the purchasing power, rather—is distributed. So, that's one of the trends is the multi-cloud adoption.And I think the big trend that I like to emphasize around multi-cloud is, just because you can run it anywhere doesn't mean you should run it everywhere. So Kubernetes, as you know, right, as it took off 2019 timeframe, 2020, we started to see a lot of people using that as an excuse to try to run their production application in two, three public cloud providers and on-prem. And unless you're a SaaS customer—or SaaS company with customers in every cloud, there's very little reason to do that. But having that flexibility—that's the other one, is we've seen that AWS has gotten a little difficult to negotiate with, or maybe Google and Microsoft have gotten a little bit more aggressive. So obviously, having that flexibility and being able to move your workloads, that was another big trend.Corey: I'm seeing a change in things that I had taken as givens, back when I started. And that's part of the reason, incidentally, I write the Last Week in AWS newsletter because once you learn a thing, it is very easy not to keep current with that thing, and things that are not possible today will be possible tomorrow. How do you keep abreast of all of those changes? And the answer is to write a deeply sarcastic newsletter that gathers in everything from the world of AWS. But I don't recommend that for most people. One thing that I've seen in more prosaic terms that you have a bit of background in is that HPC on cloud was, five, six years ago, met with, “Oh, that's a good one; now pull the other one, it has bells on it,” into something that, these days, is extremely viable. How'd that happen?John: So, [sigh] I think that's just a—again, back to trends—I think that's just a trend that we're seeing from cloud providers and listening to their customers and continuing to improve the service. So, one of the reasons that HPC was—especially we'll call it capacity-level HPC or large HPC, right—you've always been able to run high throughput; the cloud is a high throughput machine, right? You can run a thousand disconnected VMs no problem, auto-scaling, anybody who runs a massive web front-end can attest to that. But what we saw with HPC—and we used to call those [grid 00:12:45] jobs, right, the small, decoupled computing jobs—but what we've seen is a huge increase in the quality of the underlying fabric—things like RDMA being made available, things like improved network locality, where you now have predictive latency between your nodes or between your VMs—and I think those, combined with the huge investment that companies like AWS have made in their file systems, the huge investment companies like Google have made in their data storage systems have made HPC viable, especially at a small-scale—for cloud-based HPC specifically—viable for organizations.And for a small engineering team, who's looking to run say, computer-aided engineering simulation or who's looking to prototype some new way of testing or doing some kind of simulation, it's a huge, huge improvement in speed because now they don't have to order a dozen or two dozen or five dozen nodes, have them shipped, rack them, stack them, cool them, power them, right? They can just spin up the resource in the cloud, test it out, try their simulation, try out the new—the software that they want, and then spin it all down if it doesn't work. So, that elasticity has also been huge. And again, I think the big—to kind of summarize, I think the big driver there is the improvement in this the service itself, right? We're seeing cloud providers taking that discipline a little bit more seriously.Corey: I still see that there are cases where the raw math doesn't necessarily add up for sustained, long-term use cases. But I also see increasingly that with HPC, that's usually not what the workload looks like. With, you know, the exception of we're going to spend the next 18 months training some new LLM thing, but even then the pricing is ridiculous. What is it their new P6 or whatever it is—P5—the instances that have those giant half-rack Nvidia cards that are $800,000 and so a year each if you were to just rent them straight out, and then people running fleets of these things, it's… wow that's more commas in that training job than I would have expected. But I can see just now the availability for driving some of that, but the economics of that once you can get them in your data center doesn't strike me as being particularly favoring the cloud.John: Yeah, there's a couple of different reasons. So, it's almost like an inverse curve, right? There's a crossover point or a breakeven point at which—you know, and you can make this argument with almost any level of infrastructure—if you can keep it sufficiently full, whether it's AI training, AI inference, or even traditional HPC if you can keep the machine or the group of machines sufficiently full, it's probably cheaper to buy it and put it in your facility. But if you don't have a facility or if you don't need to use it a hundred percent of the time, the dividends aren't always there, right? It's not always worth, you know, buying a $250,000 compute system, you know, like say, an Nvidia, as you—you know, like, a DGX, right, is a good example.The DGX H100, I think those are a couple $100,000. If you can't keep that thing full and you just need it for training jobs or for development and you have a small team of developers that are only going to use it six hours a day, it may make sense to spin that up in the cloud and pay for a fractional use, right? It's no different than what HPC has been doing for probably the past 50 years with national supercomputing centers, which is where my background came from before cloud, right? It's just a different model, right? One is public economies of, you know, insert your credit card and spend as much as you want and the other is grant-funded and supporting academic research, but the economy of scales is kind of the same on both fronts.Corey: I'm also seeing a trend that this is something that is sort of disturbing when you realize what I've been doing and how I've been going about things, that for the last couple of years, people actually started to care about the AWS bill. And I have to say, I felt like I was severely out of sync with a lot of the world the first few years because there's giant savings lurking in your AWS bill, and the company answer in many cases was, “We don't care. We'd rather focus our energies on shipping faster, building something new, expanding, capturing market.” And that is logical. But suddenly those chickens are coming home to roost in a big way. Our phone is ringing off the hook, as I'm sure you've noticed and your time here, and suddenly money means something again. What do you think drove it?John: So, I think there's a couple of driving factors. The first is obviously the broader economic conditions, you know, with the economic growth in the US, especially slowing down post-pandemic, we're seeing organizations looking for opportunities to spend less to be able to deliver—you know, recoup that money and deliver additional value. But beyond that, right—because, okay, but startups are probably still lighting giant piles of VC money on fire, and that's okay, but what's happening, I think, is that the first wave of CIOs that said cloud-first, cloud-only basically got their comeuppance. And, you know, these enterprises saw their explosive cloud bills and they saw that, oh, you know, we moved 5000 servers to AWS or GCP or Azure and we got the bill, and that's not sustainable. And so, we see a lot of cloud repatriation, cloud optimization, right, a lot of second-gen… cloud, I'll call them second-gen cloud-native CIOs coming into these large organizations where their predecessor made some bad financial decisions and either left or got asked to leave, and now they're trying to stop from lighting their giant piles of cash on fire, they're trying to stop spending 3X what they were spending on-prem.Corey: I think an easy mistake for folks to make is to get lost in the raw infrastructure cost. I'm not saying it's not important. Obviously not, but you could save a giant pile of money on your RDS instances by running your own database software on top of EC2, but I don't generally recommend folks do it because you also need engineering time to be focusing on getting those things up, care and feeding, et cetera. And what people lose sight of is the fact that the payroll expense is almost universally more than the cloud bill at every company I've ever talked to.So, there's a consistent series of, “Well, we're just trying to get to be the absolute lowest dollar figure total.” It's the wrong thing to emphasize on, otherwise, “Cool, turn everything off and your bill drops to zero.” Or, “Migrate to another cloud provider. AWS bill becomes zero. Our job is done.” It doesn't actually solve the problem at all. It's about what's right for the business, not about getting the absolute lowest possible score like it's some kind of code golf tournament.John: Right. So, I think that there's a couple of different ways to look at that. One is obviously looking at making your workloads more cloud-native. I know that's a stupid buzzword to some people, but—Corey: The problem I have with the term is that it means so many different things to different people.John: Right. But I think the gist of that is taking advantage of what the cloud is good at. And so, what we saw was that excess capacity on-prem was effectively free once you bought it, right? There were there was no accountability for burning through extra V CPUs or extra RAM. And then you had—Corey: Right. You spin something up in your data center and the question is, “Is the physical capacity there?” And very few companies had a reaping process until they were suddenly seeing capacity issues and suddenly everyone starts asking you a whole bunch of questions about it. But that was a natural forcing function that existed. Now, S3 has infinite storage, or it might as well. They can add capacity faster than you can fill it—I know this; I've tried—and the problem that you have then is that it's always just a couple more cents per gigabyte and it keeps on going forever. There's no, we need to make an investment decision because the SAN is at 80% capacity. Do you need all those 16 copies of the production data that you haven't touched since 2012? No, I probably don't.John: Yeah, there's definitely a forcing function when you're doing your own capacity planning. And the cloud, for the most part, as you've alluded to, for most organizations is infinite capacity. So, when they're looking at AWS or they're looking at any of the public cloud providers, it's a potentially infinite bill. Now, that scares a lot of organizations, and so because they didn't have the forcing function of, hey, we're out of CPUs, or we're out of hard disk space, or we're out of network ports, I think that because the cloud was a buzzword that a lot of shareholders and boards wanted to see in IT status reports and IT strategic plans, I think we grew a little bit further than we should have, from an enterprise perspective. And I think a lot of that's now being clawed back as organizations are maturing and looking to manage cost. Obviously, the huge growth of just the term FinOps from a search perspective over the last three years has cemented that, right? We're seeing a much more cost-conscious consumer—cloud consumer—than we saw three years ago.Corey: I think that the baseline level of understanding has also risen. It used to be that I would go into a client environment, prepared to deploy all kinds of radical stuff that these days look like context-aware architecture and things that would automatically turn down developer environments when developers were done for the day or whatnot. And I would discover that, oh, you haven't bought Reserved Instances in three years. Maybe start there with the easy thing. And now you don't see those, the big misconfigurations or the big oversights the way that you once did.People are getting better at this, which is a good thing. I'm certainly not having a problem with this. It means that we get to focus on things that are more architecturally nuanced, which I love. And I think that it forces us to continue innovating rather than just doing something that basically any random software stack could provide.John: Yeah, I think to your point, the easy wins are being exhausted or have been exhausted already, right? Very rarely do we walk into a customer and see that they haven't bought a, you know, Reserved Instance, or a Savings Plan. That's just not a thing. And the proliferation of software tools to help with those things, of course, in some cases, dubious proposition of, “We'll fix your cloud bill automatically for a small percentage of the savings,” that some of those software tools have, I think those have kind of run their course. And now you've got a smarter populace or smarter consumer and it does come into the more nuanced stuff, right.All right, do you really need to replicate data across AZs? Well, not if your workloads aren't stateful. Well, so some of the old things—and Kubernetes is a great example of this, right—the age old adage of, if I'm going to spin up an EKS cluster, I need to put it in three AZs, okay, why? That's going to cost you money [laugh], the cross-AZ traffic. And I know cross-AZ traffic is a simple one, but we still see that. We still see, “Well, I don't know why I put it across all three AZs.”And so, the service-to-service communication inside that cluster, the control plane traffic inside that cluster, is costing you money. Now, it might be minimal, but as you grow and as you scale your product or the services that you're providing internally, that may grow to a non-trivial sum of money.Corey: I think that there's a tipping point where an unbounded growth problem is always going to emerge as something that needs attention and needs to be focused on. But I should ask you this because you have a skill set that is, as you know, extremely in demand. You also have that rare gift that I wish wasn't as rare as it is where you can be thrown into the deep end knowing next to nothing about a particular technology stack, and in a remarkably short period of time, develop what can only be called subject matter expertise around it. I've seen you do this years past with Kubernetes, which is something I'm still trying to wrap my head around. You have a natural gift for it which meant that, from many respects, the world was your oyster. Why this? Why now?John: So, I think there's a couple of things that are unique at this thing, at this time point, right? So obviously, helping customers has always been something that's fun and exciting for me, right? Going to an organization and solving the same problem I've solved 20 different times, for example, spinning up a Kubernetes cluster, I guess I have a little bit of a little bit of squirrel syndrome, so to speak, and that gets—it gets boring. I'd rather just automate that or build some tooling and disseminate that to the customers and let them do that. So, the thing with cost management is, it's always a different problem.Yeah, we're solving fundamentally the same problem, which is, I'm spending too much, but it's always a different root cause, you know? In one customer, it could be data transfer fees. In another customer, it could be errant development growth where they're not controlling the spend on their development environments. In yet another customer, it could be excessive object storage growth. So, being able to hunt and look for those and play detective is really fun, and I think that's one of the things that drew me to this particular area.The other is just from a timing perspective, this is a problem a lot of organizations have, and I think it's underserved. I think that there are not enough companies—service providers, whatever—focusing on the hard problem of cost optimization. There's too many people who think it's a finance problem and not enough people who think it's an engineering problem. And so, I wanted to do work on a place where we think it's an engineering problem.Corey: It's been a very… long road. And I think that engineering problems and people problems are both fascinating to me, and the AWS bill is both. It's often misunderstood as a finance problem, and finance needs to be consulted absolutely, but they can't drive an optimization project, and they don't know what the context is behind an awful lot of decisions that get made. It really is breaking down bridges. But also, there's a lot of engineering in here, too. It scratches my itch in that direction, anyway.John: Yeah, it's one of the few business problems that I think touches multiple areas. As you said, it's obviously a people problem because we want to make sure that we are supporting and educating our staff. It's a process problem. Are we making costs visible to the organization? Are we making sure that there's proper chargeback and showback methodologies, et cetera? But it's also a technology problem. Did we build this thing to take advantage of the architecture or did we shoehorn it in a way that's going to cost us a small fortune? And I think it touches all three, which I think is unique.Corey: John, I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more about what you're up to in a given day, where's the best place for them to find you?John: Well, thanks, Corey, and thanks for having me. And, of course obviously, our website duckbillgroup.com is a great place to find out what we're working on, what we have coming. I also, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. I know that's [laugh]—I'm not a huge Twitter guy, but I am pretty active on LinkedIn, so you can always drop me a follow on LinkedIn. And I'll try to post interesting and useful content there for our listeners.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:28:37], which in my case, is of course extremely self-aggrandizing. But that's all right. We're here to do self-promotion. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me, John. I appreciate it. Now, get back to work.John: [laugh]. All right, thanks, Corey. Have a good one.Corey: John Wynkoop, cloud economist at The Duckbill Group. 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 while also taking pains to note how you're using multiple podcast platforms these days because that just seems to be the way the world went.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.

How would it feel to have six figures in cash saved up in your business or personal accounts… or both? Investments are really important, but having cash at your fingertips is a totally different level of financial freedom. This is part 1 of a four-part series about saving up six figures in cash, and in this episode I'm sharing the components of a strong savings plan, asking yourself the single most important question about your money, and what causes a breakdown in savings plans. My Money Momentum program kicks off on Tuesday, November 14th! Sign up for the waitlist and get an invitation to my free masterclass - Three Tools You Need to Save $100K - on November 3rd. BONUS: If you attend the masterclass and enroll in Money Momentum by Monday, November 6th, you'll get a personalized, private cash flow audit and plan from me! Are you looking for more information on building wealth with your business? Sign up for my free email newsletter, Millionaire Mondays!    Links mentioned: Episode 79: How to Save $100K From Your Business   In this episode, you'll learn: 0:00 Free Masterclass on 11/3: Three Tools You Need to Save $100K 5:53 What it means to build momentum 8:06 The elements of a strong savings plan 13:33 What is your money for? Creating your financial priorities 17:20 Where savings plans tend to break down Do you have a question or topic you'd like me to cover on the show? Click here to send us your submission!    I'm Sarah Young - an entrepreneur, investor, and millionaire mentor for female founders! I have over a decade of experience in helping entrepreneurs scale their businesses and build wealth at the 6- and 7-figure levels, in addition to building my own successful agency, and I started the Profit + Prosper podcast to help you do the same.  Profit + Prosper will help you make more money, save more money, and set yourself up to retire early while upgrading your life - all in a way that's fun and empowering. In each episode, I'll share tactical, strategic, and mindset tips to grow your business, increase your profit, and truly prosper in your business and in life. I hope you'll subscribe so we can Profit + Prosper together!   Connect with Sarah: Instagram Facebook YouTube Website

In this episode of the Build Young Grow Wealthy podcast, join Willita Cherie as she shares six essential strategies to help you create a solid savings plan and achieve financial freedom.

Do you want to have cash for the holidays? Have you considered how make the most of Christmas without ruining your budget? On this episode of Eight Frugal Minutes, we share an easy Christmas savings plan that even Santa loves. Make your holidays the merriest by starting to save cash before the winter holiday season. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/eight-frugal-minutes/message

*The giveaway has now closed. A robust savings account puts you in a position to weather storms and invest extra money wisely. In episode five of Wealth Series 2.0, Ben Kinney, Bob Stewart, and Chad Hyams discuss money-saving habits and budget models that put your savings on automation. In this episode, we cover the following: Four elements of saving [1:36]   Stats about saving [3:35] Highlighter exercise [5:51] Reducing things you don't really need [8:02] Creating an emergency fund [12:21] Calculating four months' reserve savings [13:27] Saving and offsetting inflation [15:16] Building an emergency fund for businesses [17:00] Automate savings [19:11] 50/25/25 budget model [23:26] 80/10/10 budget model [27:27] Ten ways to save like a pro [30:05] Saving and investing questions [35:09] Resources discussed in this episode: Enroll in Wealth Series 2.0: https://WinMakeGive.com/wealth/ to receive all the workbooks and have the resources emailed to you directly Download the workbook and resources for Episode 5 at https://winmakegive.com/wealth-part-5/ Wealth Series 2.0 - Episode 2 - Reality Check: https://apple.co/45nzYvX Win Make Give Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/WinMakeGive Connect with the hosts: Ben Kinney: https://www.BenKinney.com/ Bob Stewart: https://www.linkedin.com/in/activebob Chad Hyams: https://ChadHyams.com/ Book one of our co-hosts for your next event: https://WinMakeGive.com/speakers/ More ways to connect:  Sign up for our weekly newsletter: https://WinMakeGive.com/sign-up Explore the Win Make Give Podcast Network: https://WinMakeGive.com/ Listen to Win Make Give Season 3 on YouTube: bit.ly/3pPEdAx ------ Part of the Win Make Give Podcast Network

The right bank account structure will solve a lot of financial challenges for your family, all else equal. And this includes maintaining your savings rate while being able to go on vacation. Turn into this week's episode to learn my favorite strategy to keep vacations and holiday travel from slowing down your financial progress.

We're joined by Co-Founder and COO, Nazar Khan for an in-depth conversation about how TeraWulf is leading the way to a sustainable Bitcoin mining future through nuclear and hydro. Nazar shares his exciting announcement that TeraWulf has agreed to purchase a 7.9EH/s Expansion plant and 18,5000 S19jXP Bitcoin Miners, and we discuss what that means for the growth at TeraWulf. We also speak about Joe Kernen educating people about the Bitcoin Standard on CNBC and savings tips from Wicked and Alex. Connect with TeraWulf: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TeraWulfInc Website: https://www.terawulf.com/ Timestamps: 00:00:00 "Café Bitcoin" Intro  00:01:01 Stackchain 1-Year Anniversary and Finding a Community 00:10:28 Talking to People about Bitcoin 00:29:04 Joe Kernen and the Bitcoin Standard on CNBC  00:44:00 Savings Plan with Alex and Wicked  01:16:25 Nuclear Bitcoin Mining with Nazar Khan from TeraWulf  02:00:00 “Café Bitcoin” Outro Twitter Nests:https://twitter.com/TeraWulfInc/status/1681288515160535040?s=20 https://twitter.com/AnthonyDessauer/status/1681294442383433728?s=20 https://twitter.com/pacificbitcoin/status/1678482246179647495?s=20 https://twitter.com/Swan/status/1677406484592988161?s=20 https://twitter.com/tip_nz/status/1673333758043234306?s=20 Swan Private Team Members: Alex Stanczyk Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexstanczyk Café Bitcoin Crew: Ant: https://twitter.com/2140data Tomer: https://twitter.com/TomerStrolight Wicked: https://twitter.com/w_s_bitcoin Peter: https://twitter.com/PeterAnsel9 Produced by: https://twitter.com/Producer_Jacob Free Bitcoin-only live data (no ads) http://TimechainStats.com“From Timechain to Cantillionares Game, you can find Tip_NZ creations at Geyser Fund:” https://geyser.fund/project/tip Swan Bitcoin is the best way to accumulate Bitcoin with automatic recurring buys and instant buys from $10 to $10 million. Get started in just 5 minutes. Your first $10 purchase is on us: https://swanbitcoin.com/yt  Download the all new Swan app!  iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/swan-bitcoin/id1576287352  Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.swanbitcoin.android&pli=1  Join us for Pacific Bitcoin Festival 2023! Purchase your tickets now before prices go up: https://PacificBitcoin2023.com  Are you a high net worth individual or do you represent corporation that might be interested in learning more about Bitcoin? Swan Private guides corporations and high net worth individuals toward building generational wealth with Bitcoin. Find out more at https://swanbitcoin.com/private  Check out the best place for Bitcoin education, Swan Bitcoin's “Bitcoin Canon”. Compiling all of the greatst articles, news sources, videos and more from your favorite bitcoiners! https://www.swanbitcoin.com/canon/  Get paid to recruit new Bitcoiners: https://swanbitcoin.com/enlist Hello and welcome to The Café Bitcoin Podcast brought to you by Swan Bitcoin, the best way to buy and learn about Bitcoin. We're excited to announce we are bringing the The Café Bitcoin conversation from Twitter Spaces to you on this show, The Café Bitcoin Podcast, Monday - Friday every week. Join us as we speak to guest like Max Keiser, Lyn Alden, Tomer Strolight, Cory Klippsten and many others from the bitcoin space. Also, be sure to hit that subscribe button to make sure you get the notifications when we launch an episode. Join us Monday - Friday 7pst/10est every Morning and become apart of the conversation! Thank you again and we look forward to giving you the best bitcoin content daily here on The Café Bitcoin Podcast. Swan Bitcoin is the best way to accumulate Bitcoin with automatic recurring buys and instant buys from $10 to $10 million. Get started in just 5 minutes. Your first $10 purchase is on us: ⁠⁠https://swanbitcoin.com/yt⁠⁠ Connect with Swan on social media: Twitter: ⁠⁠https://twitter.com/SwanBitcoin⁠

Book a free 30 minute financial coaching session with us!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠ In this episode, we answer a question from a client about how to know the amount of money she needs for retirement. It's a great question to ask, the earlier the better. We cover: Defining your retirement vision: You can't know how much you need until you know what you want! Retirement planning requires casting vision for your ideal post-work life. The need to consider personal preferences and goals for the next season of life. The importance of open communication with partners/spouses about shared retirement vision. How to create a retirement budget-- it's going to be different than your current budget! (think paid off mortgage, hobbies, travel, grandkids, etc!) How to use that budget to calculate your annual retirement expenses How to plan how much income you'll need in addition to any expected income How to use the 4% rule as a conservative guideline for sustainable withdrawals from your investments. How to get your magic retirement number that is a clear retirement savings goal. Here is another episode to listen to about retirement calculations. ⁠Book a free 30 minute financial coaching session with us!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠ Visit Our Website  "I love Shana & Vanessa and this podcast is amazing!"

Do you have a homestead income and savings plan? In this episode, I share a short audio section from the Workshop for Beginner Homesteaders & Dreamers. I go over some ways for you to find money to start your homestead savings account and a little about building the 3 homestead income streams.  Take advantage of the June promo!  Throughout the month of June, I'm offering my Workshop for Beginner Homesteaders & Dreamers at a special discounted price! It's a 1 hour and 40-minute video where I personally guide you through most of the Homesteading for Beginners workbook (which is included in the workshop price, by the way). To grab this exclusive offer, head over to healthyhomesteading.com/workshop and use the code "PODCAST" at checkout. With this code, you'll get over 20% off the already low regular price. But remember, this discount is only available during the month of June, so make sure to take action soon. Workshop: https://www.healthyhomesteading.com/workshop Website: https://www.healthyhomesteading.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@healthy_homesteading Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/farmer_mona Join the Homestead Income Plan Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/homesteadincomeplan Listen to the podcast on your favorite player: https://plinkhq.com/i/1636732326

Saving for college and other educational needs is one of the most pressing financial planning concerns. Investors are looking to their financial advisors for guidance. In this episode, we're going to look at the role 529 plans play and why they're so important in improving client outcomes and in supporting practice management. My guest, Leslie Geller, will be talking about the expanded set of educational expenses 529 assets can fund, details of Capital Group's CollegeAmerica savings plan – one of the largest in the country with approximately $80 billion in assets under management, as well as how Secure 2.0 has lowered barriers to opening and funding a 529. - Here is a link for more information about Capital Group and its 529 offerings: CollegeAmerica 529 Savings Plan - https://www.capitalgroup.com/individual/what-we-offer/college-america-529.html  529 Advisor Research Report – Benefits and Barriers: How advisors and clients view education savings in the current market - https://www.capitalgroup.com/content/dam/cgc/shared-content/documents/reports/03_FF_PR-529_Advisor_Study.pdf  My previous podcast with Leslie:  The Questions to Ask Your Female Clients - https://www.advisorperspectives.com/podcasts/2019/12/16/the-questions-to-ask-your-female-clients  A message from Advisor Perspectives and Vetta Fi: To learn more on this and other topics, check out our full schedule of upcoming CE-approved virtual events.”  

In this week's episode, Eileen explains why the 529 Education Savings plan might be a great option for your kids. It's one of the many ways to help your kids save for their future education costs. Tune in to get the scoop on the pros and cons of the 529 today.    All of Eileen's Links:  www.momswhomoney.com/link-in-bio   Money School for Moms: https://momswhomoney.com/msfm   Schedule a 1:1 Coaching Consultation:  https://momswhomoney.com/1-1-consulting      Email: Eileen@eileenjoy.com    Get to know me: https://www.momswhomoney.com  https://www.instagram.com/eileenjoymoneycoach/ https://www.facebook.com/EileenJoyMoneyCoach/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/momswhomoney/   P.S. Money School for Moms - Master your money with confidence in 12 weeks. There's only a few spots left. Set up your 15 minute consultation now to see if the program is right for you, get all of your questions answered and enroll.  https://momswhomoney.com/msfm    P.S.S. Private 1:1 Money Coaching with me - Create wealth and stop living paycheck to paycheck. I have 1 spot opening next month. If you're ready and serious, it's time to set up a free consultation call and get started today! https://momswhomoney.com/1-1-consulting 

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast! Justin, Ryan, Jonathan, Matthew are your hosts this week. Join us as we discuss all things cloud, AI, the upcoming Google AI Conference, AWS Console, and Duet AI for Google cloud.  Titles we almost went with this week:

George Kamel & Dr. John Delony answer your questions and discuss: "Should we still pay off our house if we're planning to move?" from the blog: How to Pay Off Your Mortgage Early, "How do I get my wife on board with the Baby Steps?" How sports betting is the new oxycontin, "Should I start an e-commerce business to get out of debt?" Support Our Sponsor: PODS Moving & Storage Neighborly Have a question for the show? Call 888-825-5225 Weekdays from 2-5pm ET Join a Personality-led FPU class. Click here! Enter The Ramsey Cash Giveaway for a chance at $3,000! https://bit.ly/TRSgvwy Shop our bestsellers during the $10 Sale! https://bit.ly/TRS10Sale Want a plan for your money? Find out where to start: https://bit.ly/3cEP4n6 Listen to all The Ramsey Network podcasts: https://bit.ly/3GxiXm6 Interested in advertising on The Ramsey Show? https://ter.li/s64ye3 Learn more about your ad choices. https://www.megaphone.fm/adchoices Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy

The Drink: 100 Year Old Cigar The Topic: Saving Strategies Continuing the theme of New Year's resolutions you can keep, Caleb and Jason dive into developing and updating your personal savings plan. If you don't have a plan, you're not going to succeed. Listen in as the boys talk strategies for saving more and with more purpose.

About RickRick is the Product Leader of the AWS Optimization team. He previously led the cloud optimization product organization at Turbonomic, and previously was the Microsoft Azure Resource Optimization program owner.Links Referenced: AWS: https://console.aws.amazon.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-ochs-06469833/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/rickyo1138 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 Chronosphere. Tired of observability costs going up every year without getting additional value? Or being locked in to a vendor due to proprietary data collection, querying and visualization? Modern day, containerized environments require a new kind of observability technology that accounts for the massive increase in scale and attendant cost of data. With Chronosphere, choose where and how your data is routed and stored, query it easily, and get better context and control. 100% open source compatibility means that no matter what your setup is, they can help. Learn how Chronosphere provides complete and real-time insight into ECS, EKS, and your microservices, whereever they may be at snark.cloud/chronosphere That's snark.cloud/chronosphere Corey: This episode is bought to you in part by our friends at Veeam. Do you care about backups? Of course you don't. Nobody cares about backups. Stop lying to yourselves! You care about restores, usually right after you didn't care enough about backups.  If you're tired of the vulnerabilities, costs and slow recoveries when using snapshots to restore your data, assuming you even have them at all living in AWS-land, there is an alternative for you. Check out Veeam, thats V-E-E-A-M for secure, zero-fuss AWS backup that won't leave you high and dry when it's time to restore. Stop taking chances with your data. Talk to Veeam. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. For those of you who've been listening to this show for a while, the theme has probably emerged, and that is that one of the key values of this show is to give the guest a chance to tell their story. It doesn't beat the guests up about how they approach things, it doesn't call them out for being completely wrong on things because honestly, I'm pretty good at choosing guests, and I don't bring people on that are, you know, walking trash fires. And that is certainly not a concern for this episode.But this might devolve into a screaming loud argument, despite my best effort. Today, I'm joined by Rick Ochs, Principal Product Manager at AWS. Rick, thank you for coming back on the show. The last time we spoke, you were not here you were at, I believe it was Turbonomic.Rick: Yeah, that's right. Thanks for having me on the show, Corey. I'm really excited to talk to you about optimization and my current role and what we're doing.Corey: Well, let's start at the beginning. Principal product manager. It sounds like one of those corporate titles that can mean a different thing in every company or every team that you're talking to. What is your area of responsibility? Where do you start and where do you stop?Rick: Awesome. So, I am the product manager lead for all of AWS Optimizations Team. So, I lead the product team. That includes several other product managers that focus in on Compute Optimizer, Cost Explorer, right-sizing recommendations, as well as Reservation and Savings Plan purchase recommendations.Corey: In other words, you are the person who effectively oversees all of the AWS cost optimization tooling and approaches to same?Rick: Yeah.Corey: Give or take. I mean, you could argue that oh, every team winds up focusing on helping customers save money. I could fight that argument just as effectively. But you effectively start and stop with respect to helping customers save money or understand where the money is going on their AWS bill.Rick: I think that's a fair statement. And I also agree with your comment that I think a lot of service teams do think through those use cases and provide capabilities, you know? There's, like, S3 storage lines. You know, there's all sorts of other products that do offer optimization capabilities as well, but as far as, like, the unified purpose of my team, it is, unilaterally focused on how do we help customers safely reduce their spend and not hurt their business at the same time.Corey: Safely being the key word. For those who are unaware of my day job, I am a partial owner of The Duckbill Group, a consultancy where we fix exactly one problem: the horrifying AWS bill. This is all that I've been doing for the last six years, so I have some opinions on AWS bill reduction as well. So, this is going to be a fun episode for the two of us to wind up, mmm, more or less smacking each other around, but politely because we are both professionals. So, let's start with a very high level. How does AWS think about AWS bills from a customer perspective? You talk about optimizing it, but what does that mean to you?Rick: Yeah. So, I mean, there's a lot of ways to think about it, especially depending on who I'm talking to, you know, where they sit in our organization. I would say I think about optimization in four major themes. The first is how do you scale correctly, whether that's right-sizing or architecting things to scale in and out? The second thing I would say is, how do you do pricing and discounting, whether that's Reservation management, Savings Plan Management, coverage, how do you handle the expenditures of prepayments and things like that?Then I would say suspension. What that means is turn the lights off when you leave the room. We have a lot of customers that do this and I think there's a lot of opportunity for more. Turning EC2 instances off when they're not needed if they're non-production workloads or other, sort of, stateful services that charge by the hour, I think there's a lot of opportunity there.And then the last of the four methods is clean up. And I think it's maybe one of the lowest-hanging fruit, but essentially, are you done using this thing? Delete it. And there's a whole opportunity of cleaning up, you know, IP addresses unattached EBS volumes, sort of, these resources that hang around in AWS accounts that sort of getting lost and forgotten as well. So, those are the four kind of major thematic strategies for how to optimize a cloud environment that we think about and spend a lot of time working on.Corey: I feel like there's—or at least the way that I approach these things—that there are a number of different levels you can look at AWS billing constructs on. The way that I tend to structure most of my engagements when I'm working with clients is we come in and, step one: cool. Why do you care about the AWS bill? It's a weird question to ask because most of the engineering folks look at me like I've just grown a second head. Like, “So, why do you care about your AWS bill?” Like, “What? Why do you? You run a company doing this?”It's no, no, no, it's not that I'm being rhetorical and I don't—I'm trying to be clever somehow and pretend that I don't understand all the nuances around this, but why does your business care about lowering the AWS bill? Because very often, the answer is they kind of don't. What they care about from a business perspective is being able to accurately attribute costs for the service or good that they provide, being able to predict what that spend is going to be, and also yes, a sense of being good stewards of the money that has been entrusted to them by via investors, public markets, or the budget allocation process of their companies and make sure that they're not doing foolish things with it. And that makes an awful lot of sense. It is rare at the corporate level that the stated number one concern is make the bills lower.Because at that point, well, easy enough. Let's just turn off everything you're running in production. You'll save a lot of money in your AWS bill. You won't be in business anymore, but you'll be saving a lot of money on the AWS bill. The answer is always deceptively nuanced and complicated.At least, that's how I see it. Let's also be clear that I talk with a relatively narrow subset of the AWS customer totality. The things that I do are very much intentionally things that do not scale. Definitionally, everything that you do has to scale. How do you wind up approaching this in ways that will work for customers spending billions versus independent learners who are paying for this out of their own personal pocket?Rick: It's not easy [laugh], let me just preface that. The team we have is incredible and we spent so much time thinking about scale and the different personas that engage with our products and how they're—what their experience is when they interact with a bill or AWS platform at large. There's also a couple of different personas here, right? We have a persona that focuses in on that cloud cost, the cloud bill, the finance, whether that's—if an organization is created a FinOps organization, if they have a Cloud Center of Excellence, versus an engineering team that maybe has started to go towards decentralized IT and has some accountability for the spend that they attribute to their AWS bill. And so, these different personas interact with us in really different ways, where Cost Explorer downloading the CUR and taking a look at the bill.And one thing that I always kind of imagine is somebody putting a headlamp on and going into the caves in the depths of their AWS bill and kind of like spelunking through their bill sometimes, right? And so, you have these FinOps folks and billing people that are deeply interested in making sure that the spend they do have meets their business goals, meaning this is providing high value to our company, it's providing high value to our customers, and we're spending on the right things, we're spending the right amount on the right things. Versus the engineering organization that's like, “Hey, how do we configure these resources? What types of instances should we be focused on using? What services should we be building on top of that maybe are more flexible for our business needs?”And so, there's really, like, two major personas that I spend a lot of time—our organization spends a lot of time wrapping our heads around. Because they're really different, very different approaches to how we think about cost. Because you're right, if you just wanted to lower your AWS bill, it's really easy. Just size everything to a t2.nano and you're done and move on [laugh], right? But you're [crosstalk 00:08:53]—Corey: Aw, t3 or t4.nano, depending upon whether regional availability is going to save you less. I'm still better at this. Let's not kid ourselves I kid. Mostly.Rick: For sure. So t4.nano, absolutely.Corey: T4g. Remember, now the way forward is everything has an explicit letter designator to define which processor company made the CPU that underpins the instance itself because that's a level of abstraction we certainly wouldn't want the cloud provider to take away from us any.Rick: Absolutely. And actually, the performance differences of those different processor models can be pretty incredible [laugh]. So, there's huge decisions behind all of that as well.Corey: Oh, yeah. There's so many factors that factor in all these things. It's gotten to a point of you see this usually with lawyers and very senior engineers, but the answer to almost everything is, “It depends.” There are always going to be edge cases. Easy example of, if you check a box and enable an S3 Gateway endpoint inside of a private subnet, suddenly, you're not passing traffic through a 4.5 cent per gigabyte managed NAT Gateway; it's being sent over that endpoint for no additional cost whatsoever.Check the box, save a bunch of money. But there are scenarios where you don't want to do it, so always double-checking and talking to customers about this is critically important. Just because, the first time you make a recommendation that does not work for their constraints, you lose trust. And make a few of those and it looks like you're more or less just making naive recommendations that don't add any value, and they learn to ignore you. So, down the road, when you make a really high-value, great recommendation for them, they stop paying attention.Rick: Absolutely. And we have that really high bar for recommendation accuracy, especially with right sizing, that's such a key one. Although I guess Savings Plan purchase recommendations can be critical as well. If a customer over commits on the amount of Savings Plan purchase they need to make, right, that's a really big problem for them.So, recommendation accuracy must be above reproach. Essentially, if a customer takes a recommendation and it breaks an application, they're probably never going to take another right-sizing recommendation again [laugh]. And so, this bar of trust must be exceptionally high. That's also why out of the box, the compute optimizer recommendations can be a little bit mild, they're a little time because the first order of business is do no harm; focus on the performance requirements of the application first because we have to make sure that the reason you build these workloads in AWS is served.Now ideally, we do that without overspending and without overprovisioning the capacity of these workloads, right? And so, for example, like if we make these right-sizing recommendations from Compute Optimizer, we're taking a look at the utilization of CPU, memory, disk, network, throughput, iops, and we're vending these recommendations to customers. And when you take that recommendation, you must still have great application performance for your business to be served, right? It's such a crucial part of how we optimize and run long-term. Because optimization is not a one-time Band-Aid; it's an ongoing behavior, so it's really critical that for that accuracy to be exceptionally high so we can build business process on top of it as well.Corey: Let me ask you this. How do you contextualize what the right approach to optimization is? What is your entire—there are certain tools that you have… by ‘you,' I mean, of course, as an organization—have repeatedly gone back to and different approaches that don't seem to deviate all that much from year to year, and customer to customer. How do you think about the general things that apply universally?Rick: So, we know that EC2 is a very popular service for us. We know that sizing EC2 is difficult. We think about that optimization pillar of scaling. It's an obvious area for us to help customers. We run into this sort of industry-wide experience where whenever somebody picks the size of a resource, they're going to pick one generally larger than they need.It's almost like asking a new employee at your company, “Hey, pick your laptop. We have a 16 gig model or a 32 gig model. Which one do you want?” That person [laugh] making the decision on capacity, hardware capacity, they're always going to pick the 32 gig model laptop, right? And so, we have this sort of human nature in IT of, we don't want to get called at two in the morning for performance issues, we don't want our apps to fall over, we want them to run really well, so we're going to size things very conservatively and we're going to oversize things.So, we can help customers by providing those recommendations to say, you can size things up in a different way using math and analytics based on the utilization patterns, and we can provide and pick different instance types. There's hundreds and hundreds of instance types in all of these regions across the globe. How do you know which is the right one for every single resource you have? It's a very, very hard problem to solve and it's not something that is lucrative to solve one by one if you have 100 EC2 instances. Trying to pick the correct size for each and every one can take hours and hours of IT engineering resources to look at utilization graphs, look at all of these types available, look at what is the performance difference between processor models and providers of those processors, is there application compatibility constraints that I have to consider? The complexity is astronomical.And then not only that, as soon as you make that sizing decision, one week later, it's out of date and you need a different size. So, [laugh] you didn't really solve the problem. So, we have to programmatically use data science and math to say, “Based on these utilization values, these are the sizes that would make sense for your business, that would have the lowest cost and the highest performance together at the same time.” And it's super important that we provide this capability from a technology standpoint because it would cost so much money to try to solve that problem that the savings you would achieve might not be meaningful. Then at the same time… you know, that's really from an engineering perspective, but when we talk to the FinOps and the finance folks, the conversations are more about Reservations and Savings Plans.How do we correctly apply Savings Plans and Reservations across a high percentage of our portfolio to reduce the costs on those workloads, but not so much that dynamic capacity levels in our organization mean we all of a sudden have a bunch of unused Reservations or Savings Plans? And so, a lot of organizations that engage with us and we have conversations with, we start with the Reservation and Savings Plan conversation because it's much easier to click a few buttons and buy a Savings Plan than to go institute an entire right-sizing campaign across multiple engineering teams. That can be very difficult, a much higher bar. So, some companies are ready to dive into the engineering task of sizing; some are not there yet. And they're a little maybe a little earlier in their FinOps journey, or the building optimization technology stacks, or achieving higher value out of their cloud environments, so starting with kind of the low hanging fruit, it can vary depending on the company, size of company, technical aptitudes, skill sets, all sorts of things like that.And so, those finance-focused teams are definitely spending more time looking at and studying what are the best practices for purchasing Savings Plans, covering my environment, getting the most out of my dollar that way. Then they don't have to engage the engineering teams; they can kind of take a nice chunk off the top of their bill and sort of have something to show for that amount of effort. So, there's a lot of different approaches to start in optimization.Corey: My philosophy runs somewhat counter to this because everything you're saying does work globally, it's safe, it's non-threatening, and then also really, on some level, feels like it is an approach that can be driven forward by finance or business. Whereas my worldview is that cost and architecture in cloud are one and the same. And there are architectural consequences of cost decisions and vice versa that can be adjusted and addressed. Like, one of my favorite party tricks—although I admit, it's a weird party—is I can look at the exploded PDF view of a customer's AWS bill and describe their architecture to them. And people have questioned that a few times, and now I have a testimonial on my client website that mentions, “It was weird how he was able to do this.”Yeah, it's real, I can do it. And it's not a skill, I would recommend cultivating for most people. But it does also mean that I think I'm onto something here, where there's always context that needs to be applied. It feels like there's an entire ecosystem of product companies out there trying to build what amount to a better Cost Explorer that also is not free the way that Cost Explorer is. So, the challenge I see there's they all tend to look more or less the same; there is very little differentiation in that space. And in the fullness of time, Cost Explorer does—ideally—get better. How do you think about it?Rick: Absolutely. If you're looking at ways to understand your bill, there's obviously Cost Explorer, the CUR, that's a very common approach is to take the CUR and put a BI front-end on top of it. That's a common experience. A lot of companies that have chops in that space will do that themselves instead of purchasing a third-party product that does do bill breakdown and dissemination. There's also the cross-charge show-back organizational breakdown and boundaries because you have these super large organizations that have fiefdoms.You know, if HR IT and sales IT, and [laugh] you know, product IT, you have all these different IT departments that are fiefdoms within your AWS bill and construct, whether they have different ABS accounts or say different AWS organizations sometimes, right, it can get extremely complicated. And some organizations require the ability to break down their bill based on those organizational boundaries. Maybe tagging works, maybe it doesn't. Maybe they do that by using a third-party product that lets them set custom scopes on their resources based on organizational boundaries. That's a common approach as well.We do also have our first-party solutions, they can do that, like the CUDOS dashboard as well. That's something that's really popular and highly used across our customer base. It allows you to have kind of a dashboard and customizable view of your AWS costs and, kind of, split it up based on tag organizational value, account name, and things like that as well. So, you mentioned that you feel like the architectural and cost problem is the same problem. I really don't disagree with that at all.I think what it comes down to is some organizations are prepared to tackle the architectural elements of cost and some are not. And it really comes down to how does the customer view their bill? Is it somebody in the finance organization looking at the bill? Is it somebody in the engineering organization looking at the bill? Ideally, it would be both.Ideally, you would have some of those skill sets that overlap, or you would have an organization that does focus in on FinOps or cloud operations as it relates to cost. But then at the same time, there are organizations that are like, “Hey, we need to go to cloud. Our CIO told us go to cloud. We don't want to pay the lease renewal on this building.” There's a lot of reasons why customers move to cloud, a lot of great reasons, right? Three major reasons you move to cloud: agility, [crosstalk 00:20:11]—Corey: And several terrible ones.Rick: Yeah, [laugh] and some not-so-great ones, too. So, there's so many different dynamics that get exposed when customers engage with us that they might or might not be ready to engage on the architectural element of how to build hyperscale systems. So, many of these customers are bringing legacy workloads and applications to the cloud, and something like a re-architecture to use stateless resources or something like Spot, that's just not possible for them. So, how can they take 20% off the top of their bill? Savings Plans or Reservations are kind of that easy, low-hanging fruit answer to just say, “We know these are fairly static environments that don't change a whole lot, that are going to exist for some amount of time.”They're legacy, you know, we can't turn them off. It doesn't make sense to rewrite these applications because they just don't change, they don't have high business value, or something like that. And so, the architecture part of that conversation doesn't always come into play. Should it? Yes.The long-term maturity and approach for cloud optimization does absolutely account for architecture, thinking strategically about how you do scaling, what services you're using, are you going down the Kubernetes path, which I know you're going to laugh about, but you know, how do you take these applications and componentize them? What services are you using to do that? How do you get that long-term scale and manageability out of those environments? Like you said at the beginning, the complexity is staggering and there's no one unified answer. That's why there's so many different entrance paths into, “How do I optimize my AWS bill?”There's no one answer, and every customer I talk to has a different comfort level and appetite. And some of them have tried suspension, some of them have gone heavy down Savings Plans, some of them want to dabble in right-sizing. So, every customer is different and we want to provide those capabilities for all of those different customers that have different appetites or comfort levels with each of these approaches.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or if you are looking to go beyond just caching and unlocking your data's full potential, these folks have you covered. Redis Enterprise is the go-to managed Redis service that allows you to reimagine how your geo-distributed applications process, deliver, and store data. To learn more from the experts in Redis how to be real-time, right now, from anywhere, visit redis.com/duckbill. That's R - E - D - I - S dot com slash duckbill.Corey: And I think that's very fair. I think that it is not necessarily a bad thing that you wind up presenting a lot of these options to customers. But there are some rough edges. An example of this is something I encountered myself somewhat recently and put on Twitter—because I have those kinds of problems—where originally, I remember this, that you were able to buy hourly Savings Plans, which again, Savings Plans are great; no knock there. I would wish that they applied to more services rather than, “Oh, SageMaker is going to do its own Savings Pla”—no, stop keeping me from going from something where I have to manage myself on EC2 to something you manage for me and making that cost money. You nailed it with Fargate. You nailed it with Lambda. Please just have one unified Savings Plan thing. But I digress.But you had a limit, once upon a time, of $1,000 per hour. Now, it's $5,000 per hour, which I believe in a three-year all-up-front means you will cheerfully add $130 million purchase to your shopping cart. And I kept adding a bunch of them and then had a little over a billion dollars a single button click away from being charged to my account. Let me begin with what's up with that?Rick: [laugh]. Thank you for the tweet, by the way, Corey.Corey: Always thrilled to ruin your month, Rick. You know that.Rick: Yeah. Fantastic. We took that tweet—you know, it was tongue in cheek, but also it was a serious opportunity for us to ask a question of what does happen? And it's something we did ask internally and have some fun conversations about. I can tell you that if you clicked purchase, it would have been declined [laugh]. So, you would have not been—Corey: Yeah, American Express would have had a problem with that. But the question is, would you have attempted to charge American Express, or would something internally have gone, “This has a few too many commas for us to wind up presenting it to the card issuer with a straight face?”Rick: [laugh]. Right. So, it wouldn't have gone through and I can tell you that, you know, if your account was on a PO-based configuration, you know, it would have gone to the account team. And it would have gone through our standard process for having a conversation with our customer there. That being said, we are—it's an awesome opportunity for us to examine what is that shopping cart experience.We did increase the limit, you're right. And we increased the limit for a lot of reasons that we sat down and worked through, but at the same time, there's always an opportunity for improvement of our product and experience, we want to make sure that it's really easy and lightweight to use our products, especially purchasing Savings Plans. Savings Plans are already kind of wrought with mental concern and risk of purchasing something so expensive and large that has a big impact on your AWS bill, so we don't really want to add any more friction necessarily the process but we do want to build an awareness and make sure customers understand, “Hey, you're purchasing this. This has a pretty big impact.” And so, we're also looking at other ways we can kind of improve the ability for the Savings Plan shopping cart experience to ensure customers don't put themselves in a position where you have to unwind or make phone calls and say, “Oops.” Right? We [laugh] want to avoid those sorts of situations for our customers. So, we are looking at quite a few additional improvements to that experience as well that I'm really excited about that I really can't share here, but stay tuned.Corey: I am looking forward to it. I will say the counterpoint to that is having worked with customers who do make large eight-figure purchases at once, there's a psychology element that plays into it. Everyone is very scared to click the button on the ‘Buy It Now' thing or the ‘Approve It.' So, what I've often found is at that scale, one, you can reduce what you're buying by half of it, and then see how that treats you and then continue to iterate forward rather than doing it all at once, or reach out to your account team and have them orchestrate the buy. In previous engagements, I had a customer do this religiously and at one point, the concierge team bought the wrong thing in the wrong region, and from my perspective, I would much rather have AWS apologize for that and fix it on their end, than from us having to go with a customer side of, “Oh crap, oh, crap. Please be nice to us.”Not that I doubt you would do it, but that's not the nervous conversation I want to have in quite the same way. It just seems odd to me that someone would want to make that scale of purchase without ever talking to a human. I mean, I get it. I'm as antisocial as they come some days, but for that kind of money, I kind of just want another human being to validate that I'm not making a giant mistake.Rick: We love that. That's such a tremendous opportunity for us to engage and discuss with an organization that's going to make a large commitment, that here's the impact, here's how we can help. How does it align to our strategy? We also do recommend, from a strategic perspective, those more incremental purchases. I think it creates a better experience long-term when you don't have a single Savings Plan that's going to expire on a specific day that all of a sudden increases your entire bill by a significant percentage.So, making staggered monthly purchases makes a lot of sense. And it also works better for incremental growth, right? If your organization is growing 5% month-over-month or year-over-year or something like that, you can purchase those incremental Savings Plans that sort of stack up on top of each other and then you don't have that risk of a cliff one day where one super-large SP expires and boom, you have to scramble and repurchase within minutes because every minute that goes by is an additional expense, right? That's not a great experience. And so that's, really, a large part of why those staggered purchase experiences make a lot of sense.That being said, a lot of companies do their math and their finance in different ways. And single large purchases makes sense to go through their process and their rigor as well. So, we try to support both types of purchasing patterns.Corey: I think that is an underappreciated aspect of cloud cost savings and cloud cost optimization, where it is much more about humans than it is about math. I see this most notably when I'm helping customers negotiate their AWS contracts with AWS, where they are often perspectives such as, “Well, we feel like we really got screwed over last time, so we want to stick it to them and make them give us a bigger percentage discount on something.” And it's like, look, you can do that, but I would much rather, if it were me, go for something that moves the needle on your actual business and empowers you to move faster, more effectively, and lead to an outcome that is a positive for everyone versus the well, we're just going to be difficult in this one point because they were difficult on something last time. But ego is a thing. Human psychology is never going to have an API for it. And again, customers get to decide their own destiny in some cases.Rick: I completely agree. I've actually experienced that. So, this is the third company I've been working at on Cloud optimization. I spent several years at Microsoft running an optimization program. I went to Turbonomic for several years, building out the right-sizing and savings plan reservation purchase capabilities there, and now here at AWS.And through all of these journeys and experiences working with companies to help optimize their cloud spend, I can tell you that the psychological needle—moving the needle is significantly harder than the technology stack of sizing something correctly or deleting something that's unused. We can solve the technology part. We can build great products that identify opportunities to save money. There's still this psychological component of IT, for the last several decades has gone through this maturity curve of if it's not broken, don't touch it. Five-nines, six sigma, all of these methods of IT sort of rationalizing do no harm, don't touch anything, everything must be up.And it even kind of goes back several decades. Back when if you rebooted a physical server, the motherboard capacitors would pop, right? So, there's even this anti—or this stigma against even rebooting servers sometimes. In the cloud really does away with a lot of that stuff because we have live migration and we have all of these, sort of, stateless designs and capabilities, but we still carry along with us this mentality of don't touch it; it might fall over. And we have to really get past that.And that means that the trust, we went back to the trust conversation where we talk about the recommendations must be incredibly accurate. You're risking your job, in some cases; if you are a DevOps engineer, and your commitments on your yearly goals are uptime, latency, response time, load time, these sorts of things, these operational metrics, KPIs that you use, you don't want to take a downsized recommendation. It has a severe risk of harming your job and your bonus.Corey: “These instances are idle. Turn them off.” It's like, yeah, these instances are the backup site, or the DR environment, or—Rick: Exactly.Corey: —something that takes very bursty but occasional traffic. And yeah, I know it costs us some money, but here's the revenue figures for having that thing available. Like, “Oh, yeah. Maybe we should shut up and not make dumb recommendations around things,” is the human response, but computers don't have that context.Rick: Absolutely. And so, the accuracy and trust component has to be the highest bar we meet for any optimization activity or behavior. We have to circumvent or supersede the human aversion, the risk aversion, that IT is built on, right?Corey: Oh, absolutely. And let's be clear, we see this all the time where I'm talking to customers and they have been burned before because we tried to save money and then we took a production outage as a side effect of a change that we made, and now we're not allowed to try to save money anymore. And there's a hidden truth in there, which is auto-scaling is something that a lot of customers talk about, but very few have instrumented true auto-scaling because they interpret is we can scale up to meet demand. Because yeah, if you don't do that you're dropping customers on the floor.Well, what about scaling back down again? And the answer there is like, yeah, that's not really a priority because it's just money. We're not disappointing customers, causing brand reputation, and we're still able to take people's money when that happens. It's only money; we can fix it later. Covid shined a real light on a lot of the stuff just because there are customers that we've spoken to who's—their user traffic dropped off a cliff, infrastructure spend remained constant day over day.And yeah, they believe, genuinely, they were auto-scaling. The most interesting lies are the ones that customers tell themselves, but the bill speaks. So, getting a lot of modernization traction from things like that was really neat to watch. But customers I don't think necessarily intuitively understand most aspects of their bill because it is a multidisciplinary problem. It's engineering, its finance, its accounting—which is not the same thing as finance—and you need all three of those constituencies to be able to communicate effectively using a shared and common language. It feels like we're marriage counseling between engineering and finance, most weeks.Rick: Absolutely, we are. And it's important we get it right, that the data is accurate, that the recommendations we provide are trustworthy. If the finance team gets their hands on the savings potential they see out of right-sizing, takes it to engineering, and then engineering comes back and says, “No, no, no, we can't actually do that. We can't actually size those,” right, we have problems. And they're cultural, they're transformational. Organizations' appetite for these things varies greatly and so it's important that we address that problem from all of those angles. And it's not easy to do.Corey: How big do you find the optimization problem is when you talk to customers? How focused are they on it? I have my answers, but that's the scale of anec-data. I want to hear your actual answer.Rick: Yeah. So, we talk with a lot of customers that are very interested in optimization. And we're very interested in helping them on the journey towards having an optimal estate. There are so many nuances and barriers, most of them psychological like we already talked about.I think there's this opportunity for us to go do better exposing the potential of what an optimal AWS estate would look like from a dollar and savings perspective. And so, I think it's kind of not well understood. I think it's one of the biggest areas or barriers of companies really attacking the optimization problem with more vigor is if they knew that the potential savings they could achieve out of their AWS environment would really align their spend much more closely with the business value they get, I think everybody would go bonkers. And so, I'm really excited about us making progress on exposing that capability or the total savings potential and amount. It's something we're looking into doing in a much more obvious way.And we're really excited about customers doing that on AWS where they know they can trust AWS to get the best value for their cloud spend, that it's a long-term good bet because their resources that they're using on AWS are all focused on giving business value. And that's the whole key. How can we align the dollars to the business value, right? And I think optimization is that connection between those two concepts.Corey: Companies are generally not going to greenlight a project whose sole job is to save money unless there's something very urgent going on. What will happen is as they iterate forward on the next generation of services or a migration of a service from one thing to another, they will make design decisions that benefit those optimizations. There's low-hanging fruit we can find, usually of the form, “Turn that thing off,” or, “Configure this thing slightly differently,” that doesn't take a lot of engineering effort in place. But, on some level, it is not worth the engineering effort it takes to do an optimization project. We've all met those engineers—speaking is one of them myself—who, left to our own devices, will spend two months just knocking a few hundred bucks a month off of our AWS developer environment.We steal more than office supplies. I'm not entirely sure what the business value of doing that is, in most cases. For me, yes, okay, things that work in small environments work very well in large environments, generally speaking, so I learned how to save 80 cents here and that's a few million bucks a month somewhere else. Most folks don't have that benefit happening, so it's a question of meeting them where they are.Rick: Absolutely. And I think the scale component is huge, which you just touched on. When you're talking about a hundred EC2 instances versus a thousand, optimization becomes kind of a different component of how you manage that AWS environment. And while single-decision recommendations to scale an individual server, the dollar amount might be different, the percentages are just about the same when you look at what is it to be sized correctly, what is it to be configured correctly? And so, it really does come down to priority.And so, it's really important to really support all of those companies of all different sizes and industries because they will have different experiences on AWS. And some will have more sensitivity to cost than others, but all of them want to get great business value out of their AWS spend. And so, as long as we're meeting that need and we're supporting our customers to make sure they understand the commitment we have to ensuring that their AWS spend is valuable, it is meaningful, right, they're not spending money on things that are not adding value, that's really important to us.Corey: I do want to have as the last topic of discussion here, how AWS views optimization, where there have been a number of repeated statements where helping customers optimize their cloud spend is extremely important to us. And I'm trying to figure out where that falls on the spectrum from, “It's the thing we say because they make us say it, but no, we're here to milk them like cows,” all the way on over to, “No, no, we passionately believe in this at every level, top to bottom, in every company. We are just bad at it.” So, I'm trying to understand how that winds up being expressed from your lived experience having solved this problem first outside, and then inside.Rick: Yeah. So, it's kind of like part of my personal story. It's the main reason I joined AWS. And, you know, when you go through the interview loops and you talk to the leaders of an organization you're thinking about joining, they always stop at the end of the interview and ask, “Do you have any questions for us?” And I asked that question to pretty much every single person I interviewed with. Like, “What is AWS's appetite for helping customers save money?”Because, like, from a business perspective, it kind of is a little bit wonky, right? But the answers were varied, and all of them were customer-obsessed and passionate. And I got this sense that my personal passion for helping companies have better efficiency of their IT resources was an absolute primary goal of AWS and a big element of Amazon's leadership principle, be customer obsessed. Now, I'm not a spokesperson, so [laugh] we'll see, but we are deeply interested in making sure our customers have a great long-term experience and a high-trust relationship. And so, when I asked these questions in these interviews, the answers were all about, “We have to do the right thing for the customer. It's imperative. It's also in our DNA. It's one of the most important leadership principles we have to be customer-obsessed.”And it is the primary reason why I joined: because of that answer to that question. Because it's so important that we achieve a better efficiency for our IT resources, not just for, like, AWS, but for our planet. If we can reduce consumption patterns and usage across the planet for how we use data centers and all the power that goes into them, we can talk about meaningful reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, the cost and energy needed to run IT business applications, and not only that, but most all new technology that's developed in the world seems to come out of a data center these days, we have a real opportunity to make a material impact to how much resource we use to build and use these things. And I think we owe it to the planet, to humanity, and I think Amazon takes that really seriously. And I'm really excited to be here because of that.Corey: As I recall—and feel free to make sure that this comment never sees the light of day—you asked me before interviewing for the role and then deciding to accept it, what I thought about you working there and whether I would recommend it, whether I wouldn't. And I think my answer was fairly nuanced. And you're working there now and we still are on speaking terms, so people can probably guess what my comments took the shape of, generally speaking. So, I'm going to have to ask now; it's been, what, a year since you joined?Rick: Almost. I think it's been about eight months.Corey: Time during a pandemic is always strange. But I have to ask, did I steer you wrong?Rick: No. Definitely not. I'm very happy to be here. The opportunity to help such a broad range of companies get more value out of technology—and it's not just cost, right, like we talked about. It's actually not about the dollar number going down on a bill. It's about getting more value and moving the needle on how do we efficiently use technology to solve business needs.And that's been my career goal for a really long time, I've been working on optimization for, like, seven or eight, I don't know, maybe even nine years now. And it's like this strange passion for me, this combination of my dad taught me how to be a really good steward of money and a great budget manager, and then my passion for technology. So, it's this really cool combination of, like, childhood life skills that really came together for me to create a career that I'm really passionate about. And this move to AWS has been such a tremendous way to supercharge my ability to scale my personal mission, and really align it to AWS's broader mission of helping companies achieve more with cloud platforms, right?And so, it's been a really nice eight months. It's been wild. Learning AWS culture has been wild. It's a sharp diverging culture from where I've been in the past, but it's also really cool to experience the leadership principles in action. They're not just things we put on a website; they're actually things people talk about every day [laugh]. And so, that journey has been humbling and a great learning opportunity as well.Corey: If people want to learn more, where's the best place to find you?Rick: Oh, yeah. Contact me on LinkedIn or Twitter. My Twitter account is @rickyo1138. Let me know if you get the 1138 reference. That's a fun one.Corey: THX 1138. Who doesn't?Rick: Yeah, there you go. And it's hidden in almost every single George Lucas movie as well. You can contact me on any of those social media platforms and I'd be happy to engage with anybody that's interested in optimization, cloud technology, bill, anything like that. Or even not [laugh]. Even anything else, either.Corey: Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I really appreciate it.Rick: My pleasure, Corey. It was wonderful talking to you.Corey: Rick Ochs, Principal Product Manager at AWS. 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 an angry comment, rightly pointing out that while AWS is great and all, Azure is far more cost-effective for your workloads because, given their lack security, it is trivially easy to just run your workloads in someone else's account.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.

Links: Amazon Aurora supports cluster export to S3  Amazon Cognito now provides user pool deletion protection  Amazon Connect adds real-time schedule adherence Amazon EC2 enables easier patching of guest operating system and applications with Replace Root Volume  Amazon Neptune Serverless is now generally available  Introducing the Amazon OpenSearch Service delivery program Amazon SageMaker Canvas supports tags to track and allocate costs incurred by users  AWS Console Mobile Application adds support for AWS CloudShell  AWS Fault Injection Simulator now supports network connectivity disruption AWS Nitro Enclaves is now supported on AWS Graviton AWS Organizations console now allows users to centrally manage primary contact information on AWS accounts  AWS Private Certificate Authority introduces a mode for short-lived certificates  Announcing dark mode support in the AWS Management Console  EC2 High Memory instances with 18TiB and 24TiB of memory are now available with On-Demand and Savings Plan purchase options  How to take advantage of the AWS Free Tier Goldman Sachs, a legacy financial services firm, transforms its operations on AWS  Reduce food waste to improve sustainability and financial results in retail with Amazon Forecast  Cost Optimization recommendations for AWS Config  Optimize your Amazon EC2 instances cost at scale by migrating from Intel to AMD using AWS Systems Manager Automation 

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