FinOps and Reducing Cloud Computing Costs – Kris Bliesner, Vega Cloud

This is texturing TV. Hey guys. Thanks for the throw.

We're here with Chris bliesner. Who is CEO for Vega cloud, and we're talking about finops Chris. Welcome the show.

Thank you. We've been talking about capacity planning and all kinds of fun stuff for decades now, so we have this new term called finops what's different about finops versus what we used to think of as just good old-fashioned best practices for managing it infrastructure. It's a great question.

You know, it was called Cloud cost optimization and Cloud economics. I think we had a bunch of different terms for it. And the reality is it's all about helping companies do a better job of managing their investments in cloud computing and I would liken it to sort of the it infrastructure Library concept.

If you're familiar with ITIL where it's a set of best practices, it's guidance process those kinds of things to help customers get their brain around how they do this sort of thing from a best practices perspective and have those best practices be industry standard. And so they have a governing body that's run by folks in the industry that allows them to make sure that they're giving the right guidance and helping folks along the journey and then doing things like certifications and training and those kinds of things to help grow. This this group of folks that's doing this and I think I don't know what the latest numbers were, but I think there's over 10,000 now folks that are registered on the finops foundation website and our sort of aligning themselves with this terminops.

And so I think that's great that we're getting a lot more folks behind it and more training and certification as well. Who's driving this conversation with the organizations? Is it the finance team or is it the IT team who's standing up going?

Hey guys, we the era of drunken spending in the cloud is over. You know, it's a little bit of both. I would say it's whoever really owns the budget for cloud computing.

So if that's the it folk, maybe CIO or CTO in some cases that might own that budget line item. Sometimes that rolls up underneath Finance or the CFO is definitely involved in terms of you know, wanting to understand it better. I think part of that is because it's not just sort of the the folks that have gone on check for a long time.

But it's this this now this is part of Opex and and you know, we don't have that smoothness that came with capital expense. It's ups and downs in the quarter and it could cost, you know could cause you some issues if you have some bright surprise bills or other things and so I think people are really wanting to get their brain around it because it's become such a big piece of folks cost center from an IT perspective. It seems like developers have a lot of influence over this as well as devops teams.

And so what does it take to kind of get them to think about this issue because historically they've just been focused on we need the provision this as quickly as possible and we need to make sure it stays up but I don't think they were really focused all that much on the cost. No, in fact the cloud providers sort of hided a little bit from you so it's super easy to spend things up because obviously if you're if you're a hyperscaler, that's what you want you want people to to quickly get what they need and that's that's great. We love that I would agree with you all early.

I think one of the challenges we have as an industry is that the devops engineers the developers who are using these tool sets not only are our motivated but it's that maybe that 20th thing on their list of things to do, right? They they're working on product features. They're working on it'll build automation or some other thing and maybe even this is behind the security training or whatever.

Right? And so, you know, and maybe he you know, the developer has implemented a virtual machine or some sort of piece of technology that only costs, you know, a couple hundred dollars a month in development. He might not even think about it.

And so I think part of the challenge there is that the tools weren't great. And so I think it's a two-part thing. I think one of the tools weren't great.

So we didn't make it easy for those folks probably because of cloud providers don't do anything out of the box for this but easy for those folks to schedule those things. The reality is the average developer doesn't Either infrastructure running 24/7 and so we can do a better job of scheduling the workloads so that it's running when they need it and not when they don't so we're not incurring costs 24/7 and we can have better Tools around that and then I think the other piece is sort of the the motivation of the behavior change, right? So how do we get these folks excited about doing something that again is long down the list and I think I think for a long time we sort of came at this as an industry the wrong way we came at it as hey you guys are you guys are wasteful well, if you if you want to engineer to to not talk to you the easiest way to do that is to call them inefficient or tell them they're wasting resources or whatever because Engineers don't want to be wasteful the reality is they want to be efficient the way that they do things but again the tools weren't there and so I think we have this behavioral change that we have to address where we want them to focus on it and we don't want to do it from a negative perspective.

In fact, I pushes this with our Cloud Heroes program. We're trying to push more of a positive reinforcement so that they get recognized for doing the right thing and I think part of that behavioral change that has to come to some of the cloud service providers have some tools that they claim to help deal with this but can you trust those tools? Because is that roughly the equivalent of asking you know the fox to guard the hen houses or I think you know this depends on our opinion is it depends on how much you're with them?

So if you are a smaller account, let's say you're less than $10,000 a month and spend the out of the box tools are gonna work great for you because the reality is you're just probably not that complex. You don't have it enough moving Parts. You probably have everything in one account.

And so the reality is a lot of those tools are pretty basic in terms of how they work when you get into the Enterprise or folks that are that are consuming at at bigger scale. So call it half a million dollars a month or more in public Cloud infrastructure. You're gonna have multiple accounts you might have multiple providers.

None of the providers handle the multiple provider thing. So that's definitely an issue that he's get addressed and then two, you know, you're gonna have more complicated setups more things going on more people touching it right more groups more teams touching the infrastructure and so you're gonna have more complication and I think three the the cloud provider tools typically lack context so they can look at things from you know, the hyper scale level they can look at it say okay, here's what's happening. Here's what I three but they really can't get into the weeds because they don't have access right part of the part of the value of these Cloud providers is they can't get at your data.

They can't get it your your actual stuff so they can only see it from a surface level. You might want to pull in data dog metrics or New Relic metrics or something else to give business context to the recommendations and things that you're trying to do. And so that's where we feel like third parties the better way to go there.

Do you think as we go along that organizations are going to be shopping cloud service providers based on cost because it seems like a lot of the workloads are pretty similar across different Cloud platforms, or are they going after more of a single provider and an Enterprise agreement trying to maximize workloads and get the discounts that route? I think it's a little bit of both. Actually I think folks are going to try and maximize what they have with each individual cloud provider.

I think as you start to spend more you realize having one vendor in places is not the greatest, right? You typically want to back up for lots of reasons not just price but maybe there's an outage or other reasons why you might want to have a backup provider and I do think that you know that the workloads are getting like-minded in terms of being able to move from cloud provider to cloud provider. It's probably cost and then I would say second maybe feature sets.

You know, I know all these Cloud providers do serverless differently, right? So you might like Amazon's version of serverless better than the Google's or you might like Azure is better than someone else's so I think part of that challenge is just understanding your folks and what technologies they prefer or which they're trained on or certified on so, I think that that could be a piece of that as well. But I do think you're gonna especially in a recessionary environment.

I think you're gonna have more pressure around costs. And so I think people want to understand one of the one of the cool things that we do Vegas we help you understand what your stores Are so per gigabyte object or per gigabyte file storage costs across the three providers so you can make good decisions. If you were going to move more data into one of the cloud providers, you can do a better job of understanding where where the least expensive places to put that stuff.

How much is this about reducing costs or is it more about just being more predictable in our cost? Because a lot of times there's a lot of Spike and financial people. They don't like surprises.

No, it's it's a great question or you know, and they don't like the ups and downs from quarter to quarter a month a month. Right that causes a challenge. I think some of that sort of Smooths out again as you get to scale.

I do think that it's about improving unit costs. So I don't think in general the costs are continue to go down. I think in general we're gonna hit some point where they're they've they've hit some floor.

But but I think in general people are looking at unit costs, right? So my cost per CPU core my cost per gigabyte of memory. My cost per gigabyte of storage those kinds of things are or the things that they're looking at saying.

Okay, great. Am I getting the best out of this that I can and how do I how do I maximize that and We live in uncertain Economic Times to be kind what's your sense of, you know, the awareness of finops. Is that escalating quickly now because people are more challenged and there are type of questions being asked.

I think so. I mean we're certainly seeing in our business. I've had more phone calls with prospective customers in the last four weeks that I've had in the last three years just to give you a sense of those sort of the uptick.

And so I do think people are more aware of what's going on. They're looking for opportunities to impact their bills in a way that's not going to necessarily cut lines of service, right? Because they've got product lines that they want to continue to run.

It's more about those unit costs and being able to bring that down and optimize areas where they may not be optimizing today. So what's your best advice to folks? How do you get your arms around this especially if they haven't had a lot of controls in place in the first place, you know, is there some way to think about this that is this is my point of entry to kind of rain it in a little Yeah, I mean, I think we see a lot of great opportunities in starting out in Devon test, which is also great place to start because typically there's less production impact, right?

So you may not be able to you might be able to make changes or try things like third-party tools like they get without impacting customers, right? So that can be a great place to start and I would say 90% of the Enterprise debit test environments. We see here are not optimized because they just don't don't spend time on it.

And so again, I think that's an area where it's a low hanging fruit people can attack that today. You can now walk down the street today without somebody telling you about their great new AI this or AI that so do you think maybe we can use AI to save ourselves from ourselves when this been UPS world? I think there's definitely some pieces of that we use pieces of it on forecasting and other areas where we want to leverage AI in terms of model recognition and and using compute power for what it's good at right be able to look at past patterns and and be able to maybe plug in some future ideas or metrics and be able to come out with some more accurate forecasting.

So I think that's super helpful and I think that can help people get their brain around. Okay, where do I think I'm going to spend in the next six months or a year plus and I think that that's super helpful. Yeah, Chris.

What's that? One thing you see organizations doing over and over again. That just makes you shake your head and go we should be better than this.

You know if it's a good question, I think part of it is just under committing. A lot of folks have made the choice to go to the cloud and have been there for years now, right so four or five years yet. They continue to honor commit to the cloud providers because they're either on unsure of where their future spend is going to be or just our hyper conservative about it and they're leaving money on the table.

I mean, those are opportunities where we see you've already made a decision you're already there. You're not going backwards. And so the reality is you can be a little bit more aggressive and fine tune those those deals most organizations do an Enterprise agreement every three to five years and that's the only time they see it.

We do these all the time so we can help folks understand that there's better credits or better pricing available to them, you know, all the different options that can be in front of them. And I think don't be afraid to go back and really negotiate agreement. If you're halfway through it, you can still do that.

Certainly if you've met your commits already or close. Those are the times to go do that and and then, you know take those those dollars off the table that you're leaving out there right now. All right, folks the cloud depending on how you crunch.

The numbers is either more expensive or less expensive than your previous approaches. But the one thing that is for certain is it will get more expensive. Hey Chris.

Thanks for being on the show. You bet. Thanks, Michael.