>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Yukon and Cloud. Native Con North America. 2020. Virtual Brought to You by Red Hat, The Cloud, Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners Welcome back to the Cube. Virtual coverage of KUB Con Cloud native 2020. It's virtual this year. We're not face to face. Were normally in person where we have great interviews. Everyone's kind of jamming in the hallways, having a good time talking tech, identifying the new projects and knew where So we're not. There were remote. I'm John for your host. We've got two great gas, both Cuba alumni's Chris. And is it chief technology officer of the C and C F Chris, Welcome back. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>Awesome. Glad to be here. >>And, of course, another Cube alumni who is in studio. But we haven't had him at a Show Jr store meant executive director of the Fin Ops Foundation. And that's the purpose of this session. A interesting data point we're going to dig into how cloud has been enabling Mawr communities, more networks of practitioners who are still working together, and it's also a success point Chris on the C N C F vision, which has been playing out beautifully. So we're looking forward to digging. Jr. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you. >>Yeah, great to be here. Thanks, John. >>So, first of all, I want to get the facts out there. I think this is really important story that people should pay attention to the Finn Ops Foundation. That J. R. That you're running is really an interesting success point because it's it's not the c n c f. Okay. It's a practitioner that builds on cloud. Your experience in community you had is doing specific things that they're I won't say narrow but specific toe a certain fintech things. But it's really about the success of Cloud. Can you explain and and layout for take a minute to explain What is the fin Ops foundation and has it relate to see NCF? >>Yeah, definitely. So you know, if you think about this, the shift that we've had to companies deploying primarily in cloud, whether it be containers a ciencia focuses on or traditional infrastructure. The thing that typically people focus on right is the technology and innovation and speed to market in all those areas. But invariably companies hit this. We'd like to call the spend panic moment where they realize they're They're initially spending much more than they expected. But more importantly, they don't really have the processes in place or the people or the tools to do things like fully, you know, understand where their costs are going to look at how to optimize those to operate that in their organizations. And so the foundation pinups foundation eyes really focused on, uh, the people in practitioners who are in organizations doing cloud financial management, which is, you know, being those who drive this accountability of this variable spin model that's existed. So we were partnering very closely with, uh, see NCF. And we're now actually part of the Linux Foundation as of a few months ago, Uh, and you know, just to kind of put into context how that you kind of Iraq together, whereas, you know, CNC s very focused on open source coordinative projects, you know, For example, Spotify just launched their backstage cloud called Management Tool into CFCF Spotify folks, in our end, are working on the best practices around the cloud financial management that standards to go along with that. So we're there to help, you know, define this sort of cultural transformation, which is a shift to now. Engineers happen to think about costs as they never did before. On finance, people happen to partner with technology teams at the speed of cloud, and, you know executives happen to make trade off decisions and really change the way that they operate the business. With this variable page ago, engineers have all the access to spend the money in Cloud Model. >>Hey, blank check for engineers who doesn't like that rain that in its like shift left for security. And now you've got to deal with the financial Finn ops. It's really important. It's super point, Chris. In all seriousness. Putting kidding aside, this is exactly the kind of thing you see with open sores. You're seeing things like shift left, where you wanna have security baked in. You know what Jr is done in a fabulous job with his community now part of Linux Foundation scaling up, there's important things to nail down that is specific to that domain that are related to cloud. What's your thoughts on this? Because you're seeing it play out. >>Yeah, no, I mean, you know, I talked to a lot of our end user members and companies that have been adopting Cloud Native and I have lots of friends that run, you know, cloud infrastructure at companies. And Justus Jr said, You know, eventually there's been a lot of success and cognitive and want to start using a lot of things. Your bills are a little bit more higher than you expect. You actually have trouble figuring out, you know, kind of who's using what because, you know, let's be honest. A lot of the clouds have built amazing services. But let's say the financial management and cost management accounting tools charge back is not really built in well. And so I kind of noticed this this issue where it's like, great everyone's using all these services. Everything is great, But costs are a little bit confusing, hard to manage and, you know, you know, scientifically, you know, I ran into, you know, Jr and his community out there because my community was having a need of like, you know, there's just not good tools, standards, no practices out there. And, you know, the Finau Foundation was working on these kind of great things. So we started definitely found a way to kind of work together and be under the same umbrella foundation, you know, under the under Linux Foundation. In my personal opinion, I see more and more standards and tools to be created in this space. You know, there's, you know, very few specifications or standards and trying to get cost, you know, data out of different clouds and tools out there, I predict, Ah, lot more work is going to be done. Um, in this space, whether it's done and defendants foundation itself, CNC f, I think will probably be, uh, collaboration amongst communities. Can I truly figure this out? So, uh, engineers have any easier understanding of, you know, if I spent up the service or experiment? How much is this actually going to potentially impact the cost of things and and for a while, You know, uh, engineers just don't think about this. When I was at Twitter, we spot up services all time without really care about cost on, and that's happening a lot of small companies now, which don't necessarily have as a big bucket. So I'm excited about the space. I think you're gonna see a huge amount of focus on cloud financial management drops in the near future. >>Chris, thanks for that great insight. I think you've got a great perspective. You know, in some cases, it's a fast and loose environment. Like Twitter. You mentioned you've got kind of a blank check and the rocket ships going. But, Jr, this brings up to kind of points. This kind of like the whole code side of it. The software piece where people are building code, but also this the human error. I mean, we were playing with clubs, so we have a big media cloud and Amazon and we left there. One of the buckets open on the switches and elemental. We're getting charged. Massive amounts for us cash were like, Wait a minute, not even using this thing. We used it once, and it left it open. It was like the water was flowing through the pipes and charging us. So you know, this human error is throwing the wrong switch. I mean, it was simply one configuration error, in some cases, just more about planning and thinking about prototypes. >>Yeah. I mean, so take what your experience there. Waas and multiply by 1000 development teams in a big organization who all have access to cloud. And then, you know, it's it's and this isn't really about a set of new technologies. It's about a new set of processes and a cultural change, as Chris mentioned, you know, engineers now thinking about cost and this being a whole new efficiency metric for them to manage, right? You know, finance teams now see this world where it's like tomorrow. The cost could go three x the next day they could go down. You've got, you know, things spending up by the second. So there's a whole set of cross functional, and that's the majority of the work that are members do is really around. How do we get these cross functional teams working together? How do we get you know, each team up leveled on what they need, understand with cloud? Because not only is it, you know, highly variable, but it's highly decentralized now, and we're seeing, you know, cloud hit. These sort of material spend levels where you know, the big, big cloud spenders out there spending, you know, high nine figures in some cases you know, in cloud and it's this material for their for their businesses. >>And let's just let's be honest. Here is like Clouds, for the most part, don't really have a huge incentive in offering limits and so on. It's just, you know, like, hey, the more usage that the better And hopefully getting a group of practitioners in real figures. Well, holy put pressure to build better tools and services in this area. I think actually it is happening. I think Jared could correct me if wrong. I think AWS recently announced a feature where I think it's finally like quotas, you know, enabled, you know, you have introducing quotas now for and building limits at some level, which, you know, I think it's 2020 Thank you know, >>just to push back a little bit in support of our friends, you ask Google this company, you know, for a long time doing this work, we were worried that the cloud would be like, What are you doing? Are you trying to get our trying to minimize commitments and you know the dirty secret of this type of work? And I were just talking a bunch of practitioners today is that cloud spend never really goes down. When you do this work, you actually end up spending more because you know you're more comfortable with the efficiency that you're getting, and your CEO is like, let's move more workloads over. But let's accelerate. Let's let's do Maurin Cloud goes out more data centers. And so the cloud providers air actually largely incentivized to say, Yeah, we want people to be officially don't understand this And so it's been a great collaboration with those companies. As you said, you know, aws, Google, that you're certainly really focused in this area and ship more features and more data for you. It's >>really about getting smart. I mean, you know, they no, >>you could >>do it. I mean, remember the old browser days you could switch the default search engine through 10 menus. You could certainly find the way if you really wanted to dig in and make policy a simple abstraction layer feature, which is really a no brainer thing. So I think getting smarter is the right message. I want to get into the synergy Chris, between this this trend, because I think this points to, um kind of what actually happened here if you look at it at least from my perspective and correct me if I'm wrong. But you had jr had a community of practitioners who was sharing information. Sounds like open source. They're talking and sharing, you know? Hey, don't throw that switch. Do This is the best practice. Um, that's what open communities do. But now you're getting into software. You have to embed cost management into everything, just like security I mentioned earlier. So this trend, I think if you kind of connect the dots is gonna happen in other areas on this is really the synergy. Um, I getting that right with CNC >>f eso The way I see it is, and I dream of a future where developers, as they develop software, will be able to have some insight almost immediately off how much potential, you know, cost or impact. They'll have, you know, on maybe a new service or spinning up or potentially earlier in the development cycle saying, Hey, maybe you're not doing this in a way that is efficient. Maybe you something else. Just having that feedback loop. Ah lot. You know, closer to Deb time than you know a couple weeks out. Something crazy happens all of a sudden you notice, You know, based on you know, your phase or financial folks reaching out to you saying, Hey, what's going on here? This is a little bit insane. So I think what we'll see is, as you know, practitioners and you know, Jr spinoffs, foundation community, you know, get together share practices. A lot of them, you know, just as we saw on sense. Yeah, kind of build their own tools, models, abstractions. And, you know, they're starting to share these things. And once you start sharing these things, you end up with a you know, a dozen tools. Eventually, you know, sharing, you know, knowledge sharing, code sharing, you know, specifications. Sharing happens Eventually, things kind of, you know, become de facto tools and standards. And I think we'll see that, you know, transition in the thin ops community over the next 12 to 4 months. You know, very soon in my thing. I think that's kind of where I see things going, >>Jr. This really kind of also puts a riel, you know, spotlight and illustrates the whole developer. First cliche. I mean, it's really not a cliche. It's It's happening. Developers first, when you start getting into the calculations of our oi, which is the number one C level question is Hey, what's the are aware of this problem Project or I won't say cover your ass. But I mean, if someone kind of does a project that it breaks the bank or causes a, you know, financial problem, you know, someone gets pulled out to the back would shed. So, you know, here you're you're balancing both ends of the spectrum, you know, risk management on one side, and you've got return on investment on the other. Is that coming out from the conversation where you guys just in the early stages, I could almost imagine that this is a beautiful tailwind for you? These thes trends, >>Yeah. I mean, if you think about the work that we're doing in our practice you're doing, it's not about saving money. It's about making money because you actually want empower those engineers to be the innovation engines in the organization to deliver faster to ship faster. At the same time, they now can have, you know, tangible financial roo impacts on the business. So it's a new up leveling skill for them. But then it's also, I think, to Christmas point of, you know, people seeing this stuff more quickly. You know what the model looks like when it's really great is that engineers get near real time visibility into the impact of their change is on the business, and they can start to have conversations with the business or with their finance partners about Okay, you know, if you want me to move fast, I could move fast, But it's gonna cost this if you want me to optimize the cost. I could do that or I can optimize performance. And there's actually, you know, deeper are like conversation the candidate up. >>Now I know a lot of people who watch the Cube always share with me privately and Chris, you got great vision on this. We talked many times about it. We're learning a lot, and the developers are on the front lines and, you know, a lot of them don't have MBAs and, you know they're not in the business, but they can learn quick. If you can code, you can learn business. So, you know, I want you to take a minute Jr and share some, um, educational knowledge to developers were out there who have to sit in these meetings and have to say, Hey, I got to justify this project. Buy versus build. I need to learn all that in business school when I had to see s degree and got my MBA, so I kind of blended it together. But could you share what the community is doing and saying, How does that engineer sit in the meeting and defend or justify, or you some of the best practices what's coming out of the foundation? >>Yeah, I mean, and we're looking at first what a core principles that the whole organization used to line around. And then for each persona, like engineers, what they need to know. So I mean, first and foremost, it's It's about collaboration, you know, with their partners andan starting to get to that world where you're thinking about your use of cloud from a business value driver, right? Like, what is the impact of this? The critical part of that? Those early decentralization where you know, now you've got everybody basically taking ownership for their cloud usage. So for engineers, it's yes, we get that information in front of us quickly. But now we have a new efficiency metric. And engineers don't like inefficiency, right? They want to write fishing code. They wanna have efficient outcomes. Um, at the same time, those engineers need to now, you know, have ah, we call it, call it a common lexicon. Or for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, folks. Ah, Babel fish that needs to be developed between these teams. So a lot of the conversations with engineers right now is in the foundation is okay. What What financial terms do I need to understand? To have meaningful conversations about Op X and Capex? And what I'm going to make a commitment to a cloud provider like a committed use discount, Google or reserved instance or savings Planet AWS. You know, Is it okay for me to make that? What? How does that impact our, you know, cost of capital. And then and then once I make that, how do I ensure that I could work with those teams to get that allocated and accounted? The right area is not just for charge back purposes, but also so that my teams can see my portion of the estate, right? And they were having the flip side of that conversation with all the finance folks of like, You need to understand how the variable cloud, you know, model works. And you need to understand what these things mean and how they impact the business. And then all that's coming together. And to the point of like, how we're working with C and C f you know, into best practices White papers, you know, training Siri's etcetera, sets of KP eyes and capabilities. Onda. All these problems have been around for years, and I wouldn't say they're solved. But the knowledge is out there were pulling it together. The new level that we're trying to talk with the NCF is okay. In the old world of Cloud, you had 1 to 1 use of a resource. You're running a thing on an instance in the new world, you're running in containers and that, you know, cluster may have lots of pods and name spaces, things inside of it that may be doing lots of different workloads, and you can no longer allocate. I've got this easy to instance and this storage to this thing it's now split up and very ephemeral. And it is a whole new layer of virtualization on top of virtual ization that we didn't have to deal with before. >>And you've got multiple cloud. I'll throw that in there, just make another dimension on it. Chris, tie this together cause this is nice energy to scale up what he's built with the community now, part of the Linux Foundation. This fits nicely into your vision, you know, perfectly. >>Yeah, no, 100% like, you know, so little foundation. You know, as you're well, well aware, is just a federation of open source foundations of groups working together to share knowledge. So it definitely fits in kind of the little foundation mission of, you know, building the largest share technology investment for, you know, humankind. So definitely good there with my kind of C and C f c T o hat, you know, on is, you know, I want to make sure that you know, you know my community and and, you know, the community of cloud native has access and, you know, knowledge about modern. You know, cloud financial management practices out there. If you look at some of the new and upcoming projects in ciencia things like, you know, you know, backstage, which came out of Spotify. They're starting to add functionality that, you know, you know, originally backstage kind of started out as this, you know, everyone builds their own service catalog to go catalog, and you know who owns what and, you know and all that goodness and developers used it. And eventually what happened is they started to add cost, you know, metrics to each of these services and so on. So it surfaces things a little bit closer, you know, a depth time. So my whole goal is to, you know, take some of these great, you know, practices and potential tools that were being built by this wonderful spinoffs community and trying to bring it into the project. You know, front inside of CNC F. So having more projects either exposed, you know, useful. You know, Finn, ops related metrics or, you know, be able to, you know, uh, you know, tool themselves to quickly be able to get useful metrics that could be used by thin ox practitioners out there. That's my kind of goal. And, you know, I just love seeing two communities, uh, come together to improve, improve the state of the world. >>It's just a great vision, and it's needed so and again. It's not about saving money. Certainly does that if you play it right, but it's about growth and people. You need better instrumentation. You need better data. You've got cloud scale. Why not do something there, right? >>Absolutely. It's just maturity after the day because, you know, a lot of engineers, you know, they just love this whole like, you know, rental model just uses many Resource is they want, you know, without even thinking about just basic, you know, metrics in terms of, you know, how many idle instances do I have out there and so, like, people just don't think about that. They think about getting the work done, getting the job done. And if they anything we do to kind of make them think a little bit earlier about costs and impact efficiency, charge back, you know, I think the better the world isn't Honestly, you know, I do see this to me. It's It's almost like, you know, with my hippie hat on. It's like Stephen Green or for the more efficient we are. You know, the better the world off cloud is coming. Can you grow? But we need to be more efficient and careful about the resource is that we use in sentencing >>and certainly with the pandemic, people are virtually you wanted mental health, too. I mean, if people gonna be pulling their hair out, worrying about dollars and cents at scale, I mean, people are gonna be freaking out and you're in meetings justifying why you did things. I mean, that's a time waster, right? I mean, you know, talking about wasting time. >>I have a lot of friends who, you know, run infrastructure at companies. And there's a lot of you know, some companies have been, you know, blessed during this, you know, crazy time with usage. But there is a kind of laser focused on understanding costs and so on and you not be. Do not believe how difficult it is sometimes even just to get, you know, reporting out of these systems, especially if you're using, you know, multiple clouds and multiple services across them. It's not. It's non trivial. And, you know, Jared could speak to this, But, you know, a lot of this world runs in like terrible spreadsheets, right and in versus kind of, you know, nice automated tools with potential, a p I. So there's a lot of this stuff. It's just done sadly in spreadsheets. >>Yeah, salute the flag toe. One standard to rally around us. We see this all the time Jr and emerging inflection points. No de facto kind of things develop. Kubernetes took that track. That was great. What's your take on what he just said? I mean, this is a critical path item for people from all around. >>Yeah, and it's It's really like becoming this bigger and bigger data problem is well, because if you look at the way the clouds are building, they're building per seconds and and down to the very fine grain detail, you know, or functions and and service. And that's amazing for being able to have accountability. But also you get people with at the end of the month of 300 gigabyte billing files, with hundreds of millions of rows and columns attached. So, you know, that's where we do see you companies come together. So yeah, it is a spreadsheet problem, but you can now no longer open your bill in a spreadsheet because it's too big. Eso you know, there's the native tools are doing a lot of work, you know, as you mentioned, you know, AWS and Azure Google shipping a lot. There's there's great, you know, management platforms out there. They're doing work in this area, you know, there's there's people trying to build their own open source the things like Chris was talking about as well. But really, at the end of the day like this, this is This is not a technology. Changes is sort of a cultural shift internally, and it's It's a lot like the like, you know, move from data center to cloud or like waterfall to Dev ops. It's It's a shift in how we're managing, you know, the finances of the money in the business and bringing these groups together. So it it takes time and it takes involvement. I'm also amazed I look like the job titles of the people who are plugged into the Phenoms Foundation and they range from like principal engineers to tech procurement. Thio you know, product leaders to C. T. O. S. And these people are now coming together in the classic to get a seat at the table right toe, Have these conversations and talk about not How do we reduce, you know, cost in the old eighties world. But how do we work together to be more quickly to innovate, to take advantage of these cognitive technologies so that we could be more competitive? Especially now >>it's automation. I mean, all these things are at play. It's about software. I mean, software defined operations is clearly the trend we've been covering. You guys been riding the wave cloud Native actually is so important in all these modern APS, and it applies to almost every aspect of stacks, so makes total sense. Great vision. Um, Chris props to you for that, Jr. Congratulations on a great community, Jerry. I'll give you the final word. Put a plug in for the folks watching on the fin ops Foundation where you're at. What are you looking to do? You adding people, What's your objectives? Take a minute to give the plug? >>Yeah, definitely. We were in open source community, which means we thrive on people contributing inputs. You know, we've got now almost 3000 practitioner members, which is up from 1500 just this this summer on You know, we're looking for those who have either an interesting need to plug into are checked advisory council to help define standards as part of this event, The cognitive gone we're launching Ah, white paper on kubernetes. Uh, and how to do confidential management for it, which was a collaborative effort of a few dozen of our practitioners, as well as our vendor members from VM Ware and Google and APP Thio and a bunch of others who have come together to basically defined how to do this. Well, and, you know, we're looking for folks to plug into that, you know, because at the end of the day, this is about everybody sort of up leveling their skills and knowledge and, you know, the knowledge is out there, nobody's head, and we're focused on how toe drive. Ah, you know, a central collection of that be the central community for it. You enable the people doing this work to get better their jobs and, you know, contribute more of their companies. So I invite you to join us. You know, if your practitioner ITT's Frito, get in there and plug into all the bits and there's great slack interaction channels where people are talking about kubernetes or pinups kubernetes or I need to be asked Google or where we want to go. So I hope you consider joining in the community and join the conversation. >>Thanks for doing that, Chris. Good vision. Thanks for being part of the segment. And, as always, C N C F. This is an enablement model. You throw out the soil, but the 1000 flowers bloom. You don't know what's going to come out of it. You know, new standards, new communities, new vendors, new companies, some entrepreneur Mike jump in this thing and say, Hey, I'm gonna build a better tool. >>Love it. >>You never know. Right? So thanks so much for you guys for coming in. Thanks for the insight. Appreciate. >>Thanks so much, John. >>Thank you for having us. >>Okay. I'm John Furry, the host of the Cube covering Coop Con Cloud, Native Con 2020 with virtual This year, we wish we could be there face to face, but it's cute. Virtual. Thanks for watching

[Music] hi I'm Peter Burroughs welcome to another cube conversation from our beautiful Studios here in palo alto california as we do with every cube conversation we come up with a great topic and we find someone who really understands it so they can talk about it we capture them for you so you can learn something about some of the new trends and changes in the industry and we've doing that today too the topic that we're talking about is how do you do a better job of mapping the costs that are being generated by the cloud or that informations coming out of cloud suppliers related to what you're using with the actual business activities that generate the differential capabilities that customers are looking for that's a tough tough challenge and to understand that better we're talking with junior Stormin who's a co-founder of cloud ability Jaron welcome to the cube thanks Peter good to be here so so let's talk about first who are you yeah so I am co-founder of cloud ability and credibility is focused around improving the unit economics of cloud spend so our customers tend to be those who are spending large amounts in AWS or Azure or GC P and we take their billing data their utilization data various metadata about their business and do machine learning and data science on top of it to help them get better visibility into sort of where that spend is going how they're using it but more importantly to give them some controls around how they want to optimize an optimize doesn't necessarily mean save money in a cloud world because most companies who are moving into cloud very heavily are doing that for the innovation for the speed so they can deliver you know better data faster but it's really about fine-tuning the conversation say okay here we want to save money here we want to move faster here we want to focus on quality and really providing a way for the the various groups that aren't normally talking the finance teams with the engineering teams with the procurement teams all these groups to come together and be able to take executive input to say okay how do we want to operate and how do we one improve those your economics as we go well I want to start with just quick comment on this notion of Union I can when people here historically hear the notion of unit unit economics they think of you know increasing scale so the average cost per unit goes down yeah I think you're talking about more than that right are you really also talking about a mapping of what spend is generating to the business activities that actually generate value and ensuring that you get the differential or the optimized Union economics unit cost yeah oh so the mapping is actually really interesting ly challenging in cloud it's hard enough in traditional IT if you look at somebody like AWS they have two hundred thousand SKUs different products you can buy and they now bill at a second level resolution so what this means is you've got all these engineers out there using cloud in a very good way to move quickly and of 8/2 little more features and they kind of have an unlimited credit card that they can go spend on as quickly as they need and they never see the statements they never see the bills and the other side you've got finance teams procurement teams who've sort of lost control of traditionally the power of the PIO that they have to actually rein that in and they're they're struggling just to understand what is the spend and then to the mapping question how do i allocate these hundreds and millions of charges that i have this month into cost centers and business units and getting that sorted in a world where engineers are focused on moving fast or not they're not tagging things based on cost and are typically so once you get that sort of mapping aspect sorted to the next point you brought as is in bringing the business value so how do we start to relate that back there's a concept a lot of you know IT has been a cost center and now it's sexual driver of value in a world where businesses are increasingly delivering their value through software so we need to start tying the spending mapping into the business and then tying that to the value delivered a great example of this I was sitting last week with one of the largest cloud spenders in the world there have been you know nine figures with their primary vendor and in the conversation with the executives we realized that nobody was looking at both sides of that equation you had the the finance people who were saying hey we're tracking the cost and we think I was happening there and then you had the the revenue generators looking at the money coming anyhow the cloud people with that but there wasn't this centralized view to say alright we want to have a conversation about what value I were getting to spend and the question that always comes up what that is I was doing the right amount well let me build on that because it's seat because IT is historically and this is one of the things that we've been doing over the last few years IT has historically done things on a project level yes all right so we had waterfall development we tried to change that with agile we had you know buy the hardware upfront and then deploy the application on a cloud changes that so this project orientation has led to a set of decisions about finance at the moment that the business asides to do it we've changed the practices that we use at a development level we've changed the practices that we use at an asset level is it now time to change the practices that we use at a finance level is that really kind of what's going on here it is that the project analogy is good because what we're seeing is they're shifting from a project basis to a productive basis and products that deliver value increasingly if you think about the change that's happened with DevOps it in the scene and cloud companies are delivering more of their value through software and they're not just using IT for internal projects right it's actually the driver of business how we interact with Airlines and banks and all these things so that's the shift to say okay now we've gotten good at DevOps moving fast and we've gotten good at deploying and building better data stores now we need to bring in this new discipline and the discipline is what the market is calling fin ops which essentially is combining financial financial operations but you simply combine technology applied specifically do a cloud roll and it only can really happen in cloud it can't happen in data centers because data centers have fixed spending right you have to wait to get resources once you make the investment it's a sunk cost there's months of lead time cloud introduced the removal of constraints which means you can get whatever you want as quickly as you want and DevOps meant it's all automated so instead of your collection of 60 servers you've got thousands that are coming up and down all the time so what you don't have to do is bring in all these groups engineers have to think about cost as a new efficiency metric they have to think about the impact of their business at this code this confirmation template they just wrote is going to have and the finance teams have to shift from this mode of I'm under report retro actively and at a quarterly granularity sixty days after it happened and block investment to be I'm going to partner with these teams report in a real-time fashion give them the visibility help forecast and actually bring them together to make better business decisions about the cloud spend so cloud has allowed development to alter practically agile has been around for a long time before the cloud predates the cloud but it became practical and almost demanded as a consequence of what you could do with cloud so cloud change development through agile it changed infrastructure management through DevOps where now you're you're deploying software infrastructure of code and know as code and what you're saying is the third leg of that stool cloud is now changing how you do financial management of technology financial management of IT and we're calling that fin ops yeah and you you you can't really have fin ops without cloud or without DevOps and if you have the two together you alter we need this new set of it's a new operating model the reason this has come to a head of late is you know if you look at going to the Amazon riemeck conferences a few years back it was like well how much is cloud gonna be a thing and okay clouds now gonna be a thing when's it gonna happen now it's about the how and how do we do this better cloud is hitting for the material spend levels now at bigger organizations I mean the you know see the the cloud projections where it's going I think it's now 360 billion the next few years and we're seeing CFO's at public companies look to say okay it's not my biggest line-item yet but it's the most variable and fastest growing cogs expense so it's actually start to affect our margins we needed a new set of process used to actually manage this so one of the things that's coming to market is this new group called the phenoms Foundation which is a non-profit trade association that initially has a few dozen of some of the largest cloudspinners of the world there's the Spotify as the alaskans the nation why it's Autodesk's and they've all come together as a set of best practice practitioners to start to codify this into something that can be you know scaled out in organizations so that group is gonna be putting out a user conference around this area there's a new o'reilly book that's coming out the end of the year that's going to be sort of the treatise and all this stuff pulled together because what we found in you know me is in code ability in the last eight years we bring in technology and platform to show the recommendations of visibility how to do this but the real challenge companies run into is they don't have the internal expertise their finance teams understand what they need to the engineers don't and so you know they came to us last year saying can you help figure out the processes can you educate us and that's really where you know the spin offs foundation is growing bringing together those people to define those processes so the the impact of cloud on each of these different groups on the development group on the infrastructure team and now on the finance team the interest the developer groups I think some of them resisted it but generally speaking it's gone okay and and eventually tooling from a variety different players came along that made it easy to enact best practices and software development through an agile mechanism in the last few years after significant battles within infrastructure teams about whether or not they were going to use software as code we've seen new products new tooling that has facilitated the adoption of those practices what kind of tooling are we going to see introduced that facilitates thin ops so that finance teams procurement teams move from a project orientation to a strategic management of the resource orientation I mean I think the first is on the engineering side is seeing costs become a first-class citizen of an efficiency metric that they need to look at so you know in their build processes baked in the CI CD looking to see am I properly sizing my compute request for the workload that it needs there's some research research just came out showing that I think it's like 80 percent of the market is not using the best discounting options the cloud providers offer you hear these horror stories it's too expensive we said overspend that's not actually a problem with the cloud providers that's a problem with the enterprises not using the tools offered the discounts the reserved ences the infrequent access door exactly so I think at the end of the day it's the first step in this is getting those checks in place to say are we using the things that help drive the right cost for our needs and the other side of that the finance team is really changing the way that they are interacting with their technology teams becoming partners becoming advocates in this versus a passive you know retroactive reporter down the line and this enables these sort of micro optimization discussions that can happen where data center world we bought it some cots is sitting there odd world we can make decisions today that impact you know the business tomorrow so let me make sure I got this so I have a client who who I was having a conversation with them they told me that their their Amazon there AWS bill is 87 gigabytes mm-hmm not that monthly that's 87 pages that's 87 gigabyte yeah so we get we bring this 87 gigabytes in and it's a story about what I consume out of Amazon it's not a story what my business utilizes to achieve its objectives so we're now entering into a world where we're trying to introduce those financial visit that financial visibility into how that spend can be mapped to what the business does so the finance group can look at a common notion of truth and the IT group can look at a combination of troop application owners can look at a common notion of truth and that's what is fin ops is providing if I got that right yeah absolutely and the eighty-seven gigabyte example is the exactly reason why it is fin option not just cloud financial management you can't have a person with a spreadsheet looking at that and trying to make decisions about it right it has to be automated its IT finances code it's got to be baked into the processes you know we we've seen organizations that have hundreds of millions of individual charges hitting them in a consumption based manner the other thing that's come in with the fin ops as a core tenant is we're now seeing a decentralization of accountability for that spend so if you look at the big cloud spenders out there maybe spending tens or hundreds mils a year some of them have thousands of cloud environments gone is the day of we have a centralized Group begins to say we're gonna turn this off turn this off we want to give each of those teams the ability to see there's just their portion of that bill in the right mapped way as you said and to be able to take actions on the back of that so that's changed and they you know you run it you maintain it you understand which shutdown what has sort of come back to the old centralized model is this notion and this is where procurements job is shifted to largely of we deal still want to centralize the rate reduction so engineers you go use less right essentially finance team procurement work together with the cloud vendors to get the best possible rates through reserved instances can be reduced discounts you know volume discounts negotiated rates whatever it is and they become sort of strategic sourcing just say you're gonna use whatever you're going to use and you're gonna watch that to make sure you're using the right amount will targets threshold we're gonna make sure we get the best rate and that's sort of the two sides of the coin well very importantly procurement has always been organized on episodic purchases where the whole point is to bring the price point down and now we're talking about a continuous services where you were literally you're literally basing your business on capabilities provided by a third party and that is a very very very different relation just-in-time purchasing right and it's and it's a new supply chain management process where you have so many SKU options and you are making these purchase decisions sometimes thousands a day and that impacts everything down the road excellent gr storm and co-founder of cloud ability talking about Finn ops and cloud abilities role in helping businesses map the cloud spend to their business activities for a better more optimal views of how they get what they need out of their cloud expenditures Jr thanks very much for being on the connects here and once again I'm Peter burrows and thanks for listening to this acute conversation until next time [Music] you