Links:

• Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Management:https://www.duckbillgroup.com/resources/unconventional-guide-to-aws-cost-management/
• Building Successful Communities of Practice: https://www.amazon.com/Building-Successful-Communities-Practice-Webber/dp/095749193X

Transcript

Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.

Corey: Ever notice how security tends to be one of those things that isn’t particularly welcoming to folks who don’t already have the word ‘security’ somewhere in their job title? Introducing our fix to that, Meanwhile in Security. To sign up for the newsletter or to find the podcast, visit meanwhileinsecurity.com. Coming soon, from The Duckbill Group.

Pete: Hello, and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief. This is Fridays From The Field, hashtag-triple-F. I am Pete Cheslock.

Jesse: I’m Jesse DeRose, and I have a question: is it hashtag-triple-F, or is it hashtag-F-F-F? Are we spelling out triple F in this hashtag, or is it just literally three Fs?

Pete: The three Fs is a little triggering for me for me, with my high school grades, so let’s just stick to—

Jesse: [laugh].

Pete: —hashtag—

Jesse: —triple-F.

Pete: Triple-F, I think, just has a better flow to it. But that’s a good—it’s a good point in our continued effort to make triple-F—hashtag-triple-f a thing.

Jesse: All of our audience members were really concerned about that one because they’ve been trying to get us trending on Twitter, but they weren’t really sure, was it triple-F. Or was it F-F-F, or was it something in between?

Pete: Exactly. It’s just bad. But we’re going to keep trying at it, and we’ll see what happens. Well, anyway, we are back again to continue our Unconventional Guide to Cost Optimization on AWS with another listener question. And unlike the last time we did listener questions, this question actually came in during our Unofficial Guide, which means we actually have one listener this series. Because we can’t count the last one that was from way before. So, to this one listener, thank you, thank you for listening.

Jesse: Just that one listener. Just you. Thank you.

Pete: Yeah, just you. Everyone else, no, we’re not going to, we’re not going to thank you at all. But if you want to be our second listener, go to lastweekinaws.com/QA and give us a question. What do you want to know more about? 

What can we dive in a lot deeper on any of these topics we’re talking about? It’s complex stuff, and we’re all learning this, we’re all trying to figure out what works best. And not every company is the same. And that’s what I actually love about this question because this question actually came in from someone who didn’t put their name—but that’s okay—they work in the public sector, which is why they didn’t put their name in there. And they had a pretty interesting question. So, Jesse, maybe you can read this off for us and let us know what we’re going to be answering today.

Jesse: Yeah. This question is, “We’re an Azure shop, partly cloud on the way, however, we’re also becoming an Oracle OCI shop”—I’m so sorry—“And an AWS shop, and well, it’s public sector, so one-of-everything cloud provider. How do we convince management that cloud is a different thing than on-prem and needs some kind of cloud team? I dislike the phrase DevOps as a job title, but we need something to change the current model where nearly all of this work is outsourced to a quote-unquote, ‘managed service provider?’” Oof. I have so many feelings.

Pete: I would imagine. I mean, I was immediately—I felt called out, you know? Just @ me next time, public sector coward with the DevOps-as-a-job-title phrase.

Jesse: Yeah.

Pete: They often say that only a DevOps tool, I guess—wait, what’s the term? It’s like, “A DevOps tool would give themselves a DevOps as a job title.” Of course, that’s often said about me because I gave myself a title called ‘DevOps Director’ or ‘Director of DevOps.’ Either way, you phrase it, it’s all pretty bad.

Jesse: Yeah. So, there’s a couple of different questions in this, and we’re going to dive into each of them individually. But really, really quick, I want to talk about multi-cloud because that’s kind of the underlying discussion here; something that is not necessarily the focus, but let’s talk about multi-cloud. Why is multi-cloud a thing? Why is it an important thing that you should be thinking about?

Pete: Multi-cloud is an interesting topic that could go a lot of different ways. And I call multi-cloud a lot different than hybrid cloud. I think most people are probably doing hybrid cloud, meaning you’ve got some data centers—because it takes you years and years and years to move off of those—and you’ve also got cloud workloads, or maybe you’ve got some data centers and you’re bursting up to cloud workloads; that’s pretty cool, too. I think of multi-cloud as individual applications being deployed to the cloud vendor and cloud provider, based on maybe price or features or things like that. And honestly there, a lot of the cloud providers are getting closer in feature sets. 

But for example, I might want to use Lambda, but I may not want to suffer high cost of data transfer. So, can I build an application that leverages Lambda, but maybe leverages the extremely low cost of Oracle’s OCI data transfer? That made the news when Zoom signed that big contract with Oracle, it was largely driven by network data transfer. So, there are some reasons why multi-cloud might be a thing.

Jesse: And we’ve definitely seen multi-cloud in practice with some of our clients. But I also want to call out the caveat that the clients that were doing this were very mature in their cloud cost practices. So, kudos to those clients because they’re doing amazing, amazing work. But it takes time to really build up a mature, scalable, optimized, multi-cloud strategy.

Pete: Yeah, exactly. And I think the biggest challenge is that we see is, on the one hand, if you say to yourself, “I’m going multi-cloud, therefore, I will only consume core primitives like compute, block, store, object store, networking,” even though all the providers will provide you those services, obviously, the APIs to interact with them will be wildly different, but most importantly, the authentication models are going to be wildly different, how you authenticat...