Links:

• Cloud FinOps: https://www.amazon.com/Cloud-FinOps-Collaborative-Real-Time-Management/dp/1492054623
• FinOps Foundation: https://www.Finops.org/
• AWS cost management blog: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cost-management/
• Mastering AWS Cost Optimization: https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-AWS-Cost-Optimization-operational/dp/965572803X

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.

Pete: Hello, and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I am Pete Cheslock.

Jesse: I’m Jesse DeRose.

Pete: Wow, we’re back again. And guess what? We have even more questions. I am… I am… I don’t even know. I have so many emotions right now that are conflicting between a pandemic and non-pandemic that I just—I’m just so happy. I’m just so happy that you listen, all of you out there, all you wonderful humans out there are listening. But more importantly, you are going into lastweekinaws.com/QA and you’re sending us some really great questions.

Jesse: Yeah.

Pete: And we’re going to answer some more questions today. We’re having so much fun with this, that we’re just going to keep the good times rolling. So, if you also want to keep these good times rolling, send us your questions, and we’ll just—yeah, we’ll just roll with it. Right, Jesse?

Jesse: Absolutely. We’re happy to answer more questions on air, happy to let you pick our brains.

Pete: All right. Well, we got a couple more questions. Let’s kick it off, Jesse.

Jesse: Yeah. So, the first question today is from Barry. Thank you, Barry. “New friend of the pod here.” Always happy to have friends of the pod. Although I do feel like that starts to get, like, Children of the Corn, kind of. I think we started that, and I also am excited about it, and also upset with myself for starting that.

Pete: That’s all right. Friend of the pod. Friend of the pod.

Jesse: “New friend of the pod here. I work in strategic sourcing and procurement and I was curious if there are any ways that you recommend to get up to speed with managing cloud spend. This is usually closely monitored by finance or different groups in product, but I can see a significant potential value for a sourcing professional to help, also.” And that’s from Barry, thank you, Barry.

Pete: Well, I’m struggling not to laugh. “This is usually closely monitored by finance or different groups in product.”

Jesse: Yeah…

Pete: But I mean, let’s be honest, it’s not monitored by anyone. It’s just running up a meter in a taxi going 100 miles an hour.

Jesse: Yeah, that’s the hardest part. I want everybody to be involved in the cloud cost management practice, but there’s that same idea of if it’s everyone’s responsibility, it’s no one’s responsibility. And so this usually ends up at a point where you’ve got the CFO walking over to the head of engineering saying, “Why did the spend go up?” And that’s never a good conversation to have.

Pete: No, never a good one. Well, Barry because you’re a friend of the pod, we will answer this question for you. And honestly, I think it’s a great question, which is, we actually have been working with a lot of larger enterprises and these enterprises still have their classic sourcing and procurement teams. That’s not an expertise that is going away anytime soon, but like most teams within the company that are adopting cloud, it’s obviously going to evolve as people are moving away from, kind of, capital intensive purchases and into, honestly, more complex, multi-year OpEx style purchases, with cloud services and all the different vendors that come with it. It’s going to just get a lot harder.

I mean, it’s probably already a lot harder for those types of teams. And so there’s a bunch of places I think that you can go that can help level up your skills around cloud spend. And I would say the first place that I personally got to dive in a little bit more—I mean, my history has been using Amazon cloud and being a person who cared about how much my company spent on it, but when you—joining Duckbill, you need to dive into other areas around the FinOps world. And the book, the O’Reilly book, Cloud FinOps is actually a really great resource.

Yeah, I think it’s really well written and there’s a lot of great chapters within there that you can kind of pick and choose based on what you’re most interested in learning about. If you’re trying to learn more about unit economics, or you’re trying to learn more about how to monitor and track things like that, it’s a great book to dive into, and becomes a really great reference that you can leverage as you’re trying to level up this expertise within yourself or your team.

Jesse: It’s a really, really great resource. The other thing to think about is any kind of collaborative social spaces where you can be with like-minded individuals who also care about cloud costs. Now, there’s a number of meetups that exist under the FinOps title that may be worth looking into. Obviously, we’re recording this during the pandemic so I don’t recommend doing those in person. But as you are able to, there may be opportunities for in-person meetups and smaller local groups focusing on cloud cost management strategies together. But also check out the FinOps Foundation. They have a Slack space that I would love to tell you more about, but unfortunately, we’re not allowed to join. So—

Pete: Yep.

Jesse: —I can’t really say more about it than that. I would hope that you’re allowed to join, but they have some strict guidelines. So, I mean, the worst that can happen is they say no; it’s definitely worth signing up.

Pete: Yeah, and they have to us. [laugh].

Jesse: Yeah.

Pete: I think when you get into the FinOps Foundation, you should angrily say that we should have more FinOps experts in here like the great Jesse DeRose should be a member of this one because right now, he’s just framed his rejection notice from there, and—

Jesse: Oh, yeah.

Pete: —while it looks beautiful on the wall, while I’m on a Zoom with him, I want more for you, Jesse.