Four insights you might have missed from the ‘AWS Savings in the Cloud’ event

A few months before the kickoff of theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Savings in the Cloud event, Amazon.com Inc. Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky stated that optimizations were ongoing in light of the company’s stock dipping.

In the midst of ongoing economic uncertainty, the company would look to optimize its cloud spend, Amazon noted. That subject — how to reduce costs around cloud — has been the top concern of companies these days, according to Amazon Web Services Inc. So how are companies optimizing their AWS cloud spend? And what’s the latest news in the space around how companies are achieving these goals?

Insights into those subjects were provided during the AWS Savings in the Cloud event by industry analysts John Furrier and Lisa Martin, hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. Furrier and Martin heard from various organizations about how they were optimizing their AWS cloud spend. (* Disclosure below.) 

Here are four key insights you may have missed:

1. The right foundation for FinOps is viewed as being crucial.

It is a simple but important question: Why is cloud financial management so critical for customers to achieve? It’s because customers are bringing more and more workloads to the cloud and maturing their practices in the cloud, according to Bina Khimani (pictured), director of AWS Insights at AWS.

“It is so very critical to set up the right foundation for FinOps in the cloud. Many of our enterprise customers are used to this quarterly budget or annual budgets, and they’re not used to this pay-as-you-go model,” Khimani told theCUBE during the event. “What happens is that if they don’t set the right FinOps foundations and the guardrails, then they end up worrying about bills.”

As a result, they don’t let all the builders and developers get access to the right innovative technology that cloud has to offer, according to Khimani. Because of that, the pace of innovation for customers will slow down.

“To be able to feel comfortable letting builders build without worrying about potentially exceeding their budget, setting the right foundation, right guardrails, right practices, right tools and right business processes will really get them started in the right direction for the FinOps,” she said.

Security teams these days are setting most of the operations guardrails followed across an organization amid increasing cybersecurity threats. But as cloud financial management’s importance increases, responsibility will move to finance teams as they look to rein in costs, according to Khimani.

“FinOps is in the beginning cycle of that journey. I anticipate this cloud cost control [and] cloud cost optimization, with the FinOps practices, being at the forefront in few years where the entire organization will follow the guardrail,” she said. “But right now, setting the right foundation is critical, and understanding what is at stake is so important for our customers.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Bina Khimani, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Savings in the Cloud event:

2. Cloud financial management starts with a change in culture.

Cloud computing has excited many people with its potential and opportunity, whether that involves designing new capabilities, launching new technologies or breaking into new sectors. Optimizations may sometimes function like an afterthought when people are looking at their cloud bills and realize the cost associated with trying to invent and create new resource types and solutions, according to Rick Ochs, senior manager of cloud optimization at AWS, during an interview with theCUBE.

“That’s very powerful. But we still have to have responsibility with how we invent, and that’s not always easy to do,” he said. “If it’s not thought of in the original invention and creation of software and solutions, that follow-up can be very devastating or detrimental to your backlog.”

If one thinks about how much time an average engineering team spends on code cleanup and repository cleanup versus building new features, it’s not a fun thought, according to Ochs. That’s why it’s important for the culture to be changed.

“We have to change the culture of how we build things, how we manage and operate cloud environments and resources,” Ochs said. “We really have an opportunity to bake into how we build things, new responsibility, not just for the resources we spend, but for the planet, the impact on the world around us as we figure out how to use resources efficiently.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Rick Ochs:

3. Leading with cost optimization is a growing trend.

The biggest question for Amazon — how to reduce costs — is also now top of mind for Ethan Simmons, managing partner of Pinnacle Technology Partners Inc., which helps companies accelerate development in cloud environments.

“We were leading with a cost optimization story over the last couple of years, and it really sort of fell on deaf ears. It wasn’t a great conversation piece,” Simmons told theCUBE. “Starting last fall, we had more and more customers coming to us saying, ‘Hey, I remember when you guys were talking to us about how we can save some money in AWS. How do we do that?’”

The company’s clients are seeking cures for diseases, and their goals aren’t to spend a lot of time or money on IT or to dedicate their headspace toward worrying about it, according to Simmons. When it comes to optimization, most organizations can start off with some low-hanging fruit, with some easy areas around storage and right-sizing.

“But more advanced customers are starting to look at Reserved Instance savings,” he said. “There’s also RIs that can be applied to other AWS services. Really getting into all those opportunities for savings is key.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Ethan Simmons:

4. Commitment-based discounting is also seen as being critical.

So what else should FinOps teams be thinking about? If those companies are seeking to see their dollars go as far as possible, then they should view commitment-based discounts as an important part of that, according to Matt Gerow, manager of principal product management at Apptio Inc.

Automation has also been a key focus, as Apptio points to Cloudability Savings Automation as a way for cloud consumers to automate key FinOps processes and maximize cost efficiency.

“FinOps teams have a lot on their plate,” Gerow told theCUBE. “They’re asked to do a lot, they’re asked to coordinate and work across so many different application teams, and across geos, and across business units — having visibility into those organizations and what they’re doing and who’s spending what can be challenging.”

When it comes to other things businesses should keep in mind while they’re in the stage of developing their commitment management strategy, Gerow cited flexibility.

“Which I think is one of the most important aspects to plan around, because when you can be intentional about flexibility, that’s where you then have that sort of optionality,” he said. “Because as we’ve seen over the last several years, there are so many things that are unpredictable about today’s landscape.”

That applies to rate changes and how quickly organizations had to react to the pandemic, according to Gerow.

“Flexibility becomes so important. And you never want to sort of have your hands tied by yesterday’s decisions,” he added.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Matt Gerow:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Savings in the Cloud event, here’s our complete event video playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Savings in the Cloud event. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over the content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.) 

Photo: SiliconANGLE