tenacity cloud

SOMETIMES, YOU HAVE TO DO THINGS PROACTIVELY

In this episode, Nick and Jason discuss the challenges of managing aging infrastructure. They explain that abandoned or orphaned infrastructure can linger in an environment for a long time and often requires a proactive approach to detect and address the issue. They recommend considering the age of the infrastructure and proactively managing it to avoid having resources that are no longer in use.

WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY

NICK: INVENTORY IS THE FIRST THING TO DO

“Know what you have, inventory it, understand it, groom it, maybe that's a tool, maybe that's a project, maybe it's bringing in a third party to help you out. We've seen all of those examples, and then once you understand it, and you are now deciding to proactively manage it, you will now want to divide up your resources out there and understand kind of where they fit,”

Get to know our hosts in the links below:

• Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger

Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

IS THERE REALLY SOMETHING TO FEAR?

The IMF recently reported that the majority of countries are unlikely to enter into a recession. However, industry analysts are still predicting a shallow recession is possible. In line with this recent news, Nick and Jason share their thoughts on what this means for cloud spending and cost, and how this impacts budgeting for the year. The two also discuss how this relates to people’s current sentiments on the economy, labor’s current status, and how tech companies are preparing for the coming shallow recession. Find out more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization.

WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY

NICK: THOUGHTS ON ECONOMIC SENTIMENT

“The sentiment is still there. And it takes a while to change. It takes a while to change sentiment around the economy. Everyone's looking for the positive signals and the uptick, but everybody's in conservative mode.”

JASON: OVERHIRING IS THE TRUE REASON FOR LAY-OFFS

“I think a lot of the tech layoffs were due to the over-hiring during the pandemic, and it just and obviously preparing for what could come in 2023.”

NICK: KEEP CONTROL OF YOUR CLOUD SPEND

“It's still important to keep control over those cloud spending, I think we got a long road out of the downturn still, in certainly with labor shift, it becomes more important than ever to kind of have your arms around what's going on inside of your organization, whether that's building a fin ops discipline internally, or whether that's, you know, getting help from an external source, or that's having the right tools in place in order to have that visibility.”

Get to know our hosts in the links below:

• Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger

Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

IT’S TIME TO SAVE UP ON CLOUD COSTS. 

HOW? BY CUTTING OFF SOME TIME.

Nick and Jason talk about savings in today’s episode. The duo introduces a no-cost, no-commitment, simple yet effective way to save by implementing scheduled instances. Nick and Jason explain and give us context on what schedule instances are and cite examples of how it applies to your cost. Learn more about this in the latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization.

WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY

NICK: THE SAVINGS YOU GET WITH SCHEDULED INSTANCES

“Just take this simple example of 10 hours a day, five days a week, so I got about 50 hours where there's an activity against that environment that's under 30% utilization. For the given weeks, I've got 70% of the time, I've got resources that are running that are costing me money, compute resources that are costing me money that I don't need to have running. So we're talking about immediately, sort of just round numbers 70% savings without any commitment, and the best savings vehicle I can get from a commitment-based strategy.”

Get to know our hosts in the links below:

• Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger

Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

JANUARY ENDS, AND YOU’RE OFF BUDGET. WHAT DO YOU DO?

Nick and Jason are back and in this episode, they talk about one of the common budget issues, which is being off-budget right at the end of the first month of the year. The two discuss how you can explain this variance and how you can manage your cost to avoid this. They will also tap into the concept of technical debt, and how it starts, and how it can be managed. Learn more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization.

Get to know our hosts in the links below:

• Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger

Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

OPTIMIZE YOUR CLOUD SPENDING WITH THE KICK-OFF EPISODES OF THIS SEASON!

Today, we take a look back on the best moments when we kicked off the season with a bang.  Tune in and listen to the best moments of Nick and Jason as they talk about the basics and the sure-fire strategies in Cloud management. Find out more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization.

If you missed these episodes, make sure to tune in to further optimize your Cloud spending experience: 

• Episode 1- WELCOME TO THE CLOUD: The Cloud Cost Optimization Podcast Kick-Off
• Episode 2 - Visibility Reduces Cloud Spend During a Recession
• Episode 3 - 3 Strategies to Maximize Cloud Cost Savings
• Episode 4 - Clean Up Your Infrastructure to Cut Idle Costs
• Episode 5 - Mitigate Risk with Committed Use and Committed Spend Programs

Get to know our hosts in the links below:

• Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger

Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

IS YOUR CLOUD SPEND FAT, BLOATED, AND OVER THE TOP?

Today, Nick and Jason will be talking about health, not the physical one, but the overall health of your organization’s cloud spending. The two discuss the importance of keeping your cloud health checked by relating it to the human body’s health and the concept of diet. Learn more about how you can create a lifestyle change for your cloud spending in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization.

WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY

JASON: IMPORTANCE OF FINANCIAL REPORTING TO OPERATIONS

“Be realistic about it and make sure that whatever is put in place doesn't make it so people will end up not following whatever processes or recommendations or things that you put in place, they have to be realistic, and they cannot put huge roadblocks in the way of your team completing their job functions.”

JASON: IMPORTANCE OF FINANCIAL REPORTING TO OPERATIONS

“Part of the lifestyle change in cloud spending is really understanding how that environment is broken up and getting down to something that a person, a human being with their head can actually wrap their, you know, their mind around it and think about the problem.”

Get to know our hosts in the links below:

• Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger

Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

HOW DO YOU KEEP TRACK OF YOUR SPENDING?

Following the theme of starting your FinOps year right, Nick and Jason’s conversation today is about operational-level financial reporting and how it can help manage and optimize cloud spending. Jason mentions that forecasting and trending are important to understand where one's spending is currently at and where it is projected to go. He also stresses the importance of tracking spending in the context of the business, so that potential budget issues can be caught and addressed early on. Find out more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization.

WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY

JASON: IMPORTANCE OF FINANCIAL REPORTING TO OPERATIONS

“It's one thing to know that your spend is going to exceed your budget, or what you thought it was going to be. But it's another thing to know why, you know, you need to be at least armed with the data at hand to be able to lead you down the path of where that potentially is.”

Get to know our hosts in the links below:

• Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger

Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

WE HAVE ANOTHER MYTH TO BUST TODAY

Jason and Nick discuss the myth that provider tools are enough to manage cloud costs. They argue that this is not the case and that organizations need to invest in their own tools and processes to optimize their use of cloud resources. Find out more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization.

WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY

NICK: TOOLS ARE ONLY THERE FOR INSIGHT

“It's there because it's necessary for them to provide a tool to give insight to their users, but it's not there to actually drive outcomes on behalf of the user.”

Get to know our hosts in the links below:

• Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger

Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

HAVE YOU BEEN IMPLEMENTING YOUR FINOPS WELL?

Nick and Jason discuss financial management and its three main components - budget, cash flow, and risk. They also talk about how organizations implementing their FinOps practices or their own cloud center of excellence should be thinking about these primary areas, and how the tooling can help them out. Learn more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization.

WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY

JASON: WHAT TO DO WHEN LEVERAGING THE CLOUD

“If you're going to leverage the cloud, and allow your organization to leverage the benefits of the flexibility, and the elasticity and all of those things, then you just have to, you have to get comfortable with the fact that because these costs can vary greatly, as you mentioned, variable costs, you have to get comfortable with knowing that budget, cash flow, and risk are going to have to be managed differently than they were when you could touch the servers.”

JASON: STOP SPENDING ON WHAT YOU DON’T NEED

“Stop spending money, cash on things you don't need, right? I mean, cash flow, and I know maybe this isn't the same necessarily the same thing with a capital environment, but if your costs aren't changing, as you add more customers, that means you're overpaying today.”

Get to know our hosts in the links below:

• Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger

Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

IT’S TIME TO MEET ONE OF THE BIG BOYS AT TENACITY

Nick and Jason interview Andrew Lake, the Chief Engineer and one of the Co-Founders of Tenacity AI. Andrew talks about his role in the company and what he does on a day-to-day basis. Andrew and the gang also touch on some cool topics such as “Chase The Fun” Principle and how Tenacity.ai differs from the rest of the pack. These and many more, in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization.

WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY

ANDREW: THE “CHASE THE FUN” PRINCIPLE

“One of the things there that's really interesting is called chase the fun. And it's been a principle that has been becoming more important over like the last 10 years, where if something doesn't work, don't continue iterating on it, take that idea apart and try to make something new with it.”

ANDREW: HOW TENACITY DIFFERS FROM THE REST

“With Tenacity AI, one thing that we're specifically doing is, and we have multiple pillars of the app, where you get to choose what you want to fix and accomplish. But at its core, every single piece of the app integrates with every other piece. So doing something on one area will yield savings in our other area.”

Connect with Andrew and find out more of his work:

• Andrew Lake | Twitter

Get to know our hosts in the links below:

• Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger

Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

SMALL, MEDIUM, LARGE/GRANDE/VENTI, WHATEVER

There’s a myth that FinOps is only for organizations with the largest cloud budgets, which is not true. There are a whole host of problems that need to be managed, regardless of budget and business size. FinOps can help solve these problems by providing a framework for managing costs, optimizing resources, and improving efficiencies. Nick and Jason will be discussing these and helping you understand more why tracking costs should be done in any business or organization’s size, in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization.

WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY

JASON: TECHNOLOGY IS NOW A LINE ITEM IN EVERY BUSINESS’ COSTS

“Technology has become a line item on everyone's budget. I mean, unless you're, you know, selling cigarettes and booze at the corner store, or haircuts or something like that. Technology has become a major part of any business.”

JASON: WHEN YOU NEED TO START TRACKING COSTS

“I think if it's growing at a rapid pace and if it's significant enough in nature that somebody is telling you we need to examine and look at the costs. That's when you should start, and that's going to depend on the size of the organization.”

Get to know our hosts in the links below:

• Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger

Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

SHARING IS CARING, BUT SOMETIMES IT’S PROBLEMATIC

The problem of shared costs is one that has been around for a long time and is especially difficult when it comes to cloud spending and variable spending. In the past, we have not managed shared costs very well. So today, Nick and Jason will be giving us a deeper understanding of this matter and explaining how we solve such problems, only here, in the latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization.

WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY

NICK: THE POWER OF VISIBILITY

“The power in the cloud is that you can actually see all those underlying costs. Maybe with the, you know, with the exception of labor, you still got to figure out your labor costs. But when it comes down to infrastructure costs, you know, I can actually see my data costs and my storage costs, and my you know, all of it I can understand directly and exactly how much those costs are.”

JASON: HOW TO START ALLOCATING

“Start with making sure everything is allocated appropriately before you work on shared allocation.”

Get to know our hosts in the links below:

• Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger

Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

CHANGE IS COMING, AND IT’S UNSTOPPABLE

In this conversation, Nick and Jason discuss how professional services consulting and AWS Partners can bring a FinOps service to market. They touch on how this has been a topic in several recent conversations and is starting to gain more traction.

In the past, organizations transitioning to the public cloud would rely on a managed service to handle security and other IT needs. However, service providers are now expected to do much more, including managing costs and providing data on where money is being spent. Learn more about the future of cloud hosting in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization.

WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY

NICK: Be sticky enough by delivering savings consistently

“If you can be the organization that consistently delivers savings, and the ability to keep their cost under control, that's a really sticky way to stay with your customer.”

NICK: The reality of real-time monitoring today and moving forward

“The reality is the need for a person to monitor an environment to make a phone call in the middle of the night is going away. That is automatable.”

Get to know our hosts in the links below:

Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger

Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

THIS MYTH IS BUSTED!

In today's episode, Nick and Jason dispel the myth that FinOps is only about saving companies money. FinOps is actually about so much more than that, it's about optimizing resources, improving efficiencies, and ensuring that an organization's finances are in good shape. While saving money is certainly a goal of FinOps, it's not the only one, and it's important to understand all of the different facets of FinOps in order to properly implement it within your organization. Find out more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization.

WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY

JASON: How FinOps help the finance teams

“It was hard for finance teams to keep up with the pace of change that was happening, and then I think FinOps is a way to help those finance teams along the way and give them the tools and the processes necessary to be able to adapt to that change.”

JASON: FinOps is not just for “savings”

“Only one leg of the FinOps operating model is optimal savings, optimization in the terms of and then even though that savings is typically only even a facet of that, but if you look at the operating model, it's about being able to predict and understand when these things changes before they happen. So that you can react and save that budget before it becomes an issue.”

Get to know our hosts in the links below:

Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger

Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

CONTEXT IS IMPORTANT IN UNDERSTANDING A LOT OF THINGS, BUT HOW DO WE UNDERSTAND CONTEXT ITSELF?

Nick and Jason talk about the importance of context in understanding cloud management and consumption. They discuss how context allows you to apply specific business data to your review of cloud spend or utilization. Without context, data can be viewed in a generic way that may not be helpful to your specific business needs. Learn more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization.

WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY

JASON: Initial thoughts on what context is

“I think, to probably make it as short as possible, it's to apply the things that are specific to my business to the data that I'm reviewing. In the cloud, it's typically spend, utilization, or optimization, based on maybe products or business groups or teams, which could be many different things. So it's viewing that data within the context that matters to me and not some generic way.

NICK: Context is very important in trying to solve a problem

“I have a bunch of alert noise in my slack channel or in my support system, what do I do with it? And we hear this one all the time, providing context around why the alert was actually generated, and what sorts of issues exist in the environment that could lead to it is really critical for an engineer trying to solve the problem.”

Get to know our hosts in the links below:

Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger

Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

AND NOW WE’RE LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD

For years, Microsoft Azure’s only weak point against AWS is the lack of a savings plan that enterprise clients can subscribe to, but in the recent news, they have announced the release of their Azure Savings Plans. Nick and Jason will be diving into this really exciting update for all cloud computing users out there and will be sharing their thoughts, so tune in and find out more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization.

WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY

JASON: Azure Savings Plans makes it easier to save money

“I think they're making it easier to save money, I think historically, you know, this was a differentiator for AWS. Whereas, you know, Azure would come in and, you know, get you into some sort of Enterprise Agreement, which, you know, the enterprise agreements require a level of commitment that's a little bit different than what you would expect, you know, if you want to just go, I want to go spin some stuff up, right, get stuff working, I'm an organization like that.”

NICK: Microsoft’s challenges before the Azure Savings Plans

“I think Microsoft's been battling their legacy customer licensing model for quite a while, and AWS didn't have that problem. From the start, they were able to adopt an enterprise discount program that made sense in the context of offering public cloud service rights that were consumption-based.”

Get to know our hosts in the links below:

Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger

Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

THAT’S HOW IT COSTS? WHAT A SHOCKER

Welcome to another episode with Nick and Jason, as they talk about applying a finance discipline when doing a cloud migration. The two discuss the importance of taking time to set up principles and governance for a cloud environment before migrating, as it can save a lot of time and effort in the long run.

WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY

JASON: What happens if you layoff half your force

“As a technology person. I want to get fin ops discipline in place so that I don't spook my CFO, and as a CFO, I want to get that fin ops methodology in place so I can get reporting right away during the migration, so I can see early problems immediately…”

JASON: What happens if you layoff half your force

“True cost by resource, or, you know, down to the individual widget perspective, if you're internal, that's always been really difficult. It's not in the cloud, and so sometimes when we're doing a migration, we see the costs of the cloud, and it's either we go ‘ ‘oh, my gosh, that's how much that one resource costs me?’ ’ Well, it's not that that resource is more expensive. It's just now you know, you had no idea what that resource costs you when it was sitting on a server unless it was unless you bought individual servers for everything.”

Get to know our hosts in the links below:

Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger

Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

LAYOFFS HERE, LAYOFFS THERE, HAPPENING EVERYWHERE

It’s alarming to see that a lot of organizations in the tech space right now are cutting down their people in massive numbers. Our hosts Nick Lumsden and Jason Yaeger will be focusing today on all things layoff, what’s happening now, what are its common causes, and its impact on downsizing organizations. Tune in to get yourself informed in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization.

HIGHLIGHTS

JASON: What happens if you layoff half your force

“If you lay off half of your staff, and then ask the other half of your staff to work twice as hard, you're probably going to churn out another, I don't know 15-20%, because there will be people that go ‘ ‘no, I'm not I'm not doing that.”

JASON: Keep as many people as you can

“I don't know if this would have this works at these really large organizations, but it's always better when you try to preserve as many jobs as you can, realistically, and so asking people to take pay cuts, and minimizing the percentage of staff that you actually have to turn, in my opinion, is probably a better way to handle these situations.”

JASON: Impact of layoffs on cloud spend

“The less people you have, the less time you have to do all of the things that all of the things outside just keeping the lights on and running, you know, which include making, you know, they include all of your efforts around cloud spend optimization.”

Get to know our hosts in the links below:

Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger

Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com