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Today, we are going to start with a series of interviews that we are going to do to know more about our speakers of the summit.
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If you don't know about the summit, you maybe are in a cave or something, because I've been doing a lot of promotion. Uh, but we'll li-leave the link in the description below.
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Basically, we are doing a two-day, uh, six hours each day event, where we are going to share all the content from the community, and we're going to have, like, a lot of, uh, speakers with wonderful talks, and you're going to be learn a lot of practical FinOps.
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That's kind of the, the theme of everything, is practical FinOps to apply for AI, for data, for cloud, as always. And, uh, we are going to be doing interviews with the people that are going to present in, in the summit.
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And the first interview that we have today is Etienne. Etienne, how are you? Thank you so much for having me, Victor. Doing great, yeah. It's great.
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Today, we have, like, a football theme kind of, uh, interview, which is, which is super nice. [laughs] And, you know, uh, maybe the, the first question that I'm going to ask you is about your, your talk.
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So can you tell us a bit more about what you're going to be talking in, in the summit, and why do you think it's, it's relevant? Yeah, yeah. Thank you very much. No, th-thanks for the opportunity, first of all.
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So, uh, I created a, an open source project called Cost Goblin. Uh, Cost Goblin is a desktop application you can install on Linux, uh, Mac, Windows.
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And the idea is to, um, totally remove the infrastructure from the equation to be able to analyze your FinOps data. Uh, so I started with, uh, the custom usage report, uh, as everybody, by, you know, um,
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like deploying a lot of infrastructure in AWS, QuickSight, Athena, all of this to be able to analyze your custom usage reports, building some dashboard.
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Then I also built some plugin on backstage to be able to analyze this cost.
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And all of this is nice, but maybe some people want to be able to quickly get started and start to deep dive into the AWS finance report without having to do all of this.
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And these days, we have quite powerful machine really, with a lot of gigabytes and so on.
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So for most people, you can actually have all of this on your laptop running extremely fast and extremely, uh, responsive, and this is what Cos- Cost Goblin is all about. So you have this application on your laptop.
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You download your custom usage report to your machine, and then you have DuckDB on, on top of it, and you have a very nice experience looking at your financial without any third parties.
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And you can even do that offline if you want. You are in the plane, the train, wherever you want, and you can start to understand where the money goes without a third party provider. That's, that's cool.
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I've, I've, you know, read about the, the project and, and you, you talk... You present it to, to me, uh, briefly about what it is, and it was super interesting. And what was the motivation behind it?
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Can you tell us a bit more about, like, why you decided to, to start this, this project? Yeah. So, um, in my, uh, previous company, so now I work for HelloFresh, but before that, I was at Solaris.
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Um, and I was a bit having the unofficial, uh, duty to try to keep the bill under control. Mm-hmm.
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And so, uh, and so, yeah, I started to look a bit into the custom usage report, deploy some dashboard and, um, and then they were in QuickSight.
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And so QuickSight is a great tool, but there is a cost per seat to access as a, to access the dashboard.
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And so this is a bit antinomic because you are trying to control your AWS spending, and as soon as people will start to access your dashboard, they will increase the bill.
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And initially, a lot of people want to see your dashboard, but very quickly, very few people are regularly looking at them, but you still increase the cost.
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So I was not super happy with this approach because I wanted as many people as possible to be able to look at the bill.
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And so I pivoted from this, uh, to build some, um, backstage plugin so any user could come to backstage and see the bill relevant to them and to their ownership, and that really worked well, in my opinion.
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Um, and then I wanted to open source all of this. I was like, "Okay, this is very cool. There is a lot of company on backstage. There is a lot of company with an AWS bill, so we should be able to match things here."
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And so I asked for the permission to open source things, and, uh, sadly the process was not really in place at Solaris, uh, about open sourcing. And so that was a bit of a dead end,
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and I was a bit frustrated, and I'm not very patient when I'm frustrated. And these days, [laughs] and these days with AI, uh, it's very easy to restart something from scratch if you have a nice idea.
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And so I, I had like, you know, polished this idea for, like, four years. I knew exactly the type of feature I wanted.
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I knew exactly what was the cost in this report, where was the, where was the, the, the, the, um, the sharp edges to avoid. And frankly, the prototype was done in a week.
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And, uh, since then I've been keep building on it.
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Uh, I can maybe make some announcement to you a bit, uh, a bit now because you, even you don't know about this, but, uh, I have some, some news to share with you because we are going to move away from the, uh, Cure, uh, from the Cure format.
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Um, but, uh, maybe, uh, on this a bit later. But the motivation was really to make it accessible to as many people as, as possible.
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And then when I decided to start from scratch, as said, I was like, "But why do we even have some server running, uh, remote to display this data to the user?
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Let, let's totally, let's totally turn the table and, and make it on the laptop." And, and I really like it. It's like it's extremely, extreme- extremely snappy experience. It's, it's very nice.
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No, I-it's like, uh, I think that's getting a bit old school, uh, like being, uh, having things in your laptop or in your, you know, in your local, uh, in your local disk.
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So it's, it's, it's amazing that you've been able to do that given that, you know, everything that we work on is, you know, pull this data from whatever, and then it takes a lot of time.
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And, you know, it's, it's super, super useful. And, you know, one, one question that I wanted to ask you is like, okay, how... what, what's been your, your journey till that? Because, you know, you...
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To make a break like, like the Cost Goblin, uh, that you made, it takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, and you mentioned too, like backstage, which I know from my, from my background on the DevOps and, and the platform side.
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So can you tell us something more about, you know, your journey till Cost Goblin happened? [laughs] Okay. Do you want the full picture? So, um- Yeah, yeah. For sure... first of all, I'm French. Uh- [laughs]...
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uh, everybody knows already since- Yeah, I think everyone can, uh, can get that. [laughs] That's the first. The second, I... But that's fine. So there is nothing I can do about my accent. Uh, some people say it's cute.
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Some people say it's annoying. You will have to decide. Um, but so, um, yeah, so born and raised in France. Um, at the end of, um, high school, I did Epitech. It's, uh, it's a software engineering school in five years.
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Super grateful about that. Then I joined SFR. SFR is a cellphone network provider.
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Um, and then I started to see what, what it is to deploy application not, not just running on your, on your computer, but running for millions of people.
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Uh, super thankful about the architect I had back then because they really taught me the things. Uh, and then I joined Solaris as a backend engineer. So I was for two years working on the backend product of Solaris.
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So Solaris is a bit of a weird bank. We don't have customer like you and me. We offer a bank via an API, so other company can then create their banking application on top of us.
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And so I was part of the digital banking, um, application, and, um, and back then, um, I was not super happy about the stability of the product.
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So I started to shift a bit away from the focus of the team to build dashboards and build, uh, telemetry and observability and start to do some load test.
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And basically, my product owner was not super happy because I was not working for him anymore. I was working in my little own world. But other people in the company were pretty happy.
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Uh, and so, um, one day the CTO came to my desk and literally say, "Étienne, you have to pack your shit." And I'm like, "What?" He say, "Yeah, you have to pack your shit. You are going to the SRE team."
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And I was like, "Okay, let me Google what's an SRE," because I had no idea. And so I Googled what was an SRE, and I was like, "Okay, that's cool. I'm an SRE now." And so the next day I was part of the SRE team.
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It was a, it was a playing field. Um, we were just starting the SRE at, at Solaris.
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And so yeah, it's a bit outside of the, of the, of the topic of this call, but basically, uh, then it was about doing what I was doing at the scale of a team for full organization.
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Um, how do you deploy SLO across an entire org, across many teams? How do you support people to, yeah, bring the success rate up without disturbing the business too much?
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And, uh, and then, uh, someone came to me and say, "Hey, we are spending a bit too much money on AWS. Can we do something about it?"
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And, uh, and then it was, you know, building dashboard, but not anymore about success rate and response time and latency, but about where is the money going.
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Starting to look into AWS tagging, starting to look into how you can distribute cost following ownership, all of the pleasure about broken ownership, about, you know, tag quality, about teams that be...
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are renamed by HR because they say this team should not be named that, but that, and then instantly [laughs] all of your tooling goes, goes through the window. Uh, but I mean, yeah, we all know about this. So, um, yeah.
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And that's, that's a super in-interesting thing because I, I feel like unless you are very into the, you know, the hands-on topic or you've been working on that, you are not...
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or it's not super aware for people that, uh, the SRE part, so like the telemetry, the observability, how much it plays a role within FinOps, like within actual- So it's connected. It's so connected. Yeah.
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Because if you start to rightsize something and then the product, like, collapse, you haven't, you haven't earned anything, right?
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So you need to be able to kind of gauge, okay, what is the risk/reward of what I'm, what I'm pushing people to do?
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And, and you also have to understand that, hey, this product, maybe it's not super well rightsized, but it's actually a critical product.
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So it's normal for this product to not be rightsized because if we have a spike of traffic on this, on this product, and now we have a, we have a SEV 1 incident, I mean, you will not be rightsizing much more things after that, you know?
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So, um, yeah. No, especially with, uh, like with things like that, you know, with, um, disasters, uh, and disaster recovery and, and all of that, and all the SLA, uh, complaints.
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Like, especially if you have like a, a service that needs to be up, uh, has an SLA, uh, agreement with, with your client, that will probably cost the business a lot of money if you, uh, you know, don't fulfill that agreement.
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Mm-hmm.
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And, and also it's because c- like as, as we've seen in the updates and everything and, and examples from, like, from the pure AWS team, like how relevant is CloudWatch to do FinOps applications and how much information, like under the hood and for real time, especially for real time kind of FinOps or real time or that takes or notice compared to, you know, core
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or things like that that tend to have like a more delayed, um, ecosystem.
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And that's a lot of telemetry, which to be honest, I admire all the people that are the case to telemetry because I, uh, you know, in my old times I started to play that role and I was like, "That's...
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This is not for me." Like, I don't know how people can start watching to, to the Prometheus data and understand anything or, uh, do the queries for Grafana. And I was like, "Dude, I don't understand anything."
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[laughs] You know, there is a g- I have a good news for you. Today, you don't have to do this yourself. You can just prompt an AI to say, "Hey, I want a dashboard-" Yeah...
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"that says this," and it will produce a very nice dashboard to you. So maybe you should get back to it Yeah. No, I don't think so. But [laughs] Uh, it was like I, like, uh, unless you've seen it, like the...
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When you see like all these Grafana dashboards that look super nice, and they are super clear, just to put an example. Or, and then you see the queries behind it, and it's like before AI- Yeah...
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you had to make that at hand or for example, like- Yeah... and the Prometheus queries and like the, the tracking. I was like, "You, you, you, you must be crazy for that."
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But, you know, uh, there has to be someone for, for each role in the world. So it's, it's great.
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And it's great to see, like, how d- that role has, well, continued to work on, but also people that are being helpful on, on other side. And
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maybe to, to continue, it's like, uh, what are, you know, from, from your side, what are the, the recommendations that you have for people to, you know, get the most out of the, out of your talk, and also to, to, for attending these summits and everything?
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Like, how are your, your learning process to become, like... Because you are being very self-taught from, from what you said.
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So what are your tips on learning more about FinOps and, and how you can, you know, how would you encourage people to, to learn more? Okay, that's a tough one.
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Uh- [laughs] I think, I think for some companies that are maybe going to attend and be at the stage zero, it can be a bit like, you know, looking at a very, very tall mountain and be like, "Wow, I'm not sure where to start."
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You know? Let's imagine you don't have any tags. Like you, like you are basically on, on a playing field, and you, you cannot understand anything of what's going on.
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Maybe sadly, you decided to have everything into one AWS account, and you are like, "Oh my God." Basically, all of the things that we are going to talk about, people will be like, "It doesn't apply to me," right? Um,
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like I will say try to start very, very simple. Mm-hmm. And try to... The very simple you start with, try to enforce it somehow.
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So for example, for the company that may be using Terraform, let's imagine you are like starting from a very plain field, but you took- Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no... a good decision to be on Terraform, you know?
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It's, it's, it's a lot of people, so- Yeah. Yeah... you, you probably need to- So you are actually, you are actually not on a playing field.
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You are already starting with a very big header, and you can already start to apply some very strict rules step by step to enforce- Mm-hmm... some tags on your CI.
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And so all of the resources that can be tagged, there is actually some ways, uh, using Terraform and CI to identify resources that a- don't have tag and should have tags.
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And maybe you can start to crank up a bit the rules on this, so your engineering team can over time start to tag things and apply your tagging strategy.
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And it will already give you a lot of, a lot of visibility on where is the money going.
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If you are on a multi-account strategy and you don't have any tags, you als- already have a big headroom because you can define tags on an account level that you can then fall back on your resources if they don't have tags themselves.
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So let's imagine you are super lazy. You have like 10 different AWS account with your environments and your different maybe domains.
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You can already tag your AWS account, and you al- already have some tagging apply on all of your resources under, and it will already help you to better understand what is going on.
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So what I want people to go out after my talk is like, A, you don't need super crazy tooling. You can just download this, enable your, enable your Focus 1.2, uh, report, and, uh, and get started.
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And then start to click around, and, um, start to use the MCP server provided inside of Cost Goblin to talk with your LLM about your AWS cost, and, and just get, get started.
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And then, and over time in- increase your, your, your tagging strategy. Um, and it's a journey. It's not a sprint. It's very, it's very a long marathon. It's like a never ending marathon actually.
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Uh, and you should not disturb your entire business, uh, running this marathon. Uh, but ideally everyone in the business should feel, uh, part of this marathon. And, and sorry, I...
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Now it's a bit lengthy, my answer, but I think we need to shift left the, the focus. Like basically FinOps in a lot of company is the deal of the CTO, you know, the CFO, finance people.
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The, the shift need to focus to the desk of the engineers because they are the one incurring this cost. They are the one making the decision about our database size.
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They are the one deciding, deciding if we go, I don't know, multi-region or not, if we will use Athena or a classic LDS database.
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All of these decision have cost, and there is some good reason to make this decision, and there is some bad reasons. And if you don't see the bill, if you don't think about the bill when you make this decision,
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you are not making the decision with all of the information you should. Yeah. No, that's, that's a very good advice.
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And I think what you mentioned is that it, it's an ongoing process, and, uh, uh, up until you are super advanced, you can always in...
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Like you will have new business that you need to onboard, and you need to, uh, put the systems in place to make that businesses, you know, uh, work with the systems for tracking the, the cost.
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And we have a full, uh, attack course thing, uh, that we, we created with, with Alfonso.
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And, and it was like super in-depth with, uh, rules for, like if you think about all the rules that you can have for Kubernetes, all the rules that you can have for the CI/CD, uh, with Terraform, with Azure.
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If it's on Azure, like if you do it with power, with the scripting, with... There is a lot of things to, to do.
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And especially like when you move to the world to, to Kubernetes, then it complex like even more, uh, because you have the shared cost and, and everything. So a lot of work to do, and [laughs]
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definitely start from, from the beginning. I have to, I have to be honest, Kubernetes is a thing still on my roadmap for, for Cost Goblin. I'm looking for a nice data set.
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Um, actually, I just arrived at EloFresh, and so I will have the n- nice data set. But I, I'm still on my onboarding, so I, I haven't had the time to, to, uh, to, to work on this, uh, for Cost Goblin d- yet.
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But, uh, no, uh, the, the support of Kubernetes is something I w- I really want to, to improve on, on Cost Goblin. It's still a bit Inexistent. [laughs] So it's, it's a tough one to- Yeah... to add support for.
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Uh- I know... it requires a lot of, a lot of code. [laughs] So now, uh, hopefully AI can help, but, uh, it still requires a lot of effort from, from your end to, to work upon.
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So, uh, well, I think that's, that's a very good intro. I think people should have enough information for, from you and to look forward to your talk in the summit the 20 and 21st.
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And today, um- May, may I close, may I close the announcement? Yeah. Because I was teasing about the announcement. So- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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So Cost Goblin is switching from the CUR format, so custom user report format, to Focus 1.2, uh, because we are going- Okay... because we are going multi-cloud. So, uh, we are going to support...
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We are already, like, bringing GCP- Mm-hmm... and the plan is to also bring, bring Azure. Um, but GCP is something I'm actively working on at the moment, and, uh, and Azure is the next one.
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And we also added another functionality, which is profiles that are fully sandboxed. So basically, on a laptop with Cost Goblin, you can now work with many companies.
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You can have, like, one co- Well, let's imagine you are a consultant, and you are working with many business. Oh, okay.
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You can now create different profile for the different company you are working with, and each profile can have many other, many cloud providers, so be, uh, AWS or GCP.
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Um, and you can visualize all of this into, into your dashboards. Um, so I'm pretty excited. You are making it like, uh, an enterprise-grade product now, like. [laughs] We will see. We will see. Step by step. Right.
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[laughs] But it looks good, and congratulations on migrating to, to Focus. I think it's, you know, a, a very good step on, on the journey and very FinOps one.
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Uh, so looking forward to seeing a lot of support on, uh, for your product. I will leave the, the link to the, to the GitHub in the, in the description, uh, so people can take a look and, and see.
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Uh, so again, Étienne, uh, great time talking to you, and thanks for, for taking the time. Looking forward to, to your talk. Thanks a lot, Victor. Looking forward to it. See you. Okay. See you.
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[outro music]
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Today, we are going to start with a series of interviews that we are going to do to know more about our speakers of the summit.
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If you don't know about the summit, you maybe are in a cave or something, because I've been doing a lot of promotion. Uh, but we'll li-leave the link in the description below.
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Basically, we are doing a two-day, uh, six hours each day event, where we are going to share all the content from the community, and we're going to have, like, a lot of, uh, speakers with wonderful talks, and you're going to be learn a lot of practical FinOps.
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That's kind of the, the theme of everything, is practical FinOps to apply for AI, for data, for cloud, as always. And, uh, we are going to be doing interviews with the people that are going to present in, in the summit.
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And the first interview that we have today is Etienne. Etienne, how are you? Thank you so much for having me, Victor. Doing great, yeah. It's great.
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Today, we have, like, a football theme kind of, uh, interview, which is, which is super nice. [laughs] And, you know, uh, maybe the, the first question that I'm going to ask you is about your, your talk.
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So can you tell us a bit more about what you're going to be talking in, in the summit, and why do you think it's, it's relevant? Yeah, yeah. Thank you very much. No, th-thanks for the opportunity, first of all.
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So, uh, I created a, an open source project called Cost Goblin. Uh, Cost Goblin is a desktop application you can install on Linux, uh, Mac, Windows.
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And the idea is to, um, totally remove the infrastructure from the equation to be able to analyze your FinOps data. Uh, so I started with, uh, the custom usage report, uh, as everybody, by, you know, um,
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like deploying a lot of infrastructure in AWS, QuickSight, Athena, all of this to be able to analyze your custom usage reports, building some dashboard.
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Then I also built some plugin on backstage to be able to analyze this cost.
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And all of this is nice, but maybe some people want to be able to quickly get started and start to deep dive into the AWS finance report without having to do all of this.
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And these days, we have quite powerful machine really, with a lot of gigabytes and so on.
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So for most people, you can actually have all of this on your laptop running extremely fast and extremely, uh, responsive, and this is what Cos- Cost Goblin is all about. So you have this application on your laptop.
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You download your custom usage report to your machine, and then you have DuckDB on, on top of it, and you have a very nice experience looking at your financial without any third parties.
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And you can even do that offline if you want. You are in the plane, the train, wherever you want, and you can start to understand where the money goes without a third party provider. That's, that's cool.
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I've, I've, you know, read about the, the project and, and you, you talk... You present it to, to me, uh, briefly about what it is, and it was super interesting. And what was the motivation behind it?
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Can you tell us a bit more about, like, why you decided to, to start this, this project? Yeah. So, um, in my, uh, previous company, so now I work for HelloFresh, but before that, I was at Solaris.
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Um, and I was a bit having the unofficial, uh, duty to try to keep the bill under control. Mm-hmm.
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And so, uh, and so, yeah, I started to look a bit into the custom usage report, deploy some dashboard and, um, and then they were in QuickSight.
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And so QuickSight is a great tool, but there is a cost per seat to access as a, to access the dashboard.
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And so this is a bit antinomic because you are trying to control your AWS spending, and as soon as people will start to access your dashboard, they will increase the bill.
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And initially, a lot of people want to see your dashboard, but very quickly, very few people are regularly looking at them, but you still increase the cost.
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So I was not super happy with this approach because I wanted as many people as possible to be able to look at the bill.
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And so I pivoted from this, uh, to build some, um, backstage plugin so any user could come to backstage and see the bill relevant to them and to their ownership, and that really worked well, in my opinion.
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Um, and then I wanted to open source all of this. I was like, "Okay, this is very cool. There is a lot of company on backstage. There is a lot of company with an AWS bill, so we should be able to match things here."
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And so I asked for the permission to open source things, and, uh, sadly the process was not really in place at Solaris, uh, about open sourcing. And so that was a bit of a dead end,
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and I was a bit frustrated, and I'm not very patient when I'm frustrated. And these days, [laughs] and these days with AI, uh, it's very easy to restart something from scratch if you have a nice idea.
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And so I, I had like, you know, polished this idea for, like, four years. I knew exactly the type of feature I wanted.
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I knew exactly what was the cost in this report, where was the, where was the, the, the, the, um, the sharp edges to avoid. And frankly, the prototype was done in a week.
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And, uh, since then I've been keep building on it.
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Uh, I can maybe make some announcement to you a bit, uh, a bit now because you, even you don't know about this, but, uh, I have some, some news to share with you because we are going to move away from the, uh, Cure, uh, from the Cure format.
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Um, but, uh, maybe, uh, on this a bit later. But the motivation was really to make it accessible to as many people as, as possible.
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And then when I decided to start from scratch, as said, I was like, "But why do we even have some server running, uh, remote to display this data to the user?
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Let, let's totally, let's totally turn the table and, and make it on the laptop." And, and I really like it. It's like it's extremely, extreme- extremely snappy experience. It's, it's very nice.
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No, I-it's like, uh, I think that's getting a bit old school, uh, like being, uh, having things in your laptop or in your, you know, in your local, uh, in your local disk.
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So it's, it's, it's amazing that you've been able to do that given that, you know, everything that we work on is, you know, pull this data from whatever, and then it takes a lot of time.
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And, you know, it's, it's super, super useful. And, you know, one, one question that I wanted to ask you is like, okay, how... what, what's been your, your journey till that? Because, you know, you...
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To make a break like, like the Cost Goblin, uh, that you made, it takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, and you mentioned too, like backstage, which I know from my, from my background on the DevOps and, and the platform side.
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So can you tell us something more about, you know, your journey till Cost Goblin happened? [laughs] Okay. Do you want the full picture? So, um- Yeah, yeah. For sure... first of all, I'm French. Uh- [laughs]...
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uh, everybody knows already since- Yeah, I think everyone can, uh, can get that. [laughs] That's the first. The second, I... But that's fine. So there is nothing I can do about my accent. Uh, some people say it's cute.
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Some people say it's annoying. You will have to decide. Um, but so, um, yeah, so born and raised in France. Um, at the end of, um, high school, I did Epitech. It's, uh, it's a software engineering school in five years.
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Super grateful about that. Then I joined SFR. SFR is a cellphone network provider.
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Um, and then I started to see what, what it is to deploy application not, not just running on your, on your computer, but running for millions of people.
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Uh, super thankful about the architect I had back then because they really taught me the things. Uh, and then I joined Solaris as a backend engineer. So I was for two years working on the backend product of Solaris.
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So Solaris is a bit of a weird bank. We don't have customer like you and me. We offer a bank via an API, so other company can then create their banking application on top of us.
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And so I was part of the digital banking, um, application, and, um, and back then, um, I was not super happy about the stability of the product.
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So I started to shift a bit away from the focus of the team to build dashboards and build, uh, telemetry and observability and start to do some load test.
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And basically, my product owner was not super happy because I was not working for him anymore. I was working in my little own world. But other people in the company were pretty happy.
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Uh, and so, um, one day the CTO came to my desk and literally say, "Étienne, you have to pack your shit." And I'm like, "What?" He say, "Yeah, you have to pack your shit. You are going to the SRE team."
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And I was like, "Okay, let me Google what's an SRE," because I had no idea. And so I Googled what was an SRE, and I was like, "Okay, that's cool. I'm an SRE now." And so the next day I was part of the SRE team.
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It was a, it was a playing field. Um, we were just starting the SRE at, at Solaris.
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And so yeah, it's a bit outside of the, of the, of the topic of this call, but basically, uh, then it was about doing what I was doing at the scale of a team for full organization.
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Um, how do you deploy SLO across an entire org, across many teams? How do you support people to, yeah, bring the success rate up without disturbing the business too much?
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And, uh, and then, uh, someone came to me and say, "Hey, we are spending a bit too much money on AWS. Can we do something about it?"
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And, uh, and then it was, you know, building dashboard, but not anymore about success rate and response time and latency, but about where is the money going.
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Starting to look into AWS tagging, starting to look into how you can distribute cost following ownership, all of the pleasure about broken ownership, about, you know, tag quality, about teams that be...
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are renamed by HR because they say this team should not be named that, but that, and then instantly [laughs] all of your tooling goes, goes through the window. Uh, but I mean, yeah, we all know about this. So, um, yeah.
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And that's, that's a super in-interesting thing because I, I feel like unless you are very into the, you know, the hands-on topic or you've been working on that, you are not...
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or it's not super aware for people that, uh, the SRE part, so like the telemetry, the observability, how much it plays a role within FinOps, like within actual- So it's connected. It's so connected. Yeah.
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Because if you start to rightsize something and then the product, like, collapse, you haven't, you haven't earned anything, right?
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So you need to be able to kind of gauge, okay, what is the risk/reward of what I'm, what I'm pushing people to do?
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And, and you also have to understand that, hey, this product, maybe it's not super well rightsized, but it's actually a critical product.
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So it's normal for this product to not be rightsized because if we have a spike of traffic on this, on this product, and now we have a, we have a SEV 1 incident, I mean, you will not be rightsizing much more things after that, you know?
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So, um, yeah. No, especially with, uh, like with things like that, you know, with, um, disasters, uh, and disaster recovery and, and all of that, and all the SLA, uh, complaints.
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Like, especially if you have like a, a service that needs to be up, uh, has an SLA, uh, agreement with, with your client, that will probably cost the business a lot of money if you, uh, you know, don't fulfill that agreement.
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Mm-hmm.
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And, and also it's because c- like as, as we've seen in the updates and everything and, and examples from, like, from the pure AWS team, like how relevant is CloudWatch to do FinOps applications and how much information, like under the hood and for real time, especially for real time kind of FinOps or real time or that takes or notice compared to, you know, core
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or things like that that tend to have like a more delayed, um, ecosystem.
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And that's a lot of telemetry, which to be honest, I admire all the people that are the case to telemetry because I, uh, you know, in my old times I started to play that role and I was like, "That's...
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This is not for me." Like, I don't know how people can start watching to, to the Prometheus data and understand anything or, uh, do the queries for Grafana. And I was like, "Dude, I don't understand anything."
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[laughs] You know, there is a g- I have a good news for you. Today, you don't have to do this yourself. You can just prompt an AI to say, "Hey, I want a dashboard-" Yeah...
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"that says this," and it will produce a very nice dashboard to you. So maybe you should get back to it Yeah. No, I don't think so. But [laughs] Uh, it was like I, like, uh, unless you've seen it, like the...
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When you see like all these Grafana dashboards that look super nice, and they are super clear, just to put an example. Or, and then you see the queries behind it, and it's like before AI- Yeah...
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you had to make that at hand or for example, like- Yeah... and the Prometheus queries and like the, the tracking. I was like, "You, you, you, you must be crazy for that."
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But, you know, uh, there has to be someone for, for each role in the world. So it's, it's great.
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And it's great to see, like, how d- that role has, well, continued to work on, but also people that are being helpful on, on other side. And
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maybe to, to continue, it's like, uh, what are, you know, from, from your side, what are the, the recommendations that you have for people to, you know, get the most out of the, out of your talk, and also to, to, for attending these summits and everything?
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Like, how are your, your learning process to become, like... Because you are being very self-taught from, from what you said.
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So what are your tips on learning more about FinOps and, and how you can, you know, how would you encourage people to, to learn more? Okay, that's a tough one.
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Uh- [laughs] I think, I think for some companies that are maybe going to attend and be at the stage zero, it can be a bit like, you know, looking at a very, very tall mountain and be like, "Wow, I'm not sure where to start."
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You know? Let's imagine you don't have any tags. Like you, like you are basically on, on a playing field, and you, you cannot understand anything of what's going on.
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Maybe sadly, you decided to have everything into one AWS account, and you are like, "Oh my God." Basically, all of the things that we are going to talk about, people will be like, "It doesn't apply to me," right? Um,
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like I will say try to start very, very simple. Mm-hmm. And try to... The very simple you start with, try to enforce it somehow.
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So for example, for the company that may be using Terraform, let's imagine you are like starting from a very plain field, but you took- Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no... a good decision to be on Terraform, you know?
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It's, it's, it's a lot of people, so- Yeah. Yeah... you, you probably need to- So you are actually, you are actually not on a playing field.
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You are already starting with a very big header, and you can already start to apply some very strict rules step by step to enforce- Mm-hmm... some tags on your CI.
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And so all of the resources that can be tagged, there is actually some ways, uh, using Terraform and CI to identify resources that a- don't have tag and should have tags.
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And maybe you can start to crank up a bit the rules on this, so your engineering team can over time start to tag things and apply your tagging strategy.
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And it will already give you a lot of, a lot of visibility on where is the money going.
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If you are on a multi-account strategy and you don't have any tags, you als- already have a big headroom because you can define tags on an account level that you can then fall back on your resources if they don't have tags themselves.
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So let's imagine you are super lazy. You have like 10 different AWS account with your environments and your different maybe domains.
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You can already tag your AWS account, and you al- already have some tagging apply on all of your resources under, and it will already help you to better understand what is going on.
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So what I want people to go out after my talk is like, A, you don't need super crazy tooling. You can just download this, enable your, enable your Focus 1.2, uh, report, and, uh, and get started.
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And then start to click around, and, um, start to use the MCP server provided inside of Cost Goblin to talk with your LLM about your AWS cost, and, and just get, get started.
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And then, and over time in- increase your, your, your tagging strategy. Um, and it's a journey. It's not a sprint. It's very, it's very a long marathon. It's like a never ending marathon actually.
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Uh, and you should not disturb your entire business, uh, running this marathon. Uh, but ideally everyone in the business should feel, uh, part of this marathon. And, and sorry, I...
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Now it's a bit lengthy, my answer, but I think we need to shift left the, the focus. Like basically FinOps in a lot of company is the deal of the CTO, you know, the CFO, finance people.
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The, the shift need to focus to the desk of the engineers because they are the one incurring this cost. They are the one making the decision about our database size.
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They are the one deciding, deciding if we go, I don't know, multi-region or not, if we will use Athena or a classic LDS database.
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All of these decision have cost, and there is some good reason to make this decision, and there is some bad reasons. And if you don't see the bill, if you don't think about the bill when you make this decision,
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you are not making the decision with all of the information you should. Yeah. No, that's, that's a very good advice.
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And I think what you mentioned is that it, it's an ongoing process, and, uh, uh, up until you are super advanced, you can always in...
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Like you will have new business that you need to onboard, and you need to, uh, put the systems in place to make that businesses, you know, uh, work with the systems for tracking the, the cost.
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And we have a full, uh, attack course thing, uh, that we, we created with, with Alfonso.
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And, and it was like super in-depth with, uh, rules for, like if you think about all the rules that you can have for Kubernetes, all the rules that you can have for the CI/CD, uh, with Terraform, with Azure.
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If it's on Azure, like if you do it with power, with the scripting, with... There is a lot of things to, to do.
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And especially like when you move to the world to, to Kubernetes, then it complex like even more, uh, because you have the shared cost and, and everything. So a lot of work to do, and [laughs]
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definitely start from, from the beginning. I have to, I have to be honest, Kubernetes is a thing still on my roadmap for, for Cost Goblin. I'm looking for a nice data set.
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Um, actually, I just arrived at EloFresh, and so I will have the n- nice data set. But I, I'm still on my onboarding, so I, I haven't had the time to, to, uh, to, to work on this, uh, for Cost Goblin d- yet.
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But, uh, no, uh, the, the support of Kubernetes is something I w- I really want to, to improve on, on Cost Goblin. It's still a bit Inexistent. [laughs] So it's, it's a tough one to- Yeah... to add support for.
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Uh- I know... it requires a lot of, a lot of code. [laughs] So now, uh, hopefully AI can help, but, uh, it still requires a lot of effort from, from your end to, to work upon.
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So, uh, well, I think that's, that's a very good intro. I think people should have enough information for, from you and to look forward to your talk in the summit the 20 and 21st.
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And today, um- May, may I close, may I close the announcement? Yeah. Because I was teasing about the announcement. So- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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So Cost Goblin is switching from the CUR format, so custom user report format, to Focus 1.2, uh, because we are going- Okay... because we are going multi-cloud. So, uh, we are going to support...
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We are already, like, bringing GCP- Mm-hmm... and the plan is to also bring, bring Azure. Um, but GCP is something I'm actively working on at the moment, and, uh, and Azure is the next one.
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And we also added another functionality, which is profiles that are fully sandboxed. So basically, on a laptop with Cost Goblin, you can now work with many companies.
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You can have, like, one co- Well, let's imagine you are a consultant, and you are working with many business. Oh, okay.
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You can now create different profile for the different company you are working with, and each profile can have many other, many cloud providers, so be, uh, AWS or GCP.
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Um, and you can visualize all of this into, into your dashboards. Um, so I'm pretty excited. You are making it like, uh, an enterprise-grade product now, like. [laughs] We will see. We will see. Step by step. Right.
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[laughs] But it looks good, and congratulations on migrating to, to Focus. I think it's, you know, a, a very good step on, on the journey and very FinOps one.
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Uh, so looking forward to seeing a lot of support on, uh, for your product. I will leave the, the link to the, to the GitHub in the, in the description, uh, so people can take a look and, and see.
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Uh, so again, Étienne, uh, great time talking to you, and thanks for, for taking the time. Looking forward to, to your talk. Thanks a lot, Victor. Looking forward to it. See you. Okay. See you.
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