บทถอดความฉบับเต็มของ Multi-Cloud Strategy: FinOps, Cost Optimization & AI Infrastructure | The Fast Track Ep. 2

virtual machines and all of those infrastructure workloads in AWS, and you chose Azure or Google Cloud for your AI workloads. 30 00:04:48.080 --> 00:04:51.180 That might work perfectly because they are completely different. 31 00:04:51.440 --> 00:05:14.280 However, if you tend to mix those workloads, and you will at some point in time, one way or the other, then you are actually going to-- That, that, that process is going to involve kind of transfer of the knowledge, transfer of the skills between those two different teams that are managing the cloud, and you need to create one single cloud team that are going to manage the whole infrastructure, no matter where it is at the end of the day. 32 00:05:15.820 --> 00:05:27.120 That's really interesting. And that leads me to another question that would be, um, is there a point where you can look to an environment and say, "Okay, this company doesn't really have a multi-cloud strategy anymore. 33 00:05:27.160 --> 00:05:36.580 It's just they just have, like, many clouds"? You mean what is the difference between many clouds and multi-cloud? [laughs] Well, if there is no- Yeah... strategy, you are in many clouds. 34 00:05:37.040 --> 00:05:41.320 That just means you're managing things that don't have anything to do with each other. 35 00:05:41.670 --> 00:05:49.200 And I would argue that many companies that are claiming to be in multi-cloud environment are actually, as you called it, in a many cloud environments. 36 00:05:49.460 --> 00:05:54.490 Because they just have multiple contracts, and there are different teams. For example, marketing is using, I don't know- 37 00:05:55.984 --> 00:06:07.824 Salesforce cloud, for example, and there's the finance that's relying on the internal tools that are in private cloud, and then you have developers or AI developers that are using something completely different, and there's no connection between it. 38 00:06:07.864 --> 00:06:14.904 That actually usually means there is no cloud strategy. If there's no cloud strategy, we cannot have a multi-cloud strategy because we don't have a strategy. 39 00:06:14.944 --> 00:06:27.514 That's the key piece that's usually, that's usually missing in that, in that particular mix. However, you know, you need to start from somewhere. So the question is, and I would say the first question, 40 00:06:28.484 --> 00:06:37.154 do you actually need a multi-cloud? Are you a customer that needs a multi-cloud strategy? Not just a strategy. Do you need a multi-cloud practice? 41 00:06:37.454 --> 00:06:49.724 Are you going to utilize different vendors, or are you okay with just one vendor? Because trust me, the fact that you have multiple vendors is not a good thing. [laughs] It's putting complexity into that mix. 42 00:06:50.004 --> 00:07:01.884 If you would be just managing one vendor and one type of the cloud, that's easier, technically speaking. Problem is that that might lock you in, and lock-in is way worse in the cloud than it was on-prem. 43 00:07:02.444 --> 00:07:11.784 Because in the on-prem world, you would be paying for the license, and that's your total lock-in. Here, you are paying for everything. So if the vendor decides to raise the prices, you cannot do much. 44 00:07:12.084 --> 00:07:23.904 That's why people are deciding to use multi-cloud scenarios so that they could actually kind of, I would say, have a feeling of control under what they can and cannot do. 45 00:07:23.964 --> 00:07:36.224 Depending on which type of service you're using, that control might be actual fact or might be illu-an illusion, but it feels better to actually have a sense of- Wow. That's interesting. 46 00:07:36.284 --> 00:07:49.944 And I keep thinking, who got to choose that? Who really needs to own the multi-cloud strategy, for example? IT, cloud teams, finance, leadership, or a combination of each one of them? I would say all of them. 47 00:07:49.984 --> 00:07:58.234 Technically speaking, the question of infrastructure, especially, I mean, there are certain things it's more related to the governments than to the companies. 48 00:07:58.334 --> 00:08:08.144 But I would argue that it can actually be applied to the big corporations and any kind of enterprise out there, and that it's called critical infrastructure. The infrastructure that's critical for your main operations. 49 00:08:08.704 --> 00:08:18.504 As I'm saying, that term is coming from the government, from the actual nation states who have critical infrastructure to p- support their citizens, their citizens' livelihoods and everything else. 50 00:08:18.924 --> 00:08:27.784 On the other hand, enterprises need to support their key businesses. Their key business workloads are critical infrastructure in an essence. 51 00:08:28.244 --> 00:08:37.944 When you have critical infrastructure, you cannot have just one person responsible for that. You might have one that's actually doing the work, but there are going to be a couple of them accountable. 52 00:08:38.314 --> 00:08:45.624 So when you are talking about multi-cloud or cloud strategy in general, you cannot just rely on, okay, this is an IT work-workload. 53 00:08:45.664 --> 00:08:53.244 So it's cloud, it's IT, so Chie-Chief, uh, Chief IT Officer or however we are calling that person now, is going to be responsible for the cloud. 54 00:08:53.604 --> 00:09:01.524 It cannot be just like that because cloud means cost, and it's an operational expense on the other hand. Yes. So it's going-- immediately it's gonna be visible on the bottom line. 55 00:09:01.564 --> 00:09:09.584 It's not something that's, you know, depreciated over time or something like that. It's an operational expense. So CFO has to be involved into that strategy. 56 00:09:09.644 --> 00:09:18.104 On the other hand, it's touch-basing with the core operations of the company. You cannot avoid that on the CXO level, so on the CEO level. 57 00:09:18.554 --> 00:09:26.024 And on the, on the, on another important point, we're talking

about critical infrastructure, which immediately opens up a security topic. 58 00:09:26.564 --> 00:09:33.124 And when you put security into the mix, it's again a job of the CEO because it's so, such an important topic. 59 00:09:33.684 --> 00:09:49.174 So I'm not expecting every single CEO in the end- in, in, in every single enterprise across the world to actually be knowledgeable about how cloud operates, how to deploy a virtual machine into the cloud or some AI agent or whatever we are deploying. 60 00:09:49.494 --> 00:10:01.344 But I would expect every single person who tends to own the business or be responsible for the full, for the full business from top to bottom to understand the impact cloud computing has on their businesses. 61 00:10:01.764 --> 00:10:05.924 And on the other hand, this is just a modern way of talking about electricity. 62 00:10:06.004 --> 00:10:14.294 You don't need to know to h- to calculate and to create, you know, circuits or whatever, but you need to understand that your bill for electricity is going to impact everything. 63 00:10:14.624 --> 00:10:25.144 So if your industry is based on the electrical energy, and everybody else's, everybody is nowadays, so that's an important part of your story. The fact that you are going to have... 64 00:10:25.484 --> 00:10:29.874 You know, while it's running, it's all good. When it stops running, you are in trouble. 65 00:10:30.164 --> 00:10:39.124 So you need to be aware that that's the same impact cloud is going to have and multi-cloud strategy is going to have on your business once it's not running. While it's running, it's the job of IT. 66 00:10:39.564 --> 00:10:50.484 When it's not running, it's the job of the CEO. That makes total sense. And even because cloud was originally a way to gain flexibility and potentially reduce infrastructure costs, right? 67 00:10:50.504 --> 00:10:57.424 But now we hear a lot about organizations that are struggling with unexpectedly high cloud bills and all of that because they don't have control. 68 00:10:57.444 --> 00:11:06.023 They keep choosing and, and that, that's the strategy that we do not want to follow. That's, again, missing the strategy, I would say- Mm-hmm... that that's producing that kind of results. 69 00:11:06.444 --> 00:11:09.064 I mean, technically speaking, a lot of people, 70 00:11:10.344 --> 00:11:20.404 especially nowadays when AI is in the mix, because AI costs are enormous, even higher than what we would expect to be, and even higher growth of the cost than it was with cloud computing. 71 00:11:20.484 --> 00:11:28.884 So currently, not that many people mention FinOps anymore. But there was a point in time, let's say five years ago, when FinOps was everything. 72 00:11:28.924 --> 00:11:36.264 It was like, we are going to hire FinOps specialists, just like you can hire that kind of a person. There is no FinOps specialist. There are best practices. 73 00:11:36.644 --> 00:11:47.444 And just like with everything else, when going into the cloud without rethinking it, without thinking it and thinking it through basic and creating a strategy, you are missing the point at the end of the day. 74 00:11:47.544 --> 00:12:01.172 Because everybody was like, "Oh, go to the cloud, it's gonna be cheaper." Well, says who? Yeah. Did anybody calculate it? Was there ever a promise that moving you to the cloud is gonna be cheaper? I don't think so. 75 00:12:01.412 --> 00:12:11.432 I, I haven't seen that kind of a campaign. It was always about they're gonna be flexible, and there was another story in the cloud you're going to pay only for what you use. 76 00:12:12.452 --> 00:12:16.451 That's technically true, and the problem is that people don't understand what they use. 77 00:12:16.592 --> 00:12:24.172 And then that- that's the point where the cloud bill comes in at the end of the month, and it's like, "Oh my God, these are unpredictable costs." 78 00:12:24.932 --> 00:12:30.852 I would argue there ne- there, there isn't a single cost in your cloud bill that's unpredictable. 79 00:12:31.552 --> 00:12:48.042 You might not be aware of it, but it's not unpredictable because you are charged only for what is running inside of your account, project, subscription, however the actual tenant is called inside of the cloud computing world, depending on AWS, Google, or Microsoft. 80 00:12:48.572 --> 00:12:55.892 But the problem is that people are not aware of what they are running and how the service that they are running is actually charged. 81 00:12:56.432 --> 00:13:05.032 And when you don't understand that, obviously your cloud bill is going to get enormous, and it's gonna surprise you every single month. So that's one problem. 82 00:13:05.612 --> 00:13:16.912 Second problem is when you start adopting cloud computing, usually there are people who can just create resources all over the place. "Oh, let's give something to Joe. Let's give something to Ryan. 83 00:13:17.252 --> 00:13:27.792 Let's give something to Tom." And then the three of us are responsible for creating resources. And I wake up one day, I want to test this virtual machine. I spin it up. 84 00:13:28.652 --> 00:13:35.552 Then I wake up the other day, now I'm going to test this database. The third day I'm going to test, test this AI capability. 85 00:13:36.312 --> 00:13:43.992 And then I'll just keep it up and running, and suddenly that VM that's doing practically nothing is spending money every single minute that it runs. 86 00:13:44.372 --> 00:13:55.971 At the end of the month, I'm going to get the bill for everything that I was using. And then somebody comes in and say, "Oh, but I wasn't using any of this." Well, you are missing the point of what using means. 87 00:13:56.032 --> 00:14:03.532 You created the service, and service was up and running. Yes. And that's what we are charging you for. If you stopped that virtual machine, you wouldn't be charged for it. 88 00:14:04.052 --> 00:14:20.341 So that's where the confusion

comes in, and that's the, the fact that enterprises deploy cloud, like, okay, different departments are going to have different subscriptions, and they're going to have their own, their own possibility or their own freedom to create any kind of resource that they would like to. 89 00:14:21.012 --> 00:14:34.162 At the end of the day, if you don't have guardrails in place, that will create something that to you might seem completely unpredictable cloud bill. And do you know who receives that cloud bill? The CFO. Yes. 90 00:14:34.162 --> 00:14:45.242 And then CFO who cannot understand what is actually happening is just like, "Oh, this is un- unpredictable cost. We need to cut it down 20%. We need to cut it down 30%." And what does that mean? 91 00:14:46.612 --> 00:15:01.372 Maybe you can cut it down 90%. Maybe you cannot even cut it down 10% because it really depends what is actually running in that cloud and what kind of workload, and is that workload at all a candidate for the cloud? 92 00:15:01.992 --> 00:15:11.172 I mean, now, obviously, technically speaking, everything can run in the cloud. But that doesn't actually mean that everything should run in the cloud. 93 00:15:11.242 --> 00:15:21.482 Maybe there are things that are gonna be cheaper if they are kept on-prem. For some of the security reasons maybe, sometimes maybe for the cost reasons, maybe for the flexibility reasons. 94 00:15:22.112 --> 00:15:31.822 Because you might argue that if we have a server that is local and everybody's los- using it locally, it has local presence, local latency. 95 00:15:32.752 --> 00:15:47.532 Why would we now move it hundreds of miles from the company and just create all sorts of tr- trouble for everyone? It's not bothering anyone. It's standing there. It has five more years of life. It's cool. Keep it up. 96 00:15:47.592 --> 00:15:50.992 You're not gonna... It's not gonna be cheaper just because you move it into the cloud. 97 00:15:52.092 --> 00:16:03.132 But there are workloads, and I would say there are predominantly different workloads that can live in the cloud, but not everything should. That's kind of how I look at this whole story. 98 00:16:04.552 --> 00:16:18.062 And so, so in the end of the day, what metrics should organization actually be watching, you know, not to fall in this mis-strategy? Huh. I wouldn't say me- I mean, metrics. 99 00:16:18.192 --> 00:16:27.152 Metric by definition is some number of something over time. Yeah. That would- Mm-hmm... define metric. So you can say cost over month, cost over day. I would say that there are practices. 100 00:16:27.552 --> 00:16:39.972 So first of all, there is absolutely no reason why you wouldn't have a cost alert of every single cloud. So every single day, either daily budget, weekly bud- monthly budget, doesn't matter. 101 00:16:40.032 --> 00:16:48.232 If you see the cost rising from day to day, and you can monitor it on that level, if you see it rising more than 20%, something is wrong. 102 00:16:48.752 --> 00:16:54.172 Or it's normal, but somebody didn't inform you that there is a new project coming up. 103 00:16:54.612 --> 00:17:04.492 So those, those things, those rising of the costs that are un- unpredictable by def- by your definition should actually be alerted, so you could immediately see. 104 00:17:04.802 --> 00:17:15.152 I can tell you, for example, I was preparing for a training, and I have alerts on, of all of my clouds. And it was immediately visible after two or three days that my cost has grown from the previous month for 30%. 105 00:17:15.212 --> 00:17:25.532 I'm on the 30% of my small budget of a hundred bucks, which is my budget for the training. And it was immediately visible that I spent 30 bucks. It was okay because I knew what I was doing. 106 00:17:25.652 --> 00:17:29.712 I knew that I was gonna spend that money. At the end of the day, one of my customers is going to pay for that. 107 00:17:30.232 --> 00:17:42.332 But the problem is if you don't s- have alert in place, if I didn't have alert in place, I could have spent hundreds of dollars without knowing what is happening. And it's an easy fix, you know. It's an easy fix. 108 00:17:42.892 --> 00:17:48.092 On the other hand, companies should control who has access to creation of the resources. 109 00:17:48.632 --> 00:18:02.012 Because if you have access to any kind of cloud portals, you can just easily in a couple of clicks, if there are no guardrails in place, you can create a virtual machine that's gonna have 256 cores and four terabytes of RAM 110 00:18:03.208 --> 00:18:17.167 That thing costs a couple of thousand dollars per day. So easily, just like that, you create 10K of cloud bill if you don't put those people under control. And it's not just the control, you know, who can do what. 111 00:18:17.528 --> 00:18:28.468 It's also the control what can actually be spun up on that particular cloud without additional approval. Sometimes you're gonna need that kind of virtual machine. 112 00:18:28.508 --> 00:18:38.778 If you're ru- running, for example, SAP workload in the Azure or Google or Amazon Cloud, you're gonna need that, that machine. But that doesn't mean... I mean, that kind of cost is usually planned. 113 00:18:39.168 --> 00:18:46.828 That kind of project shouldn't just happen, let, uh, Peter spin that up just like that. No, it's never gonna happen like that. 114 00:18:47.168 --> 00:18:53.128 It's always gonna be planned because it's a big cost, it's a big commitment, it's SAP in the cloud, it's a big project at the end of the day. 115 00:18:53.508 --> 00:19:04.288 So you can always kind of know when that cost is gonna occur at the end of the day. So alerts definitely controls what can be done, not just by whom. 116 00:19:04.508 --> 00:19:15.678 You can have 10 administrators, but there should be a limit on the amount of CPUs or cores or whatever is called that you can spin on a particular project without additional approval. 117 00:19:16.708 -->

00:19:30.228 So those are some caveats, some guardrails that companies can put in place easily without necessarily employing any kind of con- advanced consultancy, any, any kind of, you know, people or who are going to act as an advisors. 118 00:19:30.608 --> 00:19:38.478 Those are the things that you can learn easily from the basic course that you would take on cloud computing. From Amazon, Microsoft, Google, doesn't really matter. 119 00:19:38.808 --> 00:19:41.308 Cost management is the first thing that you, that you are taught. 120 00:19:41.878 --> 00:19:56.488 And even if you don't understand how each and every resource is charged, you can still put those guardrails together because it's easy to just ask for additional approval and check additional information before something is actually deployed. 121 00:19:57.148 --> 00:20:05.388 And do you think it's possible for the organizations to create a single view of what's happening so they don't get lost? You know, you mentioned the alerts. 122 00:20:05.708 --> 00:20:17.628 Is there anything that they can connect to make sure everyone is following it up so we don't, we don't lose the tracking? I mean, those are all elements of the... I mean, it's a combo. 123 00:20:17.788 --> 00:20:28.208 FinOps world, that, that's, that's why FinOps is called FinOps. It's somewhere between finance and operations at the end of the day. Operations. Mm-hmm. So they are kind of a shared responsibility. 124 00:20:28.248 --> 00:20:38.928 But from the IT point of view, the tools to monitor the costs are already there. Every single cloud has cost management solution. It's free of charge on the cloud that you're using it. 125 00:20:38.988 --> 00:20:48.168 That's a little bit problematic when you're talking about multi-cloud strategy, but in, at the end of the day, it's either one or two or three tools that you're gonna use. It's not dozens of tools. 126 00:20:48.648 --> 00:20:57.848 And all of those have some kinds of integrations. All of those support exports to any kind of, you know, business analysis system. So that's something that can be done on a regular basis. 127 00:20:58.228 --> 00:21:08.568 Alerts in place is the second thing. Third thing is general operational monitoring. What is happening with my system? And orgs usually have those things in place. 128 00:21:08.828 --> 00:21:19.028 So I would say if you have an observability team who is responsible for functioning of the system, FinOps should be just one extension of that observability team. 129 00:21:19.098 --> 00:21:30.548 So instead of just monitoring the uptime of your services, monitoring the s- how, how much memory is on the s- on that particular VM, how much CPU is there consuming, is there a need for additional one? 130 00:21:30.888 --> 00:21:38.288 All those things are already in place in, in the observability teams or in any kind of opera- IT ops teams that exist. 131 00:21:39.188 --> 00:21:48.228 We should just put additional metric, which is the cost of the resources, and tracking down the total cost of the resources into that particular mix. 132 00:21:48.738 --> 00:21:57.588 And then we should have, and we need to have basically people from finance and people from operations talking together on a regular basis. 133 00:21:57.628 --> 00:22:21.588 So people from IT ops with the fin- with somebody from fin- finance have to form a council that's going to actually meet on a regular basis, it's weekly, bi-weekly, whichever they decide, so they can discuss what are the new investments that are gonna happen, how much they are going to cost, and how much the new investment or the new technologies that are going to be brought up into the mix are actually going to increase the cost. 134 00:22:21.848 --> 00:22:35.448 Or if IT ops can do optimization, in which way and in which manner they can optimize the resources so they can actually cut down the operational cost. Okay. And now it brings me to the AI environment. 135 00:22:35.548 --> 00:22:39.648 So AI is changing a lot of things, and it's now changing the conversation again, right? 136 00:22:39.828 --> 00:22:51.228 Uh, we're seeing the emergence and rapid growth of GPU-focused cloud providers built specifically around the massive computing requirements of AI training and, and inference, right? 137 00:22:51.608 --> 00:23:03.408 Uh, how do these specialized GPU clouds change the traditional multi-cloud strategy? Huh. That's an really interesting one. Technically speaking, the current market size, 138 00:23:04.588 --> 00:23:16.588 you wouldn't believe, is already at between 20 and 25 billion. Just to compare it, Microsoft has somewhere around 100 billion, and the cloud computing AWS has around 150. So 139 00:23:17.748 --> 00:23:30.348 f- I would say up to qua- quarter of what Microsoft has is already consumed by neo cloud sec- neo cloud sector as they are calling it. It's a neo cloud, basically. It's GPU-based cloud computing. 140 00:23:30.728 --> 00:23:41.728 So those are completely specialized cloud computing vendors. They don't have many services. They offer you a bare metal, which has a ton of GPU power, and it's used for two things. 141 00:23:41.988 --> 00:23:52.138 It's either used to train the model or to inference the model, period. That's what you do with those cloud vendors. And do you know who their biggest customers are? Who? 142 00:23:52.288 --> 00:23:57.248 The traditional cloud vendors who cannot keep up to speed with the GPU power. 143 00:23:57.568 --> 00:24:08.328 So they are renting the equipment that's owned by the other clouds, smaller clouds, to actually offer to their customers the ability and capability to run the GPUs. 144 00:24:08.728 --> 00:24:17.708 I mean, they're listed as official vendors and everything else. It's not like that they are hiding something. But it's an amazing change in the dynamic how cloud actually expands. 145 00:24:18.404 --> 00:24:21.504 Problem is, how is that going to go further along? 146

00:24:21.624 --> 00:24:33.664 So are Microsoft, Google, and Amazon buying these services, which is an OpEx now for them, so they are not depreciating their equipment, but they are buying the OpEx, the most expensive thing when you are a cloud vendor. 147 00:24:34.244 --> 00:24:45.504 So how is that going to look like in a year or two? It's gonna be interesting to actually see. But yeah, I mean, from that point on, specialized cloud can be a reason to g- to do multi-cloud. 148 00:24:45.564 --> 00:25:01.284 For if you have a lot of requests, you have your own models, or you are training your own models, there is a reasonable thing to do to actually go down the road of spending money to somebody who is completely specialized for GPU power. 149 00:25:01.584 --> 00:25:11.224 First of all, it's gonna be cheaper. Second of all, it's probably gonna be a better service at the end of the day because they are specialists in what they do. So it's definitely an emergence that's gonna continue. 150 00:25:11.284 --> 00:25:24.964 I don't see that changing that quickly. The problem is, how long will it take for big vendors, which have the most money in the whole wide world, to acquire enough GPU power? Currently, they are struggling. 151 00:25:25.244 --> 00:25:35.304 They're also struggling with power, actual el-electricity. Electrical power is another story where there are certain things happening around the place, so Microsoft is investing in power plants. 152 00:25:35.864 --> 00:25:40.044 I could have never imagined that, like, ten years ago or five years ago to the, to that point. 153 00:25:40.124 --> 00:25:54.584 So those smaller vendors, which are not small and not that small anymore, are going to player, uh, play a significant role in the time to come until there's enough GPU power for everybody on the planet so that we no longer talk about it. 154 00:25:55.044 --> 00:25:57.364 We'll see how it goes. Might... 155 00:25:57.404 --> 00:26:11.904 First time since the cloud started and since the cloud war started, that's basically where the top three companies entered the war, I feel like there might be a space for some new player to emerge out of all of these GPU-based cloud vendors. 156 00:26:12.664 --> 00:26:21.484 And how... What do you think is the differentiator that this would have? I mean, the differ- it's they're going to be specialists, but we were always having some kind of specialist. 157 00:26:21.524 --> 00:26:30.044 You know, for example, everything is in the cloud, we still have GoDaddy. GoDaddy is a specialized web- Yeah. Mm-hmm... hosting service providing webs, web hosts. 158 00:26:30.404 --> 00:26:40.984 We still have Hostinger, which is another web hosting service in the US. There is Hetzner in Europe, another vendor that's providing mainly web hosting sites. 159 00:26:41.004 --> 00:26:49.254 Because somehow websites are, especially those marketing websites, not web applications, that's a whole different set of things. 160 00:26:49.644 --> 00:27:02.524 But websites are actually not that good citizens of the cloud computing because they are mainly based on the poorest written software on the planet Earth called WordPress, and WordPress requires special attention. 161 00:27:02.544 --> 00:27:11.404 And those hosting platforms actually give WordPress the special attention, and due to that fact, they are there. So that's why they, th-those companies still exist. 162 00:27:12.064 --> 00:27:18.764 I would argue that for these specialists, there's a role now and there will be a role in the future because guess what? 163 00:27:18.924 --> 00:27:31.244 Just like we are talking about different clouds and whether or not you want to keep all your eggs in the same basket, there's another story whether or not you're going to keep all your models done by same vendor. 164 00:27:31.824 --> 00:27:40.884 Are you going to just use Anthropic, for example, or are you just going to use Google, or are you just going to use Microsoft? Can you afford to have only one AI? What is... 165 00:27:41.164 --> 00:27:53.164 What kind of a lock-in is that if everybody's gonna start using AI? And it's no longer just IT. We are talking about end users. So it's gonna be interesting to see where that all, where, where that whole thing goes. 166 00:27:53.264 --> 00:27:59.164 I don't see any name, if you're asking me for the actual name of the- Mm... of the player. I don't know who's gonna be better. No. 167 00:27:59.184 --> 00:28:11.264 Currently, they're all somewhere around, and they're all, they're all always, you know, amazed or they're so happy when they sell large contract to s- to their main competi- competitor, and that's Google, Microsoft and Amazon. 168 00:28:11.624 --> 00:28:25.864 They are still really good because they are getting the money. Problem is that when you are signing such a contract, you commit to the certain capacity, and that capacity is not gonna be there for long periods of time. 169 00:28:26.224 --> 00:28:38.064 The depreciation of that hardware is also happening, and basically, that hardware is going to need to be replaced in a certain amount of time. And the more it's used, the sooner it's going to need to be replaced. 170 00:28:38.104 --> 00:28:44.204 The question is: Are you charging enough today so that you have the money to replace that hardware? 171 00:28:44.224 --> 00:28:54.944 Because currently you invested, you want to get back your, get your investment back, but the question is: Are you charging enough? If you are not charging enough, you're gonna be in trouble in a year. 172 00:28:55.664 --> 00:29:07.184 And, and this leads me to another question. That would be, when does bringing a workload back on-prem actually make sense? Well, if you asked me that question ten years ago, I would say never. 173 00:29:07.274 --> 00:29:13.203 [chuckles] Because the cloud hype was there, and we were expecting kind of the- Yeah... prices to drop. 174 00:29:13.244 --> 00:29:26.344 We were expecting

that there is gonna be innovation in the cloud that just not gonna match what is happening on-prem. I would say five years ago, during the COVID time, it was like, "Okay, this is happening. 175 00:29:26.484 --> 00:29:36.484 Everything is now going into the cloud because there's no way any single enterprise can manage that kind of a capacity that's required for the people who are starting to work from home." But guess what? 176 00:29:36.544 --> 00:29:48.544 We somehow overcame that story. We somehow were able to manage to create enough infrastructure to actually have every- everybody working from home at that point in time, and businesses were booming. 177 00:29:49.244 --> 00:29:59.524 So everything was growing, and somehow cloud vendors kept that pace in terms of investing infr- in, in the infrastructure, but the prices didn't come down. 178 00:29:59.764 --> 00:30:09.544 I haven't seen change of pricing in terms of the VMs or app services or databases that is going rapidly down in the last five years. Prices stay the same. 179 00:30:09.624 --> 00:30:16.744 Some of them increased, but majori- ma-majority of them stay the same. So you can actually count in the inflation and all of this. 180 00:30:16.764 --> 00:30:25.244 But we've seen that other than the pure infrastructure, the rest of the cost was actually coming up. The licenses are more expensive. So we've seen that. 181 00:30:26.236 --> 00:30:32.976 We've seen special services that current kind of like they change, they are saying they're changing the licensing model. 182 00:30:32.996 --> 00:30:40.336 What they're actually doing, they're increasing the price just by adding certain things that nobody needs. So we've seen that around the place for the last couple of years. 183 00:30:40.756 --> 00:30:52.176 We've seen hardware vendors or, or actual, you know, the product companies like Apple, for example, increasing their prices due to the fact that there's an inflation that influencing that. 184 00:30:52.416 --> 00:31:00.656 But the second thing is that the GPU prices have gone up. Due to that fact, you need to increase any kind of system that's depending on the GPU price, and we're gonna see that coming. 185 00:31:00.776 --> 00:31:12.016 I would say two years ago, for example, AI service was normally charged per user, per seat, or something like that. Nowadays, you see Copilot in Microsoft Word, for example. 186 00:31:12.096 --> 00:31:19.536 If you're gonna use pure Copilot, which can do certain things, you are charged X amount of dollars per user. But guess what? 187 00:31:19.616 --> 00:31:31.246 If you want to use advanced capabilities like Copilot Cowork or Work IQ, some of those services, you are no longer charged just per seat, you are charged for every single token that you spend. My God- Yes... 188 00:31:31.256 --> 00:31:42.436 but you were promising me I'm gonna have end user pricing, and I'm gonna have a license. No, no longer. Even you are now charged, even what we are using is now charged per the amount of tokens we spend. 189 00:31:43.116 --> 00:31:53.716 So then whether or not I'm going to use Cowork to generate a document, that will really be a decision to make because, for example, to generate one nice PowerPoint deck of like 190 00:31:54.736 --> 00:32:07.236 15 slides, which is a typical, you know, marketing pitch or something like that, you would spend around 20 to 30 bucks. Is it worth it? Maybe, but maybe not, depending on what you are doing. 191 00:32:07.936 --> 00:32:18.756 So these are the decisions that people are going to ask. So I wanted to touch base with that because that's one of the ways how you can think about what it makes sense to bring on-prem. 192 00:32:19.736 --> 00:32:22.636 If the workload is completely constant, if 193 00:32:23.636 --> 00:32:36.836 it's just something that's not mission critical, you don't need any kind of disaster recovery for it, it just needs to run, and it's running constantly the same pace, probably a good candidate to think about on-prem. 194 00:32:36.876 --> 00:32:41.736 I mean, if it's not bothering you in the cloud, if it doesn't cost much in the cloud, you're probably gonna leave it there. 195 00:32:41.976 --> 00:32:53.256 But if it's something that's creating a significant cost and the vendor is telling you, "You know, but when you are in the cloud, you have disaster recovery, you have automated backup, you have three copies of each and every bits and piece of data," 196 00:32:54.436 --> 00:33:03.416 but you don't need any of that, that means that you are overpaying the service because your service is actually not adequate for the cloud. It never was. It maybe should have never been migrated. 197 00:33:04.756 --> 00:33:12.756 However, if you already laid off all of your IT staff, I don't think everybody has done that, but there were talks about it, then who's gonna manage that service? 198 00:33:12.936 --> 00:33:16.076 So those are now the questions that you're going to end up asking. 199 00:33:17.716 --> 00:33:32.506 Another prob-- another thing why that question is now viable is due to the fact that cloud and investment in the cloud made vendors to invest in the typical operational software, which was never needed before. 200 00:33:33.136 --> 00:33:45.236 But guess what? A lot of that software was actually open sourced. Now, something that you could have never afford to create yourself is available there for you to utilize and run inside of your environment. 201 00:33:45.245 --> 00:33:57.516 So those farms of servers and those large disks that were striped and everything else, that, th- those were the technologies that didn't exist on-premise. They were invented in the cloud and now are being pulled on-prem. 202 00:33:58.025 --> 00:34:07.536 So those are the reasons to think and rethink whether or not everything should truly be part of the cloud world or could it actually be run on-prem. 203 00:34:07.846 --> 00:34:22.636 And I think that there are many examples out

there that, that companies actually saved money, a lot of money, sometimes in millions, sometimes in billions, by bringing certain workloads back into the, into their own data centers while they still have it. 204 00:34:23.356 --> 00:34:33.596 Am I saying go now and invest in your new data center, go now invest in your hardware? No, I'm not saying that. It's, it would probably be foolish, and probably there's no financial math that could actually 205 00:34:34.516 --> 00:34:38.376 ap- approve that kind of approach or that could actually, that could actually make sense. 206 00:34:38.676 --> 00:34:52.746 However, if you still have hardware down in, in your on-prem world, if you still have the capability of running your own workloads, yeah, every single workload should be judged again and figure out, "Okay, does this make sense in the cloud, or am I going to keep it locally?" 207 00:34:53.296 --> 00:34:57.436 Because sometimes the answer is going to be, yeah, let's keep it locally. It's a good option. 208 00:34:58.176 --> 00:35:07.996 And when it comes to the people side of this whole thing, uh, what skills the team needs today to manage this multi-cloud environment successfully? 209 00:35:09.436 --> 00:35:19.496 I would say that I- I usually like to tell people, you know, if you know one cloud, you know, you know them all, and that's technically true. There are certain differences, especially in the terminology. 210 00:35:19.896 --> 00:35:27.836 You know, Amazon is going to call the service EC2. Google is going to call it Compute. Microsoft is going to call it Azure VMs. It's exactly the same thing. 211 00:35:28.336 --> 00:35:35.896 But at the end of the day, they are called differently, and there are s- many sub-services that also create a confusion between the people. 212 00:35:35.936 --> 00:35:47.676 Technically speaking, all of the clouds are kind of converging into offering similar things, but those similar things are configured a little bit differently, and as I said before, terminology is a little bit different. 213 00:35:48.116 --> 00:35:59.016 So I would argue that any IT professional nowadays should know at least two clouds and should be certified for at least two clouds. Which one to choose from, that can be up to you totally. 214 00:35:59.336 --> 00:36:07.676 Choose AWS and Azure or AWS and Google or Microsoft and Google. It's totally up to, up to you at the end of the day what you would like to choose from those. 215 00:36:07.736 --> 00:36:19.608 But definitely at least two you should know and should be certified in. It's even better if you can cover all three, and it might be possible to do that. The skill level is always in the cloud computing being the same. 216 00:36:19.788 --> 00:36:29.778 You need to start from the point of the capability to deploy certain type of service into the cloud, and then the rest is general IT world. 217 00:36:29.848 --> 00:36:40.808 You need networking capabilities, you need to understand the virtualization, you need to understand how storage actually operates in a, in a manner of speaking, and how the apps are configured on top of that. 218 00:36:40.828 --> 00:36:52.108 If you have that, you're going to be good in any realm, whether it's the cloud or it's later on-prem world. One important difference in the cloud than in the on-prem, that you're not gonna see the hardware. 219 00:36:52.408 --> 00:36:59.048 So you're not gonna be managing the storage in the hardware way, you're not gonna see where it's hosted, you're not gonna be connecting cables together. 220 00:36:59.348 --> 00:37:03.428 However, networking knowledge in the cloud is as relevant as it is in the on-prem world. 221 00:37:03.748 --> 00:37:19.968 So I would say anything that brings you to become an IT professional who can manage their way into the modern IT world, both on-prem and in the cloud, is the knowledge that's gonna support you when you start to design the new cloud services. 222 00:37:20.607 --> 00:37:22.008 But keep one thing in mind. 223 00:37:22.168 --> 00:37:35.188 Nowadays, entering the cloud world is gonna be, to somewhat extent, a lot easier because we have AI, and AI is built into the cloud, and the same vendors who are providing cloud services are providing AI technologies. 224 00:37:35.588 --> 00:37:48.068 That actually means that a ton of work that we used to be doing manually can now be completely automated. Does that mean that you're... that it's a bad decision to go learn cloud computing nowadays? No. 225 00:37:48.608 --> 00:38:01.748 It just needs a different way of learning. So it's not just about you knowing by heart how to write, I don't know, some kind of Terraform script and all those different bits and pieces of your infrastructure as code. 226 00:38:02.168 --> 00:38:15.908 Probably not the good investment of time, but you still need to understand what it is, you still need to understand what the components are, how the architecture is going to work together, and then you can use AI to generate all of those, and AI can then start doing the work for you. 227 00:38:16.688 --> 00:38:33.608 So those are some of the things that I would argue are going down the road of what we are doing in Fastlane in terms of how we are equipping our IT professionals who are, who trust their careers to us to actually get them up to speed as soon as possible and become AI-augmented professionals. 228 00:38:33.688 --> 00:38:35.908 That's amazing. That's exactly what we do here. 229 00:38:36.008 --> 00:38:45.128 Um, and just remembering that, uh, Fastlane is an authorized training partner, so if you're interested to talk to us and get to know a little bit more about our services, we're also here to help. 230 00:38:45.508 --> 00:38:54.828 So before we wrap up, uh, I want to do a quick fire round, short answers. So I'm gonna ask you some quick questions, and then you can answer what comes to your mind. Right? 231 00:38:55.308 --> 00:39:12.228 So our first question, one cloud or multi-cloud? Multi-cloud. Best way to reduce cloud waste? Monitor what you are deploying and put alerts. Most underrated cloud skill? I would say security. 232 00:39:13.068 --> 00:39:30.028 One multi-cloud mistake companies should stop making. Don't go multi-cloud if you don't have to. FinOps, finance responsibility or technology responsibility? Both. Cloud first or workload first? Workload first, always. 233 00:39:30.408 --> 00:39:43.348 And finally, what's one piece of advice you would give a company trying to get this multi-cloud environment under control today? I would say figure out what you have. Do any kind of assessment analysis that you can. 234 00:39:43.768 --> 00:39:54.968 Figure out where you are. Because designing a strategy and not knowing what you have, it's not gonna be a strategy at the end of the day. It's just gonna be a piece of paper that you put together that looks nice. 235 00:39:55.288 --> 00:40:01.788 It was probably generated with the help of AI. It's wonderful document, but it's not gonna tell you what you should do. 236 00:40:02.128 --> 00:40:14.108 You should first understand what you have, what processes you have in place, and then you can do the change management, which basically is going to be required for you to start managing that cloud environment that you put together. 237 00:40:14.888 --> 00:40:23.068 Yeah, and that leads to run from many clouds and stick with multi-cloud. [laughs] That's a really cool... That's a really cool advice. Tom, thank you so much. 238 00:40:23.228 --> 00:40:29.438 I think the biggest takeaway from today's conversation is that multi-cloud itself isn't really the strategy, right? 239 00:40:29.768 --> 00:40:37.008 Making intentional decisions about where workloads belong, how they are governed, and how much the value they are creating is. 240 00:40:37.128 --> 00:40:49.328 And for everyone listening, Fastlane helps organizations build the expertise across AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and multi-cloud environments, from technical training to architecture and professional services. 241 00:40:49.528 --> 00:41:00.988 Don't miss the next episode where we're gonna talk about cybersecurity. We're gonna talk about some of the important topics that are overwhelming everything in the IT world today. 242 00:41:01.068 --> 00:41:07.538 So cybersecurity is no longer just a job for the IT, it's a job for the whole organization. 243 00:41:07.568 --> 00:41:15.988 So I think that some of the trends that we are seeing, and that we're gonna uncover in the next episode, are gonna be interesting for absolutely everyone to listen to. Awesome. 244 00:41:16.448 --> 00:41:24.138 Find more information, www.fastlaneus.com, and I'll see you in the next episode. Thanks. Thank you.