Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Finops is not just about, you know, just solving the cloud cost problem. FinOps is going to happen because the broader organization has bought in to this data driven decision making and accountability. If you're using cloud, you as a consumer are using cloud in a more efficient way that's good for business for them. I used to work in AWS in the early days of aws. Like we would always be cutting costs because if, if you bring more volume that made AWS more successful. I'm a big believer in AI as well, but I don't see, see a lot of differentiating functionality and kind of benefits that people are providing in the space yet. When we're dealing with cloud, we think cloud is everything and what's hidden is there's a ton more impact we could make in the organization as FinOps practitioners. Think big about what you can deliver for the organization and start to get that traction within your organization. Running a mature finops practice, it takes either a lot of money and a lot of people and effort to get to the level of maturity.
[00:01:07] Speaker B: So welcome everyone to a new episode of the Finops Weekly podcast. Today we have an honorable guest. It's going to be probably a really, really interesting podcast. But first of all, let's present my partner, Damien. Damien, how are you doing?
[00:01:27] Speaker C: And then great. I'm very happy to be here.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: And today we are honored to have Udham de Wallara. How are you Udham?
[00:01:36] Speaker A: Good, doing good. Good to be here with you guys.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: So it's, it's an honor to have you here and today is like our first, it's going to be our first episodes recorded in, in 2025 and you know, we want to, to start with you since you are, you know, the, a core item in the Focus ecosystem with this new year and with all the purposes and all the initiatives that we have for 2025. What do you think is to be the purpose of focus in 2025 and how it's going to be developing in this new year?
[00:02:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean there's a ton going on in the Focus space. I'm sure you all have been following along and I think there's a couple of core areas. Obviously the spec continues to evolve. There's going to be a lot of work that gets done in the 1.2 release. Now we just got 1.1 announced late last year, so it's going to keep evolving. I think we're trying to go for once a year or twice a year kind of release cadence and then I think on the practitioner side and the Consumer side we've seen now obviously the cloud providers really jump on board and provide the native support much faster than even I imagine when we started this.
Now really the ball is going to be on the practitioner and the consumer side about adoption and we see a ton of trends. I'm sure we'll get into it in this discussion about, you know, how that's progressing.
If you're at FinOps X, I feel like half the RXC in Barcelona, half the talks are about, you know, focus and focus adoption and the benefits. So I think 2025 is a huge year for kind of ramping up that, that, that kind of adoption story.
Obviously with specifications, you know, it takes time. Corporations can't just like, you know, on a whim be able to switch this kind of stuff. So there's a lot of positives. I'm sure we'll get into it in the, in the discussion.
[00:03:55] Speaker C: Oh, but focus, how did you get to that? I mean how it all started, it's always, it was a mystery to me.
[00:04:06] Speaker A: Yeah, that's an interesting story.
So I would say so much of my beliefs at least in this, in this need was, was formed when I went to Citigroup to lead finops there, right. So for six years I was building finops tooling at apptio, building tools like cloudability and, and to me like I felt like we were, we're doing all the right things. We were the leaders in the market, you know, we were getting ranked in the gardener and forester, you know, the quadrants as leaders and all that stuff. Went to city and tried to, you know, use the tooling like the one that I built.
And it really occurred to me that like finops is not just about, you know, just solving the cloud cost problem. Like if you ask the crowd of folks that are spending money on cloud and SaaS, are you okay wasting your money on, on SaaS, they would all say no, I want to make just as good of a efficient business aligned data driven decisions in SaaS the same way I make it in cloud. Right. And at Citi. For me that was snowflake cost, mongodb costs. We had apogee like and then there was more coming confluent cloud and, and other addition to the major clouds that we had. Right.
So I tried to essentially solve this myself over there with my team and then the more I talked to folks the more it felt like this is actually an upcoming problem for this community.
So we did some, some working groups within the FinOps Foundation. First it was called Open Billing tried to kind of get that going through, through this kind of working group is just too big of a task I think to get done as, as just a peer working group where everybody joins in once a week and for an hour and you know, we can, you know, produce this kind of thing.
I also did a podcast with, called FinOps Fridays and you know, brought up this idea that maybe the finops can, can kind of help launch this kind of effort.
And then you know, Junior, who I've known for for many years, he, he kind of reached back out publicly on LinkedIn and said hey, I saw you call out the Finos foundation to, to do this. Are you, you know, are you in, let's go do this.
You know, I was like wow, you know, do I leave the city job to kind of go go do this? And, and over time that actually came to that. So we started this new long story but, but then we started this, this new Linux foundation project, essentially an open source project for building a specification like this.
Donated the work that we did from the Open Billing group as a, as a starting point to the, this new project. And then, and then really, I mean it started with a few people that believed in, in this, it helped that like Microsoft Azure and GCP folks were on board from really the very beginning along with Irina from Neos from the European area.
Some of the folks from Walmart joined pretty early.
Tim and Carl and those kind of guys.
Riley Jenkins from, from the, the, what do you call it, the attack in the, in the FinOps foundation joined right away. So, so there's a, there's a core group of people that kind of believe that we could come together as you know, essentially a community and, and try to do this. It was still a bit of a, you know, risk that like what if you know, folks don't adopt this right? How can we as a community drive the clouds, these massive organizations to you know, come together, collaborate and, and go in on, on, on a common specification like this. And you know, what do you know, like big banks joined, you know, many others joined, you know, large social media websites joined and they just really became a thing. And you know, here we are now two years later, almost two years later and, and I think it's, it's now clear that at least for the cloud space this is the de facto standard for how you, how you deliver this consumption based cost data. Now our job is to kind of, to what I said originally about how do we expand this to serve a bigger purpose than just hey, we can get cloud cost Data to, you know, come through, come through in an easily consumable way. It needs to go to SaaS and on prem and other types of costs to really maximize the benefit it can have. So. Sorry, long answer, but that's the story behind this.
[00:09:44] Speaker B: No, no, no, that's, that's totally fine. And I think the mission is, is really crucial here about how you already been into that and how you make the mission clear and that is what it's evolving to what you think it was. And for me, when I first started in finops and all this stuff and I learned about the Focus initiative is like for me I reference it a lot to the open API standard. Like you have a way of doing things and a standardized way to refer on how you do APIs and all the elements make sense and all the elements are structured and you know how to do APIs because of that. So focus for me is like that, you know, like you, you are able to present like let's call it, it costs in a way that is standardized now. It's more focusing to cloud. But in the future, like whenever the SaaS and the on prem and all the initiative goes, then it's going to be the standard for presenting cost in the it way, which now there isn't anything like that in.
[00:10:47] Speaker A: Yeah. And I would call one more thing, and this is one I, I brought up like when we were announcing 0.5 even like 18 months ago. To me the, the biggest reason that I believed in, believe in focus and that I felt we could succeed is I, I think FinOps teams, we can, we can manage this complexity and we have been for, for years.
We understand that this means that in Azure and this in like aws, like we can keep that mental map in our, in our head because it's not great, but we can, you know, because we're, that's our job as FinOps practitioners. Right.
You can make this argument. Right. But FinOps is not going to work because the FinOps team by itself is doing a great job and understands the costs and all that finops is going to happen because the broader organization has bought in to this data driven decision making and accountability and all those things that FinOps emphasizes. And for me, like at Citi, for example, I could never take AWS data or Azure data or whatever, snowflakes data and give it to engineers and expect them to spend that time and effort the way I did to understand that data. Right. They needed a common language that was easy to understand.
And to me that was the biggest selling point for why we needed some level of standardization. It's about how do we scale finops from beyond just a finops team to this kind of broader organization that needs to be successful, right?
[00:12:36] Speaker B: Yeah, totally. And I think that's very accurate that you need a way to standardize them because there are a lot of Personas involved. So you need a way to deliver the information to them.
[00:12:48] Speaker A: Yeah, they can't, they can't all deal with that complexity, you know.
Right.
[00:12:54] Speaker C: I remember that everybody was telling me, no, it's not going to happen, standards don't work. And I said, but you know, we need it, it's required, it's needed.
[00:13:04] Speaker A: And I think honestly that that's the main driver, I think for the, the providers too. Right. Is, is they heard loud and clear from, from their customers and, and it's not that they, they, it's not that they're trying to hide something or you know, they want you to be not understanding and be inefficient. No, I think, I think for the clouds, if you're using cloud, you as a consumer are using cloud in a more efficient way that's good for business for them. I used to work in AWS in the early days of aws. Like we would always be cutting costs because if, if you bring more volume that made AWS more successful. AWS wasn't successful because we could have you waste money on S3 or some other thing. Right? Yeah, that was fine to have that money coming in, but if you're being more efficient, that meant you're going to bring in more and more workloads into the cloud, you know. So I think, I think, you know, it's surprising, but there aren't a lot of examples of the four major clouds sitting together and working on a common thing like this might be the only thing that, at least that I know of. And you know, some folks in the clouds have told us that this is the only thing where, you know, we're kind of collaborating on as an industry. So yeah, it's a nice and I think benefit for, for the community to, to have them come, come along like that. Yeah.
[00:14:38] Speaker B: After all they, I think they realize that there are now that they have, they want to, if they want to expand the power of the cloud and the size of the market, they, they, most companies that are large need a multi cloud architecture or they will have to because of whatever constraint in their identity, you know, dependability of services from each provider, whatever constraint. And then you need to like be able to collaborate and to unify all these because even though it's a very competitive environment and you know, you can't switch and it's a competition after all, between the big three and all the players, they need to wait for people to use all this because otherwise it's going to be impossible.
Especially if they, if it grows. Because before it was like yeah, small being, but now we are talking about billions and trillions of dollars.
[00:15:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:15:35] Speaker B: And so what do you see regarding like we see all this collaboration and all this evolution from the providers and from the Focus Initiative. So apart from the Focus initiative in a FinOps ecosystem, what do you think is going to happen in the environment in this 2025? Do you think AI is going to play a large role or do you think we are maybe overestimating other areas of the finops? And what do you think is going to be evolving in this 2025?
[00:16:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean I think automation is a key thing.
And I'll tell you a funny story.
At apptio we did an acquisition of a company that did automation, you know, back in 2018. I think we took that to five of our friendliest customers. Nobody was willing to give us credentials to, to essentially shut things down, scale things up and down automatically. Like this company we acquired was doing machine learning based scheduling and all that stuff. Well before, before anybody, you know, in this space was doing any of this stuff like, but, but I see, you know, so, so at the time we, you know, pretty much deprioritize that stuff. We believed it was a, you know, big deal, but it didn't seem like the community or the, the industry was ready for that. Right. I think it's much more nuanced now. People are starting to say, hey, this is my development environment. Like I'm okay to have some external system make some changes or these are, you know, kind of my kind of second level, you know, services that then I'm okay if something else does some, you know, some activities to optimize this.
So I think automation will continue to evolve. I think the industry is, is kind of trending in that direction now much faster than, you know, kind of in, in earlier years.
I'm a big believer in AI as well, but I don't see a lot of differentiating functionality and kind of benefits that people are providing in the space yet.
I think, I think when those things happen in, they make our like finops practitioners lives easier. They will definitely, you know, start to take, kind of take more of a foothold. Right now it's like, yeah, well I can ask, go ask A question in natural language and it'll you know, pull up this essentially report information for me or things like that. I think it's not that those things don't have value, they do, but I just don't know that that like we've hit that threshold where like AI, you know, is, is really driving like the FinOps FinOps market. I think there are definitely areas that are hard for us as practitioners to do on a daily basis and scale out that I think will benefit over time from, from AI, you know. So I'd say those are, those are a couple of themes I think continuing to expand finops. I think this, to me this is probably the biggest one. I think, I think you've seen FinOps foundation and others really talk about the, the kind of going beyond public cloud to SaaS and you know, maybe even on prem and then other things because I've been, I've been saying this for a couple of years. I think in the original FINOP X in Austin I did a talk about SaaS is just a mini cloud provider. Right.
And the idea is that like the same principles all apply. So I, I see 2025 naturally like we're going to take the next step in, in kind of looking at these OPEX based IT spend and trying to do finops across, you know, more than, more than just cloud into those other areas. Right. So I think, I think just numbers wise, if you look at worldwide IT spend, cloud and cloud related services probably capture about 15% of that.
There's a lot of software spend like double that amount in software spend and IT services and devices and all these things.
So I think all of those can have. Just think about the benefits of having better accountability for your software licenses and all these other areas that can drive the efficiency and the opportunity it creates for your organization. The opportunity for you as a FinOps person to be able to show this grander vision for how your organization can benefit by reinvesting these, these dollars into like the core business areas in your, in your company. So I think, I think those are some areas that I see kind of finops taking the next steps in this coming year and beyond.
[00:21:03] Speaker B: That's, that's super interesting. Yeah, I think what you, what you said is very like interesting that only 50 years, a small portion of the, of the IT cost, of the total cost is the cloud and there are a lot more into licensing and think like people that come from the cloud that we are like super cloud oriented, that we think that everything is cloud and there is almost like the Largest portion of the cake is not on cloud. So yeah, a lot of things for FinOps to expand and for FinOps to do and get out of the cloud perspective.
[00:21:42] Speaker C: Yeah, not only that, we see that if you don't do it the right way, as soon as you hit the cloud, you understand that the cost and then you go back to bucket right back to on prem.
[00:21:57] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Those unnecessary kind of restrictions start coming in from finance and leadership about cloud and, and you know, cloud really is a major driver for, for innovation. But you gotta, as you said, do you gotta do it right? Like at Citi for example, our CTO is very adamant that you, you cannot lift and shift, you know, workloads from on Prem and bring it to cloud. So we were the public cloud team, people had to show us how they were modernizing their, their, their workloads if they wanted to use, use public cloud. Right. And this like gigantic like on prem costs at places like Citi. And if you put that kind of stuff into, into the cloud, like you could easily just be out of business even for.
[00:22:51] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's what probably it's happening on a lot of cases and that's why a lot of repatriation that we're seeing. That is a lot of time and money wasted. If you already wanted to stay in on prem, just stay on on prem and that's it. Like there's a lot of failures on that side and I think there is most of that is because of lift and shift and not being able to.
[00:23:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:13] Speaker B: And so I've been talking on the, on the evolution and the evolution of things since we are doing it today.
Regarding the, the practitioners and you know, the people that work on finops directly, what do you think is, you know, a recommendation or something that people should tackle or how they should approach an evolution to advance in the, in the finop practices this, this in these times as of right now. And how do you see like people should like evolve in terms of the, the practice itself and how they should, should approach the practice this, this year?
[00:23:51] Speaker A: Yeah, that's an interesting question.
I mean my general recommendation is, is kind of related to what you said earlier about like when we're dealing with cloud, we think cloud is everything and what's hidden is there's a ton more impact we could make in the organization as FinOps practitioners. And I think keeping that in mind and at least being able to show your organization, show your leadership, these are the areas we can really expand into and the benefits we can drive if you invest in this. Right. And getting that leadership alignment. I think the leadership alignment outside of, I would say the data that practitioners need in order to drive the right outcomes, I think the alignment is such a important piece and you can start somewhere, maybe start with Cloud to show that kind of benefits that, that you can drive, but then have that bigger, you know, think big about what you can, what you can deliver for the organization and, and start to get that traction within your organization.
You know, I, I think, you know, for example, at Citi, you know, many of the things we were doing, we were starting with, with Cloud as well. But you know, the vision we were always laying out was that hey, these things, can you imagine, you know, we were 12 billion dollar IT spenders in, in, you know, as a company. If we could take this, you know, and extrapolate out to the, on prem offerings and the license, all these in different areas.
So anyway, I think that's a, that's a big one. I would say Focus Adoption. I mean, obviously, like I'm going to be biased a little bit, but I think, you know, if you are thinking about how to enable your organization, there's no, I don't see an easier way than to have people go to the FinOps foundation, maybe take the free course or the, the courses that they offer.
Just gets people so easily kind of understanding this language of finops, get into the mindset rather than you trying to drive your own, you know, kind of terminology and all that stuff. So like, I see Focus being such a massive enabler that I hope lots of folks are embracing this in their 2025 roadmaps. Indications are that way. I mean, like again, you guys are, I think all there at FinOps XE and so many talks, so many people mentioning focus as a 2025 target for, for adoption and you know, so, so yeah, I would say those are, those are a couple of things that, that I would, you know, tell practitioners, at least from my, my opinion, my perspective.
[00:27:05] Speaker C: So. Well, we talk about focus, we're talking about practitioners. What about you? What do you want to see yourself? What else do you want to do?
[00:27:18] Speaker A: Yeah, so I mean, when I, when I left City about two years ago now, I was very passionate about the, the common language for, for finops. I just felt like that that was such a hindrance to this, the growth of finops that I was, you know, really, really wanting to go, go work on that.
And that's been hugely rewarding kind of experience. You know, working as the chair for the working group there and delivering, you know, multiple releases and all that stuff. I did take a step back in, in November we announced that xe that I'm going to take a maintainer role, stay involved in the project.
But when I, when I left Citi, I also felt that, you know, another thing that's really hard for our community is running a mature finops practice.
It takes either a lot of money and a lot of people and effort to get to the level of maturity that you hear some of the folks talking about.
You know, Adobe did a great talk at FinOps X about, you know, how they really use the efficiencies from finops to, to drive new innovation in their company. Right. But those, those, those organizations have really had to invest a lot of time and effort over the last five plus years to, to get to that stage. And I think the next wave of organizations just don't have that either that level of money to be able to, to kind of get to that level of maturity or the people, you know, it's really hard to find folks to kind of build in the, in the finop space. Right. For your organizations. And so anyway, I'm going to keep this very vague but, but there's, there's a few things that I'm kind of looking in that space of how can we, how can we make it easier for, for our, our finops organizations to kind of get to that walk and run level maturity of a FinOps organization.
And I just think that's such an underserved thing that, that most people have to do what I did at Citi, which is go build out a team and go build out all this kind of capabilities that, that we feel like is necessary for our own organization to be successful.
So anyway, I won't go too much more into the, the details, but I'd say, you know, I'm kicking the tires on some stuff there to see if we can make a, make another difference for the community.
[00:30:08] Speaker B: That's right. I mean, if you are always, you know, convinced and focused to make a difference either with focus and with the initiative or with any other initiative, if you have a, you know, if the mission is something that you believe in, then it's you probably, if you are being able to make it with focus, you can probably make it with another stuff like this boost that you, that you talk about. I think it's going to, it could be an amazing, an amazing thing to, to work on and yeah, I'm sure it's going to be, it's going to be a great, a great stuff that you work on on 2025.
[00:30:45] Speaker A: Thank you. I hope. Hope that will be the case. Well, let's see.
[00:30:49] Speaker B: Yeah, let's see. So, yeah. Udam, it's been a. A pleasure to have you here.
The best wishes for 2025. Wish a lot of luck with all you do, and it's been a pleasure to have you in our podcast, man.
[00:31:08] Speaker A: Hey, thanks. Likewise. It was a pleasure talking with you all. I always love talking finops. So hopefully we'll do it again soon.
[00:31:15] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. For sure. We'll have you again. For sure.
So, yeah. Damian, again, thank you very much for being here.
[00:31:24] Speaker C: Thank you. Thank you for being here.
[00:31:26] Speaker B: Okay, I'll see you in the next episode. Bye.
