 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the CUBE's presentation of AWS Savings in the Cloud, only pay for what you need with AWS cost optimization. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and today we are very excited to be joined by Matt Jero, Manager, Principal Product Management at AppDO. He's here to talk about maximizing the value of AWS reserved instances and savings plans. Matt, great to have you. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks so much for having me. I couldn't be more excited to be here. Yeah, we're going to have a great conversation. So the cloud cost optimization landscape, really an important topic for customers. How do you see commitment-based discounting fitting into that landscape? It's such a critical component of the landscape, and if the goals of optimization are really to make sure that every dollar you spend goes as far as possible, as effective as possible, commitment-based discounts are a huge component of that. Now, in terms of how that evolves, it becomes a really exciting component and something that FinOps teams really need to think about the balance between how much they want to cover particular aspects of their usage versus maintaining flexibility for optionality in the future as their application architecture evolves or future plans evolve, whether that's M&A, growth, etc. So a lot of exciting components to it, but the commitment-based discount becomes such a critical part of ensuring that every dollar you spend is as effective as possible. And that's what customers need, right? It's always doing more with less year after year. So at a high level, Matt, walk us through how Apdeo helps customers maximize the discounts that you just mentioned. Sounds great. So Apdeo does a tremendous amount for customers. The first aspect is really providing visibility into the spend that these organizations have, how effectively that spend is being deployed and what those optimization opportunities look like. And for the organizations that want to take that a step further and trust Apdeo to automate and manage some of those commitment-based discounts, we take that on and we can do that in a pretty unique way through some of the approaches that we've developed and ultimately deliver some really outstanding results for customers. So it's ultimately kind of where customers and organizations need help in their journey and where they're at in their kind of levels of FinOps maturity. But ultimately, Apdeo can provide a broad range of solutions that help them be as effective as possible. So that's Apdeo's role. What's the role of third-party tools when it comes to commitment management and helping customers to really optimize it? Yeah. So I think third-party tools fill a very important aspect in the ecosystem. Now, obviously the providers like AWS provide a tremendous amount of transparency and a tremendous amount of granularity into those aspects of billing and usage, et cetera. But ultimately, there's always going to be a lot of different perspectives, goals, et cetera, that come into how organizations want to manage and want to optimize and play in their spend. And that's really where third parties can help because they can tailor those solutions to the needs of the very specific organizations as opposed to the breadth that AWS needs to provide, which is a solution that works for every organization, every potential customer. So it allows us to be much more targeted, much more focused and much more effective in a lot of cases. That's critical for organizations to have that customization in any industry. Let's talk about automating. Walk me through some of the main benefits of automating commitment programs with something like cloudability savings automation. What are the big points in there for customers? Yeah. So this is a really exciting thing for us here at Apdeo. So the benefits of automation are just like from one perspective, it's just response time. FinOps teams have a lot on their plate. They're asked to do a lot. They're asked to coordinate and work across so many different application teams and across GEOs and across business units. So having visibility into those organizations and what they're doing and who's spending what can be challenging. So they're pulled in a lot of different directions. Automation can tremendously help. They're just from taking things off their plate. And obviously as organizations try to do more with less, automation is a great step. The other aspect here is that you can take a very different approach when you have automation because it helps you operate at scale. And so you can think about your approach to commitment-based discounts a little differently. So traditionally the way that the model tends to work for FinOps teams, especially early in their journey, is that you're monitoring cost explorer or monitoring cloudability and you see an increase in spend. There's some on-demand usage that has popped up. And you might look at the tags, see who's responsible for that. Talk to them a little bit about it to understand, hey, is this particular database or compute instance or whatever that resource may be. Is that going to be around for a while? What's the purpose of that? Et cetera. Understand some of those future plans and then ultimately weigh that against opportunities for savings and then decide on commitments. And whether that's committing to a specific resource or committing to a spend level via savings plans, but ultimately it tends to be a reactive portion of the feedback loop. What automation allows you to do is kind of be proactive. And when you build in aspects of flexibility into that and do that at scale via automation to ultimately construct that savings instrument portfolio in a very different way that allows you to sort of build in that flexibility, you can be much more proactive. And instead of it needing to be sort of a multi-person feedback loop of that FinOps practitioner going to talk to an application owner to understand what those future plans are, you can just react in real time. And so there's always going to be a reactive component to shorten up that cycle time and ultimately that feedback loop can be tremendously beneficial because you have the flexibility to scale up and scale down and shape that coverage curve along with the demand curve. And that's where things can get really, really powerful. And to be able to do that in as close to real time as possible at scale becomes such a challenging aspect to do manually that as you lean on automation there, that's where you can really deliver results for organizations that are well beyond what organizations could do themselves. So from an automation perspective, what you just described, it's delivering savings that manual approaches just simply can't reach for customers. Is that what I'm hearing? Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It's not just automating the process that organizations do themselves. It enables a totally different process that allows a just different level of savings and much more flexibility. And that's what customers need these days. So you talked a lot about flexibility, the importance and how Apdeo is really enabling customers to achieve it. How do you measure flexibility when it comes to commitment management and why is measurement of it critical? Yeah, so the way that I like to have folks think about flexibility and we've got very specific formulas for how we measure it and quantify it here at Apdeo. But the best way to think about it is essentially how much could I lower my compute spend by without any of my commitment dollars going to waste? And so it's essentially how flexible am I to change my plans in the future. And so when we think about it from that perspective, flexibility becomes so critical and it's actually, it's not something that's necessarily top of mind at least explicitly, but is really important and it's part of organizations plan. And then typically the way that you see that manifested is organizations leave some portion of their spend on demand because ultimately that gives them a little flexibility to maybe they cover 80% of that usage with savings plans and they have some usage above and beyond that has some flexibility. And whether that's flexibility for right sizing, flexibility for some divestment or applications that may be shut down at some point, they're planning around flexibility but not being conscious of that planning around flexibility. And so flexibility, if you really build that into your strategy of your savings instrument portfolio, you can really be intentional about that and then take that coverage to a much higher level because you know you have the flexibility to reshape that curve and ultimately deliver better results for the business. And so that's where things get really exciting. And it's about taking advantage of the flexibility that comes with various types of savings instruments and a portfolio approach of all of those. So the flexibility hour to hour that comes from savings plans and it's incredible. And some of the kind of big picture flexibility that can come with things like convertible reserved instances. And when you bring those together, that's where things can get really awesome for customers. A lot of power that that delivers to organizations. You talked about flexibility kind of as different components where flexibility can really help drive those savings. What are some of the other things when you're talking with customers that organizations really need to be considering when they're in that stage of developing their commitment management strategy and their approach to it? Yeah. So I think that it's a huge component. In addition to flexibility, which I think is one of the most important aspects to plan around, because when you can be intentional about flexibility, that's where you then have that sort of optionality. Because as we've seen over the last several years, there are so many things that are unpredictable about today's landscape. So whether that's the way that rates change and the impact on business or we saw with the pandemic, how quickly organizations had to pivot, flexibility becomes so important. And you never want to be sort of, you have your hands tied by yesterday's decisions. And so if there's one thing that I try to evangelize to organizations I work with, it's about the importance of flexibility and the intentionality there. In addition to that, the transparency and all of the aspects of governance that allow organizations to push some of that visibility out to the edge and having those strong relationships between Finoff's practitioners and developers and all of the other teams that are involved in those processes become so critical because ultimately having that visibility and self-service for those organizations or members of those teams ultimately allow teams to be more nimble, more effective, and more agile. And so those two together to me can be tremendously impactful. Sounds like from an impact perspective, the team relationships are really kind of strengthening that there, which is so important and necessary, as you said, to be intentional about flexibility. I love that. Matt's been great having you on the program. Thank you so much for joining me, talking about AWS Savings in the Cloud, only paid for what you need with AWS Cost Optimization. Matt, again, thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me, Lisa. And my pleasure. We want to thank you for watching and remind you to keep it right here for more action on theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.