 Hi, this is your host of the Bhartiya and welcome to our brand new series and today We are going to discuss the impact of cost cutting that we saw in 2022 and today we have with us once again kid marker chief growth officer at Noble line kit It's great to have you on the show. Great to see you. Thanks for having me last year We saw a lot of efforts within the industry. We're a lot of layoffs happen companies are looking at cutting cost Cloud is also people are looking at how to kind of optimize it the way I see it Sometime that we are kind of clip the industry is maturing where we are I don't look at it Essentially as cost-cutting. I'm looking at becoming cost efficient or cost-effective if I ask you What kind of trends you saw throughout the year when it comes to either cost-cutting or cost effectiveness through my lens of Noble mind through our service law objectives. I think, you know, I'm particularly concerned with cost-cutting because one company is cost-cutting It's another company's revenue cutting if you know what I mean, but the the layoffs created a very specific kind of pressure on Especially on technology teams where they no longer have the slack in their environment meaning that the free time to work on projects and it really changes the calculus for build versus buy decisions and as we've seen an increase in Availability of mature solutions of open-source solutions cloud solutions things like that It becomes harder and harder. I think to justify DIY solutions for you to build things yourself now. I've got a couple of customers recently That told us, you know number one that you know, they would never buy from us because you know We they build, you know, we build everything ourselves and they've come back to us a year later and said, you know what actually We change your mind that the economics don't make sense for us to build and maintain this ourselves another customer Retailer in Europe that just told us, you know, they built a solution a year ago They thought they were ahead of us now they see how much progress we've made and now they're looking to build internally And you know what? It's not just because of us It's because the economics of building and maintaining these solutions is hard and when you you know, especially when now you've got to Focus on your core competency Due to the the time pressure you have of reducing the staff on a team. It really does change the equation so I think it's In some ways to your point about maturity, you know this is a signal that some of these IT areas and and developer tools and cloud infrastructure things like that are maturing to the point where you don't need an army of people to Build and maintain them. In fact, that should be our goal all along should have been to be Efficient with this and efficiency is perhaps one of the most important things Businesses are facing, you know, we we went through an era of growth at all costs And we saw that both from perspective of investment as well as in the perspective of technical that I would say and That growth needs to be tempered with efficiency. I think the really the goal. I like to think of is it's trying to balance between Excellent service and efficient delivery and finding that sweet spot that balances those two competing needs It's really the trick to running a sustainable sustainable business since you brought the point of open source Open source is very good at solving day one problem. You can download the code You can get it started But what commercialization of open source does is that it takes that burden away from you still ever, you know You have the confidence of using open source code base You have the confidence of looking into the code You have the confidence of patching things if you need to you also have the confidence moving from one vendor to another Depending on how you look at it, but open source has always been like that There are a lot of folks who have the resources to do that, but most companies What is also happening is that you end up wasting so many of your technical resources in plumbing the things this that does not add any Value to your business. So so talk a bit once again about you touch them on the build versus buy open source How how is this going to impact there because we will be looking at a lot of no service providers Or you know opinionated services where you're still leveraging it, but we're also Hearing a lot about cost cutting from the cloud the cloud cost is also becoming a big concern So talk how to maintain that balance. What are you seeing there? What you're really talking about is opportunity cost we're talking about opportunity cost and risk and an opportunity cost The way I think about it is it's it's the other things you could be doing instead of what you spend your time on And so what open source represents is it's a low low cost in the sense that it's free You know, it's it's free like speech not free like beer as they like to say But it is it is very expensive in terms of opportunity cost. I think that's the point And so you have to question the dollars that you're spending in terms of opportunity cost versus the free software you're getting now You know the ecosystem has become I think pretty rich with open source solutions that are available from cloud providers directly like You know sort of your managed Prometheus and these kinds of offerings You also have marketplaces that are full of offerings and there's sass versions of these open source things So I think recognizing that open source can support, you know a business right open source is not a business model But it can support various business models I think the other thing about open source is it into your point about vendor lock-in and sort of transparency, right? The way that we have approached open source for ourselves has been to open up the API's and standards for the formats You know, if somebody in our case, you know open SLO is the the open source API we use Somebody's making an investment in defining SLOs for noble nine because they want to build that that's really their intellectual property You know, and you're asking them to build code and configuration and check-in stuff You don't want them doing that using a proprietary language with no exit path If we lose the trust and confidence of our customers, they should be able to take their IP I think that's just that's just stands to reason you should take your data and take your IP And I think customers are getting sophisticated about demanding from their vendors that they follow open API's And that they let them take their data and that they make migration off of their platform Actually pretty straightforward. I think that's important at the same time, you know, you want companies to be productive So you want that, you know, you want to buy something and get real value out of it quickly And to solve those day-to-problems all the other thing that's really plaguing us these days is supply chain security and open Sources of an antidote to that as well And I think having some transparency where you can see the code and see what's going on is really helpful But you can't expect companies to give away all of their intellectual property and And products We need somebody to get paid to build the open source technology as well But I think for transparency and vendor lock-in. I think it makes perfect sense But I think buyers or consumers of open source have to be smart about the trade-offs in terms of Opportunity cost as well as making sure the people maintaining that project get paid in some way So that they can continue to invest in the in the open source Let's talk about how SLOs we we had this show real so Can actually enables companies to become more cost efficient So impact of SLOs directly on becoming more so that you know, you are actually taking the hacks off from them and giving them a scalpel So they can actually Fine-tune things so they are actually becoming cost efficient one of the things I think that it's very expensive for organizations is how they handle incidents No, it's inevitable that you will have problems in your software But what's what's maybe less obvious is that not everything that looks like an incident necessarily is an incident It needs to be done with right now And so if you can reduce the sort of temperature and frequency of emergencies And try to find ways to be more proactive This is a huge improvement right off the bat from an efficiency perspective It means you can redeploy your time and energy to other things versus waking your engineers up at 3 a.m You know having them deal with something or acknowledge something that maybe isn't a real issue Or is going to recover on its own and that comes from having you know poorly defined alert policies and Metrics that don't necessarily drive customer impact So that's one right off the bat something that SLOs help with very clearly Another area it helps with is deciding where to spend your time and energy You know if you're working on features and new innovation, but your service is burning down because of technical bet That's not a good decision. How do you bring visibility to that? I like to say that reliability is invisible Until it isn't and this is where you know reliability issues show up in the headlines Well, the question is how do you get your business stakeholders to understand the cost of reliability when things are going well? And I think this is another value that SLOs can bring one one final thing I'll say about this is you know, there's a lot of data being generated by observability systems Whether you have metrics traces logs, you know, and you may have multiple systems generating data about your about your running systems And the question is like what are you going to use that data for? I think there's a there's a mindset which is you know, you want to get as much data as possible Just in case right you want to always have this data Well, but I kind of flip this around. I think well the service is running 99.9 percent of the time well And only 0.1 of the time is the service having trouble. I mean in theory I mean it's different for different services But if it's running well most of the time When are you going to go look at that data when you're going to go dig into the logs and everything else? And it's not necessarily all of the data that's interesting So what what we've decided to do or what we've helped our customers do is actually define the interesting times You know whenever there's a software release. There's an outage is in your miss and use that to drive their data retention policy And so this means they can go upstream to you know, their log storage system their metric systems, etc They're different observability systems and actually select what data to keep Based on things that might be interesting for Investigations and they use the SLOs to determine what's interesting. Okay by doing this you can dramatically reduce the amount of data storage you have Because you're going to keep the summary data about the SLOs You're going to keep the interesting moments so you can go back and look at them You're going to keep the the annotations and history of changes to the system But you don't need to store All the logs are generated while services running properly and these kinds of techniques Are becoming very popular Very intriguing for people, especially the more sophisticated people that are looking at the sticker shock that they have from their Observability bills and I actually talked to quite a few customers Where they you know We're trying to move from one system to another to save money And then they realized that the new system was going to be the same price to the old system And so they're trying to figure out how to break through That that challenge and use you know again like open source solutions cloud hosted solutions are less expensive But just getting smarter about the data because you know data just it just grows and you just keep paying For it and at double nine we don't charge for data ever We we actually have a pretty strict policy on that So we charge we charge only for the running SLOs. You're currently collecting We allow you to export all your data. We store two years of data in our enterprise platform And so that it makes it quite a bit more cost effective than just you know piling up more and more data it also aligns the incentives because If I was trying to convince you to just sort, you know, if I wanted to make my bill go up I just tell you to collect more data And and then make it harder for you to figure out which data you're going to actually use Do you have any kind of Advice for companies so that you know, they can not only just like either SLOs leverage approach open source appropriately So that they can You know remain cost efficient. I mean we can learn a lot of lessons and you know implement them The way we run businesses my biggest advice is Is you know one is don't just Cut costs without the context, you know This this idea of Being able to make your service efficient and make your team efficient Needs the context of the value that you're paying for and so one of the metrics I think about is sort of the cost to serve right you want to serve your customers at a certain level But there's a cost associated with that and if you can get down to those unit economics and truly understand The the the value you might be spending a lot of money on cloud But guess what all your customer revenue is dependent on that cloud being up and running So, you know, what you can't really just look at and say, okay, let's cut costs There are some tried and true methods and low hanging fruit, but you can use absolutely reserved instances and other kind of cost optimization techniques but You know those have to be put into context And I think that's the my my biggest advice is to make sure that you have that context as you're Approaching whatever cost cutting activity you're doing Obviously, you know being aggressive about cost cutting is really important. But at the same time tempered with With an understanding of what's going to break your business as opposed to just You know excesses that are unnecessary. Okay. Thank you so much for taking time out today And of course talk this very important topic because 2023 is going to be a tricky year for all of us But I really appreciate your insights and I look forward to talking again soon. Thank you Thanks so much. Looking forward to it