 Hello, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Today we're joined by Spot by NetApp, who will be part of the AWS Savings in the Cloud event in New York City, Kevin McGrath. VP of Spot by NetApp is here. CUBE alumni, great to see you, Kevin. Thanks for coming on this CUBE Conversation. Thanks for having me, John. Good to be here. Good to see you again. So we're going to be in New York City on the 25th Tuesday. It's at AWS headquarters. We're going to be there with a group. We're doing a big panel on cost optimization. You guys are a big part of that. Thanks for being involved. Give a quick overview before we get into some of the optimization questions around cloud these days. But give a quick update on Spot by NetApp. What do you guys got going on? Yeah, so Spot's all about cloud optimization and cloud operations and how we make you more efficient in the cloud. We were acquired by NetApp three years ago. We've grown up a lot since then. We started with cost savings from a VM level and we graduated into containers. But now we really look at the full scope of what a customer has everything from every single dollar that they spend in the cloud down to the workloads that they run in the cloud. And we specialize on optimizing that infrastructure that the applications need to run on. Making sure that you're using all the right cost models using the right type of instance types, the right type of services. And you're more importantly, making sure in the next dollar that you spend in the cloud goes further than the last dollar that you spent in the cloud. So we really focus around there and we're hitting a really good place here in the market as people are really, really more concerned today than ever about how those dollars are being spent. You know, it's interesting, you know, a lot of people are like, oh, public cloud growth is slowing out. I mean, come on, really, I got the LLMs, you got the AI happening. More data than ever before coming on the web scene here, both in the cloud, storage, making use of the data. There's a lot of, I won't say refactoring, but like optimization, right sizing. Like a lot of people saying, okay, I need to grow more. So, okay, I maybe got to clean things up a little bit here, but I still got to do a lot of cloud operates both on premise and edge coming. This is the big conversation. There's a lot of architectural conversation. It's not so much, you know, cut costs. It's not about cutting costs. It's about efficiency and being positioned for growth. This is kind of the core conversation. How do you guys answer that when people say, hey, I want to position myself for growth? Yeah, I think that's exactly what customers are looking to do. And I think there are a few people who maybe got a little crazy when money was free for a couple of years there. A lot of people were, they were maybe spending and not thinking about exactly how those dollars were efficient. What we don't see from customers is customers making big holistic decisions just to move things because things got expensive, but to right size and optimize in the place. Now, there are some edge cases where people do pull back on certain projects and they're deciding whether they should be on-prem or the cloud. But in general, we see cloud growth going up, right? Is it going by the leaps and bounds percentages that maybe we saw over two years? No, but it's still going up. And it's going up because it allows, it allows you to move facts, right? It allows your developers, your engineers. It allows people to move at a speed they weren't able to move at before. What people are most concerned about right now is how do I put governance around this? How do I put guardrails around what can happen? And how do I get notified when things are going, maybe a little bit crazy at any care before because again, money was quote unquote free, but I care a little bit more now with some of the pullback in the market, but it doesn't change what my business needs to do. And that's what we want to help people do. Focus on your business, let your business grow because your business is still growing, but do it at a pace where there's a system and there's policies in place that use automation to make sure that you're staying within the governance and guardrails of what you want to do as a business in the cloud. You know, we've talked before, I'll stay on the queue and NetApp, many conversations with the NetApp folks over the decade, you guys have been operating with customers built into their operations, been part of that. There's always the kinds of non-destructive operations that I've had many of those conversations. When you talk about like the money's long or free, what you're really saying is that people got to start operating and scaling up their operations and get a groove swing going on. And so it kind of brings up the question of the operating model of cloud versus say custodial kind of activities. Cleaning up, you know, you got to do maintenance, you got to have hygiene, all that stuff. So you got to balance the both. Now you're getting more into the more operating model. And this is where people are starting to say, okay, I get what's happening here. They don't want to kind of know how to get started. How do you advise companies that's saying, hey, you're not going to do the custodial thing. We got to make things clean, but I got to have an operating model around constantly rightsizing and rethinking and understanding how I'm best positioned to be optimized from a cost and technology perspective. Where do I start? Is there a play? Yeah, I think it can be absolutely overwhelming. And I think you got to do a few different things. First, you have to observe and understand where you are. And I think you're right. A lot of people take a look at where they are and they go, oh my goodness, all of a sudden I got kind of out of hand and I got maybe some over provisioned infrastructure in certain places. You need to understand what that is. You need to have a tool that can go in, look at your entire environment and say, where am I and why am I here? The second part of that is you have to understand where you're going to optimize. What are the biggest things for your buck? Just because certain parts of your infrastructure over provision doesn't mean that's necessarily the place you want to start. What you have to think is what can I automate in my environment? And that's the third step. So you need to understand your full environment. You need to understand what you need to optimize in your environment. And then you need to automate those things without automation. What you do is you get in the six to 12 month cycle where you're always looking at a big report on what you should do. And then 12 months later, you're looking at those same things that you should have done 12 months ago that haven't been done. So automation is really that key third piece and you should be thinking about that at the beginning of your planning cycle. What are the things that I can do to optimize my environment? And how do I automate that? And that's really what at our heart of what we do is we want to automate everything because if you don't automate, you're never going to get to that cloud native experience that you hoped to get to when you moved to the cloud. And that's really where you got to go. If you're not automating the decisions and the governance of what you want to do, you're always going to be behind the curve. You're always going to be thinking about, oh, how do I get this done? How do I add 10 more sprints just for people to clean up, right? You don't want to stay in clean up stage. And you want to think about that at the beginning of your cycle, not the end. Yeah, and then it also frees up the human intellectual capital as well. You got the automation. That's going to put you in a position with the AI coming on scene to take advantage of that. Again, great call out there. I want to ask you a question around costs and cutting and optimizing around where it gets complex and difficult. Do you see areas in the infrastructure on the cost side where it starts to get complex and difficult? How do people tend to handle that? I mean, costing in the cloud, I mean, everything's complicated in the cloud, right? You go to the cloud, it's a benefit and a curse, right? The benefit is you can move fast, you have thousands of end points and do whatever the hell you want. The downside is it is, it's very complex. You have a million different cost models. You have a lot of different ways that you can buy and purchase stuff from the cloud provider. You have a lot of different ways that you can run applications, right? What you need to do is you need to have the right tooling. A lot of people go out and get open source tooling for this. You can get a provider. It doesn't really matter how you do it, but you need to have a plan on how you're gonna correlate all of these things together and understand your true costs to the cloud provider. And then understanding if you're using the best cost models to the cloud provider. But you have to have tooling. You're not gonna be able to sit down with a spreadsheet and look through everything like back in the day and just understand all of your costs through Excel. That's not going to happen. You have to have tooling. There's a lot of tooling out there. And again, whether you go to a vendor or whether you go open source, you have to be able to pull all of these things together so you can get a consolidated view and a punch list of what you're gonna work on for a second and third. Without the right tooling, without the right way to look at the financial ways that you're spending and to break down these cloud bills, which by the way, the cloud bills in and of themselves can be a terabyte large, right? Depending on how far back you go. So you really, really have to have a good tooling and sometimes a big data solution even just to look at your billing, which is why you also normally when you get to a certain size need to bring in a vendor to get that done as well. Got a great setup on the market. We're going to be in New York City for a big summit. We're going to have the costings in the cloud session at the AWS headquarters in New York. You guys going to be there. What is the spot solution? Let's get into the product and the technology. What is the spot solution by NetApp? What are you guys doing in the space? How are customers consuming it? And if people are watching that might have a need for it. What's their makeup? Why would they need it? Let's get into the product. Yeah, the product itself. What we want to do is we want to take care of your full cloud optimization from your billing down through what you're running in a container, right? And we take a look at everything from how you're spending with the different services of the cloud provider to how you're running your applications and what type of instances and services that you're using from the cloud provider to run that. We can also dig down into any of your workload solutions that are running in containers or on Kubernetes or anything like that. And we want to bring that full picture to you, right? We know that DevOps and platform engineers have a really, really tough job nowadays. Not only do they need to think about the FinOps but they need to think about governance, compliance and security as well. And what we want to do at spot is we want to provide these DevOps and platform engineering teams the tools that they need so they can turn around to the rest of their business and go, we have the automation and because we have the automation we have the full visibility on our call structure from the cloud bill all the way down to the container. And not only that, but it's being handled for us on a 24 by seven, 365 basis by the automation platform to make sure that the next decision that we're making in cloud is the best one. That decision can be, what's the next VM that I'm launching? Where is the next container landing? What's the next RI that I need to purchase or exchange on a marketplace? The spot platform takes care of all of this for you while also looking at your security posture around the workload as well. So we want to provide these platform engineering teams and DevOps teams the tools and abilities so they can turn around to their CFO, their CSO, their CEO, their head of product and go, we have it, right? Like we got it because we're using Spotline app and putting all of that together in a package is what we feel is very unique. Because that's whose lives we're trying to make better. These operation teams that have to run the cloud have an impossible job. They really do. There's so many requirements that come down on them that if we can make their lives better, that's what we're trying to do. You know, it's really interesting you brought up, you know, earlier, you know, when money was free basically the Wild West people spending. You mentioned platform engineering more and more platform engineers on that are supporting the DevOps team or IT engineers. We want to call them. They're running large infrastructure. They're now, they're trying to get incentive by the CFO to save costs. This is now a new dynamic. Well, just give me the tools, I'm going to stand up stuff and make things run and be on time, all that stuff. Now there's more of an incentive around the risk side of it, cost side of it, money savings, incentives. How do you get that done? How do organizations, what are you seeing Kevin in terms of companies being successful in getting the engineers to take on kind of this mindset? Yeah, it comes down to towing, right? So we had shift left, shift left went all the way to developer and the developer was like, no, no, no, no. No, I'm not taking all of that off. And so some of what we were trying to shift left all the way to developer actually got pushed a little bit back right. And we realized the developer wasn't going to take care of everything. And that's really where platform engineering and the DevOps teams really work together. And that's so they can provide the services to the developers and the application teams so that they can run their applications. But there does need to be that split of responsibilities between what the developer is pushing into the system and then what's supported by your DevOps, your platform engineering, your SRE teams, how that's being delivered to the rest of the company. And that's what I kind of alluded to before is that this team has so many different requirements. Like you said, they have requirements from the CFO. They have requirements from the CSO. They have requirements from the app dev team. They need to put together the tooling. These are the experts that you have in your organization that are going to go out and pick the right tooling for you so that you can operate the business. What we're seeing more and more is that, like let's say your CSO or CFO are going to come in with the requirements and the business governance that they want. And then they're going to allow these teams to go out and get the tooling to do it. They can't build it all themselves. It's impossible. Even if they go out and pull all the different open source off the shelf, they're going to need some sort of service that sits in the background to help them out and be more efficient. And I really do think it comes down to picking the right tooling for the job so that they can focus on building the platform for their organization, which is what they need to do. But they need to be very specific about the vendors and the technology that they're picking to make that happen. Okay, thanks for the question. What have you learned? This is a cutting edge area. I mean, it's certainly important, right? I mean, but nobody wants to be the janitor, but it is, again, operational tooling now. So it's not just, you know, someone go do that work and clean it up and let's get back to developing again. It is part of the responsibility for the teams. I get that. What have you learned? What's your observation? Can you share any observational data, real data around where this is going and what your experiences are? Yeah, I mean, we see a lot of, we see a lot of over provisioned architecture in the cloud. Like there's just a lot of it. And I don't have the exact number off the top of my head, but when we move into a customer, we can easily save sometimes, you know, 60% off costs just by right sizing. And that's before even get to cost models of whether you buy an on-demand instance or a reserve instance or a spot instance, which I won't even necessarily dive into today, but it's three other cost models you can use, but just right sizing. When you go into a customer, a lot of times they're just over provisioned. And why are we over provisioned? Because there's a lot of abstraction in what we have to go cloud native. You have containers run on top of VMs, run on top of hardware, and like all of those have different requirements going down the line before an actual hardware is provisioned to run the application. And engineers, I was an app dev engineer at one point in time. If I want my application to run, I just ask for as much as I can. I don't want to get called over the weekend. I want to make sure that my application's running. So you have all of these requirements coming in from the developer through the container, through the VM and on down. And what really needs to happen is you need to look at each one of those. You need to make sure that the workloads asking for the right resources, that your VMs are actually sized to match those requirements correctly. And when the application scales that you're actually using the right type of VMs to scale and the really, really neat thing about the cloud is you don't have to just pick one. Like on AWS, you probably have 500 different options of compute that you can launch. You can mix and match those to make the perfect solution for your application. But to do that effectively, it needs to be automated. And that's where like we really look at it with our customers. When we move in and we do a right sizing event, a lot of times we can save an average of 50% for the customer just by right sizing and then packing. And then going forward, we can get even more cost savings and optimization by understanding the application scale and understanding what type of compute to get next for the customer and doing that automatically for them. And we're gonna get more information. This is great advice. Sometimes I hear there's too many tools out there. I got compute optimizer, a cloud watch, I got all kinds of tools, a spot. I mean, what do I do? I mean, like, I don't even know how to get started. I mean, there's a lot of, you know, tool overload here. Like, is there a playbook that you recommend that people can come in, if they want to jump in the, come to the low end of the pool and then work their way up to the deep end? I mean, as you get more into it, and if you're on the advanced side, what should you be thinking there? If you're kind of like entry level versus more advanced, what's the spectrum look like? Well, selfishly, of course, I think everyone should go spot-cursed, right? And you should have to spot.io, but to generalize that answer a little bit more because you should also vet us against other things in the industry. FinOps Foundation is doing a lot of great work around this area. I think you should definitely start there if you're new. I think the FinOps Foundation has done a great job of weighing some very good groundwork on the, you know, kind of the macro topics that you need to understand and get moving with your FinOps solution. They do a lot to not only understand, hey, this is the cost model in the cloud, but what does FinOps mean for your organization? I think they do a very good job of explaining what FinOps means not only from a technology standpoint, but a business standpoint. Then after you understand what's going on by reading that information and maybe participating some of those FinOps Foundation events, listening to theCUBE when they have experts on is another good number too, probably, but then getting down to the tooling that's actually going to implement that. So there's a lot of things you need to learn and understand. But again, I probably said this four times during this interview, if you don't have tooling and you don't have automation, you're not going to get to the place that you want to get to at the end of this. Awesome, spot.io, love that URL. Spot.io, not the spot, spot.io. Spot.io. I want to ask you, because automation, I really believe that you're absolutely not only on point on that, but it's going to be an ongoing thing that I want to get your perspective as a leader. This is not a one-time thing just because there's a little bit of a recession going on or headwind. I mean, on the other side of the market, there's a tailwind with AI right now. So, and cost is a huge concern there with a lot of these foundational models coming in. So this is not going to, this is not going to go away. This is going to be a consistent thing hence the FinOps Linux Foundation activity. We'll do more, a lot more CUBE interviews. So thanks for the plug there, but this is not going to go away. This is now an operational pillar for cloud. Oh, you have to have it, right? Like we're not going to stop, right? This train left the station a long time ago. We have decided that this is how we're going to develop and how we're going to run for some time. There'll be some outliers who, you know, kind of rejected or have very specific solutions of, you know, maybe why they won't go to the cloud, but for the large majority of us who want to move fast and want to keep things as dynamic and flexible as possible public cloud, there's no substitute for it right now until the next great thing comes, maybe in the next 10 years. You're going to see a proliferation of around everything AI, even our customers, a ton of these, you know, what you see kind of ETL workloads are turning into machine learning workflows, right? And you're starting to see how this new technology is getting embedded into literally every single product that you use. There's an application for AI and ML to help those products do better. It's not just with LLMs, but, you know, machine learning models have matured so much over the past 10 to 20 years that it's becoming more commonplace in any application that runs. And what's the main thing that these models need? They need data, they need lots of data. And, you know, for a short plug, you know, being spot-by-net app, something we haven't talked about, you know, up to this point in time with storage, but that's something that we also integrate very well with and something that we see from the, you know, the core net app customers that we have is that, hey, how do I use all this data effectively in the cloud? And how do I get all this data to give me more information than I've ever had before? And then how do I get the compute for that? There's very few answers that answer that well if you don't use public cloud, because otherwise you're doing this huge capital outlay to buy all of that power that you need to analyze that data, or you can turn on an account and get it from some endpoints. But when you do that, you need to be cost-effective about it. So when you tie all of that together, yeah, the future is only going to get bigger and it's only going to grow from here. Love that data angle, storage has now become the data platform, data is now being driven by software defined. We don't hear that word anymore, but it's software in the cloud. Elasticity is a feature, not a bug. I mean, this is going to, right sizing is just, elasticity from a services standpoint, managing, provisioning, taking, tearing stuff down, standing something up. It's going to be more dynamic as we get more AI and automation. Again, freeing up the human capital to build more solutions. I mean, again, that's the flywheel here. Yeah, how do we make people more efficient? It's been, I mean, if we boil it down to that, that's been the trick ever since business started, I think at the earliest of times. I really don't see in this aspect, we talk about, hey, how is AI going to replace jobs? And maybe that'll do that in some edge areas. In the IT space though, I think we're still growing so fast. And there's so many things that you just talked about that are growing at insane speeds that this is really just an enabler to make people more efficient. And I think we're just going to be growing, we're going to be growing dramatically from here. And all of these new tools are going to help make people do their jobs better. And we're going to make people more efficient and we're going to allow people to produce more for the same hours that they're working today. And yeah, I see a lot of cool things coming out, even from a developer angle, helping developers develop faster, helping even technical support, answer customer questions faster and things like this. But as a platform grows, you still need the people there. So I don't see a full on replacement like I'm hearing maybe in other industries, but I do see a lot of efficiency happening. I mean, we're calling it the super cloud environment where you got multiple environments, it's cross cloud, it's multiple things, savings in the cloud just gets you more money to reinvest into these new services. Again, this is the flywheel of the cloud. This is one of the benefits again. It's a proven business model over time, abstract away complexities, make things easier and simpler for people to use and make it faster and cheaper and faster. So again, Kevin, thank you for coming on, this program's CUBE Conversation, supporting our event. Next week, eight of us savings in the cloud in New York City. Thanks for the commentary and thanks for that insight into the AI and the automation, really appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely, looking forward to the event. I'm excited for the panel and excited to meet everybody in New York. All right, see you there. Kevin McGrath, VP of Spot at NetApp, spot.io, check it out. You got to get the tooling, automations here, you got to be there, right sizing, it's just going to be part of savings in the cloud to reinvest this, what's going to happen with cloud. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.