 Hello, and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here at AWS re-invent, day three of our scintillating coverage here on theCUBE. I'm joined, I'm Savannah Peterson, joined by John Furrier. John, day three, energy's high. How you feeling? I don't know, day two, day three, day four. Feels like day four, but again, we're back to the post. Who's counting? Three pandemic levels in terms of 50,000 plus people. Always are packed. I got pictures of people who don't believe it. It's actually happening. Then people are back. And then the economy is a big question too, and it's still, people are here, they're still building on the cloud, and cost is a big thing. This next segment's going to be really important. I'm looking forward to this next segment. Yeah, me too. Without further ado, let's welcome our guests for this segment. We have Brad from AMD, and we have Rahul from, well, you do a variety of different things. We'll start with cloud fix for this segment, but we could talk about your multiple hats all day long. Welcome to the show, gentlemen. How you doing? Brad, how does it feel? We love seeing your logo above our stage here. Oh, look, we love this. And then talking about re-invent last year, the energy this year compared to last year is so much bigger. We love it. We're excited to be here. Yeah, that's awesome. Rahul, how are you feeling? Excellent. I mean, I think this is my eighth or ninth re-invent at this point, and it's been fabulous. I think the crowd, the engagement, it's awesome. You wouldn't know there's a looming recession if you look at the activity. But yet still, the reality is here. We had an analyst on yesterday we were talking about, spend more in the cloud, save more, so that you can still use the cloud. And there's a lot of right-sizing I call, you got to turn the lights off before you go to bed, kind of watch your, be more efficient with your infrastructure as a theme. This re-invent is a lot more about that now before. Before, it's like the glory days. Yeah, yeah, keep building. Now, with a little bit of pressure, this is the conversation. Exactly. And I think most companies are looking to figure out how to innovate their way out of this uncertainty that's kind of on everyone's head. And the only way to do it is to be able to be more efficient with whatever your existing spend is, take those savings and then apply them to innovating on new stuff. And that's the way to go about it at this point. I think it's such a hot topic for everyone that we're talking about. I mean, total cost optimization, figuring out ways to be more efficient. I know that that's a big part of your mission at CloudFix. So just in case the audience isn't first, give us the pitch. Okay, so a little bit of background on this. So the other hat I wear is CTO of ESW Capital. They're about 150 enterprise software companies within the portfolio. And one of my jobs is also to manage and run about 40 to 45,000 AWS accounts of our own. And- Casual number, just a few. Just a couple, pocket change, no big deal. And like everyone else here in the audience, yeah, we had a problem with our costs, just going out of control. And as we were looking at a lot of the tools to help us kind of get more efficient, one of the biggest issues was that while people give you a lot of recommendations, recommendations are way too far from realized savings. Okay, and we were running through the challenge of, how do you take recommendation and turn them into real savings? And multiple different hurdles, the short story being, we had to create CloudFix to actually realize those savings. So we took AWS recommendations around cost, filtered them down to the ones that are completely non-disruptive in nature, implemented those as simple automations that everyone could just run and realize the savings right away. We then took those savings and then started applying them to innovating and doing new interesting things with that money. Is there a best practice in your mind that you see emerging in this time, people starting to be more focused on it? Is there a method or a purpose, kind of best practice of how to approach cost optimization? I think one of the things that most people don't realize is that cost optimization is not a one-and-done thing. It is literally non-stop. Which means that on one hand, AWS is constantly creating new services. There are over 100,000 API at this point of time. How to use them? How to use them efficiently? A little bit of scale on the show today. You also have a problem of choice. Developers are constantly discovering new services, discovering new ways to utilize them. And they are behaving in ways that you had not anticipated before. So you have to stay on top of things all the time and really the only way to kind of stay on top is to have automation that helps you stay on top of all of these things. So yeah, finding efficiencies, standardizing your practices about how you leverage these AWS services and then automating the governance and hygiene around how you utilize them is really the key. Brad, tell me what this means for AMD and what working with CloudFix and Rahul does for your customers. Well, the idea of efficiency and cost optimization is near and dear to our heart. We have the leading... I think it's near and dear to everyone. I know, right now, do that for sure. Yeah, yeah. But we are the leaders in x86 price performance and density and power efficiency. So this is something that's actually part of our core culture. We've been doing this a long time. And what's interesting is most companies don't understand how much more efficiency they can get out of their applications, aside from just the choices they make in Cloud. But that's the one thing the message we're giving to everybody is choice matters very much when it comes to your Cloud solutions. And just deciding what type of instance types you choose to have a massive impact on your bottom line. And so we're excited to partner with CloudFix. They've got a great model for this and they make it very easier for our customers to help identify those areas. And then AMD can come in as well and then help provide additional insight into those applications. What else they can squeeze out of it? So it's a great relationship. So if I hear correctly then there's more choice for the customer. It's faster selection. So no bad choices means bad performance. If they have a workload or an app that needs to run. Is that where you kind of get into the, is that where it is or more? Well I mean from the AMD side right now, one of the things they do very quickly is they identify where the low hanging fruit is. So it's the thing about x86 compatibility. You can shift instance types instantly in most cases without any change to your environment at all. And CloudFix has an automated tool to do that. And that's one thing you can immediately have an impact on your cost without having to do any work at all. And customers love that. What's the alternative if this doesn't exist? They have to go manually figure it out, or they get some in the face, or they see the numbers don't work, or what's the alternative? If you don't have the tool to automate, what's the customer's experience? The alternative is that you actually have people look at every single instance of usage of resources and try and figure out how to do this. At CloudScale, that just doesn't make sense. You just can't get around to it. There's too many different options too. And the reality is that your resources, your human resources are literally your most expensive part of your budget. You want to leverage all the amazing people you have to do the amazing work. So you free up people. And this is not amazing work. This is mundane, simple. So you free up all the people, time. Correct, you're free up. Wasting their time and resources on doing something that's mundane, simple, and should be automated because that's the only way you scale. I think of you as like a little helper in the background helping me save money while I'm not thinking about it. You know, it's like a good financial planner making you money since we're talking about the economy. Pretty much. The other analogy that I give to all the technologists is this is like garbage collection. You know, like for most languages when you are coding, you know, you have these new languages that do garbage collection for you. You don't do memory management and stuff. With developers back in the day used to do that. Why do that? When you can have technology do that in an automated manner for you in an optimal way. So kind of freeing up your developers' time from doing this stuff that's mundane and it's a standard best practice. One of the things that we leverage AMD for is they've helped us define the process of seamlessly migrating folks over to AMD based instances without any major disruptions or trying to minimize every aspect of disruption. So all the best practices are kind of borrowed from them, borrowed from AWS in most other cases. And we basically put them in the automation so that you don't ever have to worry about that stuff. Well, you're getting so much data. You have the opportunity to really streamline. I mean, I love this because you can look across industry, across verticals and behavior of what other folks are doing, learn from that and apply that in the background to all your different customers. Exactly. Yeah, so how big is the company? How big is the team? So it's, we have people in about 130 different countries. So we've completely been remote and global and actually the cloud has been one of the big enablers of that. That's awesome. 130 countries, sheesh. And that's the best part of it. I was just telling Brad a short while ago. That's allowed us to hire the best talent from across the world and they spend their time building new amazing products and new solutions instead of doing all this other mundane stuff. So we are big believers in automation not only for our world. And once our customers started asking us about, telling us about the same problem that they were having, that's when we actually took what we had internally for our own purpose. We packaged it up as cloud fix and launched it last year at re-invent. If customers aren't thinking about automation, then they're going to probably have to struggle. They're going to struggle. I mean, with more data coming in, you see the data story here, more data's coming in, more automation. And this year, Brad, price performance is, I've heard the word price performance more this year at re-invent than any other year. I've heard it before, but this year, price performance. Not performance, price performance. So you can certainly hear that dialogue of squeeze, understand the use cases, use the right specialized processor, instance, start to see that evolve. Yeah, and there's so much to it. I mean, AMD right out of the box is, any instance is 10% less expensive than the equivalent in the market right now on AWS. They do a great job of maximizing those products. We've got our Zenfor Core general processor family just released in November and it's going to be a beast, thank you. Yeah, we're very excited about it. And AWS now support for it. So we're excited to see what they deliver there too. But price performance is so critical. And again, it's going back to the complexity of these environments, giving some of these enterprises some help to help them understand where they can get additional value. It goes well beyond the retail price. There's a lot more money to be shaved off the top just by spending time thinking about those applications. Yeah, absolutely. I love that you talked about collaboration. We've been talking about community. I want to acknowledge the AWS super fans here standing behind the stage. Hi, y'all. Rahul, I know that you are an AWS super fan. Can you tell us about that community and the program? Yeah, so I have been involved with AWS and building products with AWS since 2007. So it's kind of 15 years back when really they were just a handful of API for launching EC2 instances in S3. About the 100,000 that you mentioned earlier, my goodness, the scale. So I think I feel very privileged and honored that I have been part of that journey and have had to learn or have had the opportunity to learn both from successes and failures. And it's just my way of, you know, contributing back to that community. So we're part of the Finoff Foundation as well, contributing through that. I run a podcast called AWS Insiders and a live stream called AWS Made Easy. So we are trying to make sure that people out there are able to understand how to leverage AWS in the best possible way. Rahul, go ahead. Yeah. And yeah, we are there to help and you know, hold their hand through it. Talk about the community. Take a minute to explain to the audience watching the community around this cost optimization area. It's evolving. You mentioned Finoff's. There's a whole large community developing of practitioners and technologists coming together to look at this. What does this all mean? Talk about this community. So cost management within organizations has evolved so drastically that organizations haven't really coped with it. Historically, you've had finance teams basically buy a lot of infrastructure, which was CAPEX and the engineering teams had kind of an upper bound on what they would spend and where they would spend. Suddenly with cloud that's kind of enabled so much innovation, all of a sudden everyone wants, everyone's realized it. You know, five years of spend figuring out whether there's people should be on the cloud or not. That's no longer a question. Everyone needs to be in the cloud and I think that's a no-brainer. The problem there is that suddenly your operating model has moved from CAPEX to OPEX and organizations haven't really figured out how to deal with it, right? Finance now no longer has the controls to control and manage and forecast costs. Engineering has never had to deal with it in the past and suddenly now they have to figure out how to do all this finance stuff and procurement finds itself in a very awkward way in an awkward position because they are no longer doing these negotiations like they were doing in the past where it was, okay, right up front before you engage, you do these negotiations. Now it's kind of an ongoing thing and it's constantly changing like every day is different. And you got marketplace. And you got marketplace. So it's a very complex situation and I think what we're trying to do with the Finals Foundation is try and take a lot of the best practices across organizations that have been doing this at least for the last 10, 15 years. Take all the learnings and failures and turn them into hopefully opinionated approaches that people can take. Organizations can take to navigate through this faster rather than kind of falter and then decide that, oh, this is not for us. Yeah, it's a great model. Yeah, it's a great model. All right, balance. Fast decision, I know it's time, John. Go ahead, team up. All right, so we got a little bumper sticker exercise. We used to think, what's the bumper sticker for the show? We used to say that. Now what modernizing was saying, if you had to do an Instagram reel right now, a short, hot take of what's going on at Reinvent this year with AMD or CloudFest or just in general, what would be? Your thought leadership sizzle. What would be this sizzle? You want to go for the red? Sizzle reel. I feel like Brad's got that. That would be on Instagram or TikTok. Look, I think when you're at Reinvent right now and number one, the energy is fantastic. 23 is going to be a building year, right? We've got a lot of difficult times ahead financially, but it's the time the ones that come out of 23 stronger and more efficient and cost optimized are going to survive the long run, right? So now's the time to build. Correct. Well done, Raul, go for it. Yeah, so like Brad said, cost and efficiency is at the top of everyone's mind. Stuff that's the low hanging fruit, easy, use automation, apply your resources to do most of the innovation. Take the easiest part to realizing savings and operate as efficiently as you possibly can. I think that's going to be key. Nailed it. Nailed it. Great job, well done. Wow, well, it was really... We pushed you on our talent list of... And all right, so we recruit them? Are they a part of our host team? Of course, of course. I absolutely love this. Raul, we always do the best at CloudFest and your 17 other job. And I am genuinely impressed. Do you sleep? Actually, last question. I do, I do. I have an amazing team that really helps me with all of this. So yeah, thanks to them. And thank you for having us here. Yeah, well done. It's our pleasure. And Brad, I'm delighted we get you both now and again on our next segment. Thank you for being with us. Yeah, happy to be here. Thank you very much. And thank you all for tuning in to our live coverage here at AWS ReInvent in fabulous Sin City with John Furrier. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage.