 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, very excited to be joined by Bina Khemani, the director of AWS Insights at Amazon Web Services. Bina, thank you so much for joining us today. Great to see you. Happy to be here. Let's talk about cloud financial management and why it is so critical for customers to achieve. As customers are bringing more and more workloads to the cloud and they are maturing their practices in the cloud, it is so very critical to set up the right foundation for FinOps in the cloud. Many of our enterprise customers are used to this quarterly budget or annual budgets and they are not used to this pay-as-you-go model. And what happens is that if they don't set the right FinOps foundations and the guardrails, then they end up worrying about build and as a result, they don't let all the builders, all the developers, get access to the right innovative technology that cloud has to offer. And as a result, the pace of innovation at the customer will slow down if they don't let the builders build. To be able to feel comfortable letting builders build without worrying about, you know, potentially exceeding their budget, setting the right foundation, right guardrails, right practices, right tools and right business processes will really get them started in the right direction for the FinOps. And I think this is, you know, this is really right phase where customers are getting it. Earlier, if you think about security, you know, security team would ask everybody to set the right guardrails, you know, ask everybody to follow certain rules and at that time, I'm talking about many years ago, teams had freedom to listen or not to listen to security. Now, security is out there in forefront and they are driving the organization in certain direction and everybody follows that and that's what going to, you know, FinOps is in the beginning cycle of their journey and I anticipate this, you know, cloud cost control, cloud cost optimization, all the FinOps practices being at the forefront in few years where the entire organization will, you know, follow the guardrail. But right now, setting the right foundation is critical and understanding what is at stake is so important for our customers. Right. You mentioned the guardrails. What are some of the other things that customers can do to be able to innovate faster and not have to worry about this shock of a bill? It all starts with, you know, setting up, you know, setting up the system where you think about who should have access to what services and resources and establishing the right business structure, right accounts, grouping mechanisms and then setting the right baselines that, okay, who can consume up to what? What are the right budgets for different departments, for different applications, for different groups? And then once you have that, then there are tools that can help you get there. So you can set up the tools like AWS Budgets will help you set the right guardrails where you can control the cost and not let it go over a certain threshold. You can also set up something, you know, there are situations where you don't even know that there is a potential leak, if you may. So you can have a, you know, a lambda in a certain loop that keeps incurring the cost. You can have long running database query. Somebody could have deployed, you know, specific resource that nobody's using and it could be incurring the cost at a very high pace. So in addition to setting up the right budgets and right cost control mechanisms off the ground, it's also important to look for patterns of unintended spend. You know, customers might not wish to spend that money and might not be even beneficial to them, but there might be situations. So we also have certain tools like AWS Cost Anomaly Detection that looks at customers own historical data, looks at their spend pattern, identifies the anomalies and notifies the customers as well as customers can do the root cause analysis quickly to figure out, okay, where is the root cause of the situation? Why am I getting this spend? And what can I do to remediate it? So those are some of the foundational things that, you know, just off the bat, customers, once they set up those cost control mechanisms, they can, you know, make sure that builders can build without worrying too much about what's my cost going to be. Right. And those are examples of proactive cost controls that customers can put in place? Absolutely. Absolutely. Planning and forecasting is critical. You know, when you are setting those cost controls because if you have the right forecasting in place, then you are likely to set the right thresholds and likely to, you know, make sure that you have budgets that set, as well as your organic growth and these budgets keep auto-adjusting so that you are, you know, really making sure that you are setting it for success. And that's so important. But like DevOps, Cloud Financial Management, it's a journey, right? A lot of customers are on it, they're in different stages. When you're in customer conversations, what are some of the foundational building blocks for FinOps that you talk about with them? That's a great question. So we see that, you know, many customers are in different phases of the Cloud Financial Management journey. Some of them are just getting started with some of the basic cost control mechanisms. At the same time, some of the customers have really matured their systems and processes and adopted tools so that they are able to not only drive the cost control, but also they are able to plan, forecast, control, as well as optimize the spend at scale. So some of these governance mechanisms, like I said earlier, starts with, you know, setting the consistent view of your business. And with that view, you know, you have the right grouping mechanism, you have right, you know, deployment strategy that some of these cost control mechanisms are deployed at scale by default with certain guardrails. Then also they have, some of the customers have, you know, governance committee, where there is a cost governance committee that meets every month and different applications can be rated based on, you know, the cost control and cost optimization mechanisms they have put in place. So the team shares the recommendations for optimization with the right application owners and business units and based on what implementations are done, those application owners application get, you know, rated like a, you know, five star, two star in any applications which are lower than certain maturity level or they are not following the recommendations and not optimizing and they feel like there is a wastage of resources that is not being prevented, they have to come and explain. So those are some of the, you know, mature practices I'm talking about, but fundamentally customers need to lay out the foundation for planning and forecasting as well as they need to figure out what is that consistent view of the business and how do I get the right metrics? How do I get visibility into the different spend and set the right alerting mechanism? So whenever there is a bleeding, then I can get notified and I can take quick action. And then comes the optimization where you are not only optimizing one time, but you're optimizing at scale and running it optimally over period of time. So how do you make the right commitments? You know, if you know that certain level of usage is necessary for certain resources, can you make commitments and get the discounts based on those commitments? If there are certain underutilized resources, can you look at what can you do to make sure you have optimum usage? If there are, you know, certain business conditions that you have unexpected peaks coming up or you know, certain outliers, what can you do to plan for those situations while you are continuing to optimize? Right. So there are a lot of factors here, but fundamentally it starts with laying the right foundation, planning, forecasting, setting up controls at scale, as well as continuously optimizing. So then from a tools perspective, what are some of the AWS tools that customers can use to both manage their spend to optimize their spend? That's a great question. We are continuously focused on building tools and providing more and more innovations to our customers so that they have tools in their hands so that they can understand, plan, manage and control their spend. And it starts with building the right account structure and building the right posture for the business that what are we going to monitor? Who is going to get access to what? And setting up those access control mechanisms. So we have tools like cost categories that help you build the right grouping mechanism. We also can, customers can also set the preferences for grouping in billing console. Then, when it comes to being able to plan, we have tools like AWS forecasting that really helps you predict the future spend based on the historical spend for a specific period of time. And you can see this forecast in AWS Cost Explorer, which is a tool where you can visualize over a period of time and see and analyze the granular cost management, cost related as well as usage related data. We also have other tools that brings more and more visibility into the cost, something like AWS Cost and Usage Report, which is a really comprehensive detailed report about usage and spend about every single customer service that customer might be using from AWS and get that old data in one place. And when customers are looking at all this data and they are thinking that, how do I drive the association on which spend is being driven by what? And especially, how do I drive that association for cost which are kind of shared cost like on the container? There are so many objects sharing that container and how do I drive the accountability and split those costs? So we also have a split cost allocation feature that helps you break down cost within that shared object and drive it across the organization that helps you really make sure that right people are, you can charge back to the right people for the right spend. Additionally, if we talk about the optimization space, we have AWS Compute Optimizer that really helps avoid any type of over provisioning or under provisioning of the resources such as EC2, EBS, Fargate, ECS, and we also have right sizing recommendations. So Compute Optimizer as well as right sizing recommendations provide you the recommendations that you can share across your organization and drive those savings. You can drive those, I was talking earlier about ranking the applications, ranking the business units on who is being most cost efficient. And with this information, you can see that how many you can have a business process to see how many of those recommendations are being implemented or not and what can you drive, do across the organization to drive more savings. Additionally, as you see your historical usage and you see that there is a steady state, certain resources you're going to use in a steady state over a period of time, you can make commitments and a commitment based purchase is such as savings plan or reserve instances, but what savings plan does it really helps you get the savings based on specific hourly commitment you make for consumption of certain resources. And when you are trying to make those commitments, you are trying to understand what is the right level of commitment for that we have savings plan and reserve instances recommendation reports tells you that what is the right level of on-demand versus committed spend that you should opt for. There are just a ton of tools to be talked about to drive accountability, there is AWS billing conductor that helps you do custom billing. So if you are a reseller, you are trying to do custom billing or you are enterprise customer, you are trying to make sure that you are sharing the cost across the organization with showback and charge back on a regular basis without a lot of or any manual effort for that matter, AWS billing conductor will help you do that. So across the board, we continue to build different tools and continue to make improvements in the user experience continue to make our ML engines as well as recommendation engines, smarter and smarter so we can provide more and more relevant efficient in context cost optimization and cost management information to the customer. So they feel they are in control of their bill and it's not enough. That's important. In the organization, who is it? What team, what individual that's driving cost optimization? Like who's accountable for actually optimizing spend? That's a great question and first of all, this concept of cost accountability is so critical and that's the only way I have seen customers be successful is that, you know, within their organization, if this is the central phenops organization or the finance team that is trying to drive this governance and control that the bill is within the budget and it's really, really hard to implement that because it will slow down the agility for builders to be able to build. What I have seen really work is drive that accountability with help of first of all, charge back and show back. So if customers figure out that, hey, this is the total amount we have to pay but we are gonna figure out which resources used by which application, which business unit, which individual or group that being able to tie that is so critical and then you can say, okay, those are the specific cost incurred by your application or your group and you need to pay for it or you need to at least be aware and responsible for it. And that drives that entire cultural shift and mindset that, you know, the builders start building the cost aware architecture. They start thinking about, do I really need to make, you know, I'm generating this specific recommendations or I'm running this ML model. Do I need to give them this sliding scale or can I give them, you know, five options they can choose from and that's going to reduce my cost significantly. What can I do? Are there underutilized resources that I can, you know, think about? So every builder starts thinking about the cost like they think about the security inherently. They had, am I building a secure application? Similarly, they will start thinking about, am I building a cost, you know, cost efficient application? Am I building the right code here? And to be able to do that, you know, you asked about who is responsible for driving the cost efficiency and cost optimization. I would say everybody. So it starts with the, you know, the Phenops persona role but at the same time, every builder is responsible for it and for that it is really important for us to be able to, you know, provide access to the cost data and the usage data to every builder. For that we provide very fine-grained granular access control so that the person who is making those purchases making those, you know, savings plan commitment, they don't worry about anybody changing those things but at the same time, they give builders access to the cost data for the applications they are building. So there is fine-grained access control and it's really, really important for Phenops person to open up the controls to the builders so they can go and see, you know, where they are driving the cost and how can they reduce it? At the same time, we have a tool called AWS Billing Conductor that really helps you show back and charge back the cost across the organization. So every department and every application owner is responsible for their cost and they start being very cognizant of where they are spending those dollars. That's a great point that you say, you know, really from an accountability perspective, it's everyone's responsibility. You mentioned cultural shift and that is so challenging especially for large organizations. In your experience, what can customers do to really drive a culture of cost consciousness? Again, excellent question. I have seen that, you know, only tools don't work. First of all, like security is a shared responsibility in many different ways. This is a shared responsibility within the organization and across the board and it works with, I would say tools, cultural shift, enablement and the business process. All of these together. So if the organizations go with the old procurement processes that they have within their organizations where they were getting, you know, those servers and racks and getting the quarterly, you know, forecast and quarterly budgets and going by that, that doesn't work for crowd. So it's really, really important for them to adopt their business processes to the new model and figure out how that's going to be optimum. At the same time, it's really important for the enablement of this, you know, the new processes and the cost management tools and being able to, you know, use this information to drive the efficiency, you know, understanding the cost optimization recommendation, sharing those recommendations across the organization and making sure that people are implementing and making changes based on those recommendations, understanding the cost anomalies and really taking actions to resolve those anomalous spend. All those things, you know, it starts becoming, everybody's responsibility for that. It's really, really critical that first of all, the information is shared across the organization and the business processes support this kind of, you know, practices which are more cloud friendly and cloud ready. At the same time, you know, the builders understand and build the cost of architecture. And, you know, a lot of times I have seen that customers, you know, identify those change agents and change champions within their organization and they start celebrating those successes there. Hey, this person drove so much efficiency and start talking about them, start rewarding them and making them visible. And that inspires the change within the organization but it has to be continuous and regular and consistent over a period of time and across the organization. And then everybody starts joining that movement, if you will. Yeah, it is a movement. I was thinking it's like a flywheel, this culture of cost consciousness that you talk about, you know, everyone's responsible but really having that consistency is really key. My last question for you, Bina, we know AWS is very much committed to providing the most value to its customers for their investments. What are some of the things when you're talking with customers or prospects that they can do to get the most value out of their investments in AWS? I believe that, you know, value is the story that AWS goes with always. You know, we bring the most value to our customers and to be able to get that maximum value, first of all, you know, you let your builders build the best competitive service that you are building that helps you compete in the market and not worry about the bill and you can do that by establishing the cost governance at scale, you know, lay out the right foundation, lay out the right cost control mechanic, proactive cost control mechanisms, build the right processes, share the optimization recommendations. Make sure that you are optimally using the AWS tools that help you not worry about the bill and help you really, you know, get maximum out of your AWS investments. Do not, you know, the way for customers to get maximum value is by letting their innovators innovate and not, you know, not holding them back and making sure that they're using the right technology in the right way and, you know, not by more of a command and control mechanism but really driving that agility and that, you know, transformation, Phenops transformation within the organization and really using optimization as a differentiation. You know, they, if they, if they can get more done with less in the most innovative way, they are likely to be successful in their own industry and to do that, you really need to, you know, adapt the Phenops best practices and use the latest AWS innovations to help you propel in your own industry. Yes. I love how you said, let the innovators innovate. Beena, it's been such a pleasure having you on the program. Thank you so much for joining me today. Very nice to be here and very nice to meet you. Likewise. 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