BEST PRACTICES ARE ALWAYS THE BEST REFERENCES Nick and Jason will be breaking down the best practices in FinOps and this will be a special episode as it will be in two parts. In this first part, the duo will be discussing allocation and accountability, particularly strategies for alignment in allocation, tagging, ownership of resources, and many more. Improve your FinOps or get started with it with the best practices by tuning in and learning more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY NICK: DON’T GET HUNG UP ON THE TAGGING AND ALLOCATION “If you don't know where to allocate something, tag it as such, just put a tag on it, it's Other, or Unallocated, or Uncategorized, or whatever. The important part there is you've made a deliberate decision that you need to come back and address those, and it's better than leaving it untagged because there's going to be other resources are going to show up in the environment not tagged and you want to not be lost in the noise of all the untagged stuff trying to find the newly untagged stuff” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

FRAME IT, WORK IT Every system, process, or operation is built on a framework, and the same goes for FinOps. Nick and Jason continue with their FinOps series and today, they discuss the FinOps Framework and how it can be applied to your organization. Our duo gets down with the details starting from the core elements of the FinOps Framework, to understanding cloud usage and cost, and many more. Find out more about the FinOps Framework in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: THE CORE ELEMENTS OF THE FINOPS FRAMEWORK “They call them core elements. We've talked about some of them in some of our episodes, but Principles, Personas, Phases, Maturity, Domains, and Capabilities are the core elements of the FinOps framework.” JASON: ADVICE FOR THOSE STILL STARTING WITH THEIR FRAMEWORK “The first phase is to start with Inform. Inform gives you visibility and allows you to allocate your environment properly, budget, and forecast out into the future. So that's where I would start, with the informed phase, set realistic, SMART goals for the organization and what they want to achieve from either allocating, whatever is important, allocation, anomalies, forecasting, whatever is important to the organization, set those and then start to live up.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

APPLICATION LEADS TO RESULTS. RESULTS LEAD TO IMPACT. We have talked about the definition of FinOps, its terminologies, benefits, and core principles. In this episode, Nick and Jason will be discussing how FinOps can impact your bottom line towards improvement. Our duo will be touching on lift and shift, allocation, visibility, transparency, predictability, and many more. Stay tuned to learn more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: THE PROBLEM WITH THE LIFT AND SHIFT “If you're only doing the lift and shift portion of whatever you're calling your digital transformation, or your migration to the cloud, in effect you’re not getting the true value from the cloud, because primarily, lift and shift deals with a lot of legacy compute.” NICK: FACTORS THAT IMPACT THE BOTTOMLINE “Direct effect on the bottom line, I'm gonna drop dollars down to my EBITDA, and then there's also rate-based optimization, so I'm going to be able to commit to using certain things, and right down to my bottom line. So those are sorts of two economic drivers for impacting your driving bottom line. But there are all these other sorts of value points, I think you touched on in the beginning of that which was visibility and transparency, this sort of idea of data-driven decisions. So now I can get predictability. So once I have predictability, then I can start to make decisions about things I want to do.” JASON: TRUE BENEFIT OF FINOPS “I think FinOps is designed to help companies increase revenue, lower the cost it takes to support that revenue, and allow companies to truly leverage the benefits of the cloud without the apprehension that comes with it.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

LET’S TAKE IT DOWN TO THE CORE In the past episodes we have been diving into a deeper understanding of FinOps, and today we will be learning more. Nick and Jason will discuss the Core Principles when incorporating FinOps into your organization. The two will talk about the importance of communication, data-driven decisions, taking advantage of the variable cost model, accountability, and many more. So make sure you tune in until the end of this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY NICK: TEAMS SHOULD COLLABORATE EVERY SINGLE DAY “The best teams I've ever seen in the most secure organizations I’ve ever seen is where those two teams find a way to collaborate every single day by getting rid of each other's anxiety.” NICK: IMPORTANCE OF DATA-DRIVEN DECISION MAKING “This might be the most important, it’s data-driven decision-making, making sure that decisions are actually driven by business value in the cloud. And I think this is easy to say, I think every organization says it, but I think nearly every organization I have been involved with, at least early on, has been very immature in actually doing it.” NICK: TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE VARIABLE COST MODEL OF THE CLOUD “Being able to take advantage of variable cost and the sorts of economics that can happen, once you get out of a legacy mindset around your app and get into the cloud first, or the cloud-native mindset runs your app. This is extremely powerful because I don't want my app consuming resources when the app’s not being consumed, and legacy models are built around persistent workloads that consume the cloud all the time. And you want to get to this world where I can take advantage of those variable costs.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

IS FINOPS SALEABLE TO YOUR ORGANIZATION? As many organizations normally operate, every course of action that needs to be done or proposed to be taken will undergo a series of approvals and a whole lot of convincing and selling. If the action to take entails some cost, oftentimes it’s a hard sell. In this episode, Nick and Jason will be talking about how you can effectively sell the importance of FinOps in your organization. Stay tuned until the end in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: A SIGNIFICANT PORTION OF THE COST STRUCTURE “Cloud has to be a significant meaningful portion of your overall cost structure for the cost savings or optimization piece to bubble up to that level.” JASON: ALIGNING WITH THE PROBLEM VIA PERSONA “It's about aligning the problems that the organization faces, with how FinOps will solve some of those problems in the language that your persona identifies with. So as we mentioned with CEO, it's going to be about accelerating growth. We talked a little bit about CFOs, it's going to be more about cost visibility and making sure that you're accurately forecasting. But the key is that one, I'm assuming you have a set of problems identified, because you're looking at FinOps, and aligning those problems with how FinOps will help you solve them to the personas that you're talking to.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

WHAT’S A COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS FOR WITHOUT TALKING ABOUT BENEFITS? In the past episodes, Nick and Jason have talked about the basics of FinOps, its definition, and the terminologies involved in it. In this installment of their FinOps series, the duo will be talking about the benefits of incorporating FinOps in your organization. The two will talk about the problems experienced pre-FinOps and how they are dealt with, capabilities for transparency and data-driven decision-making, and giving predictability to a project's cost. Learn more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: THE TRUE GOAL OF GOING TO THE CLOUD “Could you potentially save some money? Yes. I mean, that's definitely possible, because I'm going to use what I need to use, but it's not necessarily the goal of using the cloud, the goal of using the cloud is to grow, to become, to generate more revenue to be more innovative and to get things done faster than I ever can before.” JASON: FINOPS ALLOWS YOU TO MAKE DATA-DRIVEN DECISIONS “More than just looking, it allows you to take that data, not only to understand what my costs were, but also what my costs are going to be so that I can make better decisions about how I leverage technology. ” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

UNDERSTANDING INDUSTRY TERMS IS CRUCIAL TO UNDERSTANDING OPERATIONS In any field of operations, it is very important to get your terminologies right. Teams cannot operate, communicate, or coordinate well together if they don’t talk or write in the same terms. This is why this subject should be discussed early on, and in this episode, Nick and Jason will be breaking down important terms in FinOps such as Blended vs Unblended Cost, Cost Allocation, On-Demand Pricing, Amortized Cost, Cost of Capital, and much more, so stay tuned until the end of this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY NICK: THE IMPORTANCE OF A COMMON VOCABULARY “This is important to cover early on because one of the first steps in any endeavor is really defining your vocabulary to help people communicate, and when we're communicating across Finance and DevOps, being able to bring those two teams together in a common dictionary, I think, is pretty important.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

LEARN THE CYCLE, LIVE THE CYCLE Nick and Jason are back with the FinOps series and today, we will be learning the FinOps Lifecycle. The two explain what the lifecycle means and how it is broken down into 3 phases, which are Inform, Optimize, and Operate. Make sure to tune in until the end so you don’t miss a thing in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: DEFINING THE FINOPS LIFECYCLE “The FinOps lifecycle is a set of phases that are prescribed for organizations to achieve FinOps. So that's broken down into three separate phases in order, it's inform, optimize as the second, and then operate as the final third phase.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

WHAT DOES FINOPS REALLY MEAN? Welcome to another episode of Cloud Cost Optimization and today, Nick and Jason will be kicking off a series of episodes that will be focused on FinOps, its definition, how it helps, why is it getting more and more popular, and what it takes for an organization to start operating with it. The two will also give their tips on how your organization can get started with FinOps so make sure to stay tuned until the end. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: Definition of FinOps “It's a practice or a discipline set of processes that you can follow that enable organizations to get maximum value from cloud spending. And it does that by bringing together the stakeholders in cloud utilization spending, right? Finance, engineering, technology, whatever the business units you have been to, and it allows them to make better decisions on Cloud spending that are data-driven, instead of guesswork like our thumb in the wind from back in the CAPEX days. You can make sound data-driven decisions in the cloud. If you have the right set of tools and processes and discipline internally” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

IS THE COST WORTH IT? Many organizations have skyrocketing cloud costs because of failing to manage their storage well. Today, our Cloud duo, Nick and Jason will be discussing how a storage that keeps growing can affect your cost exponentially. The two will also explain the problems with versioning as a remedy and what truly solves this issue. Learn more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY NICK: INVENTORY IS THE FIRST THING TO DO “Turning on versioning, and not setting a policy, not adding a rule to manage out those versions can lead to all sorts of problems. One of them that I think people don't understand is that even if you delete an object in an S3 bucket with versioning, turned on the object is stored plus, all of its previous versions are stored forever and ever until you have a policy created that says, you know, take any deleted or take any non-current object and actually get rid of it.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklumsden/ Jason Yaeger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyaeger/ Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com: https://www.tenacitycloud.com/

SOMETIMES, YOU HAVE TO DO THINGS PROACTIVELY In this episode, Nick and Jason discuss the challenges of managing aging infrastructure. They explain that abandoned or orphaned infrastructure can linger in an environment for a long time and often requires a proactive approach to detect and address the issue. They recommend considering the age of the infrastructure and proactively managing it to avoid having resources that are no longer in use. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY NICK: INVENTORY IS THE FIRST THING TO DO “Know what you have, inventory it, understand it, groom it, maybe that's a tool, maybe that's a project, maybe it's bringing in a third party to help you out. We've seen all of those examples, and then once you understand it, and you are now deciding to proactively manage it, you will now want to divide up your resources out there and understand kind of where they fit,” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

IS THERE REALLY SOMETHING TO FEAR? The IMF recently reported that the majority of countries are unlikely to enter into a recession. However, industry analysts are still predicting a shallow recession is possible. In line with this recent news, Nick and Jason share their thoughts on what this means for cloud spending and cost, and how this impacts budgeting for the year. The two also discuss how this relates to people’s current sentiments on the economy, labor’s current status, and how tech companies are preparing for the coming shallow recession. Find out more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY NICK: THOUGHTS ON ECONOMIC SENTIMENT “The sentiment is still there. And it takes a while to change. It takes a while to change sentiment around the economy. Everyone's looking for the positive signals and the uptick, but everybody's in conservative mode.” JASON: OVERHIRING IS THE TRUE REASON FOR LAY-OFFS “I think a lot of the tech layoffs were due to the over-hiring during the pandemic, and it just and obviously preparing for what could come in 2023.” NICK: KEEP CONTROL OF YOUR CLOUD SPEND “It's still important to keep control over those cloud spending, I think we got a long road out of the downturn still, in certainly with labor shift, it becomes more important than ever to kind of have your arms around what's going on inside of your organization, whether that's building a fin ops discipline internally, or whether that's, you know, getting help from an external source, or that's having the right tools in place in order to have that visibility.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

IT’S TIME TO SAVE UP ON CLOUD COSTS. HOW? BY CUTTING OFF SOME TIME. Nick and Jason talk about savings in today’s episode. The duo introduces a no-cost, no-commitment, simple yet effective way to save by implementing scheduled instances. Nick and Jason explain and give us context on what schedule instances are and cite examples of how it applies to your cost. Learn more about this in the latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY NICK: THE SAVINGS YOU GET WITH SCHEDULED INSTANCES “Just take this simple example of 10 hours a day, five days a week, so I got about 50 hours where there's an activity against that environment that's under 30% utilization. For the given weeks, I've got 70% of the time, I've got resources that are running that are costing me money, compute resources that are costing me money that I don't need to have running. So we're talking about immediately, sort of just round numbers 70% savings without any commitment, and the best savings vehicle I can get from a commitment-based strategy.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

ARE YOU HOLDING YOURSELF ACCOUNTABLE? Welcome to another episode, and today, Nick and Jason talk about Accountability. In companies, it is very important to have accountability in everything you do, even in the simplest things such as tagging. Nick and Jason break down the importance of accountability and its relation to cost allocation. Learn more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY NICK: FIND THE TOOL AND DATA THAT’S NEEDED “Just in terms of thinking about allocation, having a tool, or having a set of data that shows you where stuff is allocated, as well as what's not allocated, that's really, really critical.” NICK: ESTABLISH ACCOUNTABILITY RIGHT FROM THE START “as an IT or a CloudOps group, if you're trying not to be a call center, the very thing you want to do is assure accountability from the moment something is created.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

JANUARY ENDS, AND YOU’RE OFF BUDGET. WHAT DO YOU DO? Nick and Jason are back and in this episode, they talk about one of the common budget issues, which is being off-budget right at the end of the first month of the year. The two discuss how you can explain this variance and how you can manage your cost to avoid this. They will also tap into the concept of technical debt, and how it starts, and how it can be managed. Learn more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

OPTIMIZE YOUR CLOUD SPENDING WITH THE KICK-OFF EPISODES OF THIS SEASON! Today, we take a look back on another 5 best moments on the show that not only entertained us but really gave us a deeper understanding of Cloud spend. Tune in and listen to the best moments of Nick and Jason as they talk about the basics and the sure-fire strategies in Cloud management. Find out more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. If you missed these episodes, make sure to tune in to further optimize your Cloud spending experience: Strategies for Cloud Cost Allocation and Chargeback The Challenges and Massive Benefits of Refactoring Cloud Adoption Is Accelerating Amidst Rising Energy Costs Finding Cost-Efficiency in Instance Size Flexibility Start with Visibility to Address Issues in Cloud Spending Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

OPTIMIZE YOUR CLOUD SPENDING WITH THE KICK-OFF EPISODES OF THIS SEASON! Today, we take a look back on the best moments when we kicked off the season with a bang. Tune in and listen to the best moments of Nick and Jason as they talk about the basics and the sure-fire strategies in Cloud management. Find out more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. If you missed these episodes, make sure to tune in to further optimize your Cloud spending experience: Episode 1- WELCOME TO THE CLOUD: The Cloud Cost Optimization Podcast Kick-Off Episode 2 - Visibility Reduces Cloud Spend During a Recession Episode 3 - 3 Strategies to Maximize Cloud Cost Savings Episode 4 - Clean Up Your Infrastructure to Cut Idle Costs Episode 5 - Mitigate Risk with Committed Use and Committed Spend Programs Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

IS YOUR CLOUD SPEND FAT, BLOATED, AND OVER THE TOP? Today, Nick and Jason will be talking about health, not the physical one, but the overall health of your organization’s cloud spending. The two discuss the importance of keeping your cloud health checked by relating it to the human body’s health and the concept of diet. Learn more about how you can create a lifestyle change for your cloud spending in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: IMPORTANCE OF FINANCIAL REPORTING TO OPERATIONS “Be realistic about it and make sure that whatever is put in place doesn't make it so people will end up not following whatever processes or recommendations or things that you put in place, they have to be realistic, and they cannot put huge roadblocks in the way of your team completing their job functions.” JASON: IMPORTANCE OF FINANCIAL REPORTING TO OPERATIONS “Part of the lifestyle change in cloud spending is really understanding how that environment is broken up and getting down to something that a person, a human being with their head can actually wrap their, you know, their mind around it and think about the problem.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

HOW DO YOU KEEP TRACK OF YOUR SPENDING? Following the theme of starting your FinOps year right, Nick and Jason’s conversation today is about operational-level financial reporting and how it can help manage and optimize cloud spending. Jason mentions that forecasting and trending are important to understand where one's spending is currently at and where it is projected to go. He also stresses the importance of tracking spending in the context of the business, so that potential budget issues can be caught and addressed early on. Find out more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: IMPORTANCE OF FINANCIAL REPORTING TO OPERATIONS “It's one thing to know that your spend is going to exceed your budget, or what you thought it was going to be. But it's another thing to know why, you know, you need to be at least armed with the data at hand to be able to lead you down the path of where that potentially is.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

YOUR BUDGET’S TIGHT WHEN YOU DO IT RIGHT. Nick and Jason are back, and in today’s episode, they will talk about how to stay on top of your budget and manage your organization effectively. The two discuss the importance of implementing a framework in order to help organize and improve communication within a company, especially for startups and growth-stage companies. Tune in to discover the 3 main components of a good framework and how they work, in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY NICK: COMPONENTS OF A GOOD FRAMEWORK “The components that make up a good framework and use only the pieces that you need for your organization are rhythm, cadence, and your metrics. So your rhythm is your definition, what are you actually going to do, and your cadence is how frequently you're going to do it, and your metrics are what you're actually going to look at what's important.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

YOUR BUDGET’S TIGHT WHEN YOU DO IT RIGHT. In today's episode, Nick and Jason discuss how to get off to a strong start when it comes to budgeting for the new year. They talk about some of the mistakes that can be made when managing a budget, and how to avoid them. They also discuss the importance of thinking about the impact of budget decisions on the business as a whole. Find out more by tuning in to this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY NICK: GET YOUR RHYTHM RIGHT AT THE START OF THE YEAR “Really getting your metrics and your rhythm and everything down correctly at the start of the year to be managing, and starting strong, I think is really important.” NICK: UNDERSTAND YOUR BUSINESS GOALS AND NOT JUST THE COST “It's important if you're sitting in that seat where you own a budget to understand what your business's goals are.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE CONTEXT OF THE MATTER In today's episode, Nick, Jason, and Andrew discuss the importance of data context and how it can help organizations optimize their cloud costs. They discuss how data in the context of the business can help organizations make better decisions about their cloud usage and how Tenacity AI can help provide that data in an easy-to-understand format. More of these in by tuning to this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: UNDERSTAND WHEN THINGS ARE NOT BEING OPTIMIZED “We need to have the process in place to be able to understand when things aren't being optimized in the way that they should.” NICK: FIND THE RIGHT PERSON TO RUN YOUR CLOUDOPS “When you find the right person who's running your CloudOps, or running your DevOps teams, that wants to be efficient, giving them the power to do so giving them the tools to do so they'll they'll surprise you.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

WE HAVE ANOTHER MYTH TO BUST TODAY Jason and Nick discuss the myth that provider tools are enough to manage cloud costs. They argue that this is not the case and that organizations need to invest in their own tools and processes to optimize their use of cloud resources. Find out more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY NICK: TOOLS ARE ONLY THERE FOR INSIGHT “It's there because it's necessary for them to provide a tool to give insight to their users, but it's not there to actually drive outcomes on behalf of the user.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

HAVE YOU BEEN IMPLEMENTING YOUR FINOPS WELL? Nick and Jason discuss financial management and its three main components - budget, cash flow, and risk. They also talk about how organizations implementing their FinOps practices or their own cloud center of excellence should be thinking about these primary areas, and how the tooling can help them out. Learn more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: WHAT TO DO WHEN LEVERAGING THE CLOUD “If you're going to leverage the cloud, and allow your organization to leverage the benefits of the flexibility, and the elasticity and all of those things, then you just have to, you have to get comfortable with the fact that because these costs can vary greatly, as you mentioned, variable costs, you have to get comfortable with knowing that budget, cash flow, and risk are going to have to be managed differently than they were when you could touch the servers.” JASON: STOP SPENDING ON WHAT YOU DON’T NEED “Stop spending money, cash on things you don't need, right? I mean, cash flow, and I know maybe this isn't the same necessarily the same thing with a capital environment, but if your costs aren't changing, as you add more customers, that means you're overpaying today.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

SMALL, MEDIUM, LARGE/GRANDE/VENTI, WHATEVER There’s a myth that FinOps is only for organizations with the largest cloud budgets, which is not true. There are a whole host of problems that need to be managed, regardless of budget and business size. FinOps can help solve these problems by providing a framework for managing costs, optimizing resources, and improving efficiencies. Nick and Jason will be discussing these and helping you understand more why tracking costs should be done in any business or organization’s size, in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: TECHNOLOGY IS NOW A LINE ITEM IN EVERY BUSINESS’ COSTS “Technology has become a line item on everyone's budget. I mean, unless you're, you know, selling cigarettes and booze at the corner store, or haircuts or something like that. Technology has become a major part of any business.” JASON: WHEN YOU NEED TO START TRACKING COSTS “I think if it's growing at a rapid pace and if it's significant enough in nature that somebody is telling you we need to examine and look at the costs. That's when you should start, and that's going to depend on the size of the organization.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

SHARING IS CARING, BUT SOMETIMES IT’S PROBLEMATIC The problem of shared costs is one that has been around for a long time and is especially difficult when it comes to cloud spending and variable spending. In the past, we have not managed shared costs very well. So today, Nick and Jason will be giving us a deeper understanding of this matter and explaining how we solve such problems, only here, in the latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY NICK: THE POWER OF VISIBILITY “The power in the cloud is that you can actually see all those underlying costs. Maybe with the, you know, with the exception of labor, you still got to figure out your labor costs. But when it comes down to infrastructure costs, you know, I can actually see my data costs and my storage costs, and my you know, all of it I can understand directly and exactly how much those costs are.” JASON: HOW TO START ALLOCATING “Start with making sure everything is allocated appropriately before you work on shared allocation.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

CHANGE IS COMING, AND IT’S UNSTOPPABLE In this conversation, Nick and Jason discuss how professional services consulting and AWS Partners can bring a FinOps service to market. They touch on how this has been a topic in several recent conversations and is starting to gain more traction. In the past, organizations transitioning to the public cloud would rely on a managed service to handle security and other IT needs. However, service providers are now expected to do much more, including managing costs and providing data on where money is being spent. Learn more about the future of cloud hosting in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY NICK: Be sticky enough by delivering savings consistently “If you can be the organization that consistently delivers savings, and the ability to keep their cost under control, that's a really sticky way to stay with your customer.” NICK: The reality of real-time monitoring today and moving forward “The reality is the need for a person to monitor an environment to make a phone call in the middle of the night is going away. That is automatable.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

THIS MYTH IS BUSTED! In today's episode, Nick and Jason dispel the myth that FinOps is only about saving companies money. FinOps is actually about so much more than that, it's about optimizing resources, improving efficiencies, and ensuring that an organization's finances are in good shape. While saving money is certainly a goal of FinOps, it's not the only one, and it's important to understand all of the different facets of FinOps in order to properly implement it within your organization. Find out more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: How FinOps help the finance teams “It was hard for finance teams to keep up with the pace of change that was happening, and then I think FinOps is a way to help those finance teams along the way and give them the tools and the processes necessary to be able to adapt to that change.” JASON: FinOps is not just for “savings” “Only one leg of the FinOps operating model is optimal savings, optimization in the terms of and then even though that savings is typically only even a facet of that, but if you look at the operating model, it's about being able to predict and understand when these things changes before they happen. So that you can react and save that budget before it becomes an issue.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

CONTEXT IS IMPORTANT IN UNDERSTANDING A LOT OF THINGS, BUT HOW DO WE UNDERSTAND CONTEXT ITSELF? Nick and Jason talk about the importance of context in understanding cloud management and consumption. They discuss how context allows you to apply specific business data to your review of cloud spend or utilization. Without context, data can be viewed in a generic way that may not be helpful to your specific business needs. Learn more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: Initial thoughts on what context is “I think, to probably make it as short as possible, it's to apply the things that are specific to my business to the data that I'm reviewing. In the cloud, it's typically spend, utilization, or optimization, based on maybe products or business groups or teams, which could be many different things. So it's viewing that data within the context that matters to me and not some generic way. NICK: Context is very important in trying to solve a problem “I have a bunch of alert noise in my slack channel or in my support system, what do I do with it? And we hear this one all the time, providing context around why the alert was actually generated, and what sorts of issues exist in the environment that could lead to it is really critical for an engineer trying to solve the problem.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

AND NOW WE’RE LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD For years, Microsoft Azure’s only weak point against AWS is the lack of a savings plan that enterprise clients can subscribe to, but in the recent news, they have announced the release of their Azure Savings Plans. Nick and Jason will be diving into this really exciting update for all cloud computing users out there and will be sharing their thoughts, so tune in and find out more in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: Azure Savings Plans makes it easier to save money “I think they're making it easier to save money, I think historically, you know, this was a differentiator for AWS. Whereas, you know, Azure would come in and, you know, get you into some sort of Enterprise Agreement, which, you know, the enterprise agreements require a level of commitment that's a little bit different than what you would expect, you know, if you want to just go, I want to go spin some stuff up, right, get stuff working, I'm an organization like that.” NICK: Microsoft’s challenges before the Azure Savings Plans “I think Microsoft's been battling their legacy customer licensing model for quite a while, and AWS didn't have that problem. From the start, they were able to adopt an enterprise discount program that made sense in the context of offering public cloud service rights that were consumption-based.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

THAT’S HOW IT COSTS? WHAT A SHOCKER Welcome to another episode with Nick and Jason, as they talk about applying a finance discipline when doing a cloud migration. The two discuss the importance of taking time to set up principles and governance for a cloud environment before migrating, as it can save a lot of time and effort in the long run. WORDS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR DAY JASON: What happens if you layoff half your force “As a technology person. I want to get fin ops discipline in place so that I don't spook my CFO, and as a CFO, I want to get that fin ops methodology in place so I can get reporting right away during the migration, so I can see early problems immediately…” JASON: What happens if you layoff half your force “True cost by resource, or, you know, down to the individual widget perspective, if you're internal, that's always been really difficult. It's not in the cloud, and so sometimes when we're doing a migration, we see the costs of the cloud, and it's either we go ‘ ‘oh, my gosh, that's how much that one resource costs me?’ ’ Well, it's not that that resource is more expensive. It's just now you know, you had no idea what that resource costs you when it was sitting on a server unless it was unless you bought individual servers for everything.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

LAYOFFS HERE, LAYOFFS THERE, HAPPENING EVERYWHERE It’s alarming to see that a lot of organizations in the tech space right now are cutting down their people in massive numbers. Our hosts Nick Lumsden and Jason Yaeger will be focusing today on all things layoff, what’s happening now, what are its common causes, and its impact on downsizing organizations. Tune in to get yourself informed in this latest episode of Cloud Cost Optimization. HIGHLIGHTS JASON: What happens if you layoff half your force “If you lay off half of your staff, and then ask the other half of your staff to work twice as hard, you're probably going to churn out another, I don't know 15-20%, because there will be people that go ‘ ‘no, I'm not I'm not doing that.” JASON: Keep as many people as you can “I don't know if this would have this works at these really large organizations, but it's always better when you try to preserve as many jobs as you can, realistically, and so asking people to take pay cuts, and minimizing the percentage of staff that you actually have to turn, in my opinion, is probably a better way to handle these situations.” JASON: Impact of layoffs on cloud spend “The less people you have, the less time you have to do all of the things that all of the things outside just keeping the lights on and running, you know, which include making, you know, they include all of your efforts around cloud spend optimization.” Get to know our hosts in the links below: Nick Lumsden | Jason Yaeger Get a free assessment and optimize your environment in TenacityCloud.com

In this episode of Cloud Cost Optimization, Nick and Jason discuss a Forbes article on embracing cloud services without breaking the bank. Leaders need to gain visibility when it comes to cloud spending.

In this episode of Cloud Cost Optimization, Nick and Jason talk about how clients and other organizations commonly manage their cloud spending.

On this episode of Cloud Cost Optimization, Nick and Jason discuss standard reserved instances in Amazon Web Services. Depending on the workloads you're running, there are numerous ways to maximize savings through reserved instances. The pair discuss making smart and cost-effective decisions based on savings plans versus reserved instances. They talk about how you should approach the recommendations of service providers and choosing discount programs depending on your workload.

On this episode of Cloud Cost Optimization, Nick and Jason discuss two recent articles from Reuters and CNBC that discuss companies' increasing reluctance to spend on cloud and the move to cloud amidst rising energy costs respectively. CIOs are being told to stop spending with the biggest concern being the month-over-month, year-over-year increase in cloud spend. Then, Nick and Jason discuss the possibility of data centers getting repatriated and the price stability of cloud, primarily due to competition.

On this episode of Cloud Cost Optimization, Nick and Jason look at a real-world example of how to refactor an expensive, scale-out architecture.

On this episode of Cloud Cost Optimization, Nick and Jason dive into chargeback and (also known as showback and billback) the strategies you can deploy to implement it. It is crucial to first understand how your cost is allocated as cutting corners may have unforeseen consequences. In fact, it is also suggested that allocating costs across different departments can help to shift the focus from cost-cutting to revenue growth.

Nick and Jason dig into the differences between committed use and committed spend savings programs and the risks involved with each. Savings plans are preferred because of their simplicity but, to truly unlock deep savings, companies can explore other vehicles and utilize the ones that benefit their environment best. There are also ways to buy and sell shorter-term RI plans, as well as convertible RIs for lower discounts.

Nick and Jason discuss the basics of infrastructure cleanup and its significance in cloud cost optimization. They highlight the ease of use of cloud infrastructure and the accompanying difficulty of cleanup. They dig into why companies need to understand how their cloud infrastructures work and that cleanup is never a one-and-done deal. Companies that scale will always run into waste issues so it's best to get educated on your infrastructure and cut unnecessary costs.

Nick and Jason discuss 3 actionable strategies for you to manage your cloud spend. First, companies must first clean up their environment and remove irrelevant hardware and software. They also go into detail on getting the most discount from cloud providers and why refactoring apps is a wise ongoing process to realize cost savings.

Nick and Jason discuss two articles: one that says that 81% of IT managers were instructed by their c-suite to reduce cloud spend, and two, that 49% of companies struggle to control their cloud costs. They discuss the importance of visibility and modernization as the solution to mounting costs amidst a recession and go into detail on the complexity of optimizing cloud infrastructure.

Nick and Jason discuss 3 actionable strategies for you to manage your cloud spend. First, companies must first clean up their environment and remove irrelevant hardware and software. They also go into detail on getting the most discount from cloud providers and why refactoring apps is a wise ongoing process to realize cost savings.