Josh Dougherty (00:09):

Hi, everyone. Today, we'll be discussing the Benefits of Leveraging CloudHealth by VMware in partnership with Redapt's Managed Services experts to monitor and control your cloud cost spend. Today, we're joined by Rick Koller, who's the Practice Director of Managed Services, and Jason Webber, who's the Delivery Manager for Managed Services. Thanks for joining us today, guys.

Jason Webber (00:30):

Thank you.

Rick Koller (00:31):

Glad to be here.

Josh Dougherty (00:34):

Rick, let's start with you. I'd love for us to start by talking about some of the common challenges you're seeing with customers when it comes to controlling their cloud spend.

Rick Koller (00:50):

A lot of customers have a story where they're working into the cloud, or they've been within cloud environments for some time. Many of them have not developed skill sets around a budgetary focus. Often, they are enabling their development teams and focused on the technology problems that come with an evolution into the cloud space. When it comes to looking at their invoice and bill, and trying to figure these things out, it's almost an afterthought for many companies. Many of our cloud partners have these crazy invoices that are not human readable. That's where we come in and bring some tools to the table that make these make more sense to the teams behind the production support teams that we work with directly. CloudHealth is a tool we leverage that brings all the data visualization capabilities to the table, helping everyone understand where their spend is.

You have to develop a practice, a muscle, or a program around understanding where you're spending, how you're spending, and if your spend makes sense for the workloads. We've been at this for quite some time, and have developed all of those muscles for all of our clients that make this a lot easier to digest.

Jason Webber (02:41):

A lot of these people receive invoices for their cloud spend and they're very complicated to read. One of the initial benefits, right off the top, is taking that complicated bill and simplifying it in a way that's digestible for people to understand via separating out different workloads, or looking in different cost centers, or whatever that might be.

Josh Dougherty (03:14):

As you're separating out those invoices and simplifying them, what are some of the usual suspects you see that cause cloud spend to skyrocket?

Rick Koller (03:27):

There are quite a few easy ones that people spot the moment they get some tooling in place. One would be storage. Everyone spends a lot of time snapshotting, or keeping things around just in case. We can highlight that very, very easily, and provide some guidance around tagging and how to manage your storage within the cloud. Outside of storage, there are many ways we can help along the lines of alerting. Wherein, everyone has a pretty good idea what their spend is. We can use your phone bill, as a good example. You generally know what your phone bill's going to be every month. But, in certain cases, you have development teams working on new technologies that could cause a huge spike.

A great example would be a [HADU 00:04:33] workload. Anyone could create a HADU environment without a lot of oversight, within any of these accounts, and create an amazing cost really quickly. We help our customers and clients by working with them to establish what their budgetary guidelines are and tie that into a learning service that will notify them the moment we're off track in any specific percentage. We’ve found that it is really, really helpful for our customers to keep things within the guardrails they expect and want.

Josh Dougherty (05:19):

Are there any other usual suspects that come to mind for you, Jason?

Jason Webber (05:24):

What we'll find in many cases is that there are too many big query polls occurring too frequently. So, someone from dev goes in and builds something out, tests it, and it drives up a huge amount of spend in a single day. By utilizing the dealers we have in place, we can help prevent those types of abnormal incidents. We also help bring a better understanding to our customers in regards to, "Hey, this type of workload costs X amount of dollars per minute or per day. Regulating your budget around how often you use this will keep you within the set parameters."

Josh Dougherty (06:13):

We've begun to delve a bit into the idea of cloud governance. I'd love to hear why companies typically need help with it. 

Rick Koller (06:32):

Many companies that are at the beginning of their journeys, or even midway into their journeys, into cloud platforms, haven't fully developed a skill set around governance. Governance is a huge topic—it's not just cost. It is exactly how you're maintaining and managing everything within the cloud. That can stretch from cost all the way through to best practices around tagging, so you actually know what your workloads look like and how they relate to each other. It can even go into information security strategies and postures. What we do and provide is a framework where our clients can tighten up the way they manage their cloud spend, as well as what they actually have in the cloud. Many companies really need help there, because it’s not their core competency. That's where we fit in.