Azure FinOps – How to operate your Azure environment like a finely tuned machine

Discover the key strategies and best practices to optimize your Azure spend and ensure your cloud infrastructure operates at peak efficiency. Learn from industry experts as they share their experiences and guide you through the essential steps to achieve financial accountability in the cloud. Don’t miss this opportunity to transform your Azure operations and drive cost-effective results for your business.

In this session, we will delve into the intricacies of Azure FinOps, exploring how to leverage tools and frameworks to monitor and manage your cloud costs effectively. Gain practical knowledge on implementing governance and control mechanisms, and understand how to align your cloud investments with business objectives. Whether you’re a CTO, cloud architect, or IT finance manager, this webinar will equip you with the actionable insights needed to run your Azure environment like a well-oiled machine.

Transcript

Shawn Ambrose   10:26
 Good morning, everybody.
 Thanks for for joining the Invero show.
 Here we'll just give it a minute to let some other folks roll in and yeah, in about 6090 seconds or so, we'll officially get things rolling.
 So until then, we can talk about Ian's Halloween costume.
Ian Heron   10:41
 Jake would appreciate that being, you know hockey guy.
Mike Ackroyd   10:46
 Yeah, you're looking at.
Shawn Ambrose   10:47
 A long standing chiefs fan.
Mike Ackroyd   10:52
 That's good.
 Good time. See looking good.
Ian Heron   11:01
 Craig and Sean and Steph, are IT professionals. That's their costumes.
Craig Slack   11:11
 We went all out.
Mike Ackroyd   11:14
 What is?
 What does the other guy look like though?
 Ian, that's what I wanna know.
Ian Heron   11:18
 Oh man, he not a scratch on him.
 I'd take the brunt of it.
 Here I'll turn my camera off now.
Shawn Ambrose   11:30
 Oh no, don't do that. Not yet.
Ian Heron   11:31
 Wanna don't wanna distract?
Shawn Ambrose   11:34
 Oh, we're all. We're all we're all good.
 We'll just, we'll get rolling here in just a minute.
 Hey, Saul, how are you?
 All right. Well, let's, let's jump in.
 We're at just a little past year here and wanna get this rolling and respect all of your time.
 So hey, thanks everybody.
 Good morning to those in the West and good afternoon to those in central or east.
 We really appreciate you joining this episode of the Invero Show where we are going to talk about Azure Fin OPS.
 We've had so much fun with these invero show.
 I think this is our 8th or 9th now and it's just it's a lot of fun for us to unpack.
 Topics that we've we've learned about and we believe we've got some.
 You need capability and we feel that our our client base or our perspective client base has real interest in and.
 Overwhelmingly, this is a topic that we see over and over again of of people having, I'll say a bit of a struggle there of figuring it out.
 So we're really excited to share share our learnings and just kind of have a good, good conversation here this afternoon or morning.
 So let's let's dive in.
 I've met many of you, but for those that haven't met before, I'm Sean Ambrose, the CRO here at in Bureau and.
 And Vero show host and I'm joined with Stephanie and Craig.
 Stephanie leads our Microsoft licensing practice and Craig is our founder and CTO, and the two of them together have been our Trail Blazers in terms of all things fin OPS of understanding it from an architectural technical point of view and a cross reference around a licensing optimization pull.
 Out all that together into a comprehensive fin OPS design thinking.
 So let's dive in.
 So what are we going to talk about today?
 I'm going to just kick this off here, just like I do and invero show of just a little bit of a positioning up front of why is this worth learning about?
 Why is it important?
 What's the relevancy?
 And I'll just quickly touch on how does it fit into what Invero does. Overall, some of you have, there's a wide range of familiarity. Invero will just take 60 seconds and just tackle that. And then I'm going to pass it over to Craig to talk a little bit.
 About what is fin OPS and just unpack that and get a little deeper about it.
 And then Steph's going to join in here to talk through some different customer examples where we've where they've been at, where we've helped them in different sizes and different challenges are having in different outcomes and successes.
 And then Steph, we'll talk a little further about how you can get started.
 What can you do all in your own, just to kind of make some?
 Where are the? Where are the quick wins?
 Where is that progress?
 And then we'll talk a little further about if you want to go further than that, how could we help you achieve even more so without further ado, let's jump into why is this worth learning about? And I think it's probably quite intuitive to all of you of getting.
 That maximum value out of the platform, but let's go a little deeper here and you know, I put this together.
 I thought it was kind of fun to say. Well, Azure is awesome, right?
 So like, why do we even need to have this conversation?
 Like Azure's fantastic it it offers you scalability.
 Mobile reach, flexibility, security integration, machine learning, AI, cost management, which really I'm saying you only pay for what you use.
 So that's that's great Dev OP support and integrating what your developers are doing into operations and then just this massive list of services that you can access through the Azure platform that truly is awesome.
 It really is. However, there's a bit of a dark side or some challenges that we need to be mindful of here, so let's just think.
 Well, that a little bit.
 What are those pervasive challenges that are showing up?
 Well, the cloud costs rise of the adoption increases.
 That is not entirely bad. As I said on the left side, cost management is great that you only pay for what you use, but that kind of dark side could be, but that could spiral up really, really quickly and it could kind of come out of nowhere and.
 Maybe you didn't even have visibility to it.
 Services like AI are driving even greater adoption.
 That in itself is also not bad.
 That's fantastic, but it kind of goes back to that prior point of, but that could all of a sudden have.
 Have services and consumption spiral up and you might not have seen that coming or budgeted or prepared for that appropriately, or just might not be right.
 Another one that kind of sits on both sides of the Ledger is the good news is, it's pretty easy for an organization to give access to many, many people to deploy services in there and build in Azure.
 But again, that Darkside could be all those people are doing different things.
 What's that? Visibility to it, did it?
 Did I know what they did, or did they even know what impact they did?
 They spun up a certain.
 Service and did they really understand if that was $100 a month thing or a $10,000 a month thing?
 And how does that clarability clarity and accountability come back to them?
 These are all kind of these dark side things, just to figure out. And then the over provisioning of services sometimes services get built for kind of the maximum performance and maybe that wasn't needed or or kind of an equal thing we see.
 It's just orphan services.
 Somebody built something at some point.
 It's not really being used anymore, but it's still hanging around.
 It's still a metered service.
 Costing money.
 Licensing programs.
 This is a big part of staff's expertise of just they're complicated and they're always changing. And so organizations have to stay on top of that to get to the the the best cost structure within their Azure environment.
 So all of this says like this is this is stuff to figure out and it's not just an it thing.
 It's kind of where it meets financial management and overall operational efficiency.
 And and the old way Craig is going to talk about this a bunch more here shortly. If the kind of the old way in a CapEx model of in a spend some capital spend, some capital dollars.
 You understand what you're doing with that, you amortize that.
 That's quite different now to this OpEx consumption.
 There's a whole bunch of benefit there, but it also if you kind of go back to those points above.
 It it can create some lack of clarity or understanding of what's what's happening or about to happen, and then that can show up in your bill. And then it's difficult.
 So all is to say that Azure is awesome.
 It everything on the left is absolutely accurate.
 It is awesome and it's really awesome when the things on the right are navigated effectively so that ultimately you get that business value.
 Because when you get the business value, then it's fantastic.
 But if all those things on the right turn into runaways, then the business value gets a little diluted by inefficiencies.
 So so that that's kind of why why we're here.
 Hopefully that's a version of why all of you have invested some time to to learn about this today.
 So how does this fit into Invero's go to market for those that are not familiar Invero.
 Our purpose, our mission, is to help clients maximize, maximize the value of their investment in Microsoft.
 You see that, right? Right here. That's that's it.
 We wake up every day thinking about now.
 How do we go do that up on the top left here?
 It's what we do.
 We focus exclusively on Microsoft platform and.
 Country technologies. But we stay tight to that and combined with that is our expert level Microsoft licensing practice because we believe deeply that.
 Every architectural consideration, there's an equal part licensing consideration to get that maximum value and optimization.
 So that's that is the DNA of Invero and then everything else you see there is just kind of the technical areas of how we contribute to that from an architecture standpoint.
 So how does this conversation show up in what I've just described? Will it certainly shows up here in?
 Azure core. It also shows up in the modernization and the automation and the efficiencies that you can get on an application level.
 Now we'll go to that Microsoft licensing area.
 It shows up in the strategy. Overall, the Microsoft licensing in cost optimization in building management and then last but not least is kinda that wrap around of overall strategy and governance of that of that overall Azure environment.
 So that's just a bit of a connection point to inveroor's go to market and how it fits in and why this is such.
 A big topic for us because it fits into so many parts of what we do.
 So now I'm going to pass it over to Craig.
 Who's going to start off with just talking about some of the top pain points?
 For cloud management.
 So, Craig, over to you here.
Craig Slack   19:42
 Thanks. Very good.
 So I'm going to assume got some familiarity with what fin OPS is, but I'm gonna definitely go into more details here for those who maybe don't.
 So there's an organization called Fin OPS Foundation.
 They did a state of fin OPS report.
 It was released earlier this year and this is their view of what the top pain points are for managing cloud.
 And you can see a lot of it's around cost and cost optimization.
 The number one being actually getting your engineers to take action on cost optimization. So it may seem odd that there's a lot of tools that exists that are making recommendations.
 Here's some cost savings opportunities.
 Reserved instances what have you, but then actually carving out time or making it a priority for somebody on the admin team to actually execute and make those changes to achieve those cost optimization opportunities.
 So that is the number one challenge that companies face.
 But as I'll talk about on the next slide, Fin OPS is much more than just cost optimization.
 It gets into, as Sean talked about.
 The business value side of it as well, but if you look at just the top five things here, a lot of it's around cost.
 So accurate forecasting.
 Automation to, you know, identify anomalies. Those sort of things. But all these things that are on screen here are really the top pain points for most companies when they're managing cloud. And if you go to the next slide, Sean and kind of talk a bit more about what.
 Fin OPS is and why it became important and and where it ultimately derived from. So Shawn kind of hinted at this about kind of comparing the old CapEx model to the the new OpEx model in the cloud.
 But.
 If you think back prior to cloud World SaaS pay as you pay for what you get, there would be a a business justification process to for any capital spend. Any investment in technology.
 So the business first identifies a need.
 There's some sort of solution that's required that needs some technology so the business goes to itit is going to then select or approve the technology that's going to address that need.
 Then there's typically a finance or procurement within it function that's going to look at is this within budget and then you know APO has cut the technology is purchased, it implements it, business will consume it and it will operate.
 It has a very oversimplified view, but this is kind of the the steps. If we compare this to the OpEx model, which this model CapEx was from a budgeting and forecasting perspective.
 More easily.
 Defined because from. If you just hit next John for the animation because it's a capital spend that is depreciated over a fixed period of time.
 So it's a known spend.
 So say it's $1,000,000 to implement this technology amortized over three years, there's a unknown cost is going to hit the the income statement each month.
 So it's depreciated in an even amount.
 Next animation, John.
 Now comparing that to the cloud and and the OpEx model.
 Where the business still identifies a need, they come to ITITS.
 Gonna select or approve some technology, but now with you know you could lay down a credit card and and buy the technology or in Azure you know purchasing, you know new resources through the Azure marketplace or just directly in the portal spinning up new resources it has the.
 Ability to literally Click to buy and buy the technology, implement it, and now the business is consuming it and it will continue to operate it.
 And almost at that tail end of this is the finance and procurement function receiving the bill and trying to then scramble and figure out well, geez, is this in budget where it's not in budget, how do we deal with it? And because the costs are variable now it.
 Harder to predict, harder to get those forecasts and make sure that you know staying within budget because somebody has access to spin up resources that's now going to increase costs.
 So what's lacking here is that budget approval in the.
 Watching process again, oversimplified, but this is really what to highlight the value and the reason for fin OPS, which is driving accountability at these different stages.
 So before technology is approved or selected, there's some sort of business case still being done of what is the cost going to be when this is up and running?
 Making sure that when the technology is bought that it's in budget and those sort of things.
 So that's kind of comparing the two, the old world to the new world scenario.
 Next slide please, Sean.
 So for those who aren't familiar with Fin OPS, it's much more than just cost optimization or cost management.
 The goal of Fin OPS is ultimately tracking cloud dollars that are spent to some sort of value or return on investment and ultimately driving that accountability into the business functions or the actual consumers of the services to that value. So.
 When a business case is put forward to implement.
 A new solution, and it's going to drive maybe more revenue or more productivity reduce costs.
 That value is tracked and being able to attribute the the cloud spend to the value that's being received.
 There's three pillars. 3 primary pillars here of Fin OPS, really around driving visibility.
 So this is where cost management comes into play as well as unit economics, which is driving specific value to that.
 To each dollar spent optimization, this is not just cost optimization, it can also be around workload optimization.
 Performance and cost tied to that, but making decisions based on data, so being able to then predict where the spend is going and where to where it makes sense to optimize. And underpinning all this requires some level of governance. So some policies that are going to drive consist.
 And ensuring that that accountability.
 There one thing though, to keep in mind.
 This is a new way of doing things, and it does require a cultural shift within an organization.
 So you know the speed of the cloud, the ability to spin up resources, that is a huge benefit and allows for quicker turn around and implementation of technology.
 But it comes at a cost of, you know, being able to contain and stay within budget so.
 Building overall fin OPS processes and and practices.
 Does require a cultural shift?
 Next slide please.
 All right, so we prescribe to a company called or organization called Phen OPS Foundation.
 This is a not-for-profit organization.
 It's funded and and participate all the big cloud providers participate in setting the policies and procedures within PHN OPS. This phen OPS framework that they've developed. They also have a phnops maturity framework as well for assessing where an organization is on their maturity.
 Level of fin OPS, but if you look at the domains and capabilities section here it's highlighted.
 These are the four domains that prescribes and says are the keys to establishing fin OPS.
 This is all public information. You can go to finops.org and access this.
 They've got great resources there.
 But we follow this methodology because it's industry proven and and it it works.
 So you can see the two outer Piers there.
 Our domains are around understanding the cost and optimizing the cost.
 That's where most people go when they think of.
 Fin OPS in general.
 It's how do we get a handle on our costs and then how do we reduce those costs by optimizing?
 But in between that is the value business value.
 So being able to go and go down the path of planning and estimating. So when new workloads are spun up or where are they going to who?
 Who's ultimately responsible for that new spin?
 Quantifying that business value back to the organization.
 Now to underpin all of this, managing a fin OPS practice.
 It can't be something that's just off of the side of somebody's desk. We we get involved with a lot of clients who have these challenges where it's just assumed that the IT administrators are the ones that are going to act on costs, recommendations, cost savings, recommendations. But.
 They've got busy day jobs as well, so it's important depending on the size of your organization.
 But to at least carve out a a role or a part of somebody's role that is responsible for fin OPS.
 So this includes building some operating practices around how fin OPS is going to be run, what governance and policies are in place, and then doing regular assessments to make sure that you're progressing towards maturity.
 In the bottom right there the FIN OPS Foundation maps people's maturity organizations maturity to kind of a crawl, walk, run.
 State and I'll talk a bit more about that in a few minutes here.
 Next slide please, Ron.
 So again, this is data from PHN OPS Foundation. Their datafin OPS report.
 Looking at what are the key priorities so people that are phen OPS practitioners, where do they see their best use and and what are the most challenging things that they're facing today and that they want to prioritize the the top 2-3, there are reducing waste, managing commit.
 And accurate forecasting that's really around cost management, but then you get to the 4th one there and the allocation of cloud spend.
 That is a challenge for a lot of organizations to try to grapple, because typically cloud spend does just focus on Azure at this point, and there's obviously SaaS costs and so on that do factor into this.
 But let's just say in Azure, costs are typically just a single line item in an IT budget.
 So when the IT department gets challenged of where is that?
 What does that spend going towards?
 It becomes very difficult to explain back to the business.
 And especially if you if that cost is.
 Is rising overtime.
 It gets even more and more challenging so that that 4th priority there is around being able to allocate the costs, not necessarily in a chargeback model doesn't have to go to that extent, but at least being able to attribute and show.
 Where those costs are, are who?
 Who's consuming those those cloud resources and and what the business value is that's being driven out of that?
 Next slide.
Shawn Ambrose   30:57
 Thanks for that, Craig.
 I think at this point we're gonna transition over to Stef. Who's gonna chat with us a bit about some customer examples.
 So Stef, I'll over to you here starting with the first one.
Stephanie Yackimec   31:07
 Thanks. We thought it would be helpful just to go through some things we've been seeing in just some scenarios, match them up to some of the spend categories and just kind of go through where to get started, how we've been helping some of these customers. So the 1st.
 One, it's a pretty small environment and the the biggest challenge that this customer had was really the small IT team that was supporting their entire environment.
 It's it's a really stable Azure tenant.
 And it's really predictable cost.
 But it was really being managed by one person and so he didn't even create the environment himself.
 He inherited it.
 And so that led to just some challenges with understanding what was in there, what his cost should be.
 So we did a little bit of training, a bit of a maturity assessment just to figure out.
 Where we thought and and where this customer thought they really needed to focus to, to beef up their.
 In OPS practice, internally I did a cost optimization review and we actually have a little ongoing service with this customer where I manage a lot of that busy work that is associated with the phen OPS practice. And so just as the example here, this customer with their just.
 Over $20,000 a month of spend.
 Through utilizing some of those programs, reservations ahub, we've reduced their cost by about 20%.
 But I've also set them up with good reporting and so supplying that monthly reporting to really enable that visibility into what is in the environment has been really helpful for budgeting and the procurement team and and really just understanding their cloud costs.
 So that's what we're doing with a a pretty small customer that has just a little Azure environment.
 That's very stable.
 When we're going to talk about some of the bigger customers, the next customer.
 For example, with a bigger environment, they were actually already a lot more aware of of some of the principles and domains of fin OPS than the previous example.
 And their challenge was really trying to find the time to they already put a lot of the cost optimizations in place, but nobody was keeping an eye on it and nobody was tracking what they had going on in Azure. This customer actually referred to their environment as the.
 Wild Wild West.
 Their governance.
 Not where it should be.
 There was too many people with access.
 They weren't really treating phen OPS as a continual process.
 So what we did for this little bit larger of a customer, the first thing this was more of a point in time review that we did with them.
 So it was a cost optimization assessment. I reviewed all their Azure spend.
 I reviewed what they already had in place and honestly their reservations were not.
 Very well utilized.
 So they were actually wasting about $2000.
 Every single month, just on reservations that weren't picking up virtual machines.
 So through that cost optimization assessment, we ended up showing how to save them about 14% in cost on their Azure environment.
 Not a huge amount, but considering they already had a lot of these things in place, it was a pretty good little savings for them.
 And then we also reviewed some of their M365 licensing for optimizations.
 And showed them how to reduce some of that count.
 Just through cleaning up the the wasted licenses that weren't properly assigned to users, flipping around some of those bundles.
 And so the goal here was really, it was a cost savings exercise, but all of that cost that we showed them how to save, they were going to use that to fund the next few phases of their phen OPS journey. And what I mean by that is, is.
 Really, the next few phases were around someone that Azure governance that they needed to put in place.
 Tagging and.
 They needed some extra tools and licensing in there to be able to lock down the access.
 Things like PIM and Pam. So we were able to show them how to save some money to really fund the next few phases of this project.
 And then we've also been working with a couple of of larger customers as well.
 So in talking about some of the larger environments, this one example.
 They were actually doing quite well with the cost optimization side of things and their spend is a few $1,000,000 a year and the the one person that was solely responsible for managing their internal fin OPS practice was doing a great job. He ended up finding over a.
 $1,000,000 of savings every year.
 Just on some of these reservations and pre purchase plans and all of these cost savings programs that don't actually make you change any of your architecture, they're just there to save some money and but?
 Where they were really struggling was the internal phen OPS practice itself.
 And so this is more of a true traditional phen OPS engagement where the the whole goal was to improve the processes and the maturity of that team.
 Internally, and enable that cultural change of the whole organization.
 So what we've been doing with this large organization is a lot more workshops and some conversations and surveys to dig in a lot of where are you now?
 Where do you want to go?
 What's really important to the organization, and so as we kind of look at all these examples and we talk about the maturity levels of crawl, walk, run.
 It's important to understand that not every organization should be at that run level.
 It's it's going to be important to do that digging and to really understand what your goals are and just how to increase your internal fin OPS practice. And so for some customers it is just really important to understand how to save some money and then how to take.
 That to the next steps and so.
 With that being said, let's talk about how you can get started on your fit up sturdy.
 So PHN OPS is, it's not a point in time exercise.
 There's definitely some value in point time reviews, but it should be an on going and practice internally and ongoing idea.
 It does involve a lot of just people and involvement in your environment.
 It's that whole idea of when is the best time to plant a tree 30 years ago.
 When's the second best right now?
 So the best time to start your fin OPS right when you start in Azure but for a lot of customers that are.
 Well, down that path, the best time to really beef up your fin OPS is now.
 So some of the best places if, if you're really at that starting point initially in your Azure journey, I would say the most important thing is to understand what your current costs are and understand your current.
 Resources that you have in Azure.
 So what's your spend?
 What are those trends?
 Is it a pretty stable environment?
 Do you have an upwards trajectory?
 What are your expected costs?
 All of these things are very important to figure out.
 It's really hard to identify where you need to go if you don't have a good handle on what the problem statement is really going to be.
 The other super important thing to building a phen OPS practice internally is to identify who should be involved.
 There are a lot of personas that should be involved in a phen OPS practice.
 A really important part is that executive sponsor and the executive buy in. If you're going to go really deep in to phenopts, it's going to take an investment in.
 Resources in time and so in order to get past that I I'm just doing this from the side of my desk.
 I'm just going to do this in my spare time. If the goal is to really focus on your cloud spend and not fin OPS practice, you need executive sponsorship.
 You need to identify some of those roles, procurement and finance and engineering that really need to be involved in making sure it's a successful practice.
 The other key ingredient here, when you're identifying all these roles.
 Is to really think about what do those roles need from a data and reporting perspective to understand and to take ownership for their role in fin OPS and cloud spend.
 Do you need to meet monthly to review the trends? If you have a very dynamic environment, you're going through migration.
 That could absolutely be helpful.
 Is to have very regular cadence as you build this. If you have a stable environment, not much access, not much is happening.
 Then perhaps you don't meet with that kind of frequency.
 It really depends on on where you are. Like I said in that in that Phen OPS journey, but another really important thing, especially starting out is some guardrails in place. And what I mean by that is the budgeting and alerts that you can put in place in a.
 And so the the concern here is if somebody.
 Spin something up. If one of your burstable services takes off and there's all these scenarios where your costs can really explode, I think it's going to be helpful to to give some thought to.
 How long will it take for you to notice if something like that starts to just take off?
 Is it when you get your next invoice will you notice it within a few days?
 Who's going to notice it and what kind of steps should you take to correct it? And so setting up some of those alerts for spend.
 I'm setting up your budgeting, really being aware of what you think that should be and should look like is going to be very helpful for maintaining and containing costs. And then the the most exciting part of Fin OPS and my favorite part is definitely those cost optimizations and.
 That needs to be involved pretty early on just to really get some excitement and get some traction going if if all you're going to do is create this practice, that's going to be.
 A hay cost suck on your Azure, even more so than some of this cloud spend that's taking up resources.
 It's going to be tough to get off the ground.
 Internally, it's going to be very helpful to get excitement and involvement when you can show, OK.
 We actually know how to save a bunch of money, so let's let's start with some cost optimizations.
 So those are just some, some just general and easy ways to to get started and get people involved internally.
 And I've already kind of mentioned that there are definitely some tools to take into account.
 So what are the tools out there that's going to help get things going?
 There are some really great built in and included tools.
 And so there's a couple screen grabs here.
 These are just publicly available screen grabs.
 I stole them from the Internet.
 These are not customer information, but the top one is the Azure cost management part of that Azure portal.
 The bottom one is a view from Azure advisor.
 These are the two built in tools that are a great starting point if you're not already using them.
 The Azure cost management that's going to be kind of your starting point for.
 Slicing and dicing and understanding your current costs.
 It's a great little spot where you can filter things and change the viewpoints.
 Download all those reports.
 It's going to be really great for showing trends.
 You can look into cost by subscription.
 Cost by taking all of those kinds of things and the next one is the Azure advisor. And there's actually some really interesting and things that keep getting added into Azure advisor as well.
 So I I feel like there is a bit of.
 Love hate relationship that a lot of customers have with Azure advisor. A lot of people love to hate it.
 There is a lot of confusion that comes in.
 There's definitely some changes that have just happened where you no longer see those aggregated spend totals because that was throwing off a lot of people. I know when you popped in there and it's like save this much money a year, but a lot of them would overlap and.
 It would just not be nearly as exciting as as everyone hoped with those totals.
 But there are things being added in all the time.
 There's a cost optimization workbook in there.
 There's a service retirement workbook. I highly recommend popping in there regularly.
 Microsoft likes to retire Azure services on the regular and there is a big group of retirements coming next September.
 I see all the time affected resources just popping in there, so really take a look at that Azure advisor as well as an included built in tool.
 Now there are tons of other third party tools.
 Some free, some are very.
 Expensive.
 There is when you pop over to GitHub, there are things like orphaned resource workbooks that you can download. There is a great fin OPS tool kit and actually when you look in there, the list of contributors, there's almost 60 contributors to some of these toolkits, so this is.
 Definitely an area focus and a lot of people are really just sharing what they're coming up with to make life easier for everybody.
 Power Bi dashboards where you can connect your.
 Azure Cost management and that was just a nice user friendly way to display that data and just manipulate it in a little bit different way for users that are really comfortable with those power BI dashboards I will mention it depends on what kind of an Azure consumption agree.
 You have as to how some of these tools will interact in your environment. It's a little different for CSP customers, for example, versus direct agreements like on an MCA.
 So if you have any questions about how those tools work, what would apply to you?
 How to use them? Feel free to reach out.
 I'm happy to walk you through as much as I know about them.
 And then again, there's a ton of third party tools. I was just this morning on reading an article about the 10 best free third party tools out there.
 A lot of these big, beefy expensive tools will have a free tier or there will be like a little free tool for a very specific cost.
 Review like Kubernetes or or something like that.
 One thing I will point out if you're not really sure what kind of a tool you need, chances are you're not quite ready for any tool. I think by the time you get to that, spend where you're going to spend significant amount of money on a tool to.
 Help you?
 You should already be pretty far down the path and really have identified what you're looking for in a tool.
 What some of the gaps that your fin OPS practice needs complemented with some of these tools?
 Because there's a ton out there and they can be wildly expensive, the last piece. So Craig's already mentioned Fin OPS foundation.
 We love Fin OPS foundation.
 There's actually a free little intro course on their site.
 It's only about an hour and a half long and that's a great way to just get more familiar with some of these domains and concepts around fin OPS.
 And then there are some some more courses that are paid above and beyond that I'm doing one right now.
 So there's some great resources out there for free.
 A ton where you pay for them, but again, take advantage of the free ones to start out with. Really dig into.
 Identify what your requirements are before jumping into some of those expensive ones.
 And then this is my favorite topic.
 But what are some ways and some quick wins for cost optimizations? I'd say I might need to redefine quick and what that means to me.
 Some of these aren't super quick, but these are pretty impactful and.
 I'd say low effort, kind of reviews or ways to get started with just some cost optimizations.
 So as a licensing specialist, Azure hybrid benefit is near and dear to my heart. But really optimizing your virtual machines that is typically just the easiest, most low hanging fruit for saving a whole bunch of money.
 And when we look at the cost on a PAYGO model for just that compute and the licensing for your virtual machines.
 Throwing in reservation savings plans and then optimizing the spend on your licensing, you could save 50 sixty 80% on your virtual machines.
 It's hugely impactful and not that difficult to to navigate reservations and savings plans can be a bit complicated, but for sure I'm always happy to help answer questions and and review virtual machine spend.
 Another easy way to just kind of clean up your environment. Like I mentioned, there is a workbook that you can find on GitHub that will identify orphan objects.
 There's some native tools.
 Azure Advisor will also point out unattached disk.
 Take a quick look at that.
 Usually it's it's a little bit of spend.
 It's not hugely impactful, but just cleaning up your environment can can be just really nice and helpful.
 So I did.
 So the next one, the next suggestion is really to to figure out where your spend lies and focus on the highest spend items in your environment to start researching some of these cost savings programs.
 So there are a ton of programs pre purchase plans. There's reservations out there for a number of services outside of virtual machines, app service, and.
 Cosmos DBS and managed SQL and all of these other areas where there are some good cost savings programs in there.
 It just takes a bit of time and research, but if you understand what your top spend categories are.
 It's just gonna make it so much faster to take a look at what's available and what would fit into your environment.
 I mentioned Azure advisor.
 Like I said, customers seem to love and hate it.
 Usually all at the same time.
 I don't recommend that Azure advisor that you just blindly go in there and take all of their recommendations, but for sure it can be a good place to get some hints.
 It will help point out.
 Just some of those cost savings opportunities that are available.
 It could point out some services that you might not be aware of that would qualify for reservations.
 So pop in there, take a little look, get some hints and it's a good place to really get started on on some cost optimization.
 The last thing I'll point out is there are definitely, as Microsoft comes out with these newer generations and these updated services, a lot of the time you'll find that the the newer version is both more cost effective and it actually.
 Is more powerful.
 It can't include more CPU things like that.
 It's gonna be more efficient.
 It's gonna run better and it'll overall be cheaper, so take a look when new things are being released and just see what's available to to upgrade in your environment.
 A great example of this is app service and so on. The premium tier of app service for the V2, for example, reservations are not available, but if you were to upgrade some of those premium app services that you have in your environment to.
 V3.
 Not only is it a 16% overall cost savings just on those newer versions, but you could also throw a reservation onto it that's only available in that newest generation. And so when you, so you're gonna get better performance, you're gonna throw a reservation on there and overall.
 If with a three-year reservation you can say 50% over that V2 premium version.
 So there's a couple ways to get started with cost optimizations.
 I am pretty excited about this side of of the fin OPS, so if you have any questions.
 Tips feel free to reach out and I will talk your ear off for days.
Shawn Ambrose   51:50
 Thanks Steph.
 Thank this has been great.
 Great overview here of of the quick wins we're gonna transition.
 We're kinda in the last leg of our our messaging here and we're gonna just chat. Craig's gonna chat a little bit about how can Invero help.
 We've talked a lot about how how you can help yourself and how we can Co help you along the way.
 And so Craig, just gonna take that a little further to kind of the different stage gates that you may be in or try and aspire to and how we're helping different customers.
 So Craig, back over to you here.
Craig Slack   52:20
 Thank you and thanks Steph.
 Your passion definitely comes out so.
 Saving customers money is always good.
Stephanie Yackimec   52:26
 Hmm.
Craig Slack   52:29
 So some great suggestions there from staff.
 There's obviously lots that we've covered lots of things that need to be considered, and again, it's not just about cost savings, but that is kind of ultimately where all the efforts are focused on how to maximize the value that you're getting out of your cloud spend.
 So we introduce the concept of crawl, walk, run.
 This is following the foundation maturity model. Like many things in life, you have to crawl before you can walk and walk before you can run.
 Many organizations are not going to strive for run.
 It's just too much overkill.
 There's too much overhead, so on so forth and it's not necessary the you know you get a potentially a diminishing returns the more but you'd require more investment to get there.
 But in the same respect, you can't just say, OK, we wanna go to run or walk and just jump straight.
 There you have to first kind of get some of the foundational pieces in and many companies we talked to aren't even ready for crawl.
 They're just trying to, you know, get a handle on what they currently have and they're so. But how?
 Fin OPS Foundation defines the crawl stage, which is where many of you probably are thinking. OK, how do I get started?
 This is where you're you're really looking at, you know, getting your reporting in place.
 So you can.
 Properly understand where your cloud spend is going.
 Some of this is tied to tagging, so building a tagging policy and process so that resources are getting the appropriate tag.
 So you know when you're running reports like stuff was showing some of the Azure cost management reports and so on. You can then filter out and look at specific application types or departments or.
 However, whatever makes sense for your organization, getting those pieces in place.
 And then building some basic KP is around those to be able to measure what is, what does good look like.
 So ultimately that's that's the low hanging fruit side of things and cost savings, a lot of the opportunities that Steph just highlighted that will come out of this crawl stage.
 And if you're, if you're looking to get serious about this, phenoms foundation defines, you know, the kind of maturity level at the crawl stage of focusing on cost savings, of course.
 Being able to allocate at least 50% of the cloud spend.
 So we're thinking about all your cloud costs being able to identify more than half of that being attributed to different parts of the business and ultimately what the value is Dr. driven out of that may not be part of that allocation, but at least a conversation can be.
 Had and known where X dollars is spent and who's accountable for driving that spend or or keeping it within.
 Control.
 Then also.
 Being able to say with with confidence that you've got over 60% of the resources under some sort of reserve instance or savings plans. So being able to know that you're on top of the majority of what you have in the environment with maximizing the savings that are.
 Available from all the big cloud providers.
 Forecasting is a big part of of getting to crawl and and this is where a lot of companies struggle. Being able to forecast that spend and knowing, you know when new resources are added, how that what the impact is going to be there.
 So to get to crawl Phen OPS foundation, you know defines it as being able to have a maximum variance of 20% in your forecast.
 So we've got forecast out to the rest of the year coming within 20% of that and that may may seem daunting, but ultimately that is why you start at crawl because to get there you have now all of the underpinning.
 Foundational pieces that are required to then further mature and and move things forward.
 I won't drain the slide on the other characteristics is really just refining, getting tighter and tighter on those areas. But next slide please, Sean.
 How do you how do you define what needs to be done to get to those different maturity levels?
 So here at Invero, we've actually taken the maturity model from Phnom Foundation and built an an assessment tool to determine how where you are in quantify where you are on the the spectrum today between crawl and and run and then where you want to go. So as I.
 Said not many organizations.
 They're gonna strive for full run 100%.
 You know you're gonna get there, but somewhere in between.
 So this is a dashboard that our fin OPS ready assessment provides and you can see a quantifiable there on the top left.
 That this particular sample is, you know in between crawl and rock currently rating at 1.5 out of five. But the the customer wants to get to 3.9. So now that is great. But how do you close that gap? So then we we dive into.
 Each of the pillars around cost management.
 Cost optimization.
 Business value and fin OPS practice and we've we quantify where they're at today, where they wanna go in each of those pillars and then we we do that gap analysis and provide detailed recommendations with actionable items that you can execute on to close that gap and slowly mat.
 Your your fin OPS practices over time, so this is one way we can help is give you a current state assessment.
 Phin OPS Foundation recommends actually assessing your maturity on a regular basis so you can track that progress over time, and we have that ability built into our tool to give you that.
 You know visibility of, OK.
 Where are we?
 You know maturing where we maybe wanna focus some more energy so we can do that.
 Next slide please, Sean.
 So this is our our one pager. We're happy to to chat with you further about the Phen OPS ready assessment.
 It's a a simple engagement. We can do it in very short order to be able to get you set up for success to achieve. You know, if you're at crawl today, going to walk or if you're not even at crawl your pre crawl you want to you know.
 Figure out where where the gaps are.
 We can help.
 Kind of pinpoint that and help you identify the areas to focus on.
 Now and the next slide please, that may still be not enough for for some of you. You may think that you don't have the time or the people with the skills are available to to tackle this internally.
 So we have here at Invero FinOps as a service offering with three levels, bronze, silver, gold.
 And this it follows the Fin OPS Foundation again.
 Domains and capabilities where bronze is really focused on understanding your current cost and very basic application of.
 Rate optimization and licensing optimization around using RIS savings plans so on identifying those.
 For our customers that are on our CSP, we offer bronze fin OPS as a service included bundled with that CSP service. But it is available if you aren't on CSP or if you're not. With our CSP we can engage that and that'll give you the kind of base.
 Level understanding around your costs and and being able to predict or not predict. Sorry because.
 Forecasting as part of silver but being able to to keep things under control.
 If you need a little bit more than that, silver includes forecasting and budgeting and being able to track that and and identify where you're going to land as well as workload optimization. So being able to some of those recommendations, staff pointed out that are available in Azure ADV.
 Or whatever.
 We actually go deeper than that.
 We're going to look at your workloads, performance optimization, cost optimization and help make those recommendations and work with you to.
 Achieve those and silver also include some of the base level components of building out your fin OPS practice and we offer that we take that on as part of the service. So you're not having to staff up and and start building phenoms practice yourself. That's where I think.
 Most customers are comfortable and that gets them at least to the walk stage and gets them what they need. But then some customers wanna go even further and go full blown fin OPS and outsource that.
 That's where we offer the gold service and that's, you know, benchmarking unit, unit economic unit economics, much more detailed tagging and and resource planning as workloads are onboarded.
 There's a process that we would insert into your environment where we would be able to help guide when workloads are coming online, what the costs are going to be, what the implications are. Maybe the architecture could be optimized before it goes into production to ensure cost savings.
 Built into the plan, that sort of things.
 So there's three flavors there. If you wanna completely outsource the fin OPS function.
 Because we have economies of scale, we can offer this at less than the cost of a full time. You hiring a full time person to do this?
 So that's kind of the value we have out of this pin OPS as a service.
Shawn Ambrose   1:01:55
 Thank thanks, Craig.
 And I think you were just gonna wrap up here with kind of pulling it all together back to these top pain points there and where phenotz as a service actually shows up.
 So maybe you wanna just bring it together here.
Craig Slack   1:02:07
 Exactly. So of those top pain points that companies face with cloud management, phen OPS is a service addresses.
 You can see about half of them and and of the top five.
 For are are addressed with the Phen OPS as a service, so.
 Just want to highlight that. Thanks Shawn.
Shawn Ambrose   1:02:29
 I think, yeah.
 Thanks so much, Craig. And and and to our audience.
 Thanks so much for investing the time with us here.
 We're grateful for it.
 We hope that you you got a nugget or two of value out of it.
 Yeah. Thanks.
 Thanks Kyle so much.
 We hope you got great value.
 We, we, we, we clean up this recording and we post it on our website.
 So if you want to refer to it later, it's there.
 Our intention was to bring you all bunch of value and a whole bunch of of Nuggets that you can action yourselves and then also a little bit of information. Say, here's how AMBRO can help.
 My viewers to start with a conversation like we would love to just have a conversation with you.
 We're quite.
 Willing to invest in some presales to help you get the ball rolling? And if it turns into something more turns into something more.
 And if it doesn't?
 That's OK too.
 This is a topic that we're really passionate about.
 We love helping our customers.
 We love helping them, helping them be more efficient.
 Help them save money and ultimately helping them get the most out of that platform of Azure. So all the way back to that first slide I talked about of all those awesome things, how you get that without the dark side, right? So.
 With that, thank you again.
 We got a couple minutes at Craig, Steph and Ian.
 Can I hang out if anybody's got any questions or want to reveal their Halloween costume, that's fun too.
 And by all means, we'd love to chat with you in a in a more of a one to one session and see how we can help you.
 Thank you all so much.
Saul Valencia   1:03:55
 I do have a question.
 I don't know if I can. Hi everyone.
Shawn Ambrose   1:03:58
 Oh, so your your your questions are 10 bucks each, man.
 I'm just teasing Sol.
 It's nice to it's it's.
Saul Valencia   1:04:05
 Thank you very much man.
Shawn Ambrose   1:04:06
 I appreciate you being here, Saul.
 And yeah, by all means, that's your question.
Saul Valencia   1:04:09
 Yeah.
 I remember.
 Yeah, we were. When, when? When I was there, we were starting to do that, that, that journey to do something about.
Shawn Ambrose   1:04:17
 Yeah, you can see, we've come a long way in our in our maturity, right? Yeah.
Saul Valencia   1:04:19
 Yeah. No, it's awesome.
 It's awesome that you have this offering now that and you have a different aspect of this.
 I wanted to ask about the the reporting though.
 Would would this also provide?
 Because I think it's in the bronze part.
 Or is it the gold? I think I remember, but would that provide?
 A report that is something that.
 It will be accessible externally like I don't know power BI report or how. How is the the the report provided the advance report that is not only the one from the Azure cost analysis.
Craig Slack   1:04:56
 Yeah, it's a complicated question because the different levels of service do have different levels of reporting.
 So the bronze level is is gonna be very basic reporting.
 You know, we we don't really go as deep as like you'd want with full phnops, but because the the landscape of tools is changing so rapidly.
 We actually haven't even pinpointed like where we've gone down the path with third party products that you know charge a percentage of consumption.
 The Azure costs, which as Steph mentioned can be very expensive and we've gone down that path.
 We've explored that and and we find that the value is just not there.
 So we're, we're still, we're looking to use a lot of the tools that are available for free.
 So and and you're you can implement those yourselves.
 There's not anything secret sauce from Invero there that we are layering on.
 What we're layering on is the the.
 Methodology. So the fin OPS practice on top of that so.
 I think Steph really highlighted it.
 Well, that don't just go out and buy a tool or or implement a tool and expect that that's gonna solve your problems because you can actually get more in trouble or or get yourself into trouble with without knowing what it is that you're trying to achieve from the.
 Tool because tools are great, but you need to know what it is that you expect out of it.
 So we've built, you know, we're we're we're leveraging our service to come up with standardized way of approaching this for a different clients but.
 It.
 It's so to answer your question, you would have visibility into it like a power BI type report, but some of it's on our side.
 We're we're helping to guide that that information.
 So it's, I don't know, Steph, if you want to add further to that.
Stephanie Yackimec   1:06:45
 I just say that we definitely work with you to figure out what kind of reporting is going to be helpful and and it's a collaborative approach of how we can get you the information that you need.
Saul Valencia   1:06:56
 I I already understand because normally if my personal inform for the company, I would like to show something for management so they don't want to see how many public IPS or not they want to see networking. How much is it?
Stephanie Yackimec   1:07:10
 Hmm.
Craig Slack   1:07:10
 Mm hmm.

 Saul Valencia   1:07:11
 Compute how much is it? They don't want to see resource by resource, so yeah, no thank you.

 Craig Slack   1:07:16
 Yeah, it varies.

 Shawn Ambrose   1:07:16
 I think Sal, like we, we'd love to chat with you another time and go a little deeper into.
 You know, we we obviously we had some chats earlier about your environment.
 We have a reasonable understanding.
 And yeah, maybe there's a way we can.
 We can help you just kind of with that bowl on top of reporting back to your your management.

 Saul Valencia   1:07:35
 Thank you.

 Shawn Ambrose   1:07:36
 Awesome. Thanks Mike.

 Craig Slack   1:07:37
 Good to hear.

 Shawn Ambrose   1:07:38
 You hung around to the end, or at least it looks like you're there.
 Did you have a question or something that you wanted a table before?
 We all wrapped here.
 Maybe, maybe just kind of a fan.
 Yeah. Thanks.
 OK.
 Yeah. Thanks, Alan. And and Mike, if you're there. Thanks so much for for joining today.
 We're grateful for your time. Thanks everybody.
 We appreciate you joining the Invero Show.
 Have a great day. Happy Halloween.

 Mike Watchman   1:08:06
 Thanks.

 Ian Heron   1:08:07
 Thanks guys.

 Craig Slack stopped transcription