Oliver Molander’s Post

This is a tale of FinOps and the dark "secret" of the Cloud. During the past 12 months, I've probably spoken with close to 100 Data Engineering and DevOps leaders. 💸 There's been one common denominator trend-wise that has only accelerated: the focus on FinOps and cloud cost optimization as we've entered a more "normal" macroeconomic climate after some crazy growth-at-all-costs years when money was cheap. 💡As DevOps and Data Engineering teams have had to concentrate on speed and agility to meet the extraordinarily high expectations placed on them during the growth at all cost times propelled by low-interest rates, best practices in the field of data cloud cost optimization are still relatively new. 📚 This is changing fast, highlighted by e.g. Battery Ventures Q1 2023 State of Cloud Software Spending report that just came out: https://lnkd.in/g9t7YeZ5 📊 The report among others highlights that 95% of CXOs consider cloud cost optimization either a medium or a high priority over the next 2 years. It further highlights that non-cloud provider solutions for FinOps and cloud cost optimization are a priority for 65% of CXOs. 💬 Further, plenty of data leaders here on LinkedIn have highlighted the rising importance of FinOps such as Benjamin Rogojan, Robert Sahlin, Matthew Weingarten and Chad Sanderson to name a few. 📈 Benjamin Rogojan actually did a survey a few months back about FinOps and cost saving. The survey with 617 respondents showed that 66% of data teams had worked on cost-saving projects during the past 12 months. 😱 So to the dark "secret" of the Cloud... Cloud Egress costs are a nightmare to understand and forecast. It's also the best example of cloud provider lock-in. It represents how much providers will charge you to take YOUR data out of their data centers. Affordable prices and efficient service should be the only customer retainers, not egress costs. The graph below by the awesome team at Holori ☁️ showcases this. ➡️ Smaller players make more efforts than tech giants and push for a more open cloud ecosystem as you can see in Holori’s analysis. 🚀 The reasons listed above are a few examples of why I started looking at the end of last year at ambitious European founders looking to solve this. I'm very excited to be supporting Antoine Jeol, Alexandre Guérin and the team at Holori ☁️ building a global category leader from Europe in the space. I'm convinced that their innovative approach is the way to go to abstract complexity away from FinOps, cloud cost optimization and multi-cloud management. In the 2010s, cloud infrastructures enabled a new generation of companies to build and scale their businesses. In this decade, cloud infrastructure is table stakes and Cloud Economics is top of mind. Today the Cloud is perceived as a utility rather than a differentiator, like when Netflix started moving their workloads to AWS in early 2010! #cloud #finops #devops #dataengineering #startups #venturecapital