Eli Mansoor is an accomplished cloud transformation leader with ALMOST TEN YEARS‘ EXPERIENCE IN THE INDUSTRY, including four years’ experience working at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Eli left AWS this past May to start a business focusing on improving cloud customers’ gross margin by optimizing vendors’ agreements and cloud spend.
A few weeks ago, I left AWS to start my own business – one focused on empowering organizations with their cloud journey. This change will allow me to pursue my own passion to support cloud customers by fine-tuning their cloud vendor agreement terms, optimizing their cloud spend, building cost aware culture and much more.
I entered the cloud industry nine years ago and started in FinOps five years ago, when I led CloudHealth business in Israel. Since then, I spent four years at AWS and helped numerous AWS customers optimize their cost, build FinOps practices and adopt cloud services in an orderly, skillful manner. In my words, I help organizations “do it right from day one.”
Back in 2019, I also co-authored the book Mastering AWS Cost Optimization (Mastering), which introduced KAO (Knowledge, Architecture, Operation) methodology for optimizing AWS cloud spend. The book’s first edition was published just a few months before the book Cloud FinOps by J.R. Storment and Mark Fuller. By coincidence, we had all selected a bird to feature on our front covers – a kingfisher for Mastering and a colophon for Cloud FinOps. Despite that similarity, we came up with slightly different (but supplemental) perspectives to FinOps. Cloud FinOps speaks more about the organizational and financial change organizations should go through when scaling public cloud infrastructure; whereas Mastering dives deep into the most commonly used services and provides practical hands-on best practices for optimization and operational guardrails to minimize waste and reduce costs.
So, FinOps X came along at the right time for me. It gave me the opportunity to meet J.R. in person for the first time, attend over 15 talks and meet FinOps leaders from leading organizations. These were mainly American organizations including the top cloud spenders. I met practitioners from top tech companies, financial organizations, SaaS vendors, leading consulting firms, vendors and others. I met over 400 practitioners, each with his/her unique FinOps journey and story; and I had the great experience of meeting the whole FinOps Foundation team in person.
I also had the honor of participating on the Sustainability panel with Riley Jenkins from Domo on the TAC chair, as well as Amanda Dalton from Deloitte and Bindu Sharma from FireEye. I was invited to speak at Joe Daly’s FinOpsPod and even went on Stephanie Gooch’s (AWS) Twitch channel. All in all, it was a blast.
Now… What are my top takeaways from FinOps X? Well, FinOps X made it clear to me that no single FinOps definition fits all. It is more of a matter of perspective (or geography), such as the US enterprise perspective and the Israeli tech perspective.
US enterprise organizations are huge! Yes, huge compared to most organizations in other parts of the world. As such, they approach cloud as a “thing” that first must be gotten under control. No other way around it. There has to be an owner for every dollar spent. Therefore, the top priorities revolve around an account and tagging strategy, budget control, chargebacks, spend prediction, commitment management and shared resources cost allocation. As long as we know the budget owner for each dollar spent, and as long as we can chargeback different business units for their spend, we are done. In such organizations, what I’m describing is a BIG deal and not at all an easy task (imagine implementing and enforcing a tagging strategy in such organizations). I am happy to see that many organizations and practitioners do succeed in managing these tasks and can present their governance, automation, commitment management and success stories.
The other perspective for FinOps includes an additional layer – efficiency and cost optimization: making sure we spend only the dollars we need and that we achieve as much business performance/value out of each dollar spent (some may call this Financial Engineering). Over the past five years I’ve had cost optimizations discussions on almost a daily basis. These include discussions with organizations that care about each dollar they spend. I’m referring to companies such as Mobileye, which uses spot instances in production in massive scale for business-critical applications, or others like Singular, Coralogix or Exberry that run production workloads on Graviton instances to gain 20% price reductions (vs. On-Demand Intel instances) and better performance. Singular actually took it to the extreme, by adopting Graviton3 instances in production just two days after they become GA! We see a constant effort for further optimization and increased efficiency.
In FinOps X, the leading perspective for FinOps is about allowing engineers to innovate so organizations can react to market changes (this might be a Covid-19 impact) and increase their revenue. In such cases, FinOps practitioners manage reporting, commitments and chargebacks. This is different from the Israeli perspective that looks at FinOps as a way for CFOs and Founders to improve their gross margins by reducing cloud costs (not only by increasing revenue) and as a way for product and engineering teams to gain competitive and technological advantages and showcase their application efficiency advantage.
Looking at the bigger picture and having minimal interface with engineering teams that are spread out globally, FinOps practitioners in large organizations focus on commitment strategies. These strategies aim to squeeze the spend generated by the engineering teams. On a daily basis, they strategize and manage reservations with various combinations of Savings Plans, Convertible and Standard Reserved Instances. This was a hot topic on stage as well as at the sponsors’ booths. I met Three vendors offering commitment management tools: CloudWiry (well done with the giveaways) that offers “reservations as a service”; Archera that offers Guaranteed Reserved Instances (GRIs) with guaranteed buyback; and ProsperOps showing their commitment management tools.
Other sponsors included CloudThread, which helps engineers develop cost-aware applications showing technical cloud cost unit metrics as a service; Kubecost, that focuses on Kubernetes monitoring; Harness, whose cloud financial management platform shows potential savings in USD as well as in CO2 emission reduction; and Joel Proctor from BlueArch.io, which offers governing FinOps best practices as a service (BPaaS).
The Israeli vendor section included two good friends of mine. Anodot provides a cloud management platform that helps customers understand the true unit of economics (revenue, cost or margin) of your SaaS customers, features, teams and more. The second Israeli sponsor, FinOut, recently announced their series A $12M funding. FinOpt focuses on the unit of economics, combining data from various sources such as cloud cost data, snowflake, Datadog and more, to help calculate cost per business KPIs.
Well, while cost optimization wasn’t a topic discussed, sustainability was sure a hot topic. I attended an excellent session by Mark Butcher and participated in a panel discussion on this topic. I told a story about a customer of mine that reduced its CO2e by 70% as a result of a cost optimization project. Cost optimization just might be the secret path to sustainability…! Or maybe it’s the other way around, with sustainability being the secret path to cost optimization…
What else did I learn?
What else? I want to close by highlighting the FinOps Foundation team for putting FinOps X together. I can only imagine the stress and hard work you had to put in to make it happen.
J.R., Ashley, Stacy, Ben, Joe, Vas and all the other FinOps Foundation team members – you did it as pros, and you did it with big smiles. Great work, and I’m looking forward to seeing you at FinOps X 2023!
Eli
Eli Mansoor is an accomplished cloud transformation leader with 25 years’ experience in the technology market and ALMOST TEN YEARS‘ EXPERIENCE IN THE CLOUD INDUSTRY, including four years’ experience working at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Recently, Eli left AWS to pursue his passion and start a business focusing on improving cloud customers’ gross margin by optimizing vendors’ agreements and cloud spend.
Eli Mansoor is an accomplished cloud transformation leader with ALMOST TEN YEARS‘ EXPERIENCE IN THE INDUSTRY, including four years’ experience working at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Eli left AWS this past May to start a business focusing on improving cloud customers’ gross margin by optimizing vendors’ agreements and cloud spend.
In his four years with AWS, Eli was an Account Manager, supporting Enterprise customers with their cloud transformation journey and more recently, was Business Development manager, part of the AWS (EC2) Compute team. Before joining AWS, Eli was the Israel manager for CloudHealth Technologies (acquired by VMware), a Cloud Financial Management SaaS platform and, previously, was the Israel manager for Rackspace (acquired by Apollo Global Management). In these roles, Eli helped numerous organizations with their digital transformation journey, set up Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) teams, saved millions of dollars of cloud spend, built their FinOps practice and negotiated better terms for their cloud vendor or cloud resellers’ agreements. At AWS, Eli was part of a team defining content for AWS Cloud Financial Management certification and training and presented in various Cloud Financial Management / FinOps events including AWS Summits around the globe.
In 2019, Eli co-authored the book Mastering AWS Cost Optimization, that has since become a cornerstone for all FinOps engineers around the globe. The third release is now available in English and will soon be released in additional languages.
A small river named Duden flows by their place and supplies it with the necessary regelialia.
Behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts. Separated they live in Bookmarks
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