- December 18, 2020
Attending AWS re:Invent 2020 as a 100% virtual conference, spread over a three-week period, was as much positive as it was unusual. Because 2020 was a period of extreme disruption, it helped put renewed emphasis on the “reinvent” component of AWS’ eight-year-old cloud conference. It was a year when companies had to suddenly, and without warning, take a step back and rethink what they are doing. As a result – as AWS CEO Andy Jassy noted in his nearly three-hour AWS re:Invent 2020 keynote address – 2020 became an inflection point for cloud adoption. “Enterprises that we've been talking with for many years about moving to the cloud … have gone from talking to having a real plan and that is going to be one of the biggest changes you see.”
Jassy’s optimistic keynote set a positive conference tone, especially with discussions around cloud adoption and cloud financial management. “When we look back on history of the cloud, it will turn out that the pandemic accelerated cloud adoption by several years.” You can catch Jassy’s entire keynote here.
While Apptio’s AWS re:Invent 2020 sessions weren’t quite as long as Jassy’s keynote, we spoke to an issue that is always top of mind for customers: cloud financial management.
For example, in his session, The Definitive Guide for Kubernetes Cost Management, Casey Doran, Apptio’s head of Cloud Product Management, provides expert advice for best practices for container cost management. The three primary things that you want to think about, Doran said, are:
- How you allocate costs
- How you optimize those costs
- How you perform chargeback to the right cost centers to make sure you are allocating those costs properly
“Considering your traditional infrastructure, as well as your containerized infrastructure, you essentially have two different ways you need to think about cost allocation, and that's what we are here to talk about today.” You can watch Doran’s session on Kubernetes cost management on demand here.
Elsewhere at AWS re:Invent 2020, Eugene Khvostov, Apptio’s VP Product & Engineering, sat down with theCUBE’s Lisa Martin to talk in detail about how Apptio helps customers understand their technology costs, where they are (and aren't) spending money, and how they can optimize those costs. “We help translate [Technology Business Management (TBM)] into [common] language, whether you're a business person, or a financial person, or working directly in the technology department ... you all can come together and understand what your technology costs are, and where they are headed in the future. We also provide tools to dive deeper into your cloud specific costs,” Khvostov explained in his opening.
Here’s a sample exchange between Eugene and Lisa, but of course you can watch the full video below:
Martin: As consumers we have had this on demand expectation for so long, and now, with things changing so quickly, and organizations having to make so many pivots – and probably continue to do so – being able to have that visibility, that insight, in real time, make decisions on it, is critical … as we approach the year 2021, how do you advise organizations to think about cloud in context of overall technology spend?
Khvostov: The first thing is to think of cloud as more than just a budget line item. It’s more than just an entry into your general ledger of spending this much money. It's really about driving the growth of your organization, and making sure that you drive the optimal growth of your resources, and infrastructure, and in software that you consume in order to increase your own growth.
The second thing is to actually plan for it. There is this sort of feeling that you can't plan for cloud spend … it's just going to happen. ‘What my organization is going to consume is what we are going to consume.’ But that couldn't be further from the truth. You can plan for your cloud spend, you can look at the demand for your resources, you can plan for different scenarios and what might happen in the future. You can look at that yourself … or you can look at
Apptio as an AWS Partner
As an AWS partner in cloud financial management, Apptio also played a role during AWS partner presentations. For example, during the partner keynote by Doug Yeum, head of AWS’ Global Partner Organization, three new offerings were announced. One of those offerings is Service Catalog AppRegistry, which customers can use to describe all resources that belong to an application in order to improve observability and manageability. Dave McCann, who is AWS’ VP Marketplace, Migration, Control Services, described specifics about the new app registry, and gave a shoutout to Apptio, saying, “I’m pleased to say, we are already working with leading software companies like Apptio … to improve the management of resources by integrating their tools with Service Catalog AppRegistry.” You can listen to the entire partner keynote on demand here.
Dave McCann later led an executive session - Transformation, migration, and governance: Lessons learned – that focused on how AWS plans to help more companies migrate and improve existing digital transformations. He announced key frameworks, such as the Well-Architected Management & Government Lens, which makes it easier for customers to develop management and governance solutions to support the design, implementation, and operation of applications in AWS and on-premises. McCann presented a sample Customer Service Management Framework, which included Apptio and is based on analysis of over 1,000 customers over the past year. “We learned in the last year that customers want more and more prescriptive guidance, and the way we deliver prescriptive guidance to customers is through well-architected frameworks,” said McCann. You can listen on demand to McCann’s session here.
In partner news, Apptio announced that we are participating in the new Professional Services in AWS Marketplace, and will offer Apptio Cloudability Professional Services there. Cloudability Professional Services adds to Apptio’s existing Cloudability and Hybrid Business Management solutions, which are currently available for purchase in AWS Marketplace.
Apptio’s AWS news
In Apptio news, Apptio Cost Transparency was officially made available in AWS Marketplace, giving organizations more options to get the most value out of their AWS investments as well as their broader IT portfolio. You can read more about Apptio Cost Transparency joining AWS Marketplace here.
In other news that positively impacts customers, AWS Lambda is now rounding up compute duration to the nearest millisecond with no minimum execution time. According to AWS, with this new pricing, “you are going to pay less most of the time, but it’s going to be more noticeable when you have functions whose execution time is much lower than 100ms, such as low latency APIs.” You can read more about AWS’ pricing change here. Using Cloudability’s detailed analytics you can explore all of the components that contribute to your Lambda costs, including compute duration. Customers can choose to break out Lambda costs by each individual function and measure the savings impact across the business.
If you missed any of the content above, or want to explore more AWS re:Invent 2020 content, fear not. You can register to join, or continue logging into, the AWS re:Invent 2020 event site here and view sessions until the end of January 2021. After January, you will be able to view the sessions on the AWS YouTube channel.
