Episode Details

This conversation covers: 

• Why many businesses are shifting away from analyzing total cloud spend (CapEX vs. OpEX) and are now forecasting spend based around usage patterns.
• The difference between cloud-native, cloud computing, and operating in the cloud. 
• The delta that often exists between engineering teams and business stakeholders regarding costs. Travis also offers tips for aligning both parties earlier in the project lifecycle.
• Common misconceptions that exist around cost management, for both engineers and business stakeholders. For example, Travis talks about how engineers often assume that business teams manage purely to dollars and cents, when they are often very open to extending budgets when it’s necessary.
• Tips for predicting cloud spend, and why teams usually fall short in their projections.
• Why conducting cloud cost management too early in a project can be detrimental. 
• Comparing the cost of the cloud to a private data center. 
• The growing reliance on multi-cloud among large enterprises. Travis also explains why it’s important to have the right processes in place, to identify cross-cloud saving opportunities. 
• How IT has transitioned from a business enabler to a business driver in recent years, and is now arguably the most important component for the average company.

Links:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/TravisWRehl
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-rehl-tech/
• Main Company Site: https://cloudcheckr.com 
• CloudCheckr All Stars: https://cloudchecker.com/allstars 

Transcript

Announcer: Welcome to The Business of cloud-native podcast, where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.

Emily: Welcome to the Business of cloud-native. I'm your host, Emily Omier, and I'm here today with Travis Rehl, who is the director of product at CloudCheckr. Travis, I just wanted to start out, first of all, by saying thank you for joining me on the show. And second of all, if you could just start off by introducing yourself. What you do, and by that I mean, what does an actual day look like? And some of your background?

Travis: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me. So yeah, I'm Travis Rehl, director of product here at CloudCheckr. What that really means is, I have the fun job of figuring out what should the business do next in relation to our product offering here at the business. That means roadmap, looking at the market, what are customers doing differently now, or planning to do differently over the next year, two years or so, on cloud? What their cost strategies are, what their invoicing and chargeback strategies are, all that type of fun stuff, and how we can help accommodate those particular strategies using our product offering. 

Sort of, day to day, though, I would say that a bunch of my time during the day is spent talking to customers, figuring out where they are in their cloud journey, if you will, what programs or projects they may have in flight that are interesting, or complicated, or they need help on. Especially making any sort of analysis help in particular, and then lastly, taking all that information and packaging it up neatly, so that the business can make a decision to add functionality to our product in some way that can assist them move forward.

Emily: The first question I wanted to ask is actually if you could talk just a little bit about the distinction between cloud-native, and cloud computing, and operating in