Special Guest - Rob Martin - FinOps Education with the "Chief Story Teller"

Frank and Stephen are joined by their friend Rob Martin, Director of Learning from the FinOps foundation.

We talk about how to get into FinOps, what paths might be suitable based on your background and all of the wonderful resources available from the FinOp Foundation.

We talk about our own education journeys with FinOps and how it's still such an exciting time to get involved!

Transcript

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F- Hello everyone. Welcome to what's new in cloud FinOps. Today, it's interview time and we are extremely lucky to have Rob Martin, whose secondary title I think is director of learning for the FinOps Foundation. But really primary title is Chief Storyteller and we love good stories and we love finops stories, so perfect. And as usual, it's me Frank Contrepois and 

I am with my good friend Stephen Old.

S- I thought you'd forgotten I was here, Frank, just because I've messed up the intro three times before we started properly recording. Thought you had disowned me. 

F- No, no.  Thank you, Rob for joining us today. Can you please start with just telling who you are, little intro so that we put some context there and we prepare our questions. 

RM- Sure, sure. Thank you for having me. First off, I've been listening since the beginning of the podcast, so a huge fan of the monthly updates. I am Rob Martin, I'm with the FinOps Foundation and I was employee number two or three, I think at the foundation. I have been there for just about a year and a half and I'm the director of learning, as you said. So mostly I've been responsible for putting together training materials and training. Classes and then doing a lot of the training classes. In fact in the early days I was the face of the FINOPs certified practitioner videos. So a lot of people come up to me at conferences and said say things like I've been watching your face for like the last 10 hours while I was preparing to get my certification. So I have that distinction and the little known fact is that I can see them all as they're doing the class too. So it's a two way video that we recorded. But before this I was at a WS. I was there for about a year working in their cloud financial management practice and then before that it was with. A big cloud financial platform. Before that I was with a cloud reseller and then before that in the before cloud days, I worked at the government in the United States and also for Accenture. So the long and winding career to get to cloud, but I finally found the perfect spot. 

F- That is so such a good conclusion finding the perfect spot. 

S- cool, isn't it? So reseller then to like a fintech, I'll take it and then to or maybe it's cloud finance platform, it could be like a CMP. 

RM - Yes it was Cloudability. 

S- Ohh, gosh, yeah. You know, I did know that. You were part of the crew. So, at what point when you went into the cloud side of things, did you realize that it was the financial stuff that excited you? 

R- I wouldn't. Excitement is a really strong word there. But I think that the I'm when I moved from when I was serving as a as a reseller, that was when I was feeling the pain, right? You’re feeling the pain of Having to produce those invoices on a monthly basis for the customer, most of our customers were either heavily regulated businesses, industries or the government. And so we would fairly regularly have you know large invoices held up for a few cents of discrepancy. And so that quickly became a kind of an area to focus in on and that was really when I started seeing that happening, it became clear that this was the big thing that was different from. Everything that I had done before, I used to buy a lot of equipment for the Department of Justice. When we when I worked there, we bought, you know, 10s of millions of dollars worth of stuff. Every year for the data centers. And that process was sort of always wrong. We know now any purchase you make for a data center is always wrong. You're forecasting into the future 3 fives, fives, years, 10 years. So you're necessarily going to make assumptions that are going to buy too much or buy it in the wrong place or buy the wrong technology. And in cloud, you're going to have to have the ability to go into your data center and just go, hey, all this stuff on this side of the room, let's just get rid of it right now and stop paying for it. Nobody's ever had. That that ability before the CIOs that I was working with didn't had never gotten to do that. It never had to think about it things in that way. So of course you don't have any of those muscles to do that kind of analysis and make those kinds of decisions. So this seemed to me like all the things that we do with computers, we're also doing in cloud, but the thing that we were. Doing in the data centers is nothing like what we're doing in cloud. And this seemed like the, it seemed like an area that was going to be an area of tremendous growth and I think that's borne out over the past three or four years. 

F- Yeah. So that's that sounds very technical and now the question is how do you move that to education and learning? 

RM- Well, I got, I was lucky enough to be involved in the original FINOP certified practitioner course when it was developed very in the very early days of the foundation and I got to deliver that first course with Mike Fuller who was the co-author of the Cloud Finance book. We delivered that at a conference in September of 2019 was the first time we did a a course on on Phillips. Uh, the the workbook was about 30 pages. Now the workbook is like 100 and something pages. So the the practice has evolved a good bit since then. But it was very rewarding, very fulfilling to be able to do that. And that was at a time when I was still at Cloudability but involved in the foundation. So being able to put together that first course, being able to then deliver that course, which I've done probably. I don't know 70 or 80 times at this point. Um, has been you know, super fulfilling. And it really got me thinking about like how do we, how do we enable this, this community that's grown from 30 people back in early 2019 to over 8200 people now in October of 2022. So it's a, it's a big challenge because 

it's not an easy conceptually Phelps is not an easy thing to fully understand and the practices that we're doing are oftentimes. You know, very, very domain specific. They require a lot of thinking and a lot of new learning, a lot of interesting vocabulary. So that's kind of where where I where I felt like I could add most to the foundation. 

S- Going back to something you said a little bit earlier about feeling the pain. As a reseller, it's interesting that there are still plenty of pains out there, and some of that's one of the reasons that fin OPS exists. And certain parts of FinOps certainly are just about shining light on and simplifying some of the painful things that still exist. So, I mean between us were were kind of grandparents of clouds years could have been so long. What do you think has I'm gonna actually try to be positive because the world's feeling very negative at the moment. What do you think has improved? What you know are the things that have become less painful since you first started feeling those pains? 

RM- Gosh it's there's probably little ways that it's less painful. I'm I'm certainly hearing a lot less frequently nowadays that companies are hitting these giant you know eighty You know, oh crap. Moments with their bills, right? I think it's a much more widely understood thing that cloud can cloud cost can run away with you, that can run away from you. They can get out of control really quickly. So I think that that's a, that's a, that's a better story that more people have heard at this point. I think there's kind of a generational shift. Yeah, that's going to be required to get a new generation of CIO's in place who are sort of thinking cloud natively before that entirely goes away, but we're certainly seeing fewer of those like giant Sort of existential crises that  we used to hear about all the time. Rather than where it was, where it got signed off by finance before anything before a penny was spent. 

S- Do you agree that some of that's because people, and this comes down to education, should we talk a little bit? People are a bit more understanding now that. The kind of accountability for the creation of costs now lives at the engineering level. 

RM -Hmm. no I don't think that's the. So I think that they were, I think we were seeing those giant those, those giant crazy financial events in the past due to a couple things. One was I don't think it's necessarily that the accountability, but I think it's the visibility across the whole 

organization. Everybody's looking at it more because I think we were seeing them before. In two cases, one where CIO organizations are technology side of organizations, we're going forward and doing things sort of in a mindset of using the data center, right if I launch the biggest thing in the data. Winner and no one comes to knock on my door and and tell me to turn it off. I can just continue to use it and there's no cost to that necessarily. The cloud doesn't ever come and tell you to turn things off. So that was sort of the technology side of it. And I think the other side was groups that were doing activities that were outside of the control of even the technology parts of the organization where they were experimenting or innovating or trying to launch new things. Now with this new tool and without a real understanding of how those resources were just like it. That had to be. Controlled had to be secured, had to be networked, had to be integrated into the other parts of the business. So I think we're just seeing more visibility to that now. Overall, I think that in a lot of cases we're still seeing finance kind of left out of some of those. Some of that, some of that visibility and not being able to see what's going on or just just acquiescing to the to the feeling within the company that we're just moving to cloud and that's it., 

S- Just to try to take this on into our main topic. You've obviously come from a technical background. Frank's the same mines, more of kind of a business background. Most of my team in my current role have all come from finance or analyst backgrounds. In terms of the educational piece and the stuff you're working on and the creation of, you know, all the training materials in there. How? How different do you think people's journeys? If someone's listening to this they wanted to get into into fin OPS, how do you assure them that actually it doesn't matter what their background is, the educations are there for them to be able to still make it as a success? 

RM- Yeah, it's, it's a good point and I think that the, the, the, the number one thing for me and just as I contemplated doing this transition of my own career was that essentially every, if you look around every the move to cloud is going to be pervasive, right. Every company, every organization in the world that uses it to deliver value and increasingly almost every organization in the world is using it in some way to deliver their value to their customers are using cloud in some respect. And so they'll need to make this transition and understand. How to use this unlimited resource effectively? Cost effectively? Put their own governance, put their own controls on it. And understand what they're going to use it for and how to get value out of it. So if we think of in that model, essentially every organization in the world, every CIO in the whole world is going to need to have Phillips people to help them to manage this crazy out of control resource. And if that's the case then you know, I don't think that there's even probably 30 or 40% of the companies in the world that I know who have been up organization. So there's going to be a lot of jobs, there's gonna be a lot of opportunities to work with almost any kind of business. This is one of those disciplines I think like that is going to be everywhere. It's going to be something you can do for any kind of a company, old traditional companies, new cloud based companies, medium sized companies, Greenfield companies, any kind of an organization. That that is going to use cloud is going to need this function. So there's there's a lots of opportunities out there. Secondly, I think that there are you know there are there are paths to get into phenos from any of the different disciplines that are part of this. And I've seen you know we've heard stories in the foundation from people who have come over from procurement who were involved in purchasing and contract management and who you know just really got the bug for learning about cloud and understanding what we were buying and seeing the value that the company was getting from that. And really if you look at the way that you buy. Cloud services, it's not a traditional vendor relationship. You're procurement people are used to having this sort of contractual back and forth, very point in time relationship with vendors. This is a relationship you need to to manage, you know, sort of really across the board all the time. And from now on you're going to be dealing. If you're, if you're putting your essentially your data center resources out in AWS, Azure, GCP, whatever, you're going to need to maintain that relationship with them in a very different way than you would if you were just contracting them to come in on a Thursday and install some equipment in the data center. So it's a big change that procurement sees you know sort of right away. They see it really viscerally and I think that's a big area where a lot of a lot of our practitioners will eventually come from because they're used to handling that sort of operational side. If you're in finance this is a great way to get more involved in the technology and what's actually being delivered. Your company is delivering its value through it and this is a great way to get more connected with the company or in the mission of the company as opposed to being in a sort of a back office function. If you're in engineering, this is a shift. You know it's a mind shift to watch those cloud costs, to barely be able to control what you're doing and be able to make the kinds of decisions, especially if you're an engineering leadership. To say, you know, should we be buying equipment or should we be paying for for contractor resources or should we be hiring new engineers or should we be investing in training for our people to upgrade their skills? Or should we be investing in different types of architectures of transitioning to different types of architectures that will give us benefit, sustainability benefits or cost benefits down the road. And so as an engineering leader, this is a great, I see this as a great path to get into you because it allows you to get into the conversation with the rest of the business. Right. It's not just about that new feature you're delivering or that new search algorithm that you're coding on, but it's about what are we going to be able to do? How are we going to be able to affect the bottom line? How are we going to affect the happiness of our customers. So I think from anywhere you're coming, anywhere, any job you're doing in the business, Phillips is really about that collaboration, is really about collaboration between those groups and being curious being. Kind of bold and stepping out and understanding how the work that you're doing intersects with and interacts with other people who are doing different disciplines in that same company and then like making things better so the people who are. Who are really successful at Penobscot, at leading anops, are people who have those kinds of opinions, who aren't afraid to kind of go out there and say, like, hey, what do you do? How do you do it? Can we work together to do that more effectively? And that are really kind of out there being curious and taking risks in the organization to make things better across the board. So it's a, it's a very, I think those people can come from anywhere. It's not, it's not a thing that everybody is going to be perfect at or that everybody's going to be great at. But if you've got that kind of curious outgoing thoughtfulness about how your company is getting its value, it's a really fun way to do that across a bunch of different disciplines. 

F- OK, wow. And one thing, when you look at slightly from the cloud perspective, there is still a bias on on documentation and education on the word use and even the marketing used by cloud vendors which is still very much towards tech people, technical people and usually developers. It's quite interesting because you have dev, you have all those all things, but the developer is now seems to be the. Big target of all of these things, yet what we discuss here is that cloud impacts the full business. It's it involves, finance involves procurement, it involves. Engineer, not just as developer. So what are? What are you in and the final foundation doing to help these? I would say partially forgotten bits of the cloud. 

Rm- There's other people, yeah, I think, I mean, I think that's luckily that's changing a little bit. We're starting, I'm starting to see at least indications that the big cloud providers are also trying to reach out and speak to the finance people, to the product owners, to the business people and procurement people. I think Azure has always been more. It has always done more of its messaging geared towards the business people or the procurement people involved, primarily because I think Azure has traditionally sold through that Channel through existing relationships that Microsoft has with so many different companies around the world. um And so that's been a little bit more of a of an easier thing for their account teams to take on. But I think, yeah, you're right, ABS and GCP I think both focused primarily on those engineering resources and. Those, you know, those are the, that's, that's the entree, right? The the cloud like any product is gonna be sticky. So if you can get the people who are excited about being able to do a new thing or an innovative approach or take a tryouts and new features or to give them features that ultimately save them time, right. That's kind of a recurring theme. I think in a lot of our training and our interaction with engineers is right. The engineers need time. They need time to focus on what they're building and time to program and time to focus on that. That that using some of these managed services and cloud can sometimes give them lots of opportunities to do so they can start to get their own development time back and not have to do some of the toil that's related to a lot of those things, It's, but I mean to your question, I think that the what we try to do primarily through our training is to create a common language. I mean if I had to boil it down to kind of the one thing that we want to do is have everybody, give everybody the ability to learn to speak to one another in common language. And that's a lot of times going to be language that's specific to your company, but a lot of times it's going to be integrating the language that the cloud providers are introducing. They're bringing their terminology and they hope that you'll use. Their terminology and your business as you use their cloud, but there's also other terminology that is disciplined specific that's. You know terminology about finance or terminology about development that that those two disciplines don't understand about each other. So FinOps is really in a position to try to pull that that terminology together and that's kind of what we focus on in the in the basic training right is giving everybody the vocabulary to talk to one another more effectively. Because when you're in a community like this that's this big, um, you need to have kind of a common. Terminology nomenclature to be able to to dig into details that you wouldn't ordinarily be able to do. 

S- The terminology piece is so challenging. I was having a chat with someone today just around the fact that if you just take the terms, credits, refunds and rebates across the three vendors they mean. Different things, what one might consider a credit could be a refund to another and stuff like that. And so if you actually have a company that's multicloud, they've 

got to also take another step of actually we need to decide what we're calling things and then someone else has to do the translation to what that might be in each of the individual clouds. It is so difficult and going back to something, it kind of links into two things. One of the things you said earlier about the roles existing for a long time, but also around the challenges in terminology and other. Pieces, Frank always says. And forgive me, Frank, you might want to correct me on this, but the FinOps exists because vendors do it badly or make things too complex, and that isn't changing. Things are getting more and more complex. I mean, that's the whole reason we have the podcast and the news, because it's just so hard to keep on top of it. Four or five years ago, when I started doing, like, my exams, I knew every service that adjusted, for instance, right? I've just redone my essay exam. And I am one of those terrible people that basically refuses to do training. So I just went straight into it and I did a practice paper 1st and on the practice paper things came up that I didn't even know and I really tracked the news and I was like, what is that? And I couldn't tell from the name and I had to go and read the FAQ, right? It's. It's really challenging to keep on top of this and and that. Going on to like a statement I'd like to maybe talk to you about is. There. Ask there's so much information, so much knowledge around this area, not just from our club but just even just going into FinOps especially like say you talk there's there's a different areas of it where to be a true expert in all of it. I just don't think it's possible. Right. We all specialize like Frank is really good at the current data side. I really understand commitments and instance types. There is so much space to become a guru in your own right and FinOps 

because there are so many areas and I think that's really exciting and I think. Anyone that's coming in doing the basic level training that and for you as a as the director of learning, there is so much scope, isn't there for more stuff you can do in specialties that are there in the future. 

RM- There really is and it's it's a great point because they're what we've tried to do in the in the foundation is to gather as much of this together to give companies who are coming to this discipline a lot of you know a lot of ammunition, a lot of content that they can use in setting up a phase structure in their business. But even like separating it from the people there are lots of opportunities as you said to specialize in a particular area yourself. But there's also a great deal of of specialization or or or. Unifying that you can do for your own business, right? There's a lot of businesses who get a lot of value out of right sizing, but they don't get a lot of value out of out of commitment based discount purchasing. So they'll outsource that sort of thing to someone else or that may get value out of doing a lot of the integration to other parts of their business item or ITFM cloud based businesses that don't have those functions that don't need to do those things at all. And there are different tools that you can use that are just there's so many tools out there now that you can buy that will. Effectively outsourced parts of what needs to go on to give you the visibility you need and the recommendations that you need to optimize and the integration back to your business. So it is an area where you can kind of like pick and choose where you want to be the expert. We have a huge growing ITM group that's within the foundation who really do item as a function and item has sort of in some ways fundamentally different goals of tracking the lifecycle of an asset and how from its acquisition. All the way to its disposition that are different from our our kind of questions and then OPS about whether that asset was useful and how much value did it create this reporting. And so, you know, there's there's those kinds of people who can who can do this as a as a really specific way of of making their discipline more effective. But you give two good examples, there's a whole. There's a whole art to to doing commitment based discount and a whole art to doing commitment based discounts for a particular type of cloud for a particular cloud. So that process can be entirely different. Or it has to be thought about in in very different ways if you're buying, you know, cuds versus buying RI's in AWS. I was saddened this week. It was it this week or last week when when Google Actually, released their savings plans. flex cuds. 

S- Ohh flexcut, yeah. 

RM- Because they had a chance at that one time to to to call them savings plans just like everybody else. And I was, I'm still, I guess I'm still waiting for the one thing that's the same in all the clouds. So. 

F- Yeah, but they, yeah, they, they don't really want. But all right was not too. The bad thing is RI is one that's used, I think, by all three. The inconvenience is RI is a terrible name because it's not reserved and it's not an instance. But anyway, 

RM- Yeah, that's I think that's spot makes it closest to anything, so I think now that GCP has a spot offering, I think all three of them use spot and I'm going to hang my hat on that. 

S- Yeah, you're absolutely right. They all use spots, which is a shame because Preemptible actually were a great idea and they still exist, but they couldn't. They literally said this on a podcast we just recorded around the recapture rate of the actual machines and the cores. But yeah, I agree. I mean, so we've just had Azure savings plans recently out and we've got flex cuts and all this, and they do follow each other. But still, even though in this case the terminology could have been the same, right? You actually have to go learn the differences like Azure savings plans like our eyes cover a load more things than you can in and also they break apart licensing from machines and all of this kind of stuff. It's there's a lot to learn and we're bringing someone in my team at the moment who has never done any cloud or thin OPS. And actually we don't see that as a disadvantage, right? We can just teach them from scratch the right things. 

RM- Yeah, it's a model that that that you can teach you know, from from scratch. We've had a large number. The Finance Foundation did a scholarship program this year where we gave out. I can't remember what the number was. I think it was about $100,000 worth of scholarships for training and for for participation in our events to people who needed to start off. And I would say the majority of those people were people who were just starting off and they were just starting off in in the industry learning how to do this. For the first time. And so that's it is definitely something that you can teach from the beginning because it's got a process all its own. And if you're not, increasingly I'm finding that telling the story of how we used to do things in the data centers, particularly in college settings. I'm doing a lot more speaking as part of a class and college at a number of universities. When I go to those situations, I don't think anybody's got an appreciation except for maybe the professor about how things used to be done. So they don't really care about that. They're really just kind of. And how should we do things going forward? 

S- I have the exact opposite experience because I go in and speak to vendors and I often train them about how to speak to CFOs and stuff, right. And one of the first things I say is probably some of you guys used to sell hardware, so you know, this cycle and they all like nod vigorously. Like, yeah, I get this, I get this. And it's like you do realize you sell cloud now, right? It's different. And I try to explain the cloud side and how our eyes really work or savings plans or how it hits P&L and this kind of stuff and. The confuddled I think is the word I'll use because it feels so different and it is nice that now, like I said, you can bring people in from fresh. They don't need to know how we used to do things. That doesn't have to pollute their thinking. 

RM- That is a nice feature of of this, but you know it's you have to be able to do both of those things. I think it's important to be able to do both, because you know there are. There are big differences to the way and they're still going to be some people around the business, particularly on the finance side. I mean, you never bought a net app SAN that made you change your accounting process around, but when you buy, when you start buying cloud, that changes, things change about how you pay, how you look at those bills, how you commit to them, how you plan for them over time, how you forecast. So it's a, it's a giant change in a lot of different disciplines around the organization. Sometimes you don't even realize which ones until you. You get a pretty large usage. 

S- Yeah. I've just had a thought on one of the things that I think's improved. I think you hear less stories for when you go into like an enterprise and turn around and say we don't know how many of accounts we have because loads of them are still on credit cards from people who are just doing it themselves. I think that's got better finally because that used to be a horror show into one massive enterprise. And I said we asked the cloud vendor and they said there's 350 accounts that we don't know about. 

F- Yes that was when cloud, that's how cloud grew up with shadow it purely because by definition business would never go to something that changed the accounting method. So that was quite a push from the bottom did the interesting bit also you were talking about which is it's I think we're going to go the way we we just described it all together. It makes me think you know when you have it you have a part that it that manages the details which is usually it was operation then you had a part of it. It was slightly more abstract than with solution architect. And then you had completely abstract which was enterprise architecture. 

And are we going to go, you think into a hierarchy like this that yes you do cloud you do management of commitment, but it's what you do is roughly correct. You need to turn not only commitment but you need to turn off stuff when you're not using it as a high level and then you'll have specialists in every direction. So will we have that Metacritic groups those metal groups. 

RM- It's an interesting question because that's what we had in the data center, right? There 

was the storage team and there was the logging team and there was the platform team and the networking team and you sort of consulted. All of those people with your plans ahead of time, right, when you would put together those giant business cases for let's buy this $10 million worth of equipment and you would have to sort of take your, your plan around all those different groups. Is this enough storage, is this enough network, is this enough racks and is there enough HVAC to go around and you'd have to do all those kind of like check the box things. But everybody was looking, everybody was forecasting, right. Every single one of those groups was looking at that and going well. Will that be enough? In 18 months, when that shows up and for the next 3 1/2 years after that, so it was a very, it was all of that review and approval and the work and the the mashing of teeth that went into putting together those giant business cases was all really speculative. And I find that I was thinking about this earlier this week when I was with a customer. I find that, you know, when when we, when we think about all the work that went into those business cases initially to buy for a data center, you're spending that same amount of time probably or maybe even more every week from now on. Managing the use of those resources that you're that you're building in the cloud, but the difference is that you're actually managing to the real resource, you're actually managing the you have the ability to manage the size of the resources you're buying to the exact workload needs of what's running at that moment. And so even though it's a similar amount of work, the work that you're doing is can be much more tailored to the actual experience that you're that your workload is doing. So you're seeing. You know, I I think it's just more valuable. It's more valuable work. But it's telling us that we have the job of platform management didn't go away. The job of storage management or capacity management or networking didn't go away. They just get really compressed and sometimes they get really compressed down into a single engineer or a single engineer gets to write his infrastructure or her infrastructure as code. And when she launches that, she's expected to be a networking expert and a storage network expert and a. Database expert and all of these different experts all rolled into one as that code hits production and somehow has an impact on the cost that we're going to spend. So I think there's room for this kind of a spreading out of some of this discipline to groups that would have a specialized view of things. But again, they'd be instead of looking at the future cost or the speculative risk of doing things, they'd be looking at actual usage and able to respond much more quickly themselves as well. 

S- Conscious of time, conscious of time and the fact that we could chat forever, as people can probably tell. I think there's two areas and the first I was going to ask and I think this is the thing I promised you that we ask first because as Mr and we do very little prep. I said, Rob, anyway, I'll ask this which is how do we make it more relatable to the persons. I think we've actually covered that quite nicely. The other things what I think I'd like to ask instead and maybe give kind of. My thoughts and and see what you think, um, because I can't think of how to ask the question is someone coming into it right at the starting .1 things. The first thing I'll say is like go to the training, go do the practitioner exam. I think it's a really good exam because actually it is an exam about being able to do the job and the training isn't about learning how to pass the exam, it's about being able to do the job. And so I am just going to sound terrible. I didn't watch the videos. I went and did the exam because I've been doing flips for a bunch of years and I passed it and with a with a decent score and I was like. Great. And then I thought back and thought well I have read the book literally, you know I've 

read the the clown fin OPS book and I also think that's the, I would actually say now with more knowledge than having gone back and watched the the training to help them deliver the training in in my tail seems. Do the training. The exam and then go on to the book, the context that gives you. So then really go and take the most out of the book. And then I think then maybe even drive on to the professional piece. I think that's quite a nice neat order for someone coming into it fresh. Through your thoughts are. 

MR0 Yeah, I think that's right. And one of the things that we, one of the things that we recommend really for even people coming into the FinOps practitioner training is to take some of the cloud provider training 1st. And whether you're coming at this, if you're coming at this to from an engineering background, you probably already have a good understanding of the cloud that you're used to using I. When it really useful to be able to go back and get like AWS practitioner, Azure Fundamentals, GCP digital leader, IBM, cloud advocate. I found that in doing those kind of basic level courses and even if you don't take the exam for those the material is online and it's for free. It really does give you a kind of a view of how the different major cloud providers look at cloud, how they categorize their services and how they talk about them and then you'll start to put together in your mind. It's sort of like. Frank does this, I'm sure better than me with with five different languages. But you know, when I, 

when I studied Spanish as a younger man and I and then I sort of started studying German, it was always easier to pick up a German thing because you could relate it not only to your English experience but also to your Spanish experience. And so you're able to do that compare and contrast. And that I think is a really good ability to get that polyglot feel for what the cloud terminology is. And then really, yeah, I would say that the practitioner is the next step and whether you do that. By reading the book and taking the exam that works and we're going out to the website and really looking on philips.org and looking at the capabilities and the domains and the the information that's out there about the finance framework. That's 

another way to sort of study for a lot of the material or whether you're just a practitioner as you said and you've been doing this for a number of years. Our goal is to again to get you 

ready to have more detailed conversations with people and practitioners all about establishing that baseline for giving you the ability to. To work effectively with others to to then go ask a meaningful question instead of a question that's kind of, you know, very basic and may not be the right thing, may not be actually what you're looking to find out. 

S- Yeah, give you that that additional confidence that makes me feel better because me and Frank designed the training in the company that I was previously the Frank still at. And one of the first things we got them to do was cloud vendor training before they went to the philosophy. So we got it in the right order according to the man who knows Frank. 

F- Yes, that's good. And I have to say you remember I asked for a question before quite a long time ago and I was trying to bring you in a discreet way which obviously didn't work as I was way too discreet. It seem it's to to talk about the new trainings you've done I think on the Finance Foundation about financial engineers or special finance. 

RM- Yes that's a that's a great thank you for for giving me the the the time to do that as you know we're a Phillips Foundation is a. Is a nonprofit. We're a part of the Linux Foundation. We're actually a project of the Linux Foundation. So we we make our money primarily through training, through the sale of training. But it's really something that we're doing to create as many opportunities for people who are in our community to advance their careers and to really understand how they can move forward. So yeah, we have been in addition to the to the finance practitioner course that we offer an exam. That's a basis, as I said. Basic certification. We also have a certified professional and Frank is currently going through the Finance certified professional program. That is a much longer program as Frank will tell 

That's about a 6 to 8 week program that you go through. It's got a couple of instructor LED Sessions. It's got a bunch of self based content. There are service and contribution requirements essays and an exam at the end of that. So that's a much bigger program and while practitioner is designed to get you. Uh confident in being able to interact with the community of Phillips other Phillips practitioners. FinOps Pro is really designed to create people knowledge in people that they will be able to go and start these finance practices or lead these finance practices. As I said before, every organization is going to need a finance person at some point and so we just see that the need for someone who's. Able to look able to talk about all of the different things that you do as part of anaphase in a confident way and then also has the network of other professionals who are doing this thing as well. Because you never hit all the corners of your practice in any one company. You're always focused on sort of the things that make make a value for you. So those are that's kind of our certification track. We're also working on a, we have a finance for engineers program or training program that's out right now. That's going to be, we're going to be refreshing that a little bit to add some badges and knowledge checks to that. But that's geared at helping engineering teams who are working with a fine OPS team to understand more about how they can interact with the Philips team more appropriately. So what can they expect from the finance team in terms of getting cost data, in terms of forecasting, in terms of of the duties that the FinOps team will take over from them like buying reservations and then what can they do to better understand the cost of the. Resources that they're running, we're gonna be expanding that 

session out too. So we'll have training for not only engineers, but for finance people, for procurement people and for business or product owners. And those will be coming out in the next year. And we're also working on a finance for containers program, which is going to be coming out in next month, I think. So that's going to be again aimed at people who are running a container environment, not certifying you to build container environments, because that's a whole different complex topic. But how? If you're running a container environment, you can, effectively. Give that information back to the finance team and partner with the first team to be able to allocate its cost effectively and ultimately save yourself some time from answering all those detailed questions that people come and ask you when you own a container. 

We had Webb brown from KubeCost coming up for an interview. He was the first one really volunteering for an interview. So really, really high great guy goes just for that sacrifice. 

RM- Yeah, I know he's, he has been a great help to the foundation in this area. And of course they just recently added open cost as a framework to the CNCF, which is a sister organization of ours at the Linux Foundation. So that's going to be, I think, a good big step forward in trying to talk about how we can. Talk about container costs. Container costs are well, I can talk about contracts for a long time, but. 

S- We should do a separate episode to dive in with you and Webb on. 

RM- That would be fantastic. 

S- Just looking at the clock and the fact that. We are three minutes from when you've probably got more meetings. I just want to say massive thank you, Rob, for myself and I'm sure from the listeners, I think it's been so interesting listening to you. I'm sorry if any of our questions were garbled, but we've really loved the answers that you've given us. 

RM- It’s been lots of fun. I I enjoyed it and it was a it was good to. It was good to be on the. The preeminent FinOps news podcast of all time. 

F- Ooh, I like that better, Thank you very much, and that could be the simplest new title. We discussed titles before, but might be easy peasy.

RM- I'm not sure that's any better, yeah. 

SO- I once remember, I think you posted that we had pointed something out and you put it in the finance foundation. I was just like, did we just one of our podcasts like Ohh as Stephen Frank talked about on the podcast. And I was like, I can't remember talking about it. 

RM- Oh yeah. That was I even remember what it was. It was You guys had talked about how 

S- gen 6 to 7, six to seven had gone up in Price, 

RM- That's right. 

S- and we just did that on Excel during the recording of the podcast. Like we hadn't really realized what we'd noticed. 

RM- It was. It was really fun because every everyone have told that to says really like nobody had. You guys as far as I know are the first ones to sort of publicly out that. So there you go, new scoop. 

F- Yeah, you sure? It's when we don't think we do the greater things. 

RM- Well, sometimes. 

S- I should do more great things based on that. 

F- Anyway, I think we're done there. Thank 

S- Yeah, you very, very much, Rob. That was absolutely fantastic. 

RM- Yeah. Thanks to both of you. talk to you soon for the exam

F- Thanks to the listeners.

S/F - Bye!