Ben de Mora - The Chaos Is To Be Embraced

Episode 2 • 30th March 2022 • FinOpsPod • FinOps Foundation

[00:00:00] Ben: Hello, I'm Ben Mora. And this is FinOpsPod.

[00:00:13] Stacy: Hey, this is Stacy case

[00:00:16] Noel: And this is Noel Crowley.

[00:00:18] Stacy: And this is FinOpsPod.

[00:00:20] Noel: So tell me, Stacy, what do you think that this FinOpsPod is going to be, or where do you think we should be going with it?

[00:00:28] Stacy: That's a great question. Cause I think we got a lot of feedback from the last one, and I think what I like most about this is we're touching on FinOps but it's not just that it's the people that have done FinOps that are doing FinOps and who they are as a person.

It's showing that nice balance of this is FinOps, but Hey, here's the journey of the person's doing FinOps and also some really cool, fun, personal things of those people as well.

[00:00:53] Noel: That's what I'm enjoying about this, the things that we're learning about the people, we all know that Person A and Person B is good at doing this, that and the other. And they do presentations all over the world, but actually learning about the person behind that.

[00:01:08] Stacy: Exactly.

[00:01:08] Noel: And them and what makes them tick? That's what I'm liking. Building the community. Building our community.

[00:01:13] Stacy: Exactly. I was just gonna say that it's building the community and learning about the community. So I love this. I love this and I hope that we continue to have these amazing interviews.

Hey, Noel. I'm so excited to talk to you today, I'm even more excited to hear who you interviewed for this edition of FinOpsPod. Who was it?

[00:01:32] Noel: For today, we got the privilege of interviewing newest member of the FinOps foundation staff, Ben De Mora.

[00:01:40] Stacy: I've actually worked with Ben. Pretty much since I started with the foundation because he's been an instructor and he was my go to to lead some of the FinOps certified practitioner training.

[00:01:52] Noel: I think he might have been one of our first certified instructors as well. And we talked to him about his interests, his hobbies, and some of the things you might not know about Ben.

[00:02:01] Stacy: Yeah there's a lot, I don't know about Ben but I'm excited to listen to this, especially when he starts talking about how he got into the FinOps foundation helping out with the instruction of it, but also where did he come from? And, and how did he actually get into FinOps in general?

[00:02:16] Noel: Yeah. During the interview, we kind of go where his job was where he was coming from and why he changed into this new role of advisory and training of people. He took us on a journey that is different to a lot of other FinOps people.

[00:02:31] Stacy: A little birdie told me There's kind of something special at the very end of the interview.

[00:02:36] Noel: One of the things that I really enjoyed about when I was talking to Ben, is that what you see is not what you were getting. There is a person there with a whole journey skills and talents, and sometimes he's learning more. Sometimes he's learning, he's playing with six strings and sometimes he's not, sometimes he's playing with more.

[00:02:58] Stacy: That's awesome. I can't wait to listen to it and hear the interview Ben, that you and Joe did.

Before we move on to that interview for everybody to listen to, I just wanna say one thing we do have FinOps X coming up. This is our first in person conference. This is gonna be in Austin, Texas, June 20th to the 21st registration will be open by the time this podcast goes live and you can go to X.FinOps.Org to register and learn more about it.

All right. So let's on the interview.

[00:03:32] Noel: We never actually talked about how we would do this, you know how. Interview you because in fairness, Joe and I, when we talked to this, I think a part of this we'd have a conversation and see how it goes, right? And that's, that's, what's going to make this natural and fun and everything else. And I'll be honest with you. Like you were the first name that came to my head.

[00:03:52] Ben: Wow.

[00:03:53] Noel: Part of the reason for that was a couple of weeks ago, you said something you've done over 200 hours of training last year?

[00:04:00] Ben: 200 people, actually

[00:04:01] Noel: Was it people okay. That's, that's even better.

[00:04:04] Joe: So first question if you train 200 people, was it an hour each

[00:04:12] Ben: No, it was not an hour each. No, it was not. It was 10 hours and it was in groups of about 30 or 40 at a time, sometimes a few less, but effectively it was the, it was a FinOps practitioner course. It was the two, five hour block sessions. In two days in a row during the FinOps practitioner training course.

[00:04:28] Noel: I actually helped you on one of those, may or may not remember that.

[00:04:33] Ben: I do actually.

[00:04:35] Noel: I didn't do well on it. I discovered that while I love talking, finops, I'm perhaps not the best trainer in the world. And I remember listening to your stories and when you were talking, like you were such a natural and someone who really enjoyed this space as well powerful stuff,

[00:04:50] Ben: I think it helps. I've never had any formal training in teaching. It's just, I just make it up as I go. Right. And it seems to work.

[00:04:57] Noel: I don't agree with you there because I looked at your profiles that looked you up online and stuff. And you, you coach under eights and under nines, rugby

[00:05:07] Ben: I used to,

[00:05:08] Noel: used to yeah.

[00:05:09] Ben: As a coach for a while. I started doing that when I was, I was coaching my middle child, Toby who is just a rugby genius strategy genius. And he was really awesome to teach to coach. He's actually ASD is neurodivergent, so he has some challenges as well with that.

Which he overcame through rugby. As he, as he was was growing up Coaching his, him and his team. It was just the most wonderful thing to do. It was great fun. And then my younger child, Joseph got old enough to start playing rugby. Joe asked me to coach his team instead.

So I switched and I was coaching the little like P four, they call it in Scotland, which is like age like seven, eight. And just coaching a bunch of kids at that age to play a game as structured and as, as disciplined as rugby is kind of like trying to herd cats, you have to, you have to just abandon all hope of any actual play and just embrace the chaos and get them to run in the right direction whilst holding the ball.

It's it's great fun.

[00:06:04] Noel: I coached a small bit myself at that level. I the one thing I really enjoyed about at that level versus other sports where I'd been involved in is you teach them very early about. The laws of the game, respecting the referee, respecting the other team as well. It's different than other codes.

[00:06:23] Ben: I'm an ex player as well. I was a forward. I was I was a number seven, a flanker. And yeah, the referee is sir, on a rugby pitch. That's the way that works.

[00:06:32] Noel: Oh, yeah. I was one of the good looking guys. I was a back guy, was a scrum half.

[00:06:36] Ben: All right. were the quick

[00:06:37] Noel: yeah, I was the one that controlled all this. I was telling him where to go and play basically.

[00:06:42] Ben: Yeah, I was the idiot. That was basically my job on the pitch.

[00:06:47] Joe: All right. I don't know anything you're saying, but me ask you,

[00:06:51] Ben: Joe, I'll teach you soon, mate.

[00:06:52] Joe: Ben, which group is easier to train and coach and instruct,

[00:06:57] Ben: Hmm.

[00:06:57] Joe: Eight year old rugby players or FinOps practitioners.

[00:07:01] Ben: Ooh. eight year old rugby players.

[00:07:05] Joe: Are they better listeners.

[00:07:07] Ben: Less opinionated and the chaos has to be embraced no. I'm kidding. It varies every time. So I've, I've taught quite a few of these practitioner courses now. And I don't think any two have been the same. I don't think any two have had the same kinds of conversations. Things evolve all the time.

Things are evolving with FinOps as a discipline with the experiences people are having with the maturity that people are coming to cloud with and sort of getting to that point with concernes are changing as well. So the conversations are different in every single course I've taught so I've taught so far the kinds of people, the representation that you get coming to the course is different every single time.

So you might have a couple of CEOs and CFOs on one course. Right? And we've had, I think we had one course with like five CEOs and it was weird. The conversations were fascinating and we've given like another course. Like 12 of the people in the course are engineers. Right. And they have a deeply technical conversation about like what global automation and management and all this cool stuff.

So I learn loads every time I run that course. It's for me, I'm kind of keeping up a lot of the time. Right. I'm trying to figure out trying to get one, one page ahead in the manual before the folks that are on the call and trying to keep ahead of what they're talking about, which is fun.

It's.

[00:08:20] Joe: like you don't know which team's going to show up.

[00:08:22] Ben: Yeah, I really don't know. I started the course. It was like people introduce themselves and I'm making a little note, like CEO one, CO two engineer, finance person, project manager. Cool. And kind of going down that list. Right. But this is, this is kind of what is, when you, you know, coaching rugby, everybody goes there to play rugby and they're all fairly good idea of what that's going to be.

I'm going to carry a ball and then knock people over. It's going to be great. We get covered in mud. Brilliant. Go to a finops course. And some people come to that with a goal of understanding how to do all the usage, optimization stuff and all the engineering, clever, clever, awesome stuff. Some people come to it with this one single goal of how do I make my bill less other people come to it, and like, I want to realize what the actual value of this is and how do I get there? Right. So there's loads of different priorities and loads of different sort of focuses from one single conversation. And, and that does lead to the similar level of chaos to a bunch of eight year olds on a rugby pitch with a ball sometimes.

But yeah, you kind of have to encourage the chaos a little bit and then direct it, shape it.

[00:09:27] Joe: Noel, when you volunteered and worked in a training, do you remember what sort of the audience was and what the conversations were like?

[00:09:35] Noel: So I remember it being, and I did a couple of them. I think I did. I probably did some of the first online. So back in 2020, when they first went online and it was always an interesting mix of people because it was a very new discipline then, and I never, I don't think we ever had any CEO type people on it.

We definitely had some, I guess, what I would call people who are responsible for portfolio of applications who didn't have an in-depth technical knowledge. they were just trying to understand what was going on underneath them. There was a couple of very finance driven people. I remember being in some of my, some of the ones I did at the very start very, very fine finance people, pure accountants, where they wanted to purchase reservations all up front. So they knew that they own them not convertible so they could get tax credits or write them off for tax and do all mad things. And that sense of like, just multiple opportunities to say if they were the kind of people that were there and some of the finops stuff didn't bother them because their whole logic on saving money was, Hey, you have a budget, don't go over it.

[00:10:50] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. That's one of the challenging points, right?

How do you know what changes are going to occur in terms of engineering, roadmaps, whatever. Or your customer demand levels or the cloud service provider itself. Maybe they're going to change that pricing strategy, this is it's much more fluid than, than the traditional it model.

[00:11:08] Noel: Can I ask you a question on that? Now it's a little bit sort of tangential to that is you said you see sometimes you get a lot of technical people. And, and I found back when I did the train that has a long time. Different different mindset, FinOps is new, but now today the people coming to are, and you said there was some really good technical engineering people you'd have on some courses. you find that, is there many architects coming and if they are coming, do they still have the mindset of I'm architecting - and I'm going to use an Americanism here, but really for that Superbowl ad that plays once a year, that's going to generate maximum traffic to their website. Do they still architecture that mindset? Or are you finding they're coming because they want to learn about other ways to do things.

[00:11:58] Ben: Both right. Bit of both. I mean, you, you always going to get the architect who wants to use every single complicated, shiny toy in the box. Right? And I came from a data center engineering world where I've encountered projects where there's been an architect. I had to put something like 360 separate pieces of cat six copper between two racks, because that was the level of interconnect between the devices in the racks that this architect had designed. And he'd done it with like 25 different types of solution of system in each rack. And it was insane. It was the most complicated thing in the world, but, and there was a far simpler way of doing what they were trying to do effectively. It was a VPN endpoint. Right? But it doesn't need that much, much complexity, but that had it because he wanted to play with all the toys that were there and available to them.

Right? And you still get that now because if fact, in fact worse now, because cloud is. You've got so many different products that you can choose from on the shelf now that you're kind of spoiled for choice and for an architect to go, wow, I'm going to play with all these things because I've been given a remit to build a big thing.

I'm going to build a big thing with all the bells and whistles which can be useful, but it can distract from the actual point, which is what are you doing? What are you here for? What are you doing with this system? Right? You're trying to produce a service for a customer that is performance, resilient scalable, and cost-effective. And are you able to prove that it's cost effective? Do you really need all of these things? Right? So yeah, you get the architects that want to play with all the shiny things, but your also get the architects who understand that this ultimately is a business that needs to operate. This is a, this is a business delivery piece.

And as a result, we have to basically justify the benefit of every dollar we spend on this infrastructure, because we don't own any of it. It's all, it's all consumption-based stuff. So we can assuming this thing. Does it, does it give us anything to consume that thing or is it just a, just in case or a nice to have, is it a cherry on the top that we don't really need? Nobody will notice if it's not there. It's that different mindset we see both at the moment.

[00:14:02] Joe: It's interesting when I, I just left the practitioner world. And one of the last conversations I had was with an architect who was getting mad at me because I wouldn't let them include a three-year all upfront reserved instance in their architecture. And I kept saying reserved instances is not an architecture. It's, it's a, it's a discount method.

[00:14:25] Noel: I have really got to know how can he put that in as an architecture? My head says no problem. I even talked to people who are going take into account or EDP and savings plans when you're putting how much it's going to cost.

[00:14:41] Joe: Yeah.

[00:14:42] Noel: But how would you rate that as part of your architecture?

[00:14:44] Ben: It's strange. Isn't it? An RI or a savings plan? They're not actual things, aren't But they're billing mechanisms.

[00:14:51] Joe: Right. Well, and so this is where our team, my team started becoming more architecture based is because we would always say, well, what is the financial impact of this solution you've delivered? And they'd be like, here's what it is. Here's what it is based on our common rate that we, that we get for our company.

And they'd be like, well, no, no, no, this is overstated. And I'm like, well, it's all an estimate at this point, because nothing been built. Like, no, no, you're not doing the three-year upfront. And I'm like, no, no, discounting methods shouldn't be part of what drives the architecture, I remember one, one solution was just seemed wildly, wildly expensive.

This was being built in AWS. So it was all ec2 based. I'm like, well, this, you could just replace this entire corner of the architecture with the Athena service. And then everyone looks at the finops person. Okay. Oh, and, and, and architects giving you a dirty look and you just start drawing and that's how the finops starts playing into the architectural world.

I know we're seeing more. . . I review the membership applications that the FinOps foundation, so I'm really happy to see more architects .People with the title architects coming through. So I hope they start headed heading towards your training. .Ben.

[00:16:02] Ben: Brilliant. I'm looking forward to seeing them.

[00:16:04] Noel: Can I go back to something? You said a few minutes ago, Ben, you, you were an engineer. I think you said in an, a massive data center.

And , the question I want to ask you is today are you now poacher turned gamekeeper as in FinOps practitioner or FinOps trainer or not.

[00:16:22] Ben: Do you mean in terms of moving away from the data center towards the cloud and that kind of thing?

[00:16:26] Noel: Going more so from building, creating, making stuff. Right? As an engineer, right? And now you're the FinOps guy who is, is going back to these engineers, going actually try and do it differently don't do it the way you've always done it, you know?

[00:16:42] Ben: I mean, I've, I've actually, funnily enough, throughout my whole career, I've kind of had a focus on resource efficiency within compute. So, I mean, going way back to it when I was an intern, one of my major projects as an intern, which was they back in the early, like very early two thousands. Was with sun micro systems and we were doing a huge program to do server consolidations. Back at the back at that time we use, we were using Unix jails. It was a concept that Unix concept, which basically a bit like it was a chroot it's called chroot jail. It's a bit like a virtual machine, but way less effective. We were using these things to consolidate different workloads onto one server. This was something that was happening, what 20 odd years ago, thereabouts. And going forward, most of the work that I was doing with in their data centers was around building internal, private clouds using virtualization like Zen hypervisor virtualization, layers, and consolidating lots of disparate systems across various small satellite data centers into our virtual cloud offering that I built within the data center in Linlithgow in Scotland, which is kind of where I am now.

The consolidation of all the stuff into these virtual private clouds and that kind of thing. It's kind of been a thread through my whole career, has been, how do we maximize the benefit? How do we maximize usage of this resource that we've got in the data center? You can't really easily resize a server without a dremmel and then you get told off for doing it. But you know, If you, if you've got a, an amount of compute, you want to make sure that very little of that compute is just sat there doing nothing, because ultimately it's occupying space and power in the data center and it's an investment.

I don't feel like I've gone the other direction. There's just a continuation and evolution of what I've always been doing. And actually the fact that I'm now able to do this with incredible amounts of data analytics, with cloud. That I could never do before and we can do it in a way that allows us to be much more efficient than we will ever be before.

Really, I think is kind of an awesome progression. So it's, to me it's a natural, natural flow.

[00:18:45] Noel: Okay, I'm going to follow up that question with

[00:18:48] Ben: Okay.

[00:18:49] Noel: just said they're more efficiently.

[00:18:51] Ben: Yeah.

[00:18:52] Noel: Amazon released their sustainability pillar to their well architected framework. Re-invent 20, 21 this week, they released the carbon footprint report into, into AWS. Do you think that sustainability will play into future finops movements?

I have my opinion interested in yours.

[00:19:17] Ben: Yeah, I think that the two are intrinsically linked because ultimately if you use less compute, hopefully you're consuming less power. If the data centers are architected in such a way that a lower demand and compute can translate to a lower demand in power, what I would like to see, and I've not yet looked closely enough to know whether this is the case, but what I'd like to see is if AWS is able to say we spend down physical hardware. Because if people are being more efficient, we don't have a rack of 50 systems hot all the time, regardless of how much of it's being used. If half the rack or a third of the rack is being used, the rest of it is dark because there's no need for that power to be consumed. Right. I would love to see that kind of correlation at the moment.

There isn't that direct link. The moment that doesn't seem to be a direct connection between I've reduced my costs by half to I know that I have reduced my energy consumption by half or whatever it's going to be because at the moment that can, that's kind of a black box. We don't really know what the vendors are doing in terms of idle resource.

My gut tells me that that's probably not happening that much because of course you have to have capacity standing by in case you'll have a burst in demand, but I'd like to think there's a way around being able to sort of sensibly scale down, have a buffer zone and scale down power usage.

[00:20:42] Noel: All I mean, it's, this is new stuff, right? I mean, it's it's coming from them. I'm very interested to see how it plays out, I think, but in my head I'm same as your self. What can we see from these reports? The one thing I'm also curious about is as they increase sustainability are literally what you're saying.

If can they reduce the capacity, will that impact the spot market?

[00:21:05] Ben: That's another good, that's a great point, right? Because spot is a very attractive opposite opportunity to save a lot of money. It's like 90% cheaper in some cases, right. And all three big vendors do it. They've all do this. Their own version of preemptible compute. And it is literally making money off of the systems that are the right otherwise sat there doing.

Right. But then that implies that there are in fact systems sat there doing nothing, which is a carbon footprint problem. Right? So , does the attractiveness of spot mean that we are effectively encouraging waste by having those resources spending to provide spot. Is that a good thing? I mean, I get, I get why the vendors are doing it because they're incentivizing usage of their systems that would otherwise be earning them absolutely nothing. But what would be nice is instead of doing that, they would say, we've got this compute, this. Doing nothing and consuming energy. Let's bring it down and reduce the footprint. That would be a nice message.

I know that spot isn't hugely used by many people. There are some people who are using quite a bit of spot and they've got a very good architecture and sort of automation around doing that. But most, most people that I've seen most footprints that I've seen are like two, 3% spot. Right. And they're doing it because they're doing the dipping a toe.

[00:22:23] Noel: Yeah. I can say I see, even within the company I work in we see some teams who really leverage it and other teams it's like, no way, man. Oh, hands-off, I'm going near that! If they're going to give me a two minute warning, I can't handle that. And it's like, yeah, but you know, what are you gonna do if the EC2 fails? I got automation in place to catch that. They plan for when they're going to have a hardware failure. Well, an interruption is sort of the same thing, you know, except you can kind of predict this or, well, you get a warning that it's going to happen.

And most, most engineers is they give me a two-minute warning for anything and I can react to it. And it's, it is, I think it's encouraging people to get used more spot because it is. A massive, massive savings .

[00:23:08] Ben: Yeah, it's, it's a funny one because ultimately spot encourages the resources to sit there and burn energy when they're not being used, which is, which is not sustainable.

[00:23:18] Joe: Let me plug a working group here. That's spinning up in the finops foundation. Cause as of, as of this recording date, which is March 3rd, when we're recording this, we are spinning up our sustainability

[00:23:30] Joe (2): SIG

[00:23:30] Joe: It started off as a working group, but we're actually going to turn it into a special interest group, meaning that it's going to continue living and continue working on this.

[00:23:39] Ben: There you go.

[00:23:40] Noel: I'm going to, I'm going to ask you another question before he tries to wrap us up you said you did your finops certification. Finops Practitioner certification very early on.

[00:23:49] Ben: Fairly.

[00:23:50] Noel: When did you certify.

[00:23:52] Ben: I can't remember. It's just, just trying to figure that one out. Cause I can't find the email, but it was a while ago.

[00:23:58] Noel: The first online course.

[00:24:00] Ben: Yeah. It was one of the earlier online courses. Yeah.

That's the thing I've never actually taught a FinOps class in person. I've never taught a FinOps first class, like to see the entire human being.

[00:24:13] Noel: That's going to be, that's going to be interesting. I think when that happens again,

[00:24:17] Ben: it's going to be fun and I'm really looking forward to, I hope that we get to do a bunch of in-person training this year.

[00:24:22] Noel: Yeah, I think it'd be great to build the community again,

[00:24:25] Ben: Definitely the finops the finops Scotland community, the meetup group for finops Scotland is is going to start waking up. It's been a bit quiet over the last little while because mainly cause COVID and all that kind of thing. We've got a whole bunch of really awesome people up here. But I'm looking forward to getting together with, and eating too much pizza and having chats.

[00:24:41] Joe: Yeah, I promote getting together again in person and we need to build our Irish community so Noel has someone to talk to. If you're Irish and listening to this, join the Foundation so Noel has someone to talk to and meet with.

[00:24:54] Ben: Definitely.

[00:24:55] Noel: I feel lonely sometimes.

I'm going to ask you my last question, Ben. This is a question or a segment, I want to start calling, "The answer can't be savings plans for RDS", right?

[00:25:08] Ben: The answer can't be savings plans for RDS. Yes.

[00:25:10] Noel: Okay. If you could make one FinOps related change in the cloud service providers, anyone you like are all of them,

[00:25:18] Ben: Yup.

[00:25:19] Noel: what would it be?

[00:25:21] Ben: So this change has kind of been done by a third party already. What I'd love to see is I'd love to see some kind of a response come back, that didn't just say your infrastructure is being built, but your infrastructure is being built and the hourly cost is X. I'd like to see that, right. Just, you know, whether it's as part of a Jenkins pipeline that gets fed back as part of the outcome, or whether it says, you know, on the command line, when somebody joined Terraform . They hit me and the engineer has, I'm going to build all the things.

Here we go. Right. Go hit, apply. And I sold them lots and lots of things scroll down and Pope the page for 10 minutes and everything's built. I'd like it to just come back with something that says what you've just built is going to cost this much per hour.

[00:26:07] Noel: That's very good.

[00:26:08] Ben: now there is a third party tool right now that starting to do that, can't name them, but can we name them?

[00:26:15] Joe: are you talking about the open source one? There's an open source one.

[00:26:17] Ben: an open source one. Okay.

[00:26:19] Joe: Infra . . . Infracost.

[00:26:21] Ben: Infracost. That's the one. Yeah, very cool. I have no idea how accurate that is. I've not used it, tested it at all, but I love the idea. I think that is brilliant. And I think that the impact on having that feedback just as part of the entire cloud build experience is, uh, would be really powerful.

[00:26:40] Joe: Here's another commercial. If you go to the finops YouTube channel Dann Berg hosted,

[00:26:46] Ben: Oh yeah!

[00:26:46] Joe: um , Ali from infracost. who did a presentation on how that tooling worked and it's a really cool presentation and he he's upfront. He's like, these are all estimates, but let me tell you if, you know, if you know an estimate and the estimate is wildly crazy, then you know, you're, you're done it wrong,

So, I mean, it's a, it's a great first start. It's it's, it's pretty cool presentation. So you can go, anyone listen to it and intrigued by what Ben's talking about. Cause it is very intriguing. Go check it out on our YouTube site, the New York city meetup.

[00:27:17] Noel: We definitely have to put a link to that down below, as I say all the best YouTube channels, but, you know,

[00:27:23] Joe: watch me accidentally put it up above, but it's going to be somewhere around the thing in the show notes.

[00:27:30] Ben: Excellent.

[00:27:30] Joe: Hey, you mentioned the banjo that's on your wall. And you told me a really great story. It is your father's banjo.

[00:27:37] Ben: Is my dad that one, there is my dad's banjo. I have more than one now, but that's my dad's banjo. There

[00:27:42] Joe: How many banjos do you have?

[00:27:44] Ben: Have two now, but the reason I bought the second one was because it was pretty.

I was in a shop to buy some strings. And I saw this other one that was just ridiculously beautiful. Walnut wood on it and it was really lovely. So I was like, okay, I need that. That's very low. Very lovely. I'll buy that.

[00:28:00] Joe: Which, which banjo do you play?

[00:28:02] Ben: My dad's more than more than anything else. It sounds nicer.

[00:28:05] Joe: What'd you, could you play

[00:28:07] Ben: What

[00:28:07] Joe: for us? Well, we need it. We need theme music the podcast.

[00:28:11] Noel: We need intro and outro music yeah.

[00:28:12] Joe: I mean, it doesn't have to be a full song.

[00:28:14] Ben: Let me, let me record something so that I can have 35 different attempts to playing something that doesn't have any mistakes in it for you.

[00:28:20] Joe: I mean, sing along

[00:28:21] Ben: I'm sure you will. I'll tell you what I will. I will record you as something I'll record a little bit of Cripple Creek for you. And it's gonna be Cripple Creek and

[00:28:28] Joe: There we go. I can, I can sing that.

[00:28:30] Ben: you can sing Cripple Creek.

There you go.

[00:28:32] Joe: You've read my blog.

[00:28:33] Ben: I've not read your blog, but I feel like I know you too well already.

[00:28:39] Joe: I have a whole thing on Cripple Creek in my blog. Okay.

Do you play any other instruments,

[00:28:44] Ben: Play guitar.

[00:28:46] Joe: Which are you better at guitar or banjo?

[00:28:48] Noel: Oh, it doesn't matter. It's banjo. He's our banjo, man. putting together the finops band, he's got banjo.

[00:28:55] Ben: I, my, I inherited it from my dad when my dad passed away last November. And he was a professional banjo player for most of his rather bizarre roguish life. So I mean, if you want to hear, so here's another plug for, if you want to hear my dad play banjo listen to the song, New Shoes by Eric Bibb and the opening banjo and my dad co-wrote that song.

And the opening banjo is my dad playing. So there you go.

[00:29:19] Joe: I did listen to it. It's a cool song. It's just a good, yeah, it's a good song. Well thank you. All right. Our thing is when we interview people, Noel, you ask them, "The answer can't be RDS savings plans for AWS." My thing will be, you have to play some sort of musical instrument for us.

[00:29:35] Ben: Yeah, I will I'll record something in a bit, cause I've only been playing a couple of months, so it'll be thousands of mistakes. So I'll get something don't screw up.

[00:29:43] Joe: I don't know how people play music or read music. I like to listen to music. My daughter, my oldest daughter plays trombone and she's really good at it. And she did this solo competition where she would like she plays and then a judge would tell her. You know, they would judge her. And the judge was like, oh, he did a fantastic job, Maggie.

You your piano was really good. And it was like piano. She's playing trombone. It's a music joke. It's a volume of, I

[00:30:12] Ben: That was, that was good. That really good.

[00:30:15] Joe: a good thing. I'll

[00:30:16] Ben: I think we should leave that. Keep that

[00:30:18] Noel: That's should definitely stay in the silence should stay.

[00:30:22] Ben: could almost see the tumbleweed.

[00:30:25] Joe: All right, Ben, I feel, I feel like after this conversation, I've, , I've been in a rugby match.

[00:30:31] Ben: Sorry about that.

[00:30:33] Joe: We've been, we've been all over the place and it's just so natural and fun. But, that that's FinOps right. Encompasses so much.

[00:30:40] Ben: Yeah, it does. Right? , I mean, considering the breadth and depth of the different capabilities, you've got 18 capabilities ranging from deeply technical data ingestion and analysis through to education and empowerment and then business strategy decision-making and all this other there's so many different disciplines and different directions to run in right. To carry the ball. And if you like that, really, you have to kind of embrace that and you have to understand that it isn't just one single challenge to it. It's lots of different disciplines and that's reflected in the sort of multi-disciplinary representation that you require for a good finops team to be successful.

You need your backs, you need your wingers, you need your your scrum players. You need all these different positions on the team, And you need all these different pers positions in the finops capability in order for it to be, to be a really rounded and successful effort. So yeah, the chaos does need to be embraced in order for that to be successful.

[00:31:40] Joe: And the banjo, the banjo domain.

[00:31:42] Ben: The banjo always banjo, Yes. Don't forget the banjo domain is a very special part of finops, but really is only reached at the very final stages of maturity development. That's right.

[00:31:54] Joe: This is so lovely. It's such a great conversation. And thank you, Ben De Mora for being good person.

That was Ben Demora plucking the old banjo playing a song called "Worried Man" for us. Thank you so much, Ben. And thank you. The completionist listener, listening to the entire podcast. You're not stopping halfway. You're listening to the entire thing You are a true FinOptinaut. And you get to hear me talking over our theme song, cheese puffs and caviar. Pretty soon that jazz flutes gonna pipe right in, I'm going to talk right over it. And that is a great way to end the show.

What an interesting conversation that was. Ben gave some really great insight into what the FinOpsPod certified practitioner course is like. the conversation went all over the place. Architecture, sustainability. Banjo. Maybe I'll give banjo a try. I doubt it.

Let me plug FinOpsX, our in-person conference coming up June 20th through 21st in Austin, Texas. Go check it out. X.FinOps.Org to learn more about registering and let us know if you're interested in doing a presentation at the conference, sharing some of your FinOps skills and your FinOps knowledge with your peers.

I love to have you there. I'll attend. I will attend your session. You can count on it. Unless it's in conflict with somebody else. Who's also listening to this . We'll work it out. We'll figure things out. So thank you for listening. Thank you, Ben De Mora for being a great guest. Thanks to Noel Crowley, my co interviewer and Stacy case for kicking us off. Thank you.

Can't wait to do this all over again next time, on FinOpsPod.

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