Enhancing Cloud Governance with Stacklet’s Travis Stanfield

This is Techron tv. Hey guys, thanks for the throw. We're here with Travis Stanfield, the CEO for Stalet.

They just picked up 14 and a half million in additional funding to go after the whole issue of cloud governance and optimization. And we're gonna dive into that topic right now. Travis, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Mike. It is a pleasure to be on here and really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to tell a little bit more about what we got going on. This whole cloud thing always makes me scratch my head.

I think we've been at it now for a decade, and yet we're still not very good at governance and maybe even worse at optimization 'cause nobody seems to have their arms around costs and how to control them. How did we get here and what should we be doing about it? Yeah, great question and great overall topic.

I, I would say, let's start with the how we got here and maybe I think some of the things that we're learning as we are now, uh, uh, deeper and more mature cloud is a different, almost like physics challenge. There's so much volume of infrastructure and rate of change that you actually need to shift a bit of your culture, right? Some of the things that you may have use, let's say around change control optimization, applying standards in a legacy world, they don't necessarily serve you the same way in cloud.

It, it, it be, can become tantamount to like a spring cleaning. But if there's so much volume and rate of change and it's very dynamic, all of those challenges are gonna come right back. And, uh, uh, what a lot of organizations and certainly where a, a key part of that story are waking up to realize is they need to take a controls first.

They need those controls to be codified, automated. Uh, and those controls certainly as, uh, I think you're highlighting especially in a year like 2023 and, and certainly 20, 24 and beyond, need to, uh, be applied to efficiency, right? Cost optimization, uh, uh, type opportunities to ensure that, uh, the resources that are being used are aligned to the mission of the organization, but aren't taking on too much cost or risk for that organization.

Who's in charge of this then? Because sometimes I feel like we turn loose the developers and they go provision things and there's not a lot in the way of adult supervision. And then, you know, we wake up at the end of the month and go, my god, the bill's outta control.

And, you know, who's kind of let them loose in the first place. Great. Also topic and, and paradigm.

And I think you want your developers to embrace cloud self-serve. This is a democratization impact of infrastructure, which is great. Uh, however, to your point, you also need to apply, especially for a lot of organizations uniformity of, uh, control and best practice.

So one of the challenges of cloud is, uh, as you're kind of alluding to, is how do you apply uniformity of control to a federation of groups who are all trying to self-serve and move as fast as possible and use their own, uh, tooling or whatever may best align to the workloads that and the business problems that they're trying to solve. Right? And they're super focused on that.

Get that solution, get it in the hands of, of, of the business's own customers. And they may not fully understand the, the best practices for efficiency or, or how to reduce risk. They may not be incentivized in some cases to appropriately apply them.

So our solution helps the organization by allowing them to automate and codify all of those best practices so that they're continuously enforced, not just, Hey, here's some visibility about where there may be some opportunities, or hey, you know, we perhaps, um, uh, we're right, you know, or or appropriately aligned at one point in time, right? We're aligned in perpetuity and if something goes out of bounds, you've got that grace of course, correction already built in. And, and what we end up doing is giving organizations a declarative experience around cloud.

They've designed the end state inclusive of everything that must be true. And they've also designed what they're gonna do if something, uh, uh, uh, does not get aligned. And that's, those are the guardrails that we often refer to, uh, when we're talking to customers about our solution.

Are cost optimization and governance one and the same? Is it part of the same motion? Because I feel like a lot of times people are talking about finops teams and then they have a compliance team and they don't necessarily all talk to each other.

Yeah, the good question. I think they're related. Um, and maybe, uh, give you a sense of how they're related, where, where our solution focuses.

The usage optimization is exactly as you described in terms of the challenge, how the organization manage the relationship with all of its developers and all of the things that those developers may choose to use. You want 'em to have cho have choice. You want 'em, uh, to get as, uh, you know, self service and, and get as much value out of cloud as possible.

Uh, but you don't want those inefficiencies or those non-compliances, uh, to show up. So it's related to, uh, or where they, they start to converge is when your developers are building and using and scaling cloud. They're, they're, they're doing so through code, through infrastructure as code and keeping that infrastructure as code, uh, always aligned to both efficiency, compliance, security, good operational practices is, is what our solution unlocks for them.

So it's important for finops. It doesn't fully encapsulate everything about that domain. It's important to compliance doesn't fully encapsulate, uh, everything about that domain, but it is a very, uh, um, difficult high, uh, return on investment thing that if an organization, uh, takes the journey with us, uh, uh, they will get benefits across all of those different domains.

Do you think someday that maybe AI will save us from ourselves here? 'cause uh, you know, maybe this is a good use case? Uh, without doubt, uh, there's opportunities for AI to help and, and where we apply it today in helping to, um, uh, give customers, let's say a better application of those policies, right?

Uh, uh, being able to say, Hey, these are the, the, the best practices that we want to enact, can you go help us make sure that that's appropriate? And then perhaps as, uh, anomalies are also de detected, uh, uh, it can help with that and, and see signal through noise. So certainly a great application.

And then also being able to ask your cloud questions, right? There's another place where, uh, uh, we leverage that today, and that's really about bringing more personas, right? Who are interested in learning where the cloud is and how well the organization is doing in it to participate in a topic like governance that impacts the, the whole organization as, as we've discussed, Are we reaching some sort of tipping point in terms of the number of workloads deployed in the cloud, as, you know, risen to the level where these costs are, uh, apparent to everybody.

And, and of course there's more auditors asking questions as a result, but you know, has, is it just, have we reached some level of scale where we're entering some new phase? I think so. I think, look, the, and, and really the answer is, uh, we, we need to make the right economical choices.

Uh, I'll, I'll give you, you know, a classic example that makes logical sense in the real world, but not every organization is doing in clap, turning the lights off when you're not in a room, right? You probably do that. Your parents, uh, taught you that, and, uh, you may be teaching your family around that.

Uh, but in cloud developers don't always do that, right? And having the automation that we provide to essentially and ensure that that's taking place and taking place elegantly, you certainly don't want to disrupt their work if they actually come back into the room. Yep.

You want those things, uh, back on, or maybe they're pulling an all-nighters developers are known to do, and you want to give them the flexibility to perhaps opt out during, uh, uh, those periods or those special exceptions. And we certainly allow workflows and exception management to be a part of our, uh, automation, but just applying good common sense efficiency techniques in a way that's fully automated and seamless and continuous, uh, is, is really a, a big part of the answer. But if we don't do that right, then, to your point, there is, um, at least right now, it feels like there's a path to sustainability.

Uh, and, and I think the real answer is just, you know, you get the maturity and, and, uh, the right controls first approach in place. And, and I think this will, uh, uh, I'm very optimistic that this is correctable, but it's a difficult challenge, uh, for a lot of folks right now. It seems to me that the sustainability issue is still, uh, varies widely by geography.

So you'll find folks in Europe very attentive. And here in the US not so much. So, um, how big a driver is sustainability today around governance and optimization, and what do you think it'll be next year?

Uh, look, I think in 2023, just our, um, business growth is a testament to how important it got for every customer that we talked to. And I, I think there were a lot of things going on, obviously in the macro, uh, environment that made set that stage, uh, and look going forward. I, I don't think we are going back.

I'm no, I'm no economist. I'm not here to opine on, uh, you know, uh, macroeconomic things, but I don't think we're going back to cheap money anytime soon. So I think this is going to be an area where organizations are going to continue to push on, and I think it's a natural progression.

The future of it spend is opex. So being able to align hyphenate and the beauty of what cloud and a lot of the advanced technologies, uh, offer is, is they can give high fidelity understanding of, of that operational expenditure, but now you have to apply the appropriate finops techniques, the appropriate, uh, efficiency techniques, the appropriate cultural techniques in order to get the organization aligned there. The, this isn't, uh, uh, let's say secondhand or decades of experience, uh, for a lot of organizations.

So they're still at the kind of early stages of learning how to apply, uh, uh, some of these practices. And, but again, I'm very optimistic that, uh, it is a very achievable, uh, uh, call it like a, a paradigm overall. Each of the cloud service providers will say that they provide optimization and governance tools.

So, um, why do we need more of a third party platform approach to This? Yeah, that's also a good question. Look, I think, um, uh, it is true in, in narrow form.

Uh, what I think a lot of the, uh, tools that we see perhaps, uh, miss out on are a few things. First of all, uh, they often don't enable the action, right? The, hey, well, we found some optimizations, now what do we wanna do about it?

And that's one of the things that we're the best in the world at is helping the organization communicate, take action, and prevent, right? So, um, yes, and we have a lot of integrations with, uh, some of the cloud native optimizers and advisors and that sort of thing, but then when you want to do something about those findings, that's where, uh, uh, we shine. Moreover, as I think you're aware, we're based off of a open source project, which means if, and as the organization is continuing to evolve their cloud footprint, their cloud estate in a multi-cloud fashion, uh, having a, the backing of a community and an open standard is going to position them better.

The challenge of cloud is so large and is growing so rapidly in terms of the innovation. No one single organization is going to be able to keep up. You need the power of community, the power of many, uh, showing up to help the organization govern against the long tail of everything that, uh, that are developers may want exposure to across all the different service providers.

Uh, moreover, I think we've actually seen this pattern play out now multiple times with other cloud adjacent cloud scale challenges. Kubernetes brought together community to solve, uh, multi-cloud orchestration. Terraform brought together community to solve, uh, multi-cloud provisioning.

And when we bring together community to solve, uh, multi-cloud, uh, governance, and, and that's effectively through our, uh, yaml DSL, which is cloud custodian, Do you think we will see a much more hybrid approach to the cloud? Because if I look at it today, it's, most people have, they have stuff on premise, and they have stuff on one cloud, and then they got a few things on a couple other clouds. But are they gonna get to the point soon where they're actually shopping workloads and looking at the different hybrid cloud providers and trying to understand what is the total cost of implementing on a particular platform and which one might be best optimized for a particular class of workload?

I mean, are, are we just gonna get more sophisticated? Uh, I personally believe that the future of cloud is going to be, and the cloud service providers will differentiate at the service level, right? Their, their platform techniques are already, they're not the same, but they're similar.

And where customers will grow, appetite will be, Hey, this particular service meets my needs, uh, perhaps a little better than than others. I think, uh, um, certainly we're seeing some of that within the last year or so as it relates to, uh, uh, some of the gen ai, uh, services that exist across the, the, the various providers that, uh, we've seen, uh, uh, in our customer base folks wanting to get exposure, uh, that perhaps weren't, uh, previously in that cloud just because of, uh, perhaps, uh, of some of the services that, that were offered, uh, in the, the last year or so. And, and also I think you're starting to see, you know, um, more, uh, call it like, um, uh, countries and regions start to get a little more sensitive about their data, leaving those particular regions.

And yes, the service providers will offer storage and those sort of things in the regions, but, uh, it wouldn't surprise me if we don't see additional, call it like regionalization, balkanization, uh, and all of that, well, let's say, gives rise to, especially in a challenge like, uh, where we're focused governance, right? The, uh, the back to what we were just describing, the need for a community of folks to be working together to, uh, solve a challenge that's already complex and is perhaps only gonna grow in complexity as, uh, if and as the world continues to become more multi-cloud, more, more balkanized around cloud and, and, and that sort of thing. So the last question, are the services truly different from one cloud service provider to the other?

Or are they just using kind of a different nomenclature that makes it hard to do apples to apples comparisons? Uh, look, I, I certainly, um, you know, um, I, I've got opinions on that. My opinion are, yes, there, there's definitely some differences.

Uh, I think some of the more mature ones, to your point, like are following similar patterns, uh, but without doubt, uh, today I think there are notable differences, uh, at the service level, similar, but not the same as, uh, uh, really what my experience has been. All right, folks, you heard in here, back in the days in New York, there used to be an ad commercial that said something to the effect of an educated customer is our best customer. Well, I think that's where we're heading with the cloud.

Hey, Travis, thanks for being on the show. Thank you. Really appreciate it, Mike.

And, um, yeah, again, just, uh, really excited about what we've been able to accomplish and, and super excited about what the future holds. All right, folks, and back to you in the studio.