Sedai

In FinOps, cost is not the problem - it's a symptom of deeper engineering challenges.

Meet Dany Daya, Director of FinOps and Cloud Strategy at Etsy, a marketplace connecting 96.7M buyers and 8.5M sellers in nearly every country in the world.

Dany transformed FinOps at Etsy to focus on business impact, not just savings. He's helped negotiate $500M+ provider agreements, and achieved remarkable results - from helping reduce storage costs below 2-year-old levels by matching data lifecycles to business needs to pioneering sophisticated approaches that recognize cost inefficiencies often signal larger engineering opportunities.

Listen to this latest episode of the Future of Cloud Optimization podcast now on:
Spotify: https://buff.ly/40zg6WZ
Apple: https://buff.ly/4jk8PBs
Youtube: https://buff.ly/4gUjOA3
Sedai website: https://buff.ly/3BDI3mS

In his conversation with Suresh Mathew, Dany shares:
🔵 Etsy's FinOps journey and key accomplishments, including their transition from on-premises to cloud infrastructure and achievements in storage optimization
🔵 The critical balance between cost optimization and performance, using data-driven approaches to set the right targets
🔵 How to avoid over-optimization and maintain focus on product innovation rather than cost-cutting
🔵 The division of responsibilities between FinOps & Engineering teams at Etsy
🔵 Etsy's pioneering work in sustainable computing, starting with energy metrics and evolving to a comprehensive CO2-based approach
🔵 Essential steps & mindset shifts for organizations starting their FinOps journey
🔵 Strategies for building trust & visibility in engineering culture
🔵 The role of AI & automation in the future of cloud optimization

Key Takeaways:

1️⃣ Cost isn't the problem - it's a symptom of underlying engineering challenges. The real focus should be on addressing root causes: design issues, architectural decisions, and resource utilization patterns. Engineers relate better to these fundamentals than dollar values.

2️⃣ Trust your engineering culture and enable innovation. At Etsy, providing visibility into resource usage naturally drove optimization efforts without heavy-handed policies. Engineers focus on building features that drive business growth while maintaining efficiency.

3️⃣ Balance performance and cost through data-driven decisions. By understanding customer latency requirements and setting appropriate thresholds, teams can optimize cost without compromising user experience.

4️⃣ Sustainability initiatives align with cost optimization. Etsy's journey from measuring energy usage in 2016 to tracking carbon impact shows how environmental responsibility can be integrated into FinOps.

5️⃣ Start your FinOps journey with fundamentals: simple metrics like cost variance and CPU utilization, transparent communication, comfort with uncertainty, and reasonable error margins that allow for natural fluctuations in cost.

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How does Sedai help cloud users? Lisa Martin of SiliconANGLE & theCUBE asks the question of Sedai CEO Suresh Mathew.

Suresh covers five key areas where an autonomous cloud management platform helps:

1. Cloud Cost Savings: Customers have saved up to 50% without "doing anything" i.e., the system can autonomously identify and implement optimizations without requiring manual intervention from the customer's side. Sedai's AI-driven platform ensures that resources are efficiently allocated based on actual needs rather than static thresholds.

2. Performance Gains: Sedai enhances application performance. In the extreme, Sedai has helped applications run up to 99% faster in exceptional cases, though more typically realizing improvements up to 60%. This boost in speed and efficiency directly impacts user experience.

3. Availability: Sedai reduces Failed Customer Interactions (FCIs), a modern way of measuring availability, and a crucial metric for customer satisfaction. By leveraging Sedai, Goodhire/Inflection saw their FCI rate plummet from 3.8% to just 0.02% (below AWS's benchmark for FCIs).

4. Innovation Velocity: By reducing the operational toil associated with cloud management, teams can redirect their focus towards innovation and development.

5. Compliance: Compliance and security are paramount. Sedai ensures that every action taken on the cloud infrastructure is logged and executed according to the predefined rules and policies set by the organization. This level of autonomy and precision guarantees that operations are efficient but fully compliant with regulatory standards and internal policies.