SITC-651-Deana Solis-1
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Deana: Who want to use it for good. I think those people are still out there. I think they're burned out. I think we should all have a party and, and, um, sort of regroup and think about how we can, can, uh, do a little reboot and start thinking about. What was it we set out to do in the first place? Uh, was I trying to build a technology career around the cloud?

Probably not. It's something that I'm interested in. I don't think everyone needs to understand how to, how to deal with remote servers. I think folks need to understand, you know, how they can, uh, use. Global communications in, in ways that help them connect to people they care about. You know, I think that, that there's still so many different paths that we can take.

Same thing for FinOps though, or for, for that matter, any of the frameworks. The Agile, the DevOps, the SRE. Observability is one of my favorite things to, to observe at the moment. Here are all these great spaces where people are actually building culture and nerding out and geeking out on, um, on topics that are just like fascinating problems to solve.

And. Gosh, let's, let's build some skills around the tools and some communities around how are we going to use these tools for good things. I think that's a great way to, uh, collaborate and, you know, and inform communities around these energies.

Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Cory Quinn. My guest today is Deana Solis, who is a FinOps engineer in a freelance slash ronan style basis, but that's just scratching the surface. Thank you for joining me. I appreciate it.

Deana: Thanks, Corey. I'm really glad to be here.

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Podcast listeners, that would be, you can also get a free cloud security health scan by going to wiz.io/scream. That's wiz.io/scream. So the FinOps Foundation, a small thing that some people have heard of, and most of those people are deeply sad 'cause we know how the Cloud bill works, uh, named you their evangelist of the year in 2022.

Uh, like me, you have about two decades or so of experience beating on infrastructure, which makes us professionally sad, I think. And you're, you pop up everywhere.

Deana: I, well, thank you. I do have a lot of experience, um, in, in IT departments and in technical roles, but I've been the least technical person in my role and als in a room, and also the most technical person.

So if that gives you an idea.

Corey: Yeah. It, it keeps things entertaining. It's, it always feel like I describe doing what I do. I know the world calls it FinOps. I still think of it as cloud economics because I'm stubborn. It's marriage counseling for engineering, and Finance and you need to be able to speak at least a little bit of each language.

Personally, my bias is, is that you, you need to be a lot more conversant with the engineering side just because it, no matter how you slice it, it's an engineering problem. In my experience.

Deana: That is one take, and again, it depends on the room that you're in. I do think that having the, the. Vocabulary, the empathy of having been an infrastructure engineer is what gets me, uh, invited to meetings that otherwise I might be, um, forgotten.

And I also know that what drives engineering, uh, backlogs, um, or engineering activities, uh, is gonna be influenced by finance. Whether you admit it or not,

Corey: here's about finance has to say until suddenly they're reminded of, oh yeah, you realize you need the money to do the thing, right? And suddenly it's, oh, and I, I used to rage and lament as an engineer.

Why am I signing authority? Capped out of 20 bucks without approval, and then I employed some engineers and I no longer wonder that it turns out a little context can be a dangerous thing. And at least back in my engineering days, like a lot of engineers, I had zero appreciation for the value of my time.

Like you as a hobbyist, my time is free. You know, $20 a month though for an EC2 instance, that's expensive as I embezzle more than that in office supplies every day

Deana: well.

Since I started my career pre-cloud, and in fact, uh, as I was advancing in, in the different technical roles, it was as cloud was gaining adoption and from the world of healthcare, IT cloud was a dangerous, uh, risky place to be. Stay away from that.

Corey: It was terrifying when traveling Cloud came out. It shadow, it was now only a credit card away.

Deana: Yeah. And so, so the, the kinds of ITIL and ITSM sort of, um, guardrails and gatekeepers that were in place to, to prevent, uh, spend over runs in technology were, they were just in there by design, uh, in a data center. You can't just. You can't just magically, uh, make a, a Solaris server appear or disappear for that matter.

Corey: Oh, that, that making it disappear. Oh, that just speaks to a lack of imagination and willingness to show up at the office at two o'clock in the morning with a pickup truck. But maybe we don't talk about that until the statute of limitations expires. Uh, I wanna, I wanna talk a little bit about origin stories, because that's important.

Um, and your background is fascinating. You went from, and please correct me if I'm wrong, from electrical engineering. To liberal studies to FinOps that that's not exactly what we call a linear path. Uh, how, how did these different fields, I guess, interconnect and get you here?

Deana: Uh, let me just say, there were a lot of years in between, uh, uh, all, all three of those things.

The, the electrical engineering was, was me being a kid thinking I definitely. Have a thing for electronic gadgets and it want, I want it to be my world. Um, I was really influenced by my dad being an audio file and introducing me to, to stereos and stereo equipment and, uh, home theater equipment. And so I just thought those would be the cool things to build.

I thought that was the track to, to get on. Um, but it turns out that the rigor. Of, uh, an electrical engineering undergrad is not what I was cut out for at the time, so I went sort of running into the undeclared realm and it seemed like all the classes that always had things. Available at a relatively technical university.

Um, a state school in California were the liberal studies courses. And so I found lots of ways to fill my schedule, lots of things that I was actually really interested in learning that didn't, um, intimidate me and that, and that helped me get to within 16 units of graduating, um. Somewhere in between there though, there was a seven year career in retail electronics sales as a sales manager trainer.

And it's actually what brought me from Southern California to the Pacific Northwest opening stores like Circuit City and the good guys and uh, then. Things have a shelf life and I realized that I could probably just go back and get my undergrad and it wasn't gonna be in electrical engineering, and it certainly wasn't gonna be in political science.

However, I did have enough units. It turns out all of those classes make you write a lot, and I had a whole lot of English credits. So it turns out I've got an English degree technically. And then I did a whole lot of. Climbing the, the rungs on the it ladder. I have worked help desk. I've been in a call center for, uh, a, one of the first broadband providers in, in my area.

And it was something that, uh, was good exercise for me, uh, because I didn't talk a lot. I'm an introvert and so using my voice always sort of came with hesitance, but I've had a lot of practice. And somewhere in there I just like, I like plugging network cable into a server and, and running it through walls and, um, making it, uh, connect systems in a hospital somewhere.

And, um, I found myself in a, an IT. Career in healthcare for about nine years. Um, and about halfway through that I thought, this is crazy. I'm, I'm leading teams, I'm leading projects. Um, I should probably go back to school so I can get the next promotion. And as I was doing that, um, I think at Midway through an engineering technology management, I heard that.

Hey, you know, this company will pay for your MBA if you wanna, um, if you wanna do that. And so that's what I got back in 2008. And just in time, just in time for the economy to boom.

Corey: That was right around the very early days of cloud when people still naively thought that the cloud ran on other people's computers instead of on money.

Deana: Yeah. So I, if, if you can imagine there's, that, that's a lot of, of preparation to do a thing that I was already doing, uh, and, and thinking that. That I needed to keep proving myself with certifications. And I think, uh, the a plus network plus and a security plus maybe was one, I don't know. There were, there were a whole bunch of IT certifications with pluses at the end, and uh, and I enjoyed that and, um, it set me up on a path to being an analyst and being a.

Being a, uh, system administrator and that, that's where the infrastructure engineering stuff began. And it is where I abruptly got derailed with a, well, like I said, 2008 wasn't the best year. And uh, and some reorgs happened and, and I found myself. Unemployed and looking for my next, you know, how do I get into the next healthcare IT department?

And it turned out that I, I was competing with a whole lot of other folks and I thought, well, I'm not doing anything. I will learn a little bit about the cloud. I mean, that's how I look at it in retrospect. I think at the time I was just sort of learning whatever I could to try to make myself marketable in the job market.

Corey: Having to reinvent yourself feels like it's a perennial, pre requisite for the modern job landscape that we're on, that we don't have, oh, this is the job you're gonna do for the next 40 years. Someone was saying that there'll be between five to seven careers by the time most folks retire, not jobs, careers.

And that sounded ridiculous the first time I heard it. Now I gotta say it sounds a little light.

Deana: I, I don't think it's any accident that the first role. It was a temporary contract role, um, back in 2014 that I, that I got after being, uh, unemployed for about 10 months. Had the title of change coordinator in it, change management coordinator, and I, I hated that.

I'd been a service delivery leader. I'd been a, a a. Technology tech, technical project manager, I, I was ready for my next leadership role and they wanted me to coordinate and then they, they gave me the hourly rate and I said, oh yeah, I'll do that. I can do anything. I can do that for, for that much. And, and so I started it, but it was the, it was actually the, the soft on ramp to, um, taking more certifications and, and all of them having to do with cloud.

Corey: Which now that you talk about the certification piece, I do wanna pivot a bit because one of the things you said to ask you when before we chatted was, uh, potentially regrets you have about contributing to the FinOps Professional Certification course. I am deeply curious. I have. Opinions about certification.

Most of them wrong, but I'm always interested to hear people who say, Hmm, I did a thing with it, and I'm not sure that I would do it again. Knowing what I know now, please tell me more.

Deana: I have the same sort of mixed feelings about all of the certifications I have. I loved collecting badges. I, I like, I like being able to say.

Initials and I, I joke about it. I, I, I think I've put that on my, my, um, profile or resume, um, for a couple of decades now,

Corey: by God, your LinkedIn job title is going to win a Scrabble game someday, whether it wants to or not. I love it.

Deana: What I'm going for, um, so do I have regrets and certifications in general?

Uh, the first thing about, about certifications, I would say is that they are largely performative and that, and that you, you're gonna. If, if that's the only thing that you're basing a person's qualifications on, uh, you'll be disappointed. It, it's, it's just a piece. It is a, a demonstration of a specific kind of learning and a s specific kind of regurgitation of learning.

Corey: It's city rules at best that I can use certain terms of art and not have to explain them and expect them to be understood when I use them. I've, I've interviewed so many people over the years who all across the board, some of them never touched certification. Some appear to have done nothing else. It's a, it's a piece of paper that is indicative of some things.

You, you can't put too much weight on it. That said, I am extraordinarily sympathetic to folks who are trying to reinvent themselves in the job market. It provides a. A curriculum that gets them moving in a direction, right direction, wrong direction. Well, I think even a bad decision can be made to work.

You just need to keep moving instead of holding still.

Deana: The thing that made me think about that topic was that I am actually seeing now folks try to represent themselves as, uh, being certified in a thing. Uh, whether it's as a. Cloud, uh, engineer or it's certain type of a developer or certain type of skilled worker.

And it is very clear that they got a lot of those terms and they are repeating them from some kind of large language learning model products. Uh, and they are not necessarily capable of. Putting those concepts into practice, no matter how convincing they might sound, definitely ask the follow up question.

And that is why when I write about FinOps or write about a particular capability or a framework or, or even if it's not FinOps, but like, uh, infrastructure engineering in general, or engineering culture in general, I am not worried about folks. Uh, repeating my words back to me in, in fact, I kind of enjoy it.

Um, but, and even if it is a bot, and I would love it if, if I, uh, could do this right and ai myself out of a job because that just lets me be free for the next thing. So, do I have any regrets? No. But do I have a healthy amount of, oh gosh. I mean, I'm pragmatic about it. I, I know that it can put me in. Harms way or it could put me in a vulnerable position, um, unless I'm expecting it.

Corey: So I have to ask

because I have opinions on this, but you first No. Fair. If I do first, what is your take on AI as applied to FinOps threat tool, something else?

Deana: It is, yes, a threat and a tool. It's a threat in the way that it's a threat to, to society, to humans who are looking for convenience and shortcuts and, um, to escape accountability.

It is a tool for folks who want to. Uh, find ways to collaborate, find ways to, uh, connect with people that they might not otherwise connect with. Uh, it is a tool for folks to do analysis faster, uh, or scale their own, um, sort of output. I, I would also say be careful how you use that tool. Just like if you're learning how to use a chainsaw, it is not the right tool for every job.

Corey: I, I have to say I've, I have been paying a lot of attention for the last two years and change to gen AI as applied to the AWS bill, and there have been things that are phenomenal about it. It was able to write a mostly working script back in 2023 about analyze the NAT Gateway pricing per hour and gimme a table per region, and that was great.

But every time I have given it a, some form of input that resembles an AWS bill and say, great, or even access to the API from a particularly bounded role and say, great, give me suggestions to optimize my bill. It is a massive threat, but not to me, to whoever implements the things that it recommends. It is wildly confident and it's great at the 80% rule of you have a lot of data in S3, apply automatic lifecycle policies everywhere.

So after 90 days it winds up in infrequent access, which yeah, most of the time that'll be great except that one time where you just turned the tele the AWS bill into a telephone number because that does not map this specific use case and pattern. There is context, there is nuance and. LLMs do not have that.

It is a fundamentally a people problem that you can view through the lens of engineering, but blindly jotting off recommendations is wild to me. More to the point. That's the easy stuff to make fun of. It's the stuff that it misses. That is wild to me though. It's basically, it's like, uh, it's like when someone winds up, uh, having a, uh, a giant burning dumpster, uh, uh, of trash and like I have a problem and they point at it and people start looking behind the dumpster for the problem.

It stop that.

Deana: If you took all of the, um, uh, the scripts that get written, um, after an AI prompt and you just say. YOLO and then, and then paste it. Uh, you might actually get a pretty good representation of sometimes what happens in, in startups and, and in in technical companies anyway, in technology companies anyway, sometimes you are really just making a bet and someone like me who, who is.

Considering the human experience might come to a decision slower than my, uh, executive might want me to recommend a solution. Uh, sometimes I do have to say, okay, here's my best recommendation. Uh, and they won't take it even though it was a pretty good recommendation because I didn't have the confidence.

But what you said about that AI being. All of the unearned confidence of a large language, um, model. I, that's sort of what it reflects. It's everything that you would expect happening on a small scale in small companies to just be bigger. It's gonna scale faster. So, uh, yeah, so, so that's where the threat comes in.

And it's not necessarily to folks like. You or me, but definitely to folks who haven't learned how to use the tool, um, before they put it into production.

Corey: For me, one of the big challenges I see with it is that it's absolutely flooding the zone where I, I don't know if I, I don't know if I'm seeing a lot of AI generated articles that people are throwing out there, or just badly written articles that don't tend to know what they're talking about.

Either way, I don't put them in the newsletter because why would I. It is not, I'm not here to platform nonsense. If I'm sending things out for people to read, I think they should read them and no, it. But it's so prolific, it is so easy to throw stuff out. Every hiring manager I talk to, including me, uh, notices that whenever we open a job posting, there are now so many applicants that on paper look like they effectively have restated the job description to be exactly what I need.

So I have to start looking and squinting for specific signals just as a winnowing pass. And that is unfair for people who do not necessarily know how that works. But you have to cut. Through the noise somehow. I don't know what the answer is, and I don't think it's more ai 'cause that's just an arms race.

Why don't we just like throw all the money to Nvidia and call it a day if that's what we're gonna do.

Deana: It really is. And you know, it's only money. I, I, I'm confident that if we are. Willing to sort of detach from, uh, the outcome of how can I make this ai, uh, serve my short-term goal and, and embrace the, how can I use all of these things that make up AI to help.

Me reach my purpose. I think those are things that are worth, still worth examining. I think there's still so many, uh, people, so many humans who are interested and who are in this field and who frankly. Made it accelerate the way that it did, uh, with their brilliant minds, but who want to use it for good?

I think those people are still out there. I think they're burned out. I think we should all have a party and, and, um, sort of regroup and think about how we can, can, uh, do a little reboot and start thinking about. What was it we set out to do in the first place? Uh, was I trying to build a technology career around the cloud?

Probably not. It's something that I'm interested in. I don't think everyone needs to understand how to, how to deal with remote servers. I think folks need to understand, you know, how they can, uh, use. Global communications in, in ways that help them connect to people they care about. You know, I think that, that there's still so many different paths that we can take.

Same thing for FinOps though, or for, for that matter, any of the frameworks. The Agile, the DevOps, the SRE. Observability is one of my favorite things to, to observe at the moment. Here are all these great spaces where people are actually building culture and nerding out and geeking out on, um, on topics that are just like fascinating problems to solve.

And. Gosh, let's, let's build some skills around the tools and some communities around how are we going to use these tools for good things. I think that's a great way to, uh, collaborate and, you know, and inform communities around these energies.

Corey: This episode is sponsored by my own company, the Duck Bill Group, having trouble with your AWS bill.

Perhaps it's time to renegotiate a contract with them. Maybe you're just wondering how to predict what's going on in the wide world of AWS. Well, that's where the Duck Bill group comes in to help. Remember, you can't duck the duck bill. Bill, which I am reliably informed by my business partner is absolutely not our motto.

It's a hard problem and, and to be clear, when you say people are solving really interesting problems, that is so subjective as far as who any given person finds interesting. I dunno about you, but I find that I tend to focus primarily on things that I find deeply interesting. Uh, I am very bad at doing the boring things.

Yeah, you probably figured out what a lot of people in my company do then. But it's the. Uh, but I found that I don't have to necessarily beat my head against the wall of things I don't find interesting or fulfilling. I, I have the massive privilege of being able to focus on the stuff that moves me, that, that gets me excited to get up in the morning and, and tackle some of these fun problems.

It's. It's very weird because when you describe what FinOps is, it's like, well, it's, it's the answer of what you get when you smash assisted men into an accountant, you know, besides crippling depression. It's that, and it's, okay, great, but there's more to it than that. It sounds like a very boring area to focus on, but I can say a lot about it, but I've never been bored doing this.

Deana: I would say the same. I've never been bored because I do actually think that we spend too much time chasing money without understanding why we're doing it, uh, what we wanna do with it. Uh, and, and being afraid of it, for that matter. Being afraid of, of the. Lack of money. And, and that's true at a human level, and it's true at a, an organizational level, whether it's for profit and, and even in the nonprofit sectors, uh, uh, like healthcare care, there's always this fear that what if I lose my funding?

Oh. And so, so that, that sort of idea of, well, now. The same folks who are responsible for all of this, uh, uh, for all of this technology spend, need to be accountable for it. And, uh, they need to be brought together into the same room with the folks who are there to watch the money come in and the money go out and make sure that it's actually funneling toward the purpose of whatever that organization says it is.

And, uh, yeah. And again, like. When it's the humans in a room talking, I find. That there is very little conflict between engineers and finance.

Corey: Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. I, I think that when I get those folks in a room, very often they care about remarkably similar things that are deeply aligned, but very often the challenge is the lack of a shared language to clearly communicate.

It's, they're in violent agreement talking completely past one another half the time.

Deana: I think that might be why. Folks who are bicultural or bilingual have a a little bit better time in this particular specialty. The, the idea of code switching between a room where you are the least technical person, um, and you have to sort of absorb new changes in technology fast, uh, and be able to represent them in the room where you're the most technical person and say.

This is how this adds value to your, to your initiative, to your business objective. And, uh, you know, and to be able to do that accurately and with integrity, or at least I think that that's how I prefer to do it. Uh, but I, I think to me that has actually been my interesting problem to solve is the, this is a really.

It's like walking a tightrope, and these are the things that I have to keep in balance in order for me to keep going forward. Turns out it's a pretty slow process if you wanna do it, uh, without injury.

Corey: I, I can, I can give a classic example that I see all the time. I talk in public mostly about optimization, but that's remarkably little of what I do on a day to day.

Directionally, the CFO of a global Fortune 2000 company does not care what the AWS bill is. What they do care about is understanding the drivers behind it. They care about being able to allocate it. They care about being able to forecast it. They care that they are getting the discounts to which they are entitled.

They care about being responsible stewards of that money as they deploy. It to return value to their business. That's the problem. It just is a lot easier to talk to people when you shorthand it to manage NAT gateway, wait, gateway, bad Go bur. So it, but there, there are different levels you have to have these conversations on.

If I start talking about chargeback showback models to a bunch of my operations, engineering friends, their eyes start to glaze over and I'm asked to please leave. This is a Denny's.

Deana: I love that you bring up NAT Gateway because I think there are very specific workloads that know exactly what you're talking about and why that needs to be managed.

Corey: Okay. This is a per, uh, that's another microcosm. The reason I use the NAT Gateway is that for the individual person experimenting it, which I know there are many in the audience, uh, they will spin it up. The free tier until they fixed it recently does not cover it. It's a surprise. $35 a month charge when you, when you're just getting started out and you spun up an EC2 instance for half a day, and you get hit with that, it sucks.

On the other side of the coin, my actual customer base, the very large, uh, enterprise environments who are also well represented in the listenership here, see the same thing. They don't care about the hourly, but they do care about the fact that there's no price break at scale and they're passing petabytes a month.

Through it and okay, why is this costing us $120,000 a month on top of a bunch of other charges like data transfer? It hits at the very low end and at the very high end. But when I just curse the gnat gateway, both sides of that coin understand differently. The joke that I'm making,

Deana: the idea of, of, um, being able to finesse.

Any particular survey, whether it be or service, whether it be net gateway or, or something else, um, and make it predictable. It, it means being able to hold a whole bunch of, of, uh, building blocks in your head and say, oh, when they come together in that way, that spend is going to spike. And if we do this in a measured way.

We'll stay under the free tier or we'll stay within our, our budget for that. And when you're a big enough organization and or, or you, you have deep enough pockets or enough series funding, uh, that you just don't need to look at it at that granular level, you may never ever see that, that service name, I don't wanna keep saying it.

'cause what if I make someone mad? But,

but you've already done it.

Corey: Oh, I, uh. A friend of mine who recently was at AWS was the VP over the managed Nat Gateway. He was my diving buddy. 'cause he was perpetually looking for a nickel that a customer threw into Puget Sound and he wanted to find it before the customer did, presumably.

But it's a, it is a good service. The pricing is wonky and it's, it's a great example of, well, what's the answer to it? It depends. In some cases it's adding value. Keep it as it is. In some cases, switch to a nat instance, in some cases, turn on the S3 gateway endpoint in the private subnet, and that cost drops to zero.

But all of it is situational and depends upon the use case. There is no panacea that I can give that works for everyone. That's why the answer to every sufficiently complex question is, it depends

Deana: there. There isn't a way to do that and because. The reason that we talk about optimization so much, but we don't actually end up doing it is because the idea of op optimization means that we are committing to a certain strategy that is going to, at some point probably lock us in.

Optimizing for change means embracing the unpredictable.

Corey: And, and for the NAT Gateway as well, that conversation almost certainly did not start with the client saying, oh, uh, can you help us optimize our NAT gateway bill? Especially on the finance side, it started with, okay, we're gonna get a PPA on this private pricing agreement for special discounted pricing.

If we commit to some amount of money, what is the right amount of money for us to commit to? And. It's easy to say, well, if we assume that the previous growth pattern is correct, it should be this. But I like to start with, okay, what's it doing? What is that traffic? And very often there's a better way to do it.

So you could get a PPA or you could turn it off. I mean, there's that option too. And as a consultant, my role is to give an opinion and options and an associated cost with it, but it's up to the client to decide. That's the nature of the beast.

Deana: One of the things that I think about a lot with companies doing their, like, I guess they're calling it repatriate, repatriation, bringing their workloads from the cloud back into data centers, uh, and trying to figure that all out.

Corey: Have you seen that succeed at any kind

of scale,

Deana: uh, in, in companies that were never really fully invested in the cloud? Yes.

Corey: It almost feels like a long-term, protracted proof of concept is now being declared a failure and they are taking the things that were there out. I do see that you're correct. Yes, that aligns.

But I feel everyone likes to talk, especially folks with something to sell. Like there's this massive wave of clout repatriation everywhere, and it's, well, where's it hiding? I don't see it in my clients, admittedly a, a somewhat small subset of the market, but I also don't see it in the, uh. In the publicly traded data center companies that would show massive build out and growth.

Where's it all hiding?

Deana: Could I share a conspiracy theory,

Corey: please?

Deana: I think that Gen X, um, IT leaders are trying to bring the whole repatriation thing up as a, as something new, uh, because they, they really just wanna dis. Dust off their, their, um, cable management skills and, and, uh, raise floor physical security skills from the old data center days.

Corey: I miss being heard on the rack nuts. Kids today have it too easy. Exactly. Uh, although that is a fantastic framing as well, if you start viewing cloud based upon generational divide in the Gen X millennial area that I'm in, and presumably you as well, aws. A, you go to, uh, you go down to the, uh, younger millennials and Google Cloud starts to be, uh, to be great.

Uh, Azure, very clearly the Boomer cloud. And then you've got the, uh, like the kids today, they're going with things like Versal. Hmm, they're moving up the stack. The world is changing. It's the crusty old ops people that really trust the infrastructure. 'cause it's hard from places like AWS that is increasingly below the surface level of awareness that a lot of independent developers get.

To work with. And that matters is in no small part because by the time you're a qualified operations engineer, you've been doing it for a few years. I, I don't accept that there's a junior DevOp who's going to have a lot to contribute. So much of it is, well, the last time I saw this, we lost a hand. Here's how we don't do that this time.

Deana: There, there are no junior DevOps left there. They are all, uh, senior millennials now.

Yep. You start working on it and you're 26, boom. You have a beard, gray hair, and you are 50 years old. I don't care that it violates causality. That's what happens.

And I don't know why it's a common thing, but they all know how to make their own hot sauce.

I they're, that's what it takes for them to feel something. I think. So maybe. So I, I'm gonna bring this back to the healthcare IT thing and, and making things predictable. When we're thinking, oh my gosh, we're now at this new technology. We're, we're looking at AI and is it gonna disrupt us? Is it gonna unseat all of these, um, paradigms that we're, we're really deeply invested in?

Well, yes. But embrace it because in the early two thousands it was I outsourcing, I was outsourced when I was part of a 50 person IT department that got, um, outsourced to some consulting company in the Midwest. And, and we either had feelings about it and couldn't adjust, uh, or we rolled with it and we learned the next new thing.

And uh, yeah, I think, I think the embracing of the. Oh of the chaos really just means you, you're admitting you're in the ocean and the waves are gonna turn and the wind is gonna blow. And I, and, and you've just gotta. Sort of keep afloat and, and, uh, again, find your community, find the folks with the raf

Corey: and just like AWS config charges, the ocean's trying to kill you.

Deana: It is, it is. And there is definitely a benefit, a safety in numbers and a benefit to getting other people's perspectives because you don't know what you can't see beyond the curvature of the ocean. Right. So it's, it's alright. It's gonna be all right.

Corey: I, I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me about all of this.

If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you these days?

Deana: Oh my gosh. Well, I'll, uh, add my LinkedIn. Um, I think I, I, I tend to, if you. Have a connection request. Please write a note and say where you heard of me.

Corey: Oh my God, yes. I, I am currently sitting on 600 of them that I have to go and deny one by one 'cause I don't know who these people are.

My rule for connecting on LinkedIn is if we have had a conversation and I, I feel like it went well enough that I would introduce someone to you in a professional context. I will connect to you, but if you just saw me give a talk and we've never spoken, no, because people will reach out and ask me to introduce them to you, and I don't know who you are.

I can't do that. Well, not well.

Deana: I'm also really liking Blue Sky. I, I'm, I'm still a little bit of a lurker, uh, but every once in a while I do have a thing that, like in the old Twitter days, I would just pick it up and have a thought and really just need to get it out there. And, um, I, I did get that feeling of the old Twitter days when someone would reply to a random thing I thought and had been thinking the same thing.

And I, I like, I like how social media can be that sort of a good place too. And, you know, um, I think I wouldn't know about you if it had not been for that, um, for that platform at the time. So

Corey: it's. It was. It was a great connector. I miss that era that we, of course, put all of these links into the show notes.

Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I appreciate it.

Deana: Thank you so much, Corey. It was really a pleasure and I'm, yeah, I'm just a big fan.

Corey: Well, thank you. I, I think I'm kind of great too, but that's okay. I have people that take me down a peg or two basically every time I go on the internet.

Deana Solis FinOps engineer, uh, freelance traveling throughout the world. I'm cloud economist Cory Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please. Leave a five star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry, angry comment talking about how the managed NAT gateway is just misunderstood at, please include your location because I'm certain with that attitude the police are already looking for you.