About Erik Peterson:

Erik Peterson is the CEO and founder of CloudZero. Previous to founding CloudZero, Erik was Director of Technology Strategy for Veracode and has nearly 20 years of software industry experience, including senior leadership and technology roles at HP, SPI Dynamics, GuardedNet and Sanctum. Erik has also held IT & InfoSec roles at Moody’s Investors Service, SunTrust Bank, U.S. Embassy Vienna, Austria and the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency where he provided technical assistance to UN weapons inspectors.

• Twitter: @silvexis
• Email: [email protected]
• CloudZero: cloudzero.com
• CloudZero Twitter: @CloudzeroInc

Transcript:

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly, and you're listening to Serverless Chats. This week, I'm chatting with Erik Peterson. Hey, Erik. Thanks for joining me.

Erik: Hey. Great to be here, Jeremy.

Jeremy: So you are the CEO at CloudZero in the great city of Boston. So why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and what CloudZero is up to?

Erik: Sure. So gosh, so I'm a recovering AppSec person, actually, by trade. I think I spent 20 years in the application ⁠— in the security industry trying to move the needle on one thing, which was to get developers to care about security. I didn't necessarily start there, but I I certainly thought a lot about application security through the years and where I think the applications security industry ended up is a good place, focused on the people who create the software that we care about. But about 10 years ago, maybe 11 now, in 2008, I got bit by the cloud bug and I started experimenting with AWS and taking that where I could take it. And I had the good fortune of bringing Veracode, the company I worked at before CloudZero, over into AWS and had a lot of fun doing that and learned a lot along the way. So, recovering AppSec person. Now true cloud connoisseur I hope.

Jeremy: And what's CloudZero all about?

Erik: So CloudZero. It's pretty simple. It gets back to my roots. I want developers to care about cost, right? And so CloudZero, we're the first cloud optimization platform that is specifically built to tie engineering decisions directly at cloud cost. You look at a lot of cloud optimization solutions today, they're focused on the finance team or parts of the organization that are outside of the people who are actually making the decisions writing the code. And so we want to empower DevOps team to make smarter engineering and infrastructure decisions. And we do that by giving them a platform that could allow engineers to understand in real-time the cost ramifications of their actions. So really powerful solution that, ultimately, we're going to help the business manage costs, move faster and drive innovation for it. And we love developers. We're focused on that world.

Jeremy: Do you have any big features coming out that you want to share with the audience?

Erik: Yeah. So we are building a whole set of capabilities for engineering teams to get right into the details of what matters most to them, which is how much are the things that they're actually building costing them, and take out all of the noise. You know, today if you go look at Amazon's Cost Explorer; you look at another product. You see all this data related to cost. All I care about is what is the thing that I'm working on right now? What does it cost me? And how are my decisions affecting that? So we have a number of new dashboards that are coming up for that and a few other little surprises around the corner around anomaly detection coming out this summer.

Jeremy: Awesome. So I wanted to have you on to talk about an extremely exciting topic that I actually, surprisingly, am a little bit passionate about because I do see a tremendous amount of value in this. But I want to talk about cloud computing costs. And obviously, you have quite a bit of experience in this, but where I want to look at this is we now have this sort of very, very granular billing that goes well beyond what maybe a SaaS company might provide. And obviously, you have SaaS bills and that's a metric that you could use. But now that you have cost associated with every sort of cloud engineering action that you take, how do we need to think about this differently? Maybe let's start there.

Erik: So, you know, I think every cloud engineer should view cost as something that they ⁠— their expertise in understanding the bill needs to be something that they feel proud enough to put on the resume. You think about what was the very first Amazon service. It was, a lot of times, it's really easy to say, "Oh, it's SQS or S3." No, it was actually Amazon Billing, right? Because...

Jeremy: That's good point.

Erik: Amazon wasn't going to do anything if they couldn't bill you for it. And over time, they've figured out how to, like you say, get deeper into the metered billing. We have a millisecond billing. EC2 used to be billed by the hour, and now could be billed even tighter than that. You go look at the reports. Everything is kind of normalized to the hour, and it's a little bit more complicated to figure out. But the key kind of thing here is, whether we know it or not, as software architects, engineers, DevOps engineers, when we moved from on-prem in the cloud, we had a whole lot of constraints that just disappeared overnight. And you know, this decision about how much things cost, what used to be made for us, somebody went and bought a bunch of servers. They put it in the basement, and that was all well and good. And then we just tried to maximize our usage of that resource. Now, somebody gave us an Amazon account, and our instincts, as engineers, are a little bit off, because our instincts are how can I get the fastest path to value for my customers, innovate quicker build, you know, new capabilities. And your intuition is to expand to use all available resources in front of you in order to achieve that goal, right? It's certainly what your boss is telling you or the CEO is telling you. And so we go, "oh, I have this infinite scale. Let's go nuts." The problem, the flip side of that, of course, is if I have infinite scale, I also need to have infinite wallet, right? If I don't have infinite wallet, then actually, the reality is I don't actually have infinite scale, and so as engineers, I think we need to move past caring just about performance and uptime, and we need to add a third item to our kind of list of operational metrics, and that's cost.

Jeremy: Yeah, and and I don't know how you knew that I have a bunch of servers in my basement. They're all turned off now, but I literally have a bunch of old servers in my basement.

Erik: All have some dirty, dirty little secrets.

Jeremy: Exactly. You wouldn't believe how many hard drives I have because I didn't want to throw them away when I closed down my data center. But so you mentioned⁠ - and I think this is important - you mentioned this idea of the sort of the purchasing decision, right? And in the past, it has always been okay, we need 100 servers. We need this many copies of Windows server or we need this Oracle license or whatever we need, and those things were fairly easy to plan for. And again, they were these purchasing decisions by sort of the, I guess, the C-levels or the purchasing department or something. And you w...