As customers and partners from around the world quickly started pooling into the Revere Hotel in Boston, MA, excitement levels were high. The first annual user summit, CloudHealth Connect18, kicked off at full force today with 28 sessions covering everything from real life experiences about cloud cost optimization journeys to how to become CloudHealth certified.
If you were unable to make day one, below we have highlighted three sessions we loved today (an almost impossible pick with so many engaging sessions to attend).
Better Together: VMware & CloudHealth Technologies
On August 27, 2018, VMware announced its intent to acquire CloudHealth Technologies. Since the announcement, one common question was addressed during today’s CloudHealth Connect18 event: Why did VMware choose CloudHealth Technologies?
All cloud environments have different advantageous features and price points which is why multicloud environments are the future. However, the evolution of multicloud computing establishes a new business problem: the need to effectively manage workloads positioned in different locations across multiple dimensions of the cloud. (Yikes)
A common goal of driving long term customer success is what ultimately lead to the bond between CloudHealth Technologies and VMware. With this new bond, CloudHealth will be key to accelerating multicloud management innovation while leveraging VMware’s strong heritage in the hybrid cloud space. This was a great teaser to tomorrow’s CEO Fireside Chat with Tom Axbey and Guests starting promptly at 5pm EST.
Cloud Cost Optimization And Efficiency At Intuit
Leading this session was Dieter Matzion, a Business Systems Analyst at Intuit. It was for individuals who have workloads that are large enough where they need to have a cost optimization team. Once Matzion went over the possible team structures, he dove into how different teams need different ways to drive their efforts. For example the engineering teams need a set list of clear priorities, where as the executives usually prefer a mission statement to drive their efforts.
Matzion then fully explained, with many quick jokes, what you can actually do to save money. He referred to them as the Cost Optimization Levers, which are:
- Reserved instances
- Volume discount
- Waste elimination
- RI purchase automation
- Automated RI modifications
- EC2 rightsizing
- Custom Telemetry
Not only did Matzion cover the ways you could save money, but he went in depth about each option and discussed the common issues individuals run into.
Getting CloudHealth Certified: What You Need To Know
To start Sharon Castillo went over the benefits of certifications in general, and how they are a means for measuring an individual’s skills and knowledge. She touched on that people usually complete certifications to achieve either one of three things—to level-set their skills, to establish credibility, or for competitive advantage. Thankfully the CloudHealth certification can help you achieve all three, and exam candidates agree. Castillo shared some anonymous quotes about the exam including, “It was rigorous, but a fair exam. A good assessment of my skills.”
Today and tomorrow at CloudHealth Connect18 we are offering for attendees to take the hour-long exam during the summit. If you are unable to attend this year, you still can complete your certification through an online proctor. At the end of the session, Castillo shared a fair point for those wondering if they were ready or not to take the exam—what do you have to lose?
Putting It All Together: Financial Must Haves
CloudHealth Technical Trainer Michelle Fowler finished up the day with our finance attendees, offering best practices for how they could leverage CloudHealth reports to determine their key cost drivers. By setting up perspectives, you can easily run reports to show chargebacks, measure spend against predetermined financial targets, and analyze cost variance over time to better predict spend for the future.
Fowler then spent some time walking through the CloudHealth Pulse Check, a one-stop-shop report that highlights all the optimizations you can make to your cloud environment to reduce spend, optimize usage, and improve security. What does this report include? Your immediate monthly savings (what are you saving right now), operational monthly savings, cloud governance policies, security risks, and reservation management monthly savings. This report is a great starting point to see what’s happening in your cloud environment at a high-level before taking a deeper dive into more specific areas of cloud operation.
What was Fowler’s best practice tip of the day? “Never work inside a vacuum. Take all of our recommendations and apply them to the perspective of your daily operations. You know your business context better than anyone, so think about what makes the best sense for you and your organization. Not every recommendation will be a perfect fit.”
Come back tomorrow to read the CloudHealth Connect18 Day 2 Recap!
Related reading:
Announcing CloudHealth Connect18
CloudHealth Connect18 User Summit: Training, Certification, And Fun!
