CloudyCon
- Stephanie Gooch
- Sep 19, 2019
- 2 min read
Well, after weeks of prepping and going into the office at weekends to practice my speech on an empty office chair, it’s all over. Cloudycon 2019 is done!
I had a great time, met some awesome people and loved being able to share the knowledge I have and also learn from my peers. I will go over a couple of things of note from the week.
One thing I really noticed was the similarities in stories from the speakers. This is not a criticism but more of an awareness that we are all going through similar challenges and that is both comforting and concerning.
I was lucky enough to be asked to participate in a part of the opening morning’s talks on the main stage, as part of a Fireside Chat (I didn’t know what this meant either). Basically, it’s meant to be a casual chat between two people but in front of an audience. However, to be honestly I had the questions before and had prepared for them. I was quite nervous beforehand but I really enjoyed being up on stage. Once the questions were complete that was supposed to be it but because the event had been running ahead of time we had a spontaneous Q&A which was a curve ball but I really enjoyed it!
As well as the Fireside Chat I had a breakout session called ‘The Road to FinOps’, which you may have heard of before :). In this I talked about the work I have been doing since the start of the year, some tips on areas where people can optimise their estate and just some general stories. I had some great feedback for this and people were seeing their company’s developments echoed in the work I had done. A lot of people approached me to ask follow-up questions which was great! One thing that stood out from this was people’s amazement that I wasn’t a Cloudability user (the people who host the event), but that I had built my own mini-tool to help me with the work. The phrase ‘Bad Ass’ was used.
From the conference there were a couple of topics that kept coming up:
· Reserved Instances
· Forecasting
· Metrics
It will be interesting to see how these areas move forward in the future. I personally will be spending some time looking into Metric’s to assess if an account is cost-optimised.
I was also fortunate enough to be part of the first group of people to do the FinOps Partitioned workshop and exam, which I passed. The workshop covered a lot of high-level topics such as the pillars of FinOps and the FinOps phases. These are interesting concepts and I would advise having a read here.
Overall it was a great week and I cannot wait for next year!
When I get them- the links will be added here.
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