An Operator and a Host

It’s been a minute since I have written a blog here.?But these are very exciting times.?Upon exiting SnowPlow Analytics, I had several opportunities open up.?One that I could not pass up was working with The Cube team, David Vellante , and John Furrier . Yesterday, Dave and I announced the collaboration we will be doing. I am going to be a guest cube analyst, and we'll be working together to extract the signal from the noise, while I continue to consult with startups and large companies.

To kick things off, we covered a lot of ground in the world of #cloud and #DevOps.?As Dave put it, I will bring my unique questions to The Cube based on my long experience being an operator and product guy at a number of firms, including #AWS, #HP, #HPE, Akorri, #NetApp, #Zerto, and #Snowplow. I even did a short stint at Enterprise Strategy Group, part of TechTarget.

What will I be covering on The Cube??You can expect me to dig into what and why companies are building the features that they release—looking deeper into how they bring those products and features to market and how that ties back to the customer’s use case.

Right now, I'm seeing that people are looking how to get more out of their data, how they're bringing data together in different ways, and creating data products. ?How corporations and vendors are looking at the costs of the Cloud and how that impacts the way they build out their #SaaS applications. And once they have built the software, how are they dealing with operating and managing that code at scale.

In the video, Dave and I discuss the six factors that are leading to reduced Cloud consumption, fewer mortgage originations (#FinTech), Crypto, Lower Ad spend, less analytics with less frequency of calculations (which we disagree on a bit), optimizing compute and cheaper storage tiers, and optimized pricing plans.?Discussing the cost reduction side, one thing I point out is that you can actually lower your costs by looking at maybe some of the older generation of CPUs. Maybe your application was written ten years ago. You don't necessarily have to be on the best, newest processor for that application.

Then we swung back around to the analytics side.?Dave brought up an interesting conversation he had had with #MongoDB CEO and then the team over at #Snowflake. As I reflect on Dave’s comments, it reminds me how the #database & #datalake crowd may be experiencing shifts in the workloads that customers are running on their #PaaS or #DBaaS as customers look to optimize their cost and number of vendors.?The number of vendors part is real.?As we see layoffs, this puts stress on the remaining people at those companies to manage the technology and relationships.

And marketing organizations are definitely trying to figure out what my ad spend is across #Google, #Meta, #Apple, and #Amazon. Return on advertising spend (ROAS) is something you are going to hear a lot this year. as they would say. Companies are looking to do is understand “do I have to collect these analytics that better understand where are these people coming from?”?What is my customer’s journey?

Companies that are building products and SaaS-delivered products will increase the use this analytics for making the product better. And one of the big reasons for that is maybe they're dialing back how many product managers they have. They're looking to be more data-driven about how they actually build the product out or enhance it. But someone, usually a product manager, must still interpret the analytics and build the roadmap.?#ChatGPT still can’t do that for you yet!?We rounded out the discussion with deeper dive into Snowflake, #Databricks, #BigQuery, #Synapse, and even a little #Redshift, how co-opetition works in the Cloud.

Next, we talked a little about #AI, ChatGPT, and the responses from the rest of the Cloud folk.?We didn’t get too deep this week in that space, but it is worth watching the world of Large Language Models and how they can be used to enhance an everyday product, such as #Microsoft’s Bing announcement.?Next, we jumped into a super basic preview of KubeCon in April.?I still think there is much confusion, and a lot of the investment is still going into bringing observability, DevOps, AIOps, and MLOps together in a consistent operating model.?Today, running cloud-native is not hassle-free, with much build-it-yourself still. KubeCon in Amsterdam should be interesting for sure.

Full video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM7UWMEJB9w

I am looking forward to helping break things down, find the signal in the noise, with the rest of the team at The Cube!