Picture this: A chic Barcelona seaside hotel, gusty autumn winds, endless tapas, and the Rioja flowing. Could there be a better setting for a FinOps conversation? That was the setting for FinOpsX Europe! It brought together 500 practitioners from EMEA, APAC, and even LATAM. Everyone was in the mood to learn and interact: exchange ideas, share challenges, and find solutions. Here’s a peek at the hottest discussion topics.

In the realm of FinOps, new concepts emerge all the time. One pivotal metric recently introduced by the FinOps Foundation is the Effective Savings Rate (ESR). ESR measures the savings achieved through various cloud commitment deals, like Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans (SPs). This blog discusses how organizations can use the ESR metric while understanding its limitations and how to overcome them.

The Cloud Financial Operations (FinOps) discipline aims to understand and manage cloud costs while maximizing the value from cloud investments. While controlling cloud spend remains a key business objective, focusing FinOps efforts primarily on visibility and cost-cutting doesn’t get to crux of the problem and may even snowball into bigger issues – especially given the growing complexity of the cloud and the stakeholders involved in managing it.

In the landscape of cloud cost optimization, Azure’s discounted Reservations and Savings Plans stand out for their flexibility. On June 6th, 2024 Azure postponed its decision to limit reservation exchangeson its major compute services for an unlimited “grace period”. As a result, commitments on all of Azure’s compute and other services remain highly flexible to modify or exchange.

On October 31 the main floor of the DevOps Days TLV Expo was bustling with Halloween-themed booths of exciting DevOps vendors, offering treats for badge scans and whisky shots for “personal secrets”! It was a beautiful display of business-as-usual in unusual times—a worthy prelude to the upcoming winter event season. Here are some key lessons from the Spot by NetApp booth you might want to bring along for the upcoming FinOpsXE, Ignite, and re:Invent.

NetApp is excited to announce that it has been named a major player in the first IDC MarketScape: Asia Pacific (excluding Japan), (APEJ), Cloud Cost and Capacity Optimization 2024 Vendor Assessment (doc, September 2024).

Since its acquisition of VMware, Broadcom has made significant changes to their licensing model, which have had an impact on many customers’ licensing costs. These changes have disrupted, and in some cases, completely upended VMware customers’ existing platform strategy, becoming a forcing function for them to carefully assess the potential risks to the business and the future impact they may have on their VMware infrastructure platforms.

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses are increasingly relying on Kubernetes (K8s) to efficiently manage their containerized workloads. However, many organizations face a significant challenge when it comes to effectively utilizing compute resources.

NetApp is excited to announce the addition of Shuffle Data Store for Ocean for Apache Spark. Customers running on AWS can now benefit from improved resilience and efficiency for multi-step data preparation pipelines that require Apache Spark to shuffle data. The external shuffle solution is backed by either Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP storage or Amazon S3 storage, which have been optimally configured for Spark workloads.

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly central to business operations, many organizations are grappling with how to deploy and scale their AI models efficiently. When it comes to AI inference, or how AI analyzes and draws conclusions from new data, Kubernetes offers a compelling solution — but it’s not without challenges.