John Martinez

Break Things on Purpose

In this episode, we cover:

• 00:00:00 - Introduction
• 00:03:15 - FinOps Foundation and Multicloud
• 00:07:00 - Costs
• 00:10:40 - John’s History in Reliability Engineering
• 00:16:30 - The Actual Cost of an Outages, Security, Etc.
• 00:21:30 - What John Measures
• 00:28:00 - What John is Up To/Latinx in Tech

Links:

• Palo Alto Networks: https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/
• FinOps Foundation: https://www.finops.org
• Techqueria.org: https://techqueria.org
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmartinez/

Transcript

John: I would say a tip for better monitoring, uh, would be to, uh turn it on. [laugh]. [unintelligible 00:00:07] sounds, right?

Jason: Welcome to the Break Things on Purpose podcast, a show about chaos engineering and operating reliable systems. In this episode we chat with John Martinez, Director of Cloud R&D at Palo Alto Networks. John’s had a long career in tech, and we discuss his new focus on FinOps and how it has been influenced by his past work in security and chaos engineering.

Jason: So, John, welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you? Where do you work? What do you do?

John: Yeah. So, John Martinez. I am a director over at Palo Alto Networks. I have been in the cloud security space for the better of, I would say, seven, eight years or so. And currently, am in transition in my role at Palo Alto Networks.

So, I’m heading headstrong into the FinOps world. So, turning back into the ops world to a certain degree and looking at what can we do, two things: better manage our cloud spend and gain a lot more optimization out of our usage in the cloud. So, very excited about new role.

Jason: That’s an interesting new role. I’d imagine that at Palo Alto Networks, you’ve got quite a bit of infrastructure and that’s probably a massive bill.

John: It can be. It can be. Yeah, [laugh] absolutely. We definitely have large amount of scale, in multi-cloud, too, so that’s the added bonus to it all. FinOps is kind of a new thing for me, so I’m pretty happy to, as I dig back into the operations world, very happy to discover that the FinOps Foundation exists and it kind of—there’s a lot of prescribed ways of both looking at FinOps, at optimization—specifically in the cloud,
obviously—and as well as there’s a whole framework that I can go adopt.

So, it’s not like I’m inventing the wheel, although having been in the cloud for a long time, and I haven’t talked about that part of it but a lot of times, it feels like—in my early days anyway—felt like I was inventing new wheels all the time. As being an engineer, the part that I am very excited about is looking at the optimization opportunities of it. Of course, the goal, from a finance perspective, is to either reduce our spend where we can, but also to take a look at where we’re investing in the cloud, and if it takes more of a shift as opposed to a straight-up just cut the bill kind of thing, it’s really all about making sure that we’re investing in the right places and optimizing in the right places when it comes down to it.

Jason: I think one of the interesting perspectives of adopting multi-cloud is that idea of FinOps: let’s save money. And the idea, if I wanted to run a serverless function, I could take a look at AWS Lambda, I could take a look at Azure Functions to say, “Which one’s going to be cheaper for this particular use case,” and then go with that.

John: I really liked how the FinOps Foundation has laid out the approach to the lifecycle of FinOps. So, they basically go from the crawl, walk, run approach which, in a lot of our world, is kind of like that. It’s very much about setting yourself up for success. Don’t expect to be cutting your bill by hundreds of thousands of dollars at the beginning. It’s really all about discovering not just how much we’re spending, but where we’re spending it.

I would categorize the pitting the cloud providers against each other to be more on the run side of things, and that eventually helps, especially in the enterprise space; it helps enterprises to approach the cloud providers with more of a data-driven negotiation, I would say [laugh] to
your enterprise spend.

Jason: I think that’s an excellent point about the idea of that is very much a run. And I don’t know any companies within my sphere and folks that I know in the engineering space that are doing that because of that price competition. I think everybody gets into the idea of multi-cloud because of this idea of reliability, and—

John: Mm-hm.

Jason: One of my clouds may fail. Like, what if Amazon goes down? I’d still need to survive that.

John: That’s the promise, right? At least that’s the promise that I’ve been operating under for the 11 years or so that I’ve been in the cloud now. And obviously, in the old days, there wasn’t a GCP or an Azure—I think they were in their infancy—there was AWS… and then there was AWS, right? And so I think eventually though you’re right, you’re absolutely right. Can I increase my availability and my reliability by adopting multiple clouds?

As I talk to people, as I see how we’re adopting the multiple clouds, I think realistically though what it comes down to is you adopted cloud, or teams adopt a cloud specifically for, I wouldn’t say some of the foundational services, but mostly about those higher-level niche services that we like. For example, if you know large-scale data warehousing, a lot of people are adopting BigQuery and GCP because of that. If you like general purpose compute and you love the Lambdas, you’re adopting AWS and so on, and so forth. And that’s what I see more than anything is, I really like a cloud’s particular higher level service and we go and we adopt it, we love it, and then we build our infrastructure around it. From a practical perspective, that’s what I see.

I’m still hopeful, though, that there is a future somewhere there where we can commoditize even the cloud providers, maybe [laugh]. And really go from Cloud A to Cloud B to Cloud C, and just adopt it based on pricing I get that’s cheaper, or more performant, or whatever other dimensions that are important to me. But maybe, maybe. We’ll remain hopeful. [laugh].

Jason: Yeah, we’re still very much in that spot where everybody, despite even the basics of if I want to a virtual machine, those are still so different between all the clouds. And I mean even last week, I was working on some Terraform and the idea of building it modularly, and in my head thinking, “Well, at some point, we might want to use one of the other clouds so let’s build this module,” and thinking, “Realistically, that’s probably not going to happen.”

John: [laugh]. Right. I would say that there’s the other hidden cost about this and it’s the operational costs. I don’t think we spend a whole lot of time talking about operational costs, necessarily, but what is it going to cost to retrain my DevOps team to move from AWS to GCP, as an example? W...