Welcome to another episode of Densify Talks! We’re excited and honored to welcome Brent Eubanks, FinOps Architect at Wayfair. Brent brings a wealth of knowledge and years of experience in the FinOps realm from his time at Ticketmaster, Citi, Box, and now Wayfair.

Our host Andrew Hillier, CTO and Co-Founder of Densify, sits down with Brent to discuss containers, FinOps, resource optimization, AI, and Kubernetes to name a few topics.

Brent shares his insights on resource waste, and highlights his strategic approach with seven tactics to optimization. Andrew and Brent discuss the challenges of interfacing with engineering teams and how to approach that with a really helpful tip! They talk about the costs of AI, AI as an asset, and solving specific business problems with AI. Brent also shares some of his very fascinating non-work projects that he’s working on.

It’s an information and wisdom-packed episode! Make sure to take some notes from today’s episode. We hope it’s as valuable for you as it was for us!

ABOUT OUR GUEST:

Brent Eubanks

Brent Eubanks is the FinOps Architect at Wayfair. He’s a hands-on leader with a passion for innovating on technologies, building effective teams and a focus on delivering competitively superior FinOps technology solutions to the business while growing people in the organization and quantifying IT transformation. Design, implement, operate platforms using AI/ML, data lake, LLM local with prompt chaining and superprompts to optimize the engineers efficiency.

Brent is a digital service efficiency expert to help enterprises plan, govern, and understand the business value to facilitate self-optimizing and self-governing DevOps CICD pipelines. Solution development and Architect optimal L1-7 stacks using Kubernetes, Serverless, AWS GCP Azure. AI ML Data Science foundation models and data exploration analytics to interact with data streams and explore price performance value.

Brent strives to achieve 'Cognitive Application Focused Environments' as a key component that will blend architecture design, robotics process automation and intercloud interoperability with process, and policy interactions to enable actions to instantly scale, migrate, administer, model, and decide autonomously how to best service the applications needs.

Cloud leaders must have the right digital economics reports, dashboards, interactive decisioning frameworks to prove that the enterprise Cloud/Colo budget $ is being spent better than last year in the context of that Enterprise Business Unit’s unique needs. Brent does that by combining the vision, context, AI/ML data lake of the existing Cloud estate to produce these ITBM and FinOps valuable insights to quantify business transformation, quantify agility of IT, and track personal progress of maturity of all functional domains among the Enterprise executives.

Brent’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brenteubanks/

ABOUT DENSIFY TALKS:

Densify Talks is a podcast hosted by Andrew Hillier, Co-Founder and CTO of Densify, a cloud optimization software company. The podcast focuses on interviews with IT and technical leaders and innovators who have experience in delivering cloud and Kubernetes-based infrastructure within large enterprises.

LINKS:

• densify.com
• Papers Mentioned in the Episode:
  • https://www.finops.org/wg/effect-of-optimization-on-ai-forecasting/
  • https://www.finops.org/wg/finops-for-ai-overview/

On this episode of Densify Talks, we welcome Vladimir Remenar, Director of IT Operations at Raiffeisen Bank in Croatia. Andrew Hillier and Vladimir Remenar dive into container optimization strategies and cloud migration, discussing Raiffeisen’s processes and innovative practices.

Raiffeisen Bank was early in the automation of optimization. Vladimir shares why that was the case and what that meant for Raiffeisen. He also discusses Raiffeisen’s migration to cloud journey and shares challenges, benefits, and lessons learned along the way.

Andrew and Vladimir talk about Openshift license costs and Openshift to EKS. One of Densify’s beliefs is using cloud as intended, using standard and open frameworks, and not locking in.

They move into the topic of FinOps and highlight how Raiffeisen approaches financial operations in their cloud journey, and the importance of continuous optimization for seamless operations.

Andrew and Vladimir also cover additional topics, including Vladimir’s professional journey in the banking industry, his personal passions for fishing and boating, and their perspectives on future trends coming in the industry.

ABOUT OUR GUEST:

Vladimir Remenar

Vladimir Remenar is the Director of IT Operations at Raiffeisen Bank in Croatia. He’s involved in planning, designing, documenting and leading some of the largest IT infrastructure projects. Vladimir is passionate about cyber security, security related research and mobile phone forensics.

Vladimir Remenar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vremenar

ABOUT DENSIFY TALKS:

Densify Talks is a podcast hosted by Andrew Hillier, Co-Founder and CTO of Densify, a cloud optimization software company. The podcast focuses on interviews with IT and technical leaders and innovators who have experience in delivering cloud and Kubernetes-based infrastructure within large enterprises.

LINKS:

• densify.com
• Vladimir Remenar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vremenar

Andrew Hillier and Ashley Rodrigue from Intel Corporation have a wealth of fantastic information for you on this episode of Densify Talks! They start off by sharing the benefits of the connection and partnership between Intel and Densify, highlighting how it benefits not only the two companies but also their customers.

Ashley discusses how Intel® Cloud Optimizer is revolutionizing cloud efficiency and tackling container-related inefficiencies. She also provides a closer look at Intel's cutting-edge 5th Gen Intel Xeon Processors and their performance improvements.

Andrew and Ashley talk about the regional availability of products and how Intel Foundry fits into that, reducing “hoarding” issues. Ashley had the privilege of touring one of Intel’s production facilities and shares the impact and benefits of in-house production.

They also discuss Intel and ASML’s partnership in High NA EUV technology, FinOps trends and future directions, and touch on containers and guardrails. However, they’re saving the bulk of that discussion for a future episode.

If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe to the DENSIFY TALKS podcast ASAP so you don’t miss an episode!

ABOUT OUR GUEST:

Ashley Rodrigue

As an Intel Cloud Partner Manager, Ashley works with industry-leading cloud partners to deliver maximum value to customers who run on Intel in the cloud. Prior to this role, Ashley was an Account Executive at Intel working with large enterprise customers in the NY metro area, helping them run best on Intel from the edge to the cloud. Before joining Intel in 2014, Ashley was an Ambassador at Lenovo where she conducted briefings for the press, customers, and business partners in North America.

Ashley holds an MBA with a concentration in marketing from the University of Maine. As part of Ashley’s graduate assistantship, she worked at the University of Maine’s Technology Business Incubator helping several start-up companies conduct market research, write business plans, and launch their solutions.

ABOUT DENSIFY TALKS:

Densify Talks is a podcast hosted by Andrew Hillier, Co-Founder and CTO of Densify, a cloud optimization software company. The podcast focuses on interviews with IT and technical leaders and innovators who have experience in delivering cloud and Kubernetes-based infrastructure within large enterprises.