Welcome to another episode of Densify Talks! Andrew Hillier has a fun and informative conversation with Viktor Farcic.

Viktor considers himself a technology critic (think of the old muppet critics on the balcony) and rapscallion. We think he’s also quite the thought leader and author, with some very bold insights on technology that are worth hearing! See Viktor’s biography below for more information about him.

Andrew and Viktor dive into the maturing landscape of Kubernetes, asking the question “is Kubernetes now “boring”?” It’s a good question and Viktor and Andrew have great thoughts on it!

They also tackle AI and where it’s currently at (including Viktor’s experiences with AI recently). Andrew and Viktor talk about their experiences with KubeCon over the years and where it might be going in the future. They discuss optimization, cloud costs, automation, GitOps, VPA, Densify’s new Mutating Admission Controller, and what’s likely to come in the near future. For fun, we also get to hear Viktor’s strong opinions on Helm!

We hope you get as much out of this episode as we did!

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Viktor Farcic

Viktor Farcic is a lead rapscallion at Upbound (https://upbound.io), a member of the CNCF Ambassadors, Google Developer Experts, CDF Ambassadors, and GitHub Stars groups, and a published author.

He is a host of the YouTube channel DevOps Toolkit (https://youtube.com/@devopstoolkit) and a co-host of DevOps Paradox (https://youtube.com/@devopsparadox).

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
• upbound.io
• youtube.com/@devopstoolkit
• youtube.com/@devopsparadox

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