Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: IPv6 gets stabbed in the back, Fintech firms’ valuations are falling, and the latest browser war seems to be over—Firefox lost. (more…)
The week began with rumors that Broadcom would acquire VMware and ended with the news that the deal is all but done. The VMware board, along with Michael Dell (who still owns about 41% of VMware’s stock), have a 40-day “go-shop” option; however, I don’t believe there will be other suitors.
On Tuesday, I published an article about Broadcom’s desperation to gain cloud relevance and transform itself into a software company. I detailed the fact that VMware’s profitable business model and its nearly $4 billion of free cash flow makes it an attractive acquisition target. Finally, I said that Broadcom needed to find innovative DNA to make this acquisition work.
After thinking further about this proposed acquisition and talking to a number of VMware customers, as well as customers of CA Technology, which was acquired by Broadcom in July 2018, my outlook on the acquisition has become decidedly more cynical and likely more realistic.
We have seen this scenario play out before. Several former CA Technology customers and employees I spoke to was quick to say, “CA—where software goes to die.” That phrase has become so synonymous with CA that even the Wikipedia page for the company has a section on the phrase! Joking aside, most CA customers I spoke with over the last week agreed that since their acquisition, the company has “gone dark.” CA Technologies was a profitable company with important software that enterprise clients relied on and couldn’t easily transition away from. Sound familiar? VMware is in the exact same spot.
Soon after the CA acquisition, Broadcom slashed about 40% of the CA workforce. On an analyst call to discuss the acquisition, Tom Krause, president, Broadcom Software Group (the Software Group will be renamed VMware) said that the company will increase VMware earnings from $4.7 billion to $8.5 billion within the next three years. How will the company nearly double earnings? “Synergies,” of course. The drivers of growth will be savings generated by eliminating duplicate functions in the combined company along with projections of more workloads running on the VMware platform.
Do I expect Broadcom to change its corporate DNA to become an innovator? Will VMware innovators change Broadcom? Based on Broadcom’s past behavior, sadly, I think the answer is clear—No.
I expect VMware to quickly cut costs across the board. Everything from headcount to R&D will see an immediate slash.
You might argue that VMware has gone through this before when they were acquired by Dell and later set free by Dell Technologies in a 2021 spinoff. Why is this acquisition different? The Dell deal was, at its core, financial maneuvering to finance a deal and enrich investors with the goal of selling or taking the businesses public at a much higher market valuation. There was little cross-pollination between the Dell Technologies companies, and in this deal, Dell acted more like a private equity firm than an acquiring company.
Broadcom is different. VMware is going to be milked as a cash cow as Broadcom tries to leverage VMware’s importance in the data center. VMware has huge cloud computing customers (AWS, for one) that are reliant on the company’s technology. If you are a VMware customer, get ready for higher prices as the company shifts to more of a subscription model. I also suspect that we will see large layoffs and the diminution of VMware as an entity. This is the end—VMware is not going to have another opportunity to go public on its own or go private in the future.
I also don’t expect huge technology advancements from VMware over the next decade; but the company won’t die. The company will continue to exist because of the mere fact that enterprise software never dies.
This isn’t the end of technology acquisitions; nor is it a one-off event. Within the current market conditions, software vendor valuations have come crashing down to a more realistic level. I suspect that many large businesses with cash on hand will be looking to buy profitable software businesses that are viewed as essential. So, what should technology and business leaders do?
At its swampUP event, JFrog launched a JFrog Connect platform for updating, managing, monitoring and securing remote Linux and internet of things (IoT) devices.
The JFrog Connect platform is based on a lightweight agent JFrog gained last year with the acquisition of Upswift and that has now been integrated with the JFrog Artifactory repository. DevOps teams can now use a low-code tool to build flow logic that is integrated with a Git repository in addition to triggering a rollback to ensure a device returns to its previous known software state when necessary.
DevOps teams will also be able to connect to a wide range of Linux-based IoT devices from anywhere in the world and then manage and monitor them in real-time by name, description or tags.
JFrog CTO Yoav Landman said in the near future, DevOps teams will find themselves building and deploying applications that will not only be deployed on fleets of endpoints at the network edge, but also will be continuously updated.
Historically, those endpoints have been managed mainly by operations technology (OT) teams, but it will soon be up to DevOps teams to automate the management of those platforms down to an individual container using the lightweight agent created by Upswift, he said.
The number of application workloads being deployed on edge computing platforms is rising sharply as organizations seek to process and analyze data closer to the point where it is being created and consumed. In fact, that shift is at the core of digital business transformation initiatives that depend on edge computing platforms and devices running, for example, IoT applications that process data in near-real-time.
The challenge today is in many cases organizations lack the ability to consistently deploy software on edge computing platforms, which results in the creation of a hodgepodge of homegrown tools to manually deploy software on edge computing platforms. There is a clear need to raise the DevOps bar to address edge computing requirements, said Landman.
It’s too early to say just how much software will be deployed on the edge, but there may come a day when there is more software at the edge than there is in the cloud. In the meantime, the line between edge computing and cloud computing continues to blur. Many more DevOps teams will soon find themselves managing thousands of distributed endpoints from a central cloud.
In the meantime, DevOps teams should expect to find themselves working more closely with OT teams that generally have a significantly different culture. Many of those OT teams are just now coming to terms with the implications of connecting endpoints to the internet. The need to continuously update the software on those platforms is not typically the first issue that comes to mind for them. Today much of the software running on edge computing platforms is rarely updated. In the future, however, that software is likely to be updated at a rate that many OT teams are not ready to envision much less manage.
Broadcom today pulled the trigger on an acquisition of VMware for $61 billion in cash and stock that could dramatically expand its software portfolio.
Tom Krause, president of the Broadcom Software Group, told investors that the Broadcom infrastructure software group will become part of VMware once the deal closes. The deal, however, includes a 40-day “go shop” option for VMware to court another suitor who might be willing to acquire VMware at a higher price.
Should the deal close, Broadcom is committed to melding its portfolio of DevOps, AIOps and security offerings with the VMware portfolio, said Krause. Broadcom acquired CA Technologies in 2018 and the enterprise division of Symantec in 2019.
Krause said Broadcom plans to invest in the core VMware vSphere, vSAN and vRealize management software platforms that drive the most revenue for VMware today. Broadcom is also committed to increasing VMware earnings from $4.7 billion to $8.5 billion within the next three years. The primary driver of that growth will be savings generated by eliminating duplicate functions in the combined company and a forecasted increase in the volume of workload running on VMware platforms, said Krause. There are currently 300,000 vSphere customers that are increasing the number of workloads they are deploying both in the cloud and in on-premises IT environments, he noted.
Broadcom is also committed to shifting as many customers as possible away from perpetual software licenses to subscriptions that generate more consistent recurring revenues, added Krause. VMware today reported revenue for the first quarter of fiscal 2023 was $3.09 billion, an increase of 3% from the first quarter of fiscal 2022. Subscription and software-as-a-service applications accounted for 29% of total revenue for the quarter. Subscription and SaaS revenue for the first quarter was $899 million, an increase of 21% year-over-year.
Dan Kirsch, principal analyst and managing director for Techstrong Research, an arm of the parent company of DevOps.com, said given the size of the deal, many existing VMware customers are naturally going to be nervous. The primary concern will be the degree to which Broadcom might attempt to increase licensing fees to meet its financial goals, he noted.
The acquisition of VMware comes at a time when the number of workloads being deployed in the cloud is far outpacing the rate at which workloads are being deployed in on-premises IT environments. The bulk of those workloads run on non-VMware-based hypervisors. However, many of the workloads that run on VMware today in a data center are being shifted to the cloud. VMware has also invested in building a Tanzu platform for building and deploying cloud-native applications on Kubernetes clusters.
Broadcom is committed to investing in research and development across the combined software portfolio, said Krause.
It remains to be seen how much of the VMware employee base will remain with the combined company. It’s not uncommon for there to be a ‘brain drain’ in the wake of a major merger, noted Kirsch.
Whether or not the deal closes, a lot of IT teams will, at the very least, be reviewing their VMware software portfolio in the weeks ahead as the new Broadcom-VMware entity evolves. In fact, it’s likely that the acquisition of VMware will set off a wave of mergers and acquisitions during what appears to be an economic downturn. That means regular reviews of vendor relationships will soon be the order of the day for a wide range of IT organizations.
Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: Golang goes from zero to hero, will Broadcom buy VMware? And limitless vacation is still a Thing. (more…)
WhiteSource rechristened itself Mend today and launched a remediation platform that automatically resolves security issues for application developers.
Rami Sass, co-founder and CEO of Mend, said now the company is going beyond just identifying vulnerabilities in open source software using software composition analysis (SCA) tools and is also fixing them. The overall goal is to make it simpler for developers to address security issues without taking time away from writing code or slowing down the rate at which applications are developed, he added.
To further that effort, Mend also announced today it is making available a plug-in for JFrog Artifactory that enables Mend Supply Chain Defender, formerly WhiteSource Diffend, to enable detection of malicious open source code. Last year the company acquired Diffend followed by the acquisition of two startup providers of static analysis security testing (SAST) tools.
Collectively, those applications enabled the company to build the Mend Application Security Platform, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that combines SCA and SAST tools to create an automated remediation framework that can be applied to both open source and proprietary code residing in a repository.
Mend claimed it added more than 350 customers in the last year to bring its total to more than 1,000 organizations. Most recently, the company raised an additional $75 million in financing to continue investing in a platform specifically designed to address application security issues. In the wake of a series of high-profile security breaches involving software supply chains, Sass noted there is now a much greater appreciation for securing applications and that demand for application security solutions is growing. That demand, in turn, is fueling a wave of consolidation that is, in part, enabled by the convergence of application security tools made available via a SaaS platform, he added.
Historically, much of the focus on application security focused on discovering vulnerabilities that developers are asked to patch. The issue is that developers are being asked to patch the same modules repeatedly. The Mend Application Security Platform keeps track of what modules have been successfully updated to give developers higher confidence in the updates being applied, said Sass.
Those recommendations are not being surfaced using machine learning algorithms but rather by the data analytics capabilities that have been added to the company’s portfolio of tools over time, he noted.
While there may never be such a thing as perfect security it’s apparent that most application security issues can be traced back to relatively common mistakes that developers routinely make. The more those issues are surfaced within a developer workflow, the less dependent organizations will need to be on embedding guardrails within DevSecOps workflows to prevent vulnerabilities from finding their way into production environment. The Mend Application Security Platform doesn’t eliminate the need for those guardrails as much as it reduces the sheer volume of security issues that might otherwise need to be addressed.
It may be a while before these more advanced developer security tools achieve that result, but it’s clear from how quickly advances are being made that such tools should have a material impact on the overall state of application security.
Rumors are swirling that Broadcom wants to buy its way into the growing hybrid cloud market by acquiring VMware. The deal won’t come cheap—after news of the potential deal surfaced, VMware’s market cap soared to around $50 billion. Yes, billion with a ‘B’.
As interest rates increase and investors reevaluate many of the lofty software company valuations, I expect to hear many more acquisition rumors. During this time of uncertainty, cash-flush vendors are going to be on the hunt for software vendors that can provide a technology platform, have large partner ecosystems and that also produce reliable revenue.
Broadcom has a nice, solid business producing semiconductors for smartphone makers as well as storage and networking devices used in large data centers. However, like many hardware companies, the business has been desperately trying to break into the software industry. Why? There’s a semiconductor shortage and the company is in the right market at the right time. However, the company’s leadership knows that market conditions change. Software margins are significantly higher than hardware deals, and R&D and manufacturing costs for semiconductors are notoriously high.
VMware has grown to become a large cloud technology platform, not just a virtualization offering. If Broadcom is able to successfully close on this deal, it will instantly own one of the largest cloud software platforms in the industry. In addition to acquiring large enterprise customers, the VMware partner ecosystem is important. For example, I believe that the NVIDIA partnership will be a profitable one for VMware. The two companies have been working together to create a platform to support AI-based applications for the data center, cloud and at the edge.
In a time when some cloud businesses are experiencing wild fluctuations because of their lack of profitability, the VMware business model is solid. However, these fundamentals are also why the company is ripe for acquisition. In its fiscal year 2022, the company reported $12.85 billion in revenue and $6.33 billion in subscription and SaaS licensing revenue. Free cash flow for fiscal year 2022 was nearly $4 billion.
Let’s quickly contrast VMware to the cloud data warehouse Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW). Snowflake’s market capitalization is around $40 billion and within the last year was well over $120 billion. Meanwhile, the company’s revenue is around $1.2 billion and it is struggling to find a path to profitability. If you were hunting to acquire a software business during a time when financial indicators are flashing red, which business model would you prefer?
I mentioned that Broadcom is desperate to gain relevance in the software industry. Why do I say this? The company’s recent acquisitions showed a clear pattern emerging—Broadcom has been trying to acquire its way into software.
In 2018 the company acquired CA Technologies for nearly $19 billion. The following year, Broadcom acquired Symantec’s enterprise cybersecurity business for $10.7 billion. In addition, there were rumors that Broadcom was planning to acquire SAS Institute, the privately held analytics vendor, for somewhere around $15 billion to $20 billion. Those talks fell through when the SAS Institute’s aging co-founders and majority stakeholders announced a plan to go public in 2024.
This M&A strategy might seem strange to many, but Broadcom originally tried growing through the acquisition of companies similar to itself. In 2018, the company made an offer of $117 billion to acquire chip producer Qualcomm. Broadcom later withdrew the bid when it became clear that the Trump administration pushed hard to prevent the deal, citing national security concerns.
Although this latest deal would face governmental review and the Biden administration previously voiced concerns over tech mega-mergers and monopolies, we have not seen the administration prevent similar deals.
The market is full of cautionary tales of software vendors that were acquired only to be slowly destroyed. A successful acquisition would require Broadcom to tread lightly and maintain the elements that have made VMware the company that it is today. Below are three priorities that Broadcom should focus on if the deal is completed.
Keep VMware independent: It is critical that VMware does not show favoritism toward one chip maker. VMware’s largest customers use chips from Intel as well as other manufacturers. If Broadcom tries to steer VMware toward its own chips exclusively, the backlash could quickly undercut the value of the acquisition. In addition, it’s my belief that the hybrid and multi-cloud models are here to stay (rather than a single cloud approach). Customers expect vendors to work with each other and are reluctant to accept single stack proprietary approaches.
Find innovative DNA and facilitate business unit collaboration opportunities: Hock Tan, Broadcom’s CEO, is very well respected in the industry; however, the company is not known for software innovation. Although I expect VMware to remain a standalone business unit (similar to CA’s current position within Broadcom’s ecosystem), it will be important to foster innovation. Broadcom should accelerate VMware investments, like Project Monterey and the NVIDIA partnership, while looking for new investment opportunities. Perhaps Broadcom could provide VMware with custom chips to help accelerate Project Monterey, but this sort of line-of-business collaborative innovation hasn’t been the model for Broadcom’s other software acquisitions. It should be.
Nurture the partnership network: The next phase for the VMware partner ecosystem will require partners to understand the company’s vision for the future. What will the acquisition mean for partners? Will they have access to more solution selling that combines VMware and Broadcom technologies? How can existing Broadcom partners join the VMware partnership ecosystem? That will be another big question.
It will be extremely interesting to see how this plays out. We’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this potential merger of two heavyweights!
A survey published today for National DevOps Day found nearly two-thirds (63%) have seen an increase in the frequency of service incidents that have affected their customers over the course of the last 14 months.
The survey polled 1,046 engineering, IT operations, DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) professionals at organizations with more than 300 employees. The research was conducted by Transposit, a provider of a platform for connecting DevOps workflows, and found well over half (58%) of respondents reported the cost of downtime for their organization could be, on average, up to $499,999 per hour, with 40% of respondents noting that the cost of downtime has increased in the last year.
Respondents said the top contributing factors to the increase in service incidents were digital transformation (61%), new product rollouts or product updates (55%) and methods and tools for collaboration that do not adequately support their team working remotely (49%). A full 90% of respondents reported there has been an increased focus on digital transformation during the last year with 73% having expanded the technology stack they support. More than half (55%) have increased the size of their DevOps teams.
Overall, 46% of organizations reported they have experienced between six and 19 major incidents over the course of the last 12 months. More than half (53%) also reported an increase in the amount of time it takes to resolve incidents over the course of the last year, even though three-quarters of respondents (75%) said their organization increased their adoption of SRE practices in the last 12 months. Additionally, 65.1% of those organizations planned to hire site reliability engineers in the next 12 months. However, only just over a third of those respondents said their organization planned to expand their SRE efforts in 2022.
A full 83% said up to 50% of their engineering operations processes are automated, but over half of the respondents that use SRE practices noted they still manually enter data into an IT service management (ITSM) application or other system-of-record to keep track of actions that were taken by humans during the resolution of an incident. Nearly two-thirds said their approach to automation was incremental, in which they begin by codifying processes and worked up to more advanced, fully automated scenarios.
The top three tasks respondents would like to automate were service requests (53%), change requests (43%) and user provisioning (40%).The top barriers to implementing automation were cited as inadequate documentation of institutional knowledge and existing processes (56%), lack of clarity about what to automate (55%) and an inability to share knowledge (52%).
Investments to improve their incident management processes over the next 12 months are focused on automation tools or applications (48%), communications/collaboration tools or applications (42%) and integration tools or applications (41%). Only a quarter (25%) said their tools are integrated through one tool or platform.
Lack of unified communication with teammates (45%), processes that have changed or are harder to follow while working remotely (42%) and lack of visibility into dependencies and what teams or people are responsible for the code or infrastructure (38%) are all cited as reasons why serviced requests are now more complex.
Transposit CEO Divanny Lamas said despite all the challenges facing DevOps teams, it’s fortunate that advances in low-code automation are making it simpler to more widely implement DevOps best practices. The challenge is finding a way to implement those best practices faster at a time when IT environments are becoming more complex.
DevOps and cloud-native technologies are changing the application development landscape, accelerating the pace of innovation and transforming the way organizations develop, deploy and employ modern software. The DevOps/Cloud-Native Live! event is coming to Boston on May 25 to provide attendees with all the knowledge and tools they need to succeed in the world of DevOps and cloud-native computing.
This in-person event will bring together DevOps luminaries and cloud-native experts to discuss some of the hottest topics in the industry today, share valuable insights and offer hands-on training to all attendees to help them future-proof their careers and stay ahead of the competition.
DevOps/Cloud-Native Live! Boston features a stellar lineup of speakers, including:
At the conference, attendees will have the opportunity to meet these leaders and speakers, exchange ideas and information with like-minded peers, attend educational sessions and get certified by completing upskilling sessions. These upskilling sessions are designed to help both new and seasoned engineers hone their skills, adapt for future growth and improve operational efficiency.
Joshua Mazgelis, cloud architect and senior sales engineer at Progress will be conducting a hands-on training session on “Cloud Agility with Chef.” In this session, attendees will learn how they can improve cloud security and compliance without sacrificing agility and how to use Chef software to detect, correct and automate remediation of security vulnerabilities across the infrastructure.
Check out our interview with Joshua Mazgelis below for a sneak peek of what to expect from the “Cloud Agility with Chef” upskilling session.
[videopress oyeKYTnR]
The agenda for DevOps/Cloud-Native Live! Boston features a mix of topics, including technical sessions, lively discussions and case studies covering digital transformation, DevOps principles, Kubernetes, cloud-native tools, DevSecOps, API security, monitoring and observability, ITIL v4 and more.
There will also be two amazing onsite giveaways:
By visiting the expo hall, attendees will also be able to interact with sponsors and receive valuable content. Breakfast, lunch and coffee will be offered to all attendees as well.
To see the full agenda and to register, please visit the DevOps/Cloud-Native Live! Boston website.
Scream if you want to go faster! When it comes to a dual hybrid-cloud-and-DevOps rollout, most organizations would admit they’re eager to get going a little bit faster. But what started so enthusiastically can turn to frustration (and a different kind of screaming starts) when they’ve accelerated into this major transformation without considering all the necessary elements.
The benefits are clear. Hybrid cloud backed up by DevOps is an efficient vehicle for change. A robust DevOps platform can be a make-or-break factor in developing a hybrid cloud strategy that goes the distance. Together, they are a force for transformation, and if organizations aren’t already implementing both DevOps and hybrid cloud, they should be asking themselves why not.
It is true that the move to hybrid cloud is a different journey for cloud-enabled organizations than it is for cloud-native ones. The trip is harder for cloud-enabled, particularly for larger enterprises. Increased release frequency requires tighter alignment and collaboration than is traditionally seen between lines of business, development and IT operations, and this, in turn, drives the need for enhanced collaboration, automation and information transparency.
But although the transition might be harder, it must be seen as inevitable. Organizations could wait another year, maybe a little more, but the transformation of technology and business is going to happen—so why not get started? In the first of two articles, I’m going to take a look at what needs to change so that organizations can start living life in the hybrid cloud and DevOps fast lane.
As has been covered in these pages in some detail already, the move to hybrid cloud backed by DevOps is doomed to fail if organizations think all they need to worry about is tooling and hiring. It’s not. Underlying both of these transformations is a sweeping cultural change. DevOps is about agility, trust and autonomy, and so is hybrid cloud.
Most of all, though, DevOps and hybrid cloud are a commitment to enhancing an organization’s developer experience (DevX), and that’s not something that can be achieved with simply a ticketing tool or by adopting a GitOps approach. DevX means autonomous, unbound movement. It means empowerment, user experience and self-service. These are changes that can only happen with a successful change in business culture, not a tool. And this is an important starting point that many organizations are still struggling to understand.
People are another well-worn topic, but one that continues to present a major challenge. The cultural transition required to successfully implement DevOps can, theoretically, start with just one person. But for a successful outcome, it actually requires long-term change as deeply-ingrained beliefs are disbanded and tribal loyalties are broken down.
For instance, many believe that implementing DevOps requires hiring new people. That belief embraces two fallacies: One, that organizations will be able to hire the teams they need and two, that DevOps is just a job title. As we know, a good DevOps team is not hired, it is developed through the melding of development and operations. The old silos, where devs developed and ops operated, is a relic from less-enlightened times.
Today, it requires learning how to build automation, often open source, while managing on-premises, private and public cloud infrastructure. DevOps is a philosophy that seeks to help others, and with that comes the need for collaboration, encouragement, persuasion and other soft skills.
Moving to a hybrid cloud means that more care needs to be taken with regard to security and privacy. One of the main problems is that it’s no longer enough for security teams to reign from on high. With control moving from the server room to the cloud and from highly-siloed ops engineers to the whole team, security policies also need to change. Competent developers will make the right decisions, but they need the right bottom-up tooling that takes their decisions from theory to reality and safeguards those who aren’t as aware.
These must be a catalyst to make organizations sit up and take a long look at what security in the age of cloud, containers and microservices really means. If the simultaneous move to DevOps and hybrid cloud is that catalyst, then so be it. Just as DevOps is revolutionizing the way teams approach their work, DevSecOps is going to revolutionize the way they look at security.
Security shows its face at various stages of infrastructure: When a cloud organization is created and structured; when a vault is integrated to ensure that key passwords are secured and even when a pipeline is launched that triggers dedicated security software. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it illustrates how organizations need to start taking a methodical, step-by-step look at security in their hybrid cloud.
Gartner recently found that the average company uses 28 infrastructure tools. That’s simply too many to be handled and understood by one person. Even specialist DevOps engineers can’t be experts in all the cloud providers, OpenStack and VMware. Other studies showed that a developer generally only uses 5% of their Git repositories or an average of five repositories.
The mistake lots of companies make is thinking that suddenly shifting to using APIs with a GitOps approach is adequate to handle the change to hybrid cloud. It’s not, and can actually be detrimental to DevX. Why? There’s too big a gap—it’s like just doing a long weekly run the day before a marathon. You might start, but you’ll be severely compromising your ability to meet your goal. Even DevOps engineers struggle to maintain a single source of truth and well-maintained reusable repositories.
The solution is to plan for the long term. It’s not realistic to believe that one or two DevOps engineers can be the saviors of a hybrid cloud approach. There are far too many tools, best practices and options—between Ansible, Terraform, Kubernetes and Concourse CI/CD to name just a few—to be managed by a handful of devs, no matter how talented they are.
That’s why the true way to hybrid cloud mastery lies in the ability to get the whole tech team pulling in the same direction, collaborating, upskilling and leveraging their strengths to support the parts that make the whole. This might sound like a pipe dream, but there are companies out there talking the talk and walking the walk.
It is futile to tell an organization exactly how to get started since many are already taking the first steps and every organization’s situation is unique. There is more to cover; in the next installment, I’ll be taking a look at areas like FinOps, automation and cloud waste. Hopefully, you’ll see the fast lane is clear up ahead.