Ready for AWS re:Invent 2023? Attending the show? Make sure to visit with Quali.
AWS re:Invent 2023 takes place November 27 - December 1, 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada, across multiple venues.
Read this exclusive interview between VMblog and Colin Neagle, VP Growth Marketing at Quali, a leading provider of Environments-as-a-Service infrastructure automation and management solutions.
VMblog: If you
were giving an AWS re:Invent attendee a quick overview of the company, what
would you say? How would you describe
the company?
Colin Neagle: At our core, Quali is an
infrastructure automation company. But over the years, our platform has evolved
to support how hybrid cloud infrastructure is used. We describe this shift in
approach as offering a control plane to help our customers move faster in the
cloud without sacrificing efficiency or security. In practice this means simplifying
infrastructure so more stakeholders can use it, using automation to optimize
how they use it, and providing visibility to help leadership understand how it's
being used.
VMblog: Your
company is sponsoring this year's AWS re:Invent event. Can you talk about what that sponsorship
looks like?
Neagle: We've been an AWS partner for years
and have sponsored AWS customer-facing events regularly. There are few better
opportunities to get feedback on our product strategy than to speak with the
AWS community face-to-face and learn about what's important to them. We're
heading to Vegas with several members of our technical staff and ecosystem
partnership development, and we're excited to hear about what the community is
interested in.
VMblog: How can
attendees of the event find you? What do
you have planned at your booth this year?
What type of things will attendees be able to do at your booth?
Neagle: We're very fortunate this year to
have a booth in the Infrastructure Solutions zone. Our actual booth number is 512,
and you can find the Infrastructure Solutions zone just to the left after
entering the expo hall. Of course, we'll have some giveaways and raffles at the
booth, and our team will be demonstrating our SaaS platform, Torque, at the
booth.
VMblog: Have you sponsored AWS re:Invent in the past? If so,
what is it about this show that keeps you coming back as a sponsor?
Neagle: We have. Aside from it being one of the largest annual
cloud-focused events in the country, re:Invent brings together the people who can
give us the most valuable feedback on our products. It's also a great
opportunity to keep up with the latest updates from AWS and get the perspective
from the AWS community.
VMblog: What do you attribute to the success and growth of this
industry?
Neagle: It's an interesting time to consider that question
because I think a lot of people are starting to wonder whether their foray into
the public cloud has been successful. Of course, the cloud industry has been
revolutionary, making enterprise-grade technology accessible to anyone with a
computer and a credit card. Thinking about things like machine learning and
artificial intelligence-they've lowered the barrier for those types of
technologies, and that impact is hard to quantify.
But it's not hard to find surveys and interviews
where enterprise technology and engineering leaders are starting to question
their investment in public cloud. Revenue is down, budgets are tight, and
almost everyone is feeling pressure to show immediate ROI on every dollar
spent.
And what we often remind our customers is that the
ROI is in how you use the cloud. If you don't use it responsibly, you'll blow
out your budget. If you tighten up your processes to focus on cost efficiency,
you'll bring things grinding to a halt and diminish the velocity that makes the
cloud so valuable in the first place.
So to answer your question, it's the velocity that
has made the public cloud so successful. And as enterprises find ways to take
advantage of that velocity while maintaining efficiency, there's no reason the
industry should slow down.
VMblog: What kind
of message will an attendee hear from you this year? What will they take back to help sell their
management team and decision makers?
Neagle: I would say that it's time to take a
developer- or end user-centric approach to the cloud. So many of the cloud
management platforms that helped drive the growth of public cloud in the past
decade-plus have not evolved in tandem with the way that developers and
engineers use the cloud today. It's not enough anymore to know which cloud
services are powering your application or what showed up on the cloud bill,
because that information doesn't provide the context you need to make decisions
that drive ROI in the cloud. Today you need to accommodate the open-source
ecosystem that your teams rely on to provision and access cloud infrastructure.
And that extends to visibility and governance. If your teams are using a suite
of tools to move faster in the cloud, what are you doing to make sure you can
see what they're running? How do you support developer experience without incurring
security risks or seeing a spike in cloud spend? There are ways to move faster
in the cloud without incurring the budgetary or security risks of unmanaged
usage. And it starts with a focus on the engineers and developers who use the
cloud.
VMblog: Can you
double click on your company's technologies?
And talk about the types of problems you solve for an AWS re:Invent attendee.
Neagle: We're a lightweight SaaS platform
that bridges the gap between where cloud infrastructure is defined and where it
is consumed. Typically, when someone-for example a developer or a software
tester-needs to run a cloud environment, they have to request someone with
expertise in cloud infrastructure to provision it for them. Which pulls them
away from their work and naturally leads to delays.
At the same time, that provisioning process
leaves room for misconfigurations and idle cloud resources that drive up budget
and create security risks. So, in a lot of cases, you have a situation where
cloud operations are slow but still aren't standardized in a way to maintain
efficiency and security.
Our platform leverages our users'
existing cloud resources configurations and makes them digestible and
repeatable for the stakeholders who need to run them. So, a tester can deploy a
pre-configured testing environment every time they need it, directly within the
CI/CD or other tool they rely on. And they don't need to learn how to use
Terraform or CloudFormation or whatever tool was used to define those cloud
services.
And since our platform orchestrates
and launches those cloud services, you can track who's running which resources,
track costs based on the team who launched them, and enforce rules to deny deployments
with misconfigurations or overly expensive resources.
VMblog: While
thinking about your company's solutions, can you give readers a few examples of
how your offerings are unique? What are
your differentiators? What sets you
apart from the competition?
Neagle: The way we help manage cloud costs
is definitely unique. Most cloud cost management tools rely on cloud billing
data and focus on things like discount pricing opportunities. Since our
platform defines and deploys cloud resources, we can calculate costs based on
that activity. So, we're not only moving the focal point to the resource
deployment and runtime, but also to the person who deployed it and the purpose
it supported. It's a big shift for an industry that has been
infrastructure-centric for so long.
That also allows us to automate
recommendations, such as idle cloud resources. Our platform looks for signals
that indicate a cloud resource is inactive, then calculates the potential cost
savings from terminating it and provides immediate access to the resource
configuration and owner who deployed it.
Our approach to cloud governance is
truly automated. I've seen platforms that trigger notifications about policy
violations, which can result in a mountain of notifications but little
resistance to some truly risky behavior unless someone intervenes manually.
Again, since we deploy the infrastructure, our platform can simply deny the
deployment and/or require approval from an admin if someone attempts to launch
a cloud resource that violates a governance policy. So, your teams can run the
infrastructure they need, but only as long as it's compliant.
And we're a truly API-first platform
when it comes to the tools our users rely on to provision and run
infrastructure. We plug into CI/CD, CLI, IDE, and we've helped platform
engineering teams to incorporate application infrastructure into Internal
Developer Platforms, like Spotify Backstage. I always say that some of the
users who benefit most from our platform rarely interact with it, because we
help them use their preferred toolset more efficiently.
VMblog: AWS
re:Invent is typically a great venue for a company to launch a new product or
an update to an existing product. Will
your company be announcing anything new?
If so, without asking you to give away too much, can you give us a sneak
preview?
Neagle: We've enhanced our support for AWS
CloudFormation. Our Torque platform will automatically discover CloudFormation
templates in a Git repository and leverage the cloud resource configurations to
create, deploy, and govern application environments automatically.
We are also releasing no-code
environment orchestration capability. Essentially, admins can connect a Git
repository and turn IaC resource configurations into "building blocks" that
they can drag-and-drop to define the inputs and dependencies for an
environment. While our platform will continue to support YAML for all resources,
this just makes it easier to define new environment blueprints.
And finally, our automated
inactivity detection has already shown some impressive results for our
customers. Using our machine-learning engine, our Torque platform will
recognize when an actively running cloud resource is inactive-or not being used
for an active workload-and calculate the cost savings of terminating it. Our
new Opportunity Savings dashboard will aggregate these recommendations so admins
can prioritize based on impact and dive into the culprits behind this waste.
VMblog: Are companies going all in
for the cloud? Or do you see a return
back to on-premises? Are there
roadblocks in place keeping companies from going all cloud?
Neagle: There are certain factors that prevent those in some
industries from going all in on the cloud. Financial services, for example,
will need to keep some of their infrastructure on-prem for regulatory and
security reasons. Others have legacy systems on-prem that they won't be too
quick to abandon for various reasons.
But I would expect most companies to continue embracing
the cloud. I think we hear more about the few that decide to revert to
on-premises than we do about those that continue to migrate or build out new
functions in the cloud. We still see plenty of organizations moving new
workloads to the cloud. And especially as cloud-native technologies continue to
proliferate, the value will be just too great to pass up.
We live in a hybrid cloud world, and that's not
likely to change any time soon. This is why we recommend a developer-centric
approach to infrastructure. Those that normalize infrastructure across
platforms will cut through the complexity that holds back cloud ROI.
VMblog: The
keynote stage will be covering a number of big topics, but what big changes or
trends does your company see taking shape as we head into 2024?
Neagle: There's a couple of things that we
think will shape the cloud landscape in the coming year.
First, we'll see the pace of change
accelerate due to the proliferation of new AI technologies, and it will bleed into
the majority of cloud-adjacent offerings in the market.
Second, cloud infrastructure
governance considerations like security, compliance and cost controls will need
to shift left. No longer will these managed retroactively solely through
monitoring; they will need to be embedded into the infrastructure, itself,
before environments are even provisioned. This will allow businesses to
proactively address these issues for greater control and predictability.
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