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ERIC LAM: Hello, everyone.
Thanks for joining us today.
I hope you are enjoying your Google Cloud Next sessions,
and welcome to our session on how startups,
organizations are optimizing their cloud costs
and maximizing their value on Google Cloud.
My name is Eric Lam, and I'm the head of Cloud FinOps at Google.
With me joining here today is Hazrat Godil,
who leads commercializations and Head of Infrastructure
Engineering at Nuro.
We have a lot to cover today, so we'll jump right in.
We'll be hearing directly from Nuro AI on how they approach
the discipline of cost savings and accelerate
the adoption of Cloud FinOps.
To set the backdrop for the conversation,
we'll start with an overview of the Google Cloud framework
to FinOps and cost optimizations,
and then we'll deep dive into the best practices on how
a startup like Nuro optimizing its Cloud Services on Google
Cloud.
The reality of the industry is that the public cloud continues
to grow at an exponential rate.
And organizations, whether they are big or small,
are seeing over 30% in wasted cost spend alone in 2021.
As such, according to the "Flexera State of Cloud Report"
early this year, 59% of companies
are focusing on Cloud cost optimization
as one of the key strategic initiatives
for the sixth time in a row.
So at Google, we define Cloud FinOps
as essentially an operational framework and a cultural shift,
as an opportunity to bring technology, finance,
and business leaders together to drive
that financial accountability.
And as much as we talk about cost optimization,
it's also about accelerating the business value
and helping organizations transform specifically
for startup.
So as we work with many customers of size and scale
from start up to global enterprises,
we see there are five critical building
blocks to successfully drive Cloud FinOps and cost
organizations, but then the organizations.
Certainly, one of the key focused areas
today is centered around customization,
as this is a continuous discipline and not one time
and done effort.
To do this in a continuous and proactive manner,
there are essentially four key steps
where startup companies can start implementing immediately
and today.
And the first step starts with, essentially,
getting full cost visibility into your organization cost
and consumption.
Again, the single pane of glass view is very, very important.
The second step is developing a set
of cost-aware architectural patterns
that will be used as a blueprint for many other applications
to be deployed on Google Cloud Services.
And third, we'll need a set of controls and policies
to proactively manage your cost spend.
And this is very important.
This is an area that we see as an opportunity
for many organizations to embrace.
And we call this as policy as code or governance as code.
And finally, the fourth step is to drive awareness and training
through a series of enablement programs.
We see a spectrum of customization strategy
as we work with many customers, and the strategy
ranges from the level efforts and the savings
they're able to achieve.
What you see on the screen are the top 10 ways
many of our customers are leveraging
to lower their cloud costs, and that depends upon a use case.
Some strategies are going to be providing the highest
value with very minimal effort.
So those are what we call the low-hanging fruit
and such as purchasing, commit use discount, or cuts,
and reserving slots for BigQuery.
There are also other strategies that
can be employed during the architecture and design
phase for your cloud project, like all the scaling,
choosing the custom VM to rightsize the machine based
on your workload-specific requirements.
So with the framework and strategy in mind,
we're now jumping to a conversation with Hasrat
of Nuro, an autonomous vehicle startup,
on how they drive customization with some of these techniques.
So, Hasrat, to kick us off, as the digital native startup
company, can you show us some of the challenges
that you face to drive cost efficiency
and maximize the investment you received?
HASRAT GODIL: Thanks, Eric.
Nuro is a startup in the Bay Area with the mission to better
everyday life through robotics.
Our first product is a last-mile delivery service,
which leverages a fleet of custom-designed,
autonomous electric vehicles.
A large part of our R&D and production services
operate in the cloud.
In terms of challenges, firstly, we
are constantly scaling along multiple dimensions.
Over the past year, we've begun running sustained operations
on public roads.
This was enabled by a rapidly-growing team
and continuous improvement of our autonomy software.
A big challenge for us has been maximizing
the utilization of our cloud spend
during this incredible growth phase we have been in.
Secondly, building autonomy software
is a complex and resource-intensive process.
Nuro collects processes and stores hundreds of petabytes
of time series data.
This data is used to power simulations
and to train advanced machine-learning models.
Simulation technology, in general,
has very few limits to personalization,
and we're constantly looking for ways
to improve the frequency, scale, and fidelity
of our simulations.
There's also the constant challenge
to fully utilize the allocated compute hardware
and efficiently load balance across CPUs and GPUs.
Lastly, in a growing cross-functional organization,
it's extremely important to stay aligned with stakeholders.
With the help of our GCP partners,
we've created structure across software, finance,
and our leadership team, and this group
drives visibility into costs, manages plans,
and action items.
ERIC LAM: Thanks for sharing that, Hasrat.
It is very interesting to hear how
Nuro is allowing Google Cloud Services to innovate in solving
the industry-wide problem.
So what are some of the key lessons
learned from doing cost optimization on Google Cloud?
HASRAT GODIL: Yeah.
So with any software system, the initial focus for a startup
is often just to get your MVP functionality set up.
A big lesson for us--
and learn early in your cloud journey--
is to recognize that material savings can
be realized by focusing on cost optimization.
For Nuro, it's been very obvious that constant focus on this
drives meaningful dollars back into our business.
And the ROI of this effort compounds over time.
Another big lesson for us is to create
the right cross-functional buy in.
By doing so, you equip the team with the right people
and the right tools, and this allows
you to bring visibility to your Cloud
spend across the organization.
It lets you better understand the key drivers for your Cloud
spend.
Also, then increases your ability
to holistically forecast and proactively manage your spend.
Now, the final lesson is to just build
a strong partnership with the GCP team,
leaning on them for best practices
and identifying very incremental savings opportunities.
They have been incredibly helpful in driving
structure for us and shaping our direction for cost
optimization.
ERIC LAM: Thanks for sharing your lessons, Hasrat.
One more question I do want to ask, and it's a fun one.
So if you have a magic wand to go back in time,
what will be one thing that you would do differently
to drive financial resiliency at Nuro?
HASRAT GODIL: So for us, the answer
for this would be doing bottoms-up detailed budgets
sooner.
By doing so, you get much closer to your existing
spend, get your key cost drivers set up,
and also, understand areas of opportunity.
This also helps each of your teams
understand the role that they're playing in the larger project
and come up with a very specific plan for cost
optimization for each project.
ERIC LAM: Yeah, that's a very good point.
As we were [? omitting ?] Google Cloud customers,
we do see there's certainly a top-down approach,
getting a macro view into the overall cost span.
But also, the bottom up is as equally important
as you build your use case and the workloads
and looking, really, at that granular level
to figure out where are your cost efficiencies
are, so really appreciate sharing that.
So tell us more about the biggest win
from a FinOp and cost saving perspective
as you have embraced Google Cloud Services.
HASRAT GODIL: Yeah.
To start with, it was all about increasing
visibility and observability.
For us, it was essential to create easy-to-use metrics
and dashboards and then to start using them to get visibility
into our costs and trends.
Next, we created a very structured and detailed process
to track and plan for cost optimization.
This led to very effective capacity planning,
and then we invested into cost saving initiatives,
such as retention policies for all our data,
compression for all the data that's stored in the Cloud.
But capacity planning, we also became very structured
in the purchasing of our committed use discounts.
This makes across SCUDS and preemptive nodes,
we're basically buying our base and renting our peak.
So lastly, we became very good at measuring and forecasting
the impact of our cost optimization changes.
As this increase in predictability
was very valuable in strategic planning.
Being a Cloud first startup, we spent millions of dollars
on Cloud, and the delta this creates from cost optimization
is very significant.
ERIC LAM: Yeah, thanks for sharing.
So with the uncertainty of the economics happens,
what advice would you give to other similar digital native
startups to optimizing their cloud
investment until the market opens up again soon, I hope?
HASRAT GODIL: Yeah, I want to acknowledge that this is truly
a challenging time for startups, and costs are really
top of mind for all of us.
We would highly recommend starting very early
with cost tracking and optimization,
no matter how big you are.
Even if you haven't looked into it yet,
there are probably already some savings you can get from it.
More importantly though, we'll start
building the right discipline within the team
and you would avoid costly inefficiencies
before you scale.
Secondly, you invest in detailed bottoms-up budgets
and really, identify your key cost, KPIs, and drivers.
For example, for us, we see a very high correlation
of the Cloud costs with the amount of miles being driven.
And cost per mile metric is very important for us to track.
So identify your own key metric, and track it down.
Third is create visible channels to review and track
your KPIs, your budgets, your trends, and your action items.
And just that structured gives you
a lot of focus on optimization.
And lastly, make sure you lean on your Google Cloud partners.
They're a really big source of support.
ERIC LAM: Thanks for teeing that up.
So talking about leveraging Google Cloud resources,
Google Cloud does have a set of tools
to help startup companies jumpstart
and scale securely and cost effectively,
from ideation to an IPO.
So the Google Cloud four-step program
is designed, essentially, to give startup companies
the financial business and technical support needed
to be successful.
So through this program, eligible startups
will have access to Google experts,
Cloud credits up to $100,000 for the first two years,
as well as addition of benefits of cost
is set up Google Cloud products and services.
So for startup company, apply today
at cloud.google.com/startup.
And once again, thanks, everyone again for listening,
and have a great Google Next Conference
wherever you are in the world.
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