Operating within the AWS Ecosystem with Rahul Subramaniam, CEO, and Founder of CloudFix

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:01) Today, we're talking to Rahul, CEO and founder of CloudFix, about optimizing cost within the AWS ecosystem. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:16) Rahul, how are you doing, bud?

(Rahul at 00:00:18) Doing very well. Thanks for having me, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:20) You've got a — is that a spaceship behind you? A little model spaceship?

(Rahul at 00:00:24) That is the Saturn V. It's a LEGO set. It's about four and a half feet tall. I think the video doesn't do justice to the scale, and that's the International Space Station and a Bugatti Chiron. So as you can see, I'm a LEGO fan here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:39) Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So, but I'm excited. We just hang out and talk. That's all we do. We hang out and talk a little bit. I know you know podcasts because you have a podcast. I think that's a good place to start. Let's give a shout out to your podcast. Can you tell me a little bit about what it is and how it got started?

(Rahul at 00:00:54) Yeah. So AWS Insiders is the podcast that I do, and what we're really trying to do with that podcast is try and make AWS a lot more accessible to the customer base that is really struggling to grasp the entire scope of everything that AWS does. And when you really start looking at the announcements that AWS puts out every week, it's like a fire hose that you're standing in front of. And to keep up with all of that is just incredibly hard. So we've had the benefit of being on the AWS platform and the ecosystem for over fifteen years now, and that helps us digest all these things a lot faster and better, and we've got a process in place. So just trying to make it easier for the AWS customer base to understand a lot of these technologies, understand what they can do for you, and hopefully operate a more efficient and optimized environment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:53) And so do you use AWS a lot? When did you first start using it?

(Rahul at 00:01:57) Yeah. So we are an all-in-on-AWS shop. So the other hat I wear is that of a CTO at ESW Capital. It's a private equity firm with over 150 enterprise software companies within the portfolio, and we manage about 40,000 AWS accounts of our own. Yeah. We started with AWS back in 2007. So, yeah, we've been on AWS for fifteen-plus years now. And it's been quite an amazing ride.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:27) So can you say that again? You're part of an equity company that participates in 150 different companies, and collectively, there's 40,000 AWS — is that correct?

(Rahul at 00:02:38) Yeah. So we are a private equity firm called ESW Capital, and within the portfolio, we have over 150 enterprise software companies, and everything is on AWS. We are all in on AWS. And, yeah, collectively, we have over 40,000 AWS accounts to manage.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:55) That is so cool. That's a huge scale. Now have you found any business cases of things that you need to do at that scale of managing 40,000 AWS accounts?

(Rahul at 00:03:07) Well, pretty much at that scale, you have to rethink everything about how you look at things, how you do things. And one of the big issues that we had was the fact that just managing costs across 40,000 AWS accounts is an absolute nightmare. You can't even put 40,000 accounts under one organization, by the way, in AWS. So managing cost is quite a challenge in itself. So, historically, what we ended up doing was looking at literally every tool out there in the market to see whether we could do something to save our costs. And initially, it was super exciting. And the reason was that every one of these tools told us that we could save 50 to 60% on our AWS bills, and who wouldn't be excited about that? So we put together a SWAT team and started going at the problem. Unfortunately, after a year, I was sad to say that it was an unmitigated disaster. And in retrospect, it is for three reasons. The first one is that all of these tools literally just told you the area where the problem might be, but knowing what to do was kind of left to the consumer of those reports. So it was just reporting, nothing else. Second, all the hard work of actually saving money and putting that in my bank account was my job. The tools literally assisted me with nothing. Everything was a suggestion. But what you do with that suggestion or an insight or a report, you know, alert that came up is all left to the consumer of that report. And lastly, organizational change, I realized, is incredibly hard when you ask someone to change your server, change their architecture, make changes. It is incredibly hard, not only from the fact that sometimes the kind of changes that you need to do are major surgeries on software that has been written twenty-plus years ago, and that's really, really hard to do. At other times, it's just working through a lot of people and their angst about things going down or services not being available when you're trying to make these changes or just folks just not knowing enough about their own products to be able to make big changes. It was all a big learning for us. And so what we ended up doing was we literally went through every AWS recommendation on cost savings, filtered them down to just the recommendations that were completely non-disruptive in nature, which are guaranteed by AWS. And we just implemented a whole lot of automations that we could run centrally, almost like a dictatorship without needing to ask anyone because, again, non-disruptive AWS-recommended changes. So we just automated the hell out of it. And unlike the claims of all these other tools, what we found was that we weren't saving 50 or 60% like the tools were recommending, but we actually got 10 to 15% real savings in our bank, which is awesome. You know, it's infinitely better than 50% of potential savings. Yeah. And to get 10 to 15% of real-world savings in your bank. I mean, that's worth infinitely more. So that's a little bit of the history of how CloudFix, the tool that is now in the market, kind of came to be where we were using it for ourselves. We ran into a big problem. So for the longest time, we've been using that internally for our own tool. But last year, we launched it as a product that's available to the general public.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:40) And so it just helps you automate the non-destructive suggestions from AWS?

(Rahul at 00:06:46) Correct. Not just non-destructive, but non-disruptive. So anything that causes a downtime or a restart or any changes like that, we consider disruptive. And so CloudFix kind of stays clear of all of those kinds of recommendations and just focuses on the super simple, super straightforward automations that have to be done at scale. Like, to give you an example, about two years ago, AWS announced a new volume type called gp3. It's 20% cheaper. AWS published a blog post about it. Of course, it reads like an eight-page legalese or legal document. But the simple distillation is that if you're using a certain number of IOPS, usually with your gp2 volume, which is the old-generation volume, if you just switched over to gp3, A, it's completely non-disruptive. You wouldn't even notice it. It's a simple call. It changes everything to gp3. It saves you 20% on your cost, and you should just do this across the board. So changes like that are what we automate and implement, and it's really that simple. So it's all about just a very simple solution that has to operate at scale, and you might have 10,000 gp3 volumes out there in your account. The fact that you can automate them all in one shot is really where all the value is. You can't possibly do these things manually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:08) The 50% cost savings — so that from the other products in market — so they just give you recommendations on things you could do. They're not actually doing things for you. And then that 50% that they're marketing, that doesn't account for the time it would actually take you from an engineering perspective to implement the decisions. Correct?

(Rahul at 00:08:28) Correct. It doesn't account for any of that stuff. And I think one of the drawbacks of most tools out there is that they feel like showcasing potential savings is where all the value is at. They don't realize that as a business consumer or as a business user, what I really, really care about is the real savings that I can get in my account. Right? That's what matters to me as a business person. Now they don't think so. They feel content showing more and more potential savings, hoping that someone will act on it, but getting people to act on it is incredibly hard because there's lack of knowledge, there's lack of understanding of what those fixes might imply. And lastly, surgery on code is incredibly hard. It's not trivial. So I think people end up not understanding all of those aspects of cost savings.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:26) So how long did you run this tool within your companies before you decided to open it up to the public?

(Rahul at 00:09:31) So we've been running this tool, and this tool also has been evolving constantly for roughly five years now or a little over five years. And it's just been open to the public for about a year. We launched it at re:Invent last year, and coming end of this month, it'll be about a year since it's been available to the general public.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:53) Has Amazon had any acknowledgment or response to this publicly?

(Rahul at 00:09:57) Oh, Amazon is very, very excited about this because, again, for their customers who are constantly looking for cost savings, I think for the first time, there's been a tool that they can literally get running at their customer environment and save 15%, which frees up certain budget for them to do other interesting projects within AWS. So they've been super supportive. They've been introducing the tool to all of their customers, and it's been a pretty amazing ride.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:24) It's an interesting relationship because when you were describing this, my first thought was, okay, so why isn't Amazon doing this themselves? You know, like, putting a button in there. It's like, hey, reduce my cost. And then I thought, well, you wouldn't, as a company, want to spend money and resources to develop a tool that would then make you less money. Because if you do that at scale, right, think about how many computers they have. If they moved everybody to gp3, I think you said, from two, then instantly overnight, gp2 becomes obsolete. Now they have to replace — they have this huge — it's this massive task for this large organization. But if another company comes along and they're just figuring out how to implement the recommendations autonomously at scale, that's great because then they can point to that when people do need cost savings. Right? They get a customer that's pushing hard or need some cost savings, needs some money-wise, they can point at CloudFix and say, hey, maybe you should check out CloudFix, and then that could save them some money. Yeah.

(Rahul at 00:11:24) So I actually don't think that AWS is driven by that way of thinking. AWS culturally tends to be completely non-opinionated. So when it comes to recommendations, they already have a whole lot of tools that give you a bunch of recommendations. But telling you explicitly what to do literally is not — or it goes against every aspect of AWS DNA. They will never tell their customer what to do. And so implementing automated fixes, even though they have recommendations, is something that goes against the grain of everything that AWS has done, and it's just a big cultural shift for them. They are being forced to kind of change some of that thinking. Like, for example, they will not even tell you what services to stitch together in what form to achieve a certain outcome. They will bring somebody else who has got a case study of how they are using something, and they'll say, here's one way you can do it. They seem incredibly non-opinionated about almost everything, and I think that's also part of the problem right now with their customer base because when they have 200-plus services, 90,000-plus APIs that are already in production and available today, the customer base has so much of it that they just don't know what to do. You have this analysis paralysis where you can't even get started because it's just so complex. And I think AWS is at this juncture where they really have to think about becoming more opinionated, provide more patterns, provide more templates. It's just this cultural thing with them. And because of the size that they have, it's going to take them a while to kind of overcome that inertia that they have internally. But they love the idea of saving their customers money. They're extremely customer-focused or customer-success-focused. So they love the idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:15) Yeah. Well, I mean, they're putting the recommendations out. You're just making it automated. Right?

(Rahul at 00:13:18) Correct. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:20) See, I didn't know that. I haven't had a whole lot of hands-on direct experience. Mostly, I deploy and my systems have run on, like, Heroku. So it's, you know, an abstraction. Ultimately, AWS is behind it, but it's a very opinionated system, obviously. And so I haven't actually ever had the opportunity to get involved in the AWS culture, but that absolutely makes sense. If their entire culture and belief of thinking is just infrastructure and we're not going to do things, we're just going to make suggestions. I respect that. That's kind of along the lines of my style as well.

(Rahul at 00:14:01) Yeah. I mean, historically, they've declared that they wanted to be the plumbing for the Internet. They wanted to offer all of these LEGO blocks. Again, I'm a LEGO fan, so the LEGO analogy. They've always wanted to be a platform that offered all of these LEGO blocks that you could — you decide what you want to build with it, and they just want to be a provider of that. But I think they're realizing that now they have so many different LEGO pieces that people are just confused about what to put together and how. And just like LEGO evolved to create these very unique kits you see behind me, I think AWS has got to take the next step and become opinionated and offer these prepackaged patterns of how some of their services are stitched together and how to optimally run them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:49) Call up Werner, have him buy CloudFix. Have you got to have him on your show?

(Rahul at 00:14:56) Not yet, but hopefully soon. Yeah. He'd absolutely be an amazing guest. He's — interestingly, Werner is actually extremely opinionated about how developers should be doing things, and that completely makes sense as the CTO at Amazon. But when it comes to the external customer base, I think they almost have a bipolar personality when it comes to the external customer base. They are super focused on their success, but they never prescribe anything to them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:28) Yeah. They're very opinionated about not being opinionated for their customers.

(Rahul at 00:15:33) That's a good way to put it. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:37) Okay. So what's the evolution of this? Are you — you know, you're intelligent, you're part of an equity-type company, capital. What are you trying to do with CloudFix? Are you going to grow it, explode it to hundreds and hundreds of employees? Is it going to stay something small and just serve your companies? What's the dream? What's the vision for CloudFix?

(Rahul at 00:15:55) Yes. Actually, we see that anyone who's spending any money on AWS can get tons of value out of CloudFix for two reasons. Number one is you have to understand that cloud cost savings is not a one-time thing. A lot of people think that you can spend the effort once and save money, optimize your system, and then forget about it. That's not how it works. Cloud cost savings is constant. There are new services coming up. You're deploying new setups. You are using the services in completely different ways, and there are new recommendations coming every single day. So a combination of all of those things means that you have to be at the top of your cloud savings game constantly.

(Rahul at 00:16:38) So when things are constant in that form, you've got to rely on automation to actually get you those kind of savings. And unless you rely on something like that, it's not going to be sustainable. And so we actually see CloudFix being part of every AWS customer's journey, their usage of AWS, because it helps them maintain a certain level of hygiene within their accounts, run optimally, save a bunch of standard recommended costs, and stay on top of these little things that just—I almost think of it like technical debt, but on your AWS accounts. So we actually see the potential for CloudFix to literally be in use at every single AWS customer.

(Rahul at 00:17:29) And one of the other things that, you know, why we think that it has the potential to do that is we are very consciously aware of how the industry looks at pricing their products. When you start looking at cost savings and trying to take a percentage of those savings, it kind of puts off most customers. So CloudFix took a completely different approach where we created a super low flat fee structure for using CloudFix so that it's literally a no-brainer for anyone to use CloudFix. And we hope that people will see that value and literally every AWS customer will use it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:09) Okay. So you're not doing percentage of savings-based charging. It's just—

(Rahul at 00:18:13) It just makes no sense to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:15) Well, doesn't it, though? I'll push back on that. If I'm a business, don't I want a percentage of the savings? Because some of these companies have $100,000 a month bills. You know, if we're saving 10% a month, I want a percentage of that. What's the thought there?

(Rahul at 00:18:30) It basically boils down to this. CloudFix is a super simple product. It's simple because it automates recommendations created by AWS. They're non-disruptive in nature. And so there's no big IP that's behind this. It is just something that's incredibly practical, simple, automated. You want to make simple decisions around CloudFix as well. And so if you're going to start going through an entire exercise bringing in your CFO and your finance team and your ops team and everyone trying to figure out pricing before you adopt something so simple and something so basic, it just doesn't make sense. It's kind of, you know, it's just additional friction to adopting the product, which is completely unnecessary. I mean, at some point in time, if somebody, you know, is about to give us a portion of their savings which adds up to a million bucks, I would say go build a version of CloudFix yourself. But at the kind of price points that we are at, it's a no-brainer. Just pick the tool, because a person spending 10 hours on fixing problems within your organization is going to outweigh the expenses on CloudFix. So keeping pricing super simple, super trivial, and, you know, goes back to the value proposition of CloudFix itself. It's a simple, straightforward product. It's almost like your disk defragmenter that you used to have in the old days on your machine. It just ran in the background, did all this stuff. You didn't even care about it. It wouldn't even cross your mind on a day-to-day basis. It just runs, keeps things clean. This is almost like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:07) Yeah. And you press a button, clean stuff up, then you figure out how to get a Mac and not have those problems.

(Rahul at 00:20:13) Correct. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:16) So pricing—is your pricing public?

(Rahul at 00:20:18) It absolutely is. So it's on the CloudFix website, and it's really, really simple.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:25) Now is there a way that—I talk to a lot of people who manage a lot of AWS instances. Is there a way I can tell them, like, can they go maybe let your system into theirs read-only to tell you how much they would be saving? Do you do anything like that?

(Rahul at 00:20:41) Yeah. So they can actually log in to CloudFix straight away. They can register. They can get on. They can get a full scan of their AWS accounts, link all of your accounts, get a full scan, look at the number. As soon as you start saving money, that's literally when the charge hits.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:57) It's less than the cost of hiring an entry-level or mid-level engineer to sit there all day and do it.

(Rahul at 00:21:04) It's a fraction. It's literally a fraction of that cost. So if you are, for example, spending $10 million with AWS every year, the cost of CloudFix would be $10,000 a year for you. When you really think about it that way, it's nothing. If you're spending $100 million on AWS, and there are a bunch of customers who do, up to, you know, 10 to $100 million will cost you $100,000 a year. I mean, that's less than the cost of an engineer that you would assign to monitor that kind of spend. So we've tried to make it an absolute no-brainer with that simplicity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:42) And that engineer would have to build automation tools anyway. And so they'd spend a year building the automation tools just to figure it out. Is it really this easy? Like, alright. We can edit anything we need to around the podcast. But if I go start telling people, like, hey, you've got to check this out. You basically press a button, and it will save you money on your cloud. Is it really going to happen? Like, I know I don't want to sound like I'm doubting it, but I believe one of the biggest sales problems that you'll have is the too-good-to-be-true sales objection.

(Rahul at 00:22:11) Yeah. So let me give you an example. I'll take a concrete example with what you just said. So you said you use S3 buckets, right? Have you turned on Intelligent-Tiering on your S3 buckets?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:22) No. I haven't touched those S3 buckets in three years.

(Rahul at 00:22:26) So here's the thing. AWS recommends that you turn on Intelligent-Tiering, and what Intelligent-Tiering really does is it looks at your access patterns for your S3 buckets and your S3 objects. And depending on how frequently or infrequently you use those objects, it will move the storage tier to one of four different storage levels. And the further down that tier you go, the cheaper it gets. It can get up to 90% cheaper on your S3 costs. But the first two levels of infrequent access have zero latency penalties. The other layers, as you go down further, they actually have more penalties of latency. Like, sometimes you might have to wait an hour before the object comes back for access. But the first two layers have zero penalty, and you can save up to 30% or 40%, in fact, on your S3 storage costs. Now, as simple as that is, and all the heavy lifting has been done by AWS—like, all you have to do is go to the console, go to every bucket, explicitly click a whole bunch of buttons, and turn on S3 Intelligent-Tiering—nobody does it. And AWS doesn't do it for you by default. You have to do it explicitly for every single object. And what CloudFix delivers—

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:42) Developers wouldn't do it either. They wouldn't want to mess with infrastructure-type stuff. They just focus on the code. You know? We are not big enough to have an infrastructure person. So we just set it up the best we can.

(Rahul at 00:23:53) And with CloudFix, it automatically detects all the buckets that don't have Intelligent-Tiering turned on, and it'll turn it on for the first two levels only so that you don't incur any latency penalties. So there's absolutely no downside to your applications, and you start saving money.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:10) Does it implement new ones? Like, new recommendations come out—does it notify me and then I can choose to implement the newer recommendations?

(Rahul at 00:24:18) Yeah. So here's the other thing. Most people don't realize that there's a service in AWS called AWS Change Manager, which is AWS's recommended way of implementing the fixes. They want you to have good change management, a good audit trail that you can go to and see what happened with your account. And the way CloudFix implements this is using Change Manager. So we basically don't take any admin credentials from our users. That's literally the worst way to do it. It's in fact one of the other reasons why a lot of other tools haven't even considered it. Because, invariably, if you want to make any changes to the account, you have to need admin credentials. We don't do any of that. We literally take read-only permissions, but we take write permissions into AWS Change Manager, which allows us to create change requests and change templates in your AWS account. And then we basically redirect you to Change Manager where you go in and you say, oh, this is the change you're making. Here are the change requests that have been submitted to the system. You can hit approve. And when you approve it, those get executed by Change Manager, and you see the savings. You also get a full audit trail of everything that happens. So, again, we made it even easier. We don't require any of our customers to give us any admin credentials or any high-access keys or whatever. This is really, really simple. In conjunction with AWS, this has been made as simple as possible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:44) That is cool. Because there's a lot of cost-saving tools out there that are more than just the recommendation engines. There's, like, you know, the ones that'll figure out algorithmically where the cheapest spot instances are and what time of day and how to move loads from different places. And those are really cool, right? And they can make an impact on your business. I've got one friend whose company just got bought by NetApp. They're called Spot by NetApp now. But, you know, that's not something in conversation with high-level people that I can be like, hey, go implement that, because, I mean, it's a longer motion and it's—I mean, you could save money and it's great, but it is a longer motion. And also these things aren't exclusive. You could use Spot by NetApp and you can be using your CloudFix. They're separate things completely.

(Rahul at 00:26:29) Correct. And the thing is that, again, a lot of these other fixes that people have been going after are in essence very, very disruptive fixes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:38) They are.

(Rahul at 00:26:39) Like, if you take whatever application that you built and you deployed it on AWS and you decide that, hey, I'm going to spot instances as I'm doing these, the challenge there is you don't even know if your application is capable of handling downtime. Like, can it handle a restart to then be switched over to a spot instance? Is it capable of handling a scenario where an entire machine might be taken away at two minutes' notice and replaced with another one? Like, will it come back up all elegantly and continue to operate the way it's supposed to?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:13) Well, you have to learn how to use these new technologies. And whenever you do that, there's a learning curve, you know.

(Rahul at 00:27:18) And that's the big friction in getting these big savings. Now, it absolutely makes sense to have dedicated teams to work on all these big savings because, yes, they are big numbers. But one of the approaches that a lot of our customers seem to be doing right now is they use something like CloudFix to free up resources from the AWS spend and use that as an investment to save more on the big boulders, so to speak. You know, the big money—there might be one initiative that might take you a year and a lot of engineering effort to do that. But instead of spending that money out of a whole new budget area, which, again, these are tough times for everyone, you'd much rather just save that money with CloudFix and use that to invest it in something else.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:03) Now are you—you're the founder. Do you have a co-founder, or are you the founder?

(Rahul at 00:28:07) I am the founder of CloudFix.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:09) What's your personal desire? You can tell me you don't want to talk about it if you want. What's your personal desire? Do you want a big company with culture? Do you want something that's more automated and just is a tool in an app store? Do you want to build it and sell it? Do you want to hang on to it forever? Have you thought about any of this?

(Rahul at 00:28:27) I think the only thought I have on that one is I've always been very passionate about building a product that has massive distribution because people find it valuable. And that's what's been driving, you know, everything around CloudFix. It is a relatively small team, but, again, I love the idea of having a super simple product, a super simple value proposition that everyone gets and understands, and near-zero friction implementation that allows people to adopt it very, very easily.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:01) Well, I mean, there's companies like that, like Basecamp, right? 37signals. They're like that. They have a really small team for the size of project that they have. I think they have less than 100 people.

(Rahul at 00:29:10) Correct. Whether it be your culture, whether it be your team size, whether it be the economics around it, that is subservient to that simple goal of what you want your product to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:21) What type of pain did you go through to learn that lesson?

(Rahul at 00:29:25) Oh, an insane amount of pain given that we have—I mean, being an early adopter at AWS and literally trying out every tool in the market gave me a lot of insights about what I want out of a tool that I would use. We just—in general, I am not a big fan of building and owning tons of code. I already manage two and a half billion lines of code across our portfolio. I have no interest in adding more to that list. So I would much rather, if there is a great solution out there, I'd much rather use that than try to build one of my own. It's only out of absolute desperation that we had to build something like CloudFix because there wasn't another solution like this out there. But for me, the key takeaway was I wanted to build products that I would love using, and that meant when somebody's pitching a product idea to me, you should be able to do that in about two or three minutes. I shouldn't have to go through a 50-slide deck for you to explain to me why that product idea is great. Second, I should be able to jump in. There should be completely low friction. I should be able to pick it up, get started with it, try it out for myself, and make my own evaluation of whether it's good or bad before I start using it in a full-fledged manner. And third, the pricing has to be rational and not become another point of friction. Like, if I spend too much time thinking about how that company is trying to screw me, I don't want to be in that kind of a setup. I'll call out one. I don't know if it's permitted. You can edit it out if it's not permitted on your show. But something like an Oracle licensing, I try to stay away from it with a barge pole. For a simple reason that it is very predatory in a sense that they'll keep jacking up prices on you. They'll try to figure out every way of extracting as much as they possibly can out of your subscription. And if they find that you are kind of semi-hostage because you're on an old platform using Oracle, they will go all out to extract the most out of whatever you have. And that's not something I want to get into. So keeping things simple, where it's simple to understand, simple to implement, simple to price, simple to pay out or get started with it. That's kind of key, and we've tried to bring that into every product that we've worked on internally as well as moved out to the general public.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:04) Your go-to-market strategy, what is that? Are you going around to companies like Spot by NetApp and saying, hey, put us in your pipeline and sell us as an upsell to your customers when you're expanding your account managers, or, you know, companies that already are inside people's infrastructure and things of that nature, or are you just going directly to the engineers and the technical leaders and saying, hey, come try this out and save some money?

(Rahul at 00:32:30) So there are, of course, different channels. Like any good marketing strategy, you have to learn more than one distribution channel. And for us, again, we have a whole lot. There's, of course, the online stuff, but I think where we are really focused on is we are trying to make sure that AWS feels like they are our biggest partners and biggest fans because we bring so much value to their customer base. And that just selfishly is my personal goal from a marketing standpoint. Second, we, of course, are participating in re:Invent and all of these events centered around AWS.

(Rahul at 00:33:09) Again, CloudFix is a very AWS-specific product and caters to the AWS customer base only. And therefore, we are definitely very involved in the AWS ecosystem. Again, we've also been there for fifteen plus years, so it's a great opportunity to share our insights and learnings and stuff like that. And the tool is literally a bonus that goes with it. So that's another kind of approach that we're taking: going to the community, sharing our insights and the tools.

(Rahul at 00:33:38) And lastly, of course, you have the other traditional go-to-market approaches like online ads and other events. But yeah, I might just selfishly and personally, my dream would be when AWS realizes that they couldn't have a better partner than CloudFix for a tool that their customers will find incredibly valuable, helps them get very efficient, and they become our biggest distributors.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:05) Nice. Well, look, you've got an ally. I'm a fan. We made a podcast. You feel good?

(Rahul at 00:34:11) Yeah, I feel pretty good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:13) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.