Understanding cloud costs, with Ashley Hromatko, Snr FinOps Manager at Pearson

Cost is often one of the main drivers for adopting the cloud, but it's not always plain sailing once you get there. Cloud bills are complicated, so it can be a challenge to understand where your money is being spent, never mind how to manage and optimise that spend to get the biggest bang for your buck!
Luckily, our guest is here to help!
Ashley Hromatko, Senior FinOps Manager at Pearson, joins Aled and Alasdair to discuss cloud, costs and cultural change. Ashley is a founding member of and currently serves on the Technical Advisory Council for FinOps Foundation, and so is the perfect guest to talk about the financial impetus towards cloud, what FinOps is and how it's helped Pearson to grow and the importance of accountability and visibility when it comes to understanding your cloud costs.
Ashley is recognised as a leader in the emerging discipline of FinOps and is responsible for building Pearson's Global FinOps practice which spans 600+ AWS accounts. Pearson is one of AWS largest public sector customers, so Ashley has a huge amount of practical experience (and advice) for those looking to migrate to cloud and understand their costs better.
We also get an insight into what 'good cloud' looks like with Pearson's FinOps team and some of the struggles and successes the team has faced to reach its current level of maturity.
FinOps
Connect with Ashley and learn more about FinOps Principles.
About the hosts
Aled Sage (VP Engineering at Cloudsoft) brings 20 years of experience developing distributed applications, mostly in the enterprise sector. Particular areas of interest include devops, automation, cloud, concurrency and distributed systems. Prior to joining Cloudsoft, Aled was Chief Architect at Enigmatec Corporation. He holds a PhD (Computer Science) from the University of St Andrews.
Connect with Aled
Alasdair Hodge (Principal Engineer and Solutions Architect at Cloudsoft) is a leadingauthority in cloud, software applications and automation across all major cloud platforms, he has been engaged in the design and optimisation of cloud services in banking and finance and other service-based sectors such as telecoms, electronic design and supply-chain automation for over 12 years.
Connect with Alasdair

About Cloudsoft
Cloudsoft specialise in applications, automation and the cloud. Our top-down, application-centric approach is what sets us apart and empowers our customers to tame their IT estates and drive real business value.

Our public cloud IT transformation expertise is embedded our Tempo cloud services, helping our clients to transform faster and exploit the benefits of cloud. We’re an active contributor to the Apache Brooklyn open source project, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with Well-Architected, Microsoft Workloads, DevOps Competencies, a FinOps Foundation Member and a FinOps Certified Service Provider.
Our flagship AMP software is a Digital Platform Conductor, enabling customers in Banking, Defence and other heavily regulated industries to cut through the complexity of their estates. This maximises value from their technology investments, drives down costs and reduces risks. Cloudsoft AMP is the only product which strategically manages applications throughout their lifecycles across hybrid infrastructures, regardless of environment or location.

We're based in Edinburgh, UK, but work with clients around the world.