Mike Julian

Consulting 101: My top 10 lessons in getting paid to give advice. 🧵

Tomorrow 10 AM PST / 1 PM EST: Office Hours. Maturing your FinOps practice? Building exec reports that get read? Creating cost awareness without slowing engineering? Let's talk.

Thursday 10 AM PST / 1 PM EST: Office Hours. Implementing chargeback? Finding metrics that matter? Getting teams to care about spend? Bring your challenges.

Tomorrow 10 AM PST / 1 PM EST. Office Hours. Wrestling with RI strategy? Justifying cloud spend to your CFO? Negotiating an EA? Bring your questions.

Thursday 10 AM PST / 1 PM EST: Office Hours. Managing costs across dozens of accounts? What's centralized FinOps look like? Maintaining agility while controlling spend?

Thursday 10 AM PST / 1 PM EST: Office Hours. Engineering decisions meet business outcomes. Committed use discounts, multi-account strategy, showback vs chargeback.

Office Hours Thursday, 10 AM PST / 1 PM EST. Bring tough AWS billing questions—contracts, cost allocation, business impact. Real answers, zero fluff. No sales pitch.

Last day at re:Invent! I'm at booth #1217 through this afternoon if you want to connect.

Dealing with complex cloud contracts? I'm at #1217 demoing Skyway. Let's talk. #reInvent #AWSreInvent

Remember this night? Atomic Liquors, a packed patio, and re:Invent finally feeling alive again in 2022. We’re running it back on Wednesday. Join us if you’re in town! RSVP: luma.com/5naymwo1

Tomorrow night we're hosting a casual gathering during re:Invent with friends from RedMonk and Heavybit. If you've been meaning to RSVP, now's the time. RSVP: luma.com/5naymwo1

Before re:Invent's keynote: breakfast with @QuinnyPig, @mike_julian, @jpatanooga, and fellow cloud practitioners. Mon Ami Gabi, Tuesday, December 2. No sales pitch. Just fuel and conversation. RSVP: luma.com/npyv1y2k

If your re:Invent week isn't complete without witnessing Corey Quinn interact with actual humans, this is your moment. Wednesday at 7pm. Corey will be... well, Corey. You can decide whether that's the reason you're attending or the challenge you're embracing. RSVP: luma.com/5naymwo1

Missed your AWS spend commitment? Don't panic. AWS has a neat trick with a hidden "available balance" that lets you kick that shortfall down the road, as long as you keep signing new deals. Learn how to play their game. #finops

Keynote preparation: breakfast at Mon Ami Gabi. Real food, strong coffee, honest conversation about enterprise cloud realities. Join us Tuesday, December 2 before the announcements begin. RSVP: luma.com/npyv1y2k

We're teaming up with RedMonk and Heavybit to host a relaxed off-the-clock gathering during re:Invent. No demos, no presentations—just a chance to connect with people who shape this industry. Whether you're new to the scene or a long-timer, we'd love to see you there. RSVP: luma.com/5naymwo1

Trying to negotiate with AWS when your spend is shrinking? You have the negotiating leverage of a wet napkin. The only winning move is not to play. Let your contract expire, slash your costs, and then come back to the table from a position of power. #finops

Is your entire FinOps "team" just one person who looks perpetually haunted? The centralized vs. decentralized debate is a trap. The real answer is a hybrid "Cost Champions" model—like little sleeper agents of fiscal responsibility embedded in your teams. #finops

Pre-keynote breakfast at Mon Ami Gabi with @QuinnyPig, @mike_julian, @jpatanooga, and practitioners who know the first question about any new service is always about cost. Tuesday, December 2. Complimentary. Straightforward. RSVP: luma.com/npyv1y2k

Started planning re:Invent? Good. Now plan your exit strategy from the Venetian. We're throwing "the best party at re:Invent" with RedMonk and Heavybit. Wed, Dec 3 @ 7pm at Atomic Liquors. Selfie with Corey or avoid him entirely? Both valid. RSVP: luma.com/5naymwo1

The day has come where we get to announce what we've been working on for the past year 😍 www.duckbillhq.com/blog/skyway-...

Want to start a FinOps program? The secret first step: do almost nothing. Just measure everything and show people the numbers. Let the gentle, persistent shame of a public dashboard work its magic. You'll be amazed how quickly costs go down. #finops

So you want to know how your cloud spend stacks up against the competition? Great. Do you also want to be profoundly mediocre? Chasing benchmarks strips away everything unique about your business. Compete with the only company that matters: yourself, last month. #finops

Should you use an AWS reseller? For the most part, no. But there are exactly three situations where they aren't a complete waste of time. If you're just buying AWS from them and getting nothing else, you've just added a useless—and expensive—middleman. #finops

The first San Francisco #FinOps meetup is *tonight* at 5:30! Come hang out! lu.ma/v75d6o5e

If you're in San Francisco on Tuesday, we're hosting the first ever San Francisco FinOps Meetup in FiDi! Join us! lu.ma/v75d6o5e

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I know I'm supposed to be in Vegas for re:Invent but, uhh, the Excel World Championship Finals are in Vegas at the same time 🤔

A whole lot of SaaS products have been touting their cost optimization capabilities since ZIRP ended. I think "can manage its own costs" is tablestakes for most SaaS products now to such a degree that it's not even worth mentioning in the core features--it's just _expected_.

Just realized every major Vegas strip hotel is now unionized. Venetian unionized last August. I wonder how long before "Relocate re:Invent" made it to someone's agenda--minutes? hours? 😆

Amazon acquiring Bee is a pretty strong admission that they can't make Alexa work. www.linkedin.com/posts/activi...

Just doin some wild shit in studio with @quinnypig.com today 🤘

Now that AWS fixed the free tier, I think the next biggest technical absurdity, in terms of a thing that seems like a decision made outside of technical considerations, is how you can't move an S3 bucket between accounts.

"Being a founder is, well, it actually sucks. It's oddly like being repeatedly punched in the face." 🤣 too real

New post up, with a bunch of thoughts on what drives me personally, and my own 40-year career (h/t @lethain.com). I have a pretty unusual life story. But one of the reasons I love the tech industry so much is how common unusual stories like mine have historically been. charity.wtf/2025/07/09/t...

The problem I have with modern observability tools is that I feel like an idiot trying to figure out how to use them.

Ever wondered what is a day in the life of a server in an AWS data center ? @quinnypig.com has it covered for you www.lastweekinaws.co...

I'm hosting the @duckbillgroup.com office hours in ten minutes! If you have questions about #AWS contracts, cost optimization, or #FinOps in general, come on over! zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Want to know the most telling metric about cloud cost management tools? Check how many people actually USE them. Great tools matter, but without the right people driving your strategy, they're just expensive dashboards collecting dust.

Missing your AWS EDP commitment? Don’t panic. If you’re 10–15% underwater, doing nothing might be optimal since shortfall fees use discounted rates. Focus on total savings, not perfect forecasting.

Finance and Engineering need couples therapy when it comes to cloud costs. Finance wants confidence in the numbers and trajectory. Engineering thinks they need to defend every dollar. Better understanding leads to better outcomes. youtube.com/shorts/XY4Ax...

I have managed multiple teams at a company with a hybrid schedule. I have also been hiring pretty consistently for years now (basically until like a month ago). One thing I hear from candidates often is that they are actively excited to come into the office a few times a week to be around others.

You can skate by with informal knowledge and keeping state in people's heads and making it accessible via in-person conversation if you are in person. Mandatory written artifacts create a lot of overhead for many people if they are not reading and writing first people.

The foundation of cloud cost management isn't about optimization—it's about understanding why engineering teams make the decisions they do. Start there, and meaningful optimization follows.

This is great to see AWS centralizing info about their end of life products in one place! Hopefully I'll eventually be able to retire github.com/SummitRoute/... aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in...

Freeman & Forrest is a year old! It's been a wild, incredible journey and we've learned so much. I'm remembering an executive we pitched early on who called us a "small business for shitty little companies." Anyway, we've paid technical content creators $1.7M. I'm proud of that. fnf.dev/one-year

AWS VPC endpoint interface support for AZs is chaos. Of the 392 services these endpoints support, 75 services are not available in all AZs in us-east-1. You think, ok use1-az3 is probably missing support for some, because of course it is, because it's cursed and you'd be right, it's the worst, but

Your cloud cost management central team can't handle it all forever. The path to scale is through decentralization - equipping teams across the organization with the tools, standards, and processes to manage their own costs. Enable, don't control.

Pretty common case that we see $500k-$750k a month on cloudwatch logs in our enterprise customers. This is great.