Deana Solis, 2022 FinOps Foundation Evangelist of the Year, joins Corey Quinn to discuss her winding career path from electrical engineering to healthcare IT to FinOps. She shares why certifications are "largely performative," warns that AI can turn your AWS bill into "a telephone number," and explains why NAT Gateway costs hit everyone from hobbyists to enterprises. The episode covers cloud repatriation conspiracy theories, translating between engineering and finance teams, and why good FinOps work is really just getting humans in a room to talk.

Show Highlights:

(02:36) FinOps Foundation

(03:15) FinOps as Marriage Counseling Between Engineering and Finance

(06:00) Deana’s Journey From Electrical Engineering to FinOps

(12:41) The Performative Nature of Certifications

(16:22) AI as Both a Threat and Tool in FinOps

(20:41) Why AI Is Flooding the Job Market with Noise

(25:09) Why FinOps Is Never Boring Despite Sounding Like It

(29:10) The NAT Gateway Problem

(33:09) The Generational Divide in Cloud Platform Preferences

(37:23) Stay In Contact With Deana Solis

About Deana Solis:

Deana Solis is a senior FinOps engineer with more than 20 years of infrastructure management experience. Recognized as the FinOps Evangelist of the Year by the FinOps Foundation in 2022, she has become a leading voice in driving cloud financial accountability and culture.

Beyond her technical expertise, Deana is passionate about humanizing technology. She serves as a FinOps Foundation ambassador and mentor, using her voice to elevate Women in FinOps and underrepresented folks in technology.

Her unique journey, from electrical engineering to liberal studies to FinOps, embodies both analytical rigor and emotional intelligence. Deana isn’t just shaping the way organizations think about cloud costs; she’s helping reshape the culture of technology itself.

Sponsor: https://www.wiz.io/

On this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey welcomes back Chris Weichel, CTO of Ona (formerly Gitpod). Chris explains the rebrand and why Ona is building for a future where coding agents, not just humans, write software.
They discuss what changes when agents spin up environments, why multi-agent workflows feel addictive, and how Ona is solving the scaling and safety challenges behind it.
If you’re curious about the next wave of software engineering and how AI will reshape developer tools, this episode is for you.

About Chris: Chris Weichel is the Chief Technology Officer at Ona (formerly Gitpod), where he leads the engineering team behind the company’s cloud-native development platform. With more than two decades of experience spanning software engineering and human–computer interaction, Chris brings a rare combination of technical depth and user-centered perspective to the systems he helps design and build.

He is passionate about creating technology that empowers people and tackling complex engineering challenges. His expertise in cloud-native architecture, programming, and digital fabrication has earned him multiple publications, patents, and industry awards. Chris is continually exploring new opportunities to apply his broad skill set and enthusiasm for building transformative technology in both commercial and research settings.

Show Highlights
(00:00) Introduction to Modern Software Interfaces

(00:55) Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud

(01:02) Introducing Chris Weichel and Ona

(02:23) The Evolution from Git Pod to Ona

(03:26) Challenges and Insights on Company Renaming

(05:16) The Changing Landscape of Software Engineering

(05:54) The Role of AI in Code Generation

(12:04) The Importance of Development Environments

(15:44) The Future of Software Development with Ona

(21:31) Practical Applications and Challenges of AI Agents

(30:01) The Economics of AI in Software Development

(38:11) The Future Vision for Ona

(39:41) Conclusion and Contact Information

Links:
Christian Weichel LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-weichel-740b4224/?originalSubdomain=de

Ona: https://ona.com/

https://csweichel.de/

Sponsor: Ona: https://ona.com/

Brian Scanlan, Senior Principal Engineer at Intercom, the company building Fin.ai, joins Corey Quinn on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss Intercom’s move from AWS Aurora to PlanetScale’s managed Vitess after years of scaling challenges with their Ruby on Rails monolith. He explains how 13 Aurora clusters created operational pain and why PlanetScale’s white-glove, partnership-driven model won out over Amazon’s building-block approach.

The discussion also covers Intercom’s volunteer-based on-call system, their pivot to AI agents after ChatGPT’s launch, concerns about the shrinking pipeline of systems engineers, and how companies like PlanetScale and Snowflake are outpacing AWS by delivering superior user experiences.

About Brian: Brian is an engineer based in Intercom’s Dublin office. He fixes problems, builds things, and grows people.

Show Highlights

(01:34) The Digital Clippy Rant

(2:16) The Good Chatbot vs. Bad Chatbot

(03:51) The AI Chatbot Revolution

(04:33) Unexpected Consequences of Good Chatbots

(05:42) AI Support vs. Human Support

(05:59) The Alexa Problem and Feature Discoverability

(19:03) Amazon's Struggles Moving Up the Stack

(26:55) The Unix Networking Society Origins

(34:43) The Global On-Call Challenge

(42:09) LinkedIn: The World's Largest Porn Site

Links

Intercom: intercom.com

Brian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scanlanb/

Brian on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/bscanlan.bsky.social

Sponsor
Wiz - Listen to Crying Out Cloud: wiz.io/crying-out-cloud