The Challenge

The Cloud Engineering and FinOps team at REPAY aimed to advance from rate and other basic optimizations to more sophisticated cloud usage optimization. They faced several challenges, including:

• Limited Visibility and Fragmented Environments: With a highly fragmented cloud setup across multiple accounts, verticals, and environments, maintaining consistent visibility and control over costs and resources proved difficult.
• Excessive Time Spent on Reporting and Tracking: Teams needed to spend more time manually generating reports and tracking data across cost, security, and compliance areas, limiting their efficiency.
• Limited to Basic Optimization Practices: The REPAY team was doing basic usage optimization practices due to the limited breadth of capabilities of the existing tools set.

“If you think about it, we deal with many different verticals, and each one has a different product set. Each vertical is a different customer, and when you think about cloud governance and the sprawl of accounts, environments, and VPCs, managing it all in one place becomes challenging. It also makes it difficult to enforce policies on teams so they don’t make a mistake that costs the company money.”

Van Wolfe
VP of Platform Engineering at REPAY

• Reactive Mode with No Preventative Guardrails: The team was largely operating in a reactive mode, responding to issues as they occurred. However, the need for proactive cost and security risk prevention through automated guardrails is becoming increasingly urgent.
• Scaling Automation and Workflows: As the cloud environment scaled, REPAY needed to automate workflows to capture optimization opportunities and enforce tagging at scale, reducing manual intervention.
• Inconsistent Tagging and Allocation: The REPAY team faced challenges with maintaining consistent tagging and cost allocation practices across all environments, leading to inefficiencies in resource management.

Outcomes

With the adoption of the Stacklet Platform, the REPAY cloud team was to boost visibility, unlock more usage optimization opportunities, and reduce risk. Key outcomes included:

• Boost Visibility and Cut Governance Reporting Time by 75%: Stacklet’s comprehensive cloud asset database enabled REPAY to gain real-time insights into their cloud accounts, providing a single source of truth for cost, security, and compliance across a diverse cloud environment. The efficiency gains were significant; with the team able to use SQL to query, Stacklet AssetDB has allowed them to cut reporting times by up to 75%.
• Near 100% Tagging Enforcement with Automated Policy Enforcement: Stacklet automated REPAY’s tagging processes, ensuring consistent and accurate tagging across all cloud resources. This facilitated improved reporting and control, reducing the manual effort and time required for tagging and achieving results in under a week.
• Achieved six-digit savings in the first few months: Stacklet’s automated workflows and broad resource coverage allowed REPAY to identify and capture optimization opportunities through rightsizing, scheduling development resources, and more.
• Proactive Cost Avoidance: By leveraging Stacklet’s prevention capabilities, REPAY was able to prevent costly resource misconfigurations before they could impact their cloud bills, leading to substantial cost savings and improved efficiency.
• Improved Security and Compliance: With Stacklet, REPAY’s security and infosec teams could easily access necessary data through the Stacklet AssetDB, allowing them to self-serve security reports and ensure compliance across all environments.
• Advanced Cost Management and Unit Economics: REPAY used Stacklet to understand the cost per transaction, aligning their cloud spend with business growth. This insight enabled them to tie cloud costs directly to business value, making better-informed decisions on pricing models and product scalability.

“We want to know how much it costs per transaction, and as we add more features, how those costs back into our pricing model. Stacklet has the capability to give us that data.”

Van Wolfe
VP of Platform Engineering at REPAY