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:

• As cloud spending rapidly increased, Avalara’s FinOps program needed a way to scale cost monitoring and maximize the value of cloud investments.
• Given the need for timely alerts, a significant cost optimization backlog, and disconnected, manual workflows, our developers, understandably, found it frustrating to take the required action.
• Existing FinOps toolsets were not designed with engineers in mind and could not fix issues. As a result, they had minimum usage.

“We wanted to find a tool that was aligned with our team’s workflows and skill sets, and that would provide strong support for our FinOps program”

Lindbergh Matillano
Director Cloud Cost Optimization at Avalara.

Outcome

Stacklet Platform, based on the Cloud Custodian open-source project, provides Avalara’s development and FinOps teams with an efficient, flexible, and automated way to enforce governance policies across their large scale, dynamic cloud environments. Cloud Custodian was already being used by some groups within Avalara in a limited fashion, so Stacklet helped standardize that as well. To date, the team has deployed Stacklet policies across all their cloud accounts with their largest public cloud provider

• Achieved 500% ROI: By consistently enforcing policies, Avalara was able to realize a 500% return on their Stacklet investment within the first few months.
• Reduced run-rates from 30% to 60%: Significantly reduced annual run rate by 30% – 60% of certain services and accounts through better visibility and ability to take actions on cost and usage optimization opportunities.
• Up to 80% reduction in manual processes related to cost governance: Avalara streamlined and automated workflows to improve operational efficiency and foster better collaboration between FinOps and DevOps teams.

“Stacklet AssetDB is extremely powerful because it contains hundreds of resource types and is accessible to our engineers and FinOps teams, who are already familiar with SQL. Our teams can easily query the data and create reports to answer pressing questions about our resource utilization.”

Lindbergh Matillano
Director Cloud Cost Optimization at Avalara.

• Higher Visibility: Avalara leveraged Stacklet’s asset database to build a high-fidelity data source to track, optimize, and provide self-serve cost optimization data.
• Scale FinOps: Using a standardized tool like Stacklet across clouds now, Avalara can scale the FinOps program across hundreds of accounts now and multiple platforms in the future.

“Now, if a resource is non-compliant, our teams are notified immediately, so they can take the necessary steps to address the issue. Plus, this is all happening through the tools and workflows our engineers are accustomed to.”

Lindbergh Matillano
Director Cloud Cost Optimization at Avalara.