The Challenge

A large media and entertainment company (a.k.a ACME Inc) faced rising cloud expenses and increasing complexity as their business grew over the years. Their cloud infrastructure spanned multiple providers and hundreds of accounts, creating several key challenges:

• Limited Visibility and Attribution: ACME teams lacked clear insights into their cloud state, optimization opportunities, and risks. Without proper attribution and ownership, it was difficult to identify inefficiencies, prioritize actions, and execute optimizations effectively. Capturing optimization opportunities and addressing non-compliance often took too long, delaying impactful changes.
• Inefficient Optimization Processes: Manual workflows slowed down the detection and remediation of non-compliant resources, as well as the capture of cost optimization opportunities. This resulted in increased risks, excessive cloud waste, and compounding delays in optimization efforts.
• High Risks in Policy Implementation: Concerns about the potential blast radius of retroactive policy enforcement made it challenging to scale governance without risking operational stability.
• Cultural Resistance: Optimization and governance efforts often encountered pushback from engineering teams, hindering cost savings, policy adoption, and compliance efforts.

Overall, the company sought the right combination of tools and processes to drive continuous optimization, accelerate action on opportunities, and foster a cultural shift – one that would be sustainable and scalable across their growing operations.

Solution

ACME set out to implement comprehensive tagging standards, usage optimization practices, and governance policies to identify, remediate, and prevent costly and risky misconfigurations. During their research, they discovered the Cloud Custodian project and initially considered implementing it independently. However, they quickly realized this approach would require significant engineering resources and custom development to effectively scale and operate in their complex, multi-cloud environment.

They then explored Stacklet, which not only accelerated their adoption of Cloud Custodian but also offered additional capabilities such as advanced FinOps features and a real-time cloud asset inventory management solution. These features seamlessly complemented their governance initiatives, helping them achieve their optimization and compliance goals more efficiently and at scale.

Outcome

“Governance without enforcement is just an aspiration. With Stacklet we have combined policy enforcement with communication and education to foster a culture of compliance.”

100% Tagging Compliance

• Automated tagging workflows and preventative guardrails ensured 100% tagging compliance across the entire cloud environment.
• This compliance enabled better attribution, cost allocation, and resource ownership clarity, addressing inefficiencies and improving overall governance.

Enhanced Cloud Visibility

• Stacklet AssetDB provided real-time insights into cloud compliance, posture, and resource configurations using SQL queries.
• Customizable dashboards, streamlined reporting and audit preparedness, significantly reducing manual effort and improving response times for compliance queries.

“Stacklet AssetDB gave us the visibility we needed. With SQL queries and custom dashboards, we could instantly understand our cloud posture, enabling faster decisions and smoother audits.”

Increased Team Productivity

• Automated processes reduced manual efforts, freeing engineering resources for higher-impact work.
• Improved communication frameworks fostered a culture of collaboration and trust.

“The automation of remediation and compliance workflows saved us countless engineering hours, allowing us to focus on higher-impact initiatives.”

Sustained Efficiency, Scalable Governance, and Cultural Shift

• Stacklet fostered a cultural shift by aligning engineering teams with governance and optimization goals through early feedback loops and a shift left approach, enabling teams to address compliance and inefficiencies during the development lifecycle.
• Preventative guardrails and automated workflows ensured sustained efficiency, minimizing disruptions and reducing operational overhead.
• Unified governance policies and scalable processes allowed for effective multi-cloud management while embedding compliance and accountability into daily operations.
• The shift left strategy empowered teams to proactively identify and resolve issues before deployment, fostering collaboration and continuous improvement.

“Prevention is the best remediation. Fixing production issues while they’re live is expensive and hard. By implementing preventative guardrails, we mitigated costs and risks before they could escalate.”