Finout case study
4 min read
Problems with cloud costs
Today, nearly every organization runs its applications and systems in the cloud. This helps them in avoiding to have to buy physical infrastructure and just use resources that are available in the cloud. This is a good practice as the infrastructure can be scaled in just a few clicks or the entire scaling process can be automated as well.
This introduces its own set of challenges as many times, you might be spending money on resources that are not being utilized by your application. This is what we call invisible costs. You are paying for it, but no one knows what are you paying for.
This also limits visibility into what companies are or will be paying for, why are they paying, what are they paying for, and most importantly, how can these costs be optimized. This limited visibility causes them to pay more than what they actually need. This is where FinOps can help you in optimizing costs.
Finout
Finout is a FinOps first, a cost management platform that combines business metrics with AWS/GCP/Kubernetes for full cost observability and optimization. Finout's platform slices the company's spend into customers, features, or any other unit metrics, enabling holistic cost reduction in both the short and long run. All without adding code or adding an agent.
Finout’s cloud cost management platform combines all invoices into one Mega-bill, enabling you to see every cloud service you are paying for in one single bill. It combines infrastructure services from cloud providers, data warehouses, and CDNs including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, Datadog, Kubernetes, and Snowflake as well as middleware such as Stripe, Twilio, and AuthO.
Once in the Mega-bill, every line item can be attributed to its business role, feature, team, and product using advanced assignment rules and virtual tagging, including native agentless Kubernetes support. Finout can then correlate those costs to unit economics using Datadog, Salesforce, Looker, and more to attribute revenue data and profitability margins for each customer.
This overall enables you to see how much cloud costs are being assigned to which teams, and how much the organization spends on each customer, and see all this information in one single customizable dashboard.
What makes it unique
While the market is filled with legacy products such as CloudHealth & Cloudabillity or optimization tools such as Zesty & Spot, no tool supports a company's cloud infrastructure and gives them the ability to create a business unit such as cost per customer, feature, or segment, all on one platform.
Finout's platform can also actively help reduce infrastructure costs from day one with no extra charge using a cost optimization layer called CostGuard, which includes:
- Idle Resource Locator: WS, Snowflake or GCP, if it is an idle resource, Finout can identify and send you an alert.
- Predefined Anomaly Detection: an anomaly engine that protects from unplanned cost spikes and alert them the moment they happen.
- Rightsizing Recommendations: now in AWS and soon in Kubernetes
The beta version is now free to any user onboarded to Finout, including the free tier and POC period.
Finout's ability to give any user-customizable dashboards and reporting systems means that Finance, Sales, IT, DevOps, and C-level all can see exactly what they need in seconds without bothering DevOps teams. Additional benefits are the fact that the platform is very easy to use without having to change any code or configuration settings.
As a young company, Finout has grown rapidly with top-tier customers such as WalkMe, Riskified, Hunters, and many more, we usually save more than 3 times the cloud spend and its costs to use Finout's platform, with additional huge savings in company resources and RI planning.
Conclusion
Handling cloud costs is getting difficult due to a lack of visibility. These unseen costs are only going to increase as the application size increases and managing the costs would also become difficult.
FinOps platforms such as Finout are helping teams to gain visibility into where they are spending money and how they can reduce their costs without sacrificing application performance or availability.
