Avalara, a leader in tax automation software, optimizes cost, operational efficiency, and collaboration—realizing an ROI of over 500%
CASE STUDY
Avalara Unlocks Cloud Savings and Improves Engineer Experience With Automated Cost Governance Avalara, a leader in tax automation software, optimizes cost, operational efficiency, and collaboration—realizing an ROI of over 500%.
Industry: Software Provider Customers: 30,000+ across 95 countries Headquarters: Seattle, WA
www.stacklet.io
CASE STUDY
Challenge • The pandemic fueled growth for Avalara’s business, which led to increased cloud infrastructure usage. • As cloud spending rapidly increased, Avalara’s FinOps program needed a way to scale cost monitoring and optimization backlog, and disconnected, manual workflows, frustrated developers struggled to take required action. Impact maximize the value of cloud investments. • Given the lack of timely alerts, large cost • By consistently enforcing policies, Avalara was able to realize a 500% return on their Stacklet investment within the first few months. • Avalara streamlined and automated workflows to improve operational efficiency and foster better collaboration between FinOps and DevOps teams. • Avalara leveraged Stacklet’s asset database to build a high-fidelity data source to track, optimize, and provide self-serve cost optimization data.
In the first month alone, our improved ability to deploy consistent policies yielded savings that exceeded the amount of our initial investment. In the first few months we easily achieved over 500% return on our investment in Stacklet. Lindbergh Matillano, Director Cloud Cost Optimization at Avalara “
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CASE STUDY
Pandemic Boosted Business and Cloud Adoption Avalara delivers cloud-based software that automates sales and use tax processing for clients. To support its expanding services, customer base, and operations, Avalara has continued to grow its cloud deployments, which now span across many accounts and regions and multiple cloud providers. The advent of the pandemic resulted in a massive increase in online ordering, which in turn led to rapid growth in customers’ use of Avalara’s services. For the Avalara team, this meant operations had to expand, fast. Along with demand, cloud resource usage, and costs, started to increase dramatically. In providing critical services, Avalara must ensure its cloud-based resources are reliable and responsive. In addition, in an effort to optimize cost management, the team began building out a full FinOps program. In pursuing these initiatives, the team was contending with several challenges. Lack of Timely Alerts and Reactive Approaches Were Costing the Business To manage cloud resources, teams need timely access to data. For example, teams must be able to quickly identify unused or underused resources, such as Amazon EBS volumes, Amazon RDS, or Amazon EC2 instances. However, these data were spread across multiple cloud provider and third-party tools, various teams, and many accounts. This meant disparate teams had to manually export and aggregate the data using spreadsheets and they lacked any effective way to query and report on all their cloud environments. Further, once significant time and effort had been invested in aggregating data and analyzing it, and optimization opportunities were discovered, it was difficult to distribute the required information to the people who needed to address these changes. Ultimately, all this time and effort and lack of centralization made the team more reactive and slow to respond. Disconnected Workflows Frustrated Developers The team struggled to establish standard governance policies and apply them consistently. Their prior third-party vendor tools weren’t intuitive or familiar for developers. Developers couldn’t readily understand, collaborate on, or implement the policies that were in effect. Further, the team had been relying on manual reports and email-based communications, processes that weren’t aligned with developers’ existing workflows. This meant remediations were time-consuming and more of a distraction than they needed to be.
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www.stacklet.io
CASE STUDY
Avalara Deployed Stacklet for Proactive Insights and Guardrails To counter these obstacles, the team began to look for solutions that could support their governance and cost optimization efforts. “We wanted to find a tool that was aligned with our team’s workflows and skill sets, and that would provide strong support of our FinOps program,” explained Lindbergh Matillano, Director Cloud Cost Optimization at Avalara. The team at Avalara ultimately chose to work with Stacklet. 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. The sections below examine a few of the advantages Stacklet delivered. Simple, Declarative Language Boosts Collaboration With Stacklet, DevOps engineers and FinOps teams can now use a simple, easy-to-understand language for writing policies. This boosts collaboration and simplifies the underlying complexity of cloud technologies. Out-of-the-Box Policy Packs Provide Rapid Time To Value Stacklet Platform came with out-of-the-box policies for cloud cost optimization based on industry best practices. These policies gave the Avalara team a quick start and saved hundreds of person-hours in policy writing and testing. Stacklet’s policies were also flexible and enabled the FinOps team to customize these policies and embed them into their existing workflows. Streamlined, Automated Developer-Centric Workflows Reduce Backlog With Stacklet Platform, the team can now manage policies in the same fashion as they manage code. Like application code, policy code is deployed and managed via Git. In addition, communications with DevOps and engineering teams are automated and can happen via the team’s preferred channels, including Slack and Jira. For example, Stacklet Platform can automatically detect resources that violate a policy, such as unattached Amazon EBS resources, volumes, and snapshots that were older than 30 days; open JIRA tickets for the right team; and notify them on Slack. Periodically, the “cost optimization backlog” is reviewed with the engineering team for accountability. In instances in which applications are not in production, Stacklet Platform can automatically de-provision resources and notify the right engineering team. 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 “
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www.stacklet.io
CASE STUDY
High Quality Data and Flexible Reporting Provided Insights Stacklet Platform features Stacklet AssetDB, which provides Avalara with a real-time asset inventory. Through Stacklet AssetDB, the team can leverage centralized, granular data on cloud resources and configurations, from across all their accounts and environments. Further, the solution offers integration with the company’s business intelligence tools, which facilitates fast, easy analysis. 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 “ By harnessing Stacklet, the teams at Avalara have been able to realize a range of benefits. Cost Savings Fuel Rapid ROI Their average daily costs declined by 2% since they started using Stacklet. They can now identify and address resources that are being unused or underutilized. In the first few months of operation, the Avalara team was able to realize a 500% return on their investment. “In the first month alone, our improved ability to deploy consistent policies yielded savings that exceeded the amount of our initial investment,” Matillano explained. “In the first few months, we easily achieved over 500% return on our investment in Stacklet.”
500% Return on Investment
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www.stacklet.io
CASE STUDY
Enhanced Staff Productivity and Developer Experience With Stacklet, the team has been able to eliminate a lot of manual processes that used to be required. By leveraging automation and built-in remediation and notification capabilities, teams can spend more time focusing on value-added efforts while ensuring consistent policy adherence. Developers also get a better experience as they receive automated alerts and recommendations for cost optimization in the channel of their choice. Developers are also able to develop policies and remediations themselves. Optimized Scalability With Stacklet Platform and continuous cost optimization policies in place, they’ve been able to capitalize on their cloud investments and maximize scale across all their cloud environments. With automated deployment and enforcement, their small team is able to ensure policy remediation. Further, they are able to scale FinOps capabilities across an ever-increasing number of cloud resources, providers, and application groups. Stacklet Platform has provided us with tremendous benefits in terms of cost savings in the cloud and optimizing our internal operations. But we are just beginning to realize the potential of Stacklet and are looking forward to uncovering more opportunities and usecases as we scale our cloud operations. Lindbergh Matillano, Director Cloud Cost Optimization at Avalara “
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