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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