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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