Case study - Hunters

Hunters’ FinOps Visibility Challenge:

Hunters were looking for an intuitive solution that cloud provide leadership with clarity for their cloud costs. They required a solution capable of consuming their multi-tenant, cross-platform, cost data using a self-service model. The C-level executives needed full cost visibility to make business decisions based on their infrastructure costs without draining the engineering teams of necessary cloud resources.

Over the last few years, the Cyber Security sector in general – and Hunters in particular – have experienced tremendous growth. As Hunters scaled up the number of cloud services they rely on, the complexity of their infrastructure has grown accordingly. 

Hunters’ primary service offering works with enormous datasets. Their cloud infrastructure comprises AWS and Snowflake handling these big datasets. This architecture enabled Hunters’ to quickly scale to support their customers. 

However, this architecture also required the Hunters DevOps and Finance teams (including the CTO’s office )to invest significant time and attention in order to understand their cloud costs invoices. The variation between different clients’ cloud usage meant the profit margin changed dramatically according to each client’s usage. Yet no one knew which client was responsible for what charges on the invoice’s bottom line.

As usage grew, at the end of each month they were left with a hefty invoice that created more questions than answers. Questions like "Why did our cost grow by 5%?" or "Is client X still profitable?" remained unanswered. Also, as usage grew, the risk of losing cost control grew with it.

And so, in mid-2020, Hunters sought a better FinOps solution for their cloud cost challenges. Hunters’ initial solution, AWS Cost Explorer, wasn’t a great fit. It lacked essential features and offered poor granularity. More importantly, Cost Explorer could not allocate Hunters’ cloud spend within AWS (not to mention across AWS and Snowflake).

Hunters applied CloudHealth and Snowflake’s cost tools to access the data and export to Excel files for analysis. Doing this did not solve all of Hunters’ problems:

“Every day, I opened Cloudheath and Snowflake billing and spent hours exporting to Excel and calculating metrics. Now I get it all, with one click, on the Finout dashboard.” Tomer Kazaz, Hunters’ Co-Founder and CTO

• -CloudHealth could not provide precise cost allocation for Hunters’ multi-tenant AWS, Kuberentes, and Snowflake environments.
• - It took too long to export and report on data.. That meant they could only monitor charges once a month.
• - Due to the manual work with Excel, there was a constant concern that the numbers were not accurate or that they were already obsolete.
• - The Excel report did not’t provide the Hunters teams with the information they needed. It could also not be changed or expanded quickly.
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• Why Finout?

Finout finally allows the team to look at their cost bills from a business perspective while also supporting their FinOps needs to constantly improve their cost optimization solutions – with no extra engineering hours required.” Tomer Kazaz, Hunters’ Co-Founder and CTO

Finout was built by engineers that have experienced the same issues that the Hunters team faced. With this experience, Finout elegantly addresses FinOpsand DevOpscost demands in modern cloud environments. 

Finout proved to be Hunters’ ideal solution.

“Finout is the only place I can attribute both AWS and Snowflake to my customers and understand how my gross margin is behaving over time.” Tomer Kazaz, Hunters’ Co-Founder and CTO

The benefits of Onboarding Finout’s Cloud Observability platform

Hunters gained a single platform to manage all their cloud costs (AWS, K8s, and Snowflake). Finout enabled Hunters to slice and dice their infrastructure costs using various business KPIs. This created full visibility over the desired Unit Economics: achieving an accurate and automatic cost-per-customer view.

• Finout enabled Hunters to slice and dice their infrastructure costs using various business KPIs, creating full visibility over the desired Unit Economics: achieving an accurate and automatic cost-per-customer view.

“I can now put my business metrics and application metrics on top of my usage, so I can understand immediately the efficiency of my cloud spend.” Tomer Kazaz, Hunters’ Co-Founder and CTO

The cost-per-customer view alone changed the way Hunters operates in the cloud. Before Finout, Hunters could only monitor absolute cost in several different systems. 

After Finout’s implementation, the level of cost observability has reached a point in which each anomaly for any business KPI, or a change in a customer’s usage, can be monitored and reviewed almost in real-time – ensuring that their cloud cost growth is healthy and based on a client’s or the company’s needs.

"When onboarding a new client, I’m calm as I know exactly how much they cost me in real-time and understand what’s the best pricing offer I can give them - there isn’t anything like that in the market.” Tomer Kazaz, Hunters’ Co-Founder and CTO

Today, Finout enables Hunters to maximize their business value by helping Engineering, Finance, Dev, and Sales teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions daily, practicing FinOps disciplines and saving tens of thousands of dollars.

"It’s amazing to see all the departments in Hunters talk about Finout as an integral part of their decision-making process within such a short time of integration.” Tomer Kazaz, Hunters’ Co-Founder and CTO

And, this is only the beginning; Finout is rapidly becoming a go-to platform for any technical cost center  of the company that needs to determine strategy, from development and deployment to buyer persona metrics and budget forecasting.

“We use Finout constantly to evaluate new use cases decide on our approach in growing into new markets and developing new features.” Tomer Kazaz, Hunters’ Co-Founder and CTO

Hunters are excited to see what they can achieve now that their cost visibility has been unleashed.

Interested to understand how Finout can solve your cloud cost challenges? Click here.