Holland & Barrett Case Study

About Holland & Barrett

Holland & Barrett (H&B) is a leading international health and wellness retailer, operating an extensive e-commerce platform and in-store digital infrastructure. As part of a major digital transformation, H&B built an internal engineering function from scratch, scaling to over 400 engineers and developing a cloud-native technology stack. With rapid cloud expansion came the need for better visibility, cost allocation, and efficiency in cloud spend management.

The Challenge

Holland & Barrett rapidly expanded its cloud footprint after transitioning from a third-party-managed tech stack to an in-house engineering function. The result was:

• Scaling Complexity: Hundreds of microservices built on AWS and Kubernetes, with some usage of Azure and GCP.
• Lack of Cost Visibility: Cloud spending spread across a single AWS account made cost attribution to teams difficult.
• Observability Cost Spikes: Datadog costs increased unpredictably, and engineering teams lacked clarity on cost drivers.
• Manual Cost Tracking Overhead: Initial attempts to manage costs internally proved inefficient and time-consuming.

H&B needed a FinOps solution that could provide granular cost visibility, empower engineering teams with insights, and automate cost-saving opportunities.

Why Finout

After evaluating multiple solutions, H&B chose Finout due to its seamless integration, automation capabilities, and intuitive cost visibility tools. Key decision 
factors included:

• Instant Cost Visibility & Allocation: Finout’s Virtual Tags allowed automatic team-level cost breakdowns without manual tagging.
• Anomaly Detection & Cost Optimization: CostGuard helped identify inefficiencies, such as unused custom logs, leading to significant savings.
• Ease of Adoption for Engineers: Unlike traditional FinOps tools, Finout presented cost insights in a way that was accessible and actionable for engineers.
• Automated Cost Reporting & Alerts: Engineers and product managers received automated reports, reducing reliance on spreadsheets and manual tracking.

The Result

Empowering Engineering Teams

Finout provided engineers with self-serve cost visibility, eliminating the need for manual cost tracking and allowing teams to take ownership of their cloud spend. The intuitive dashboards ensured that even teams without deep FinOps expertise could easily monitor their spending.

Proactive Cost Management

Before Finout, SREs had to manually chase teams about cost spikes over months. With Finout, the engineering team quickly identified cost inefficiencies, such as under-optimized Datadog log indexing, which was resolved within a single day after visualization.

Cultural Shift in FinOps Accountability

H&B’s engineering function embraced FinOps as a key operational pillar, expanding traditional “Four S’s” of Engineering Excellence (Stability, Security, Scalability, and Speed to Market) to include a Fifth “S”—Spend

Looking Ahead

As H&B continues to optimize its cloud financial operations, the next steps include:

• Scaling Tag Governance: Enhancing Finout’s tag governance features to further improve cost attribution.
• Expanding Shared Cost Allocation: Implementing shared cost breakdowns for CDN and OpenAI-related expenses.
• Broader Cross-Functional Adoption: Further engaging finance and product teams to integrate cost insights into strategic planning.

Conclusion

Finout has transformed how Holland & Barrett manages cloud costs, embedding cost accountability across engineering teams while driving significant cost optimizations. With intuitive automation, real-time insights, and proactive anomaly detection, Finout has enabled H&B to take control of its cloud financial strategy and ensure sustainable cloud spending.