Happening
Shifting FinOps Culture: Happening’s Path to Cloud Optimization with Infracost
Happening, led by Shreshth Tuli, Senior Research Engineer, actively integrates advanced technology solutions in the betting and gaming industry. The company has diversified its offerings worldwide, including sports betting, personalized games and casino services, while ensuring data-driven, efficient operations. Happening’s business model, which focuses on balancing customer engagement with revenue generation, underscores the importance of efficient and innovative cloud infrastructure management.
A focus on AI and data-driven optimization characterizes the company’s approach to technology. This focus isn’t just about leveraging AI for service delivery but also about applying AI principles to optimize cloud infrastructure and costs. Shreshth’s role at Happening involves managing costs and resources and balancing the platform’s efficiency with revenue generation and customer-centric metrics. His approach to problem-solving is both generalist and specialist, applying AI-based optimization to a wide range of challenges.
Key results
Cultural Shift in FinOps
One of Happening’s key results is the cultural shift in FinOps. As Shreshth notes, this is not intuitively embraced across the industry, making it a significant achievement.
Cost Prevention and Savings
Happening optimized its infrastructure using Infracost for early-stage cost estimation, ensuring efficient use of cloud resources and preventing significant costs from being added to their cloud bills.
Efficiency and Automation in FinOps
Happening’s use of Infracost led to detecting several issues across thousands of pull requests, significantly reducing the need for post-deployment fixes and saving significant engineering time. This efficiency negated the need to hire dedicated personnel for issue resolution, transforming their cloud management approach with the automation created using Infracost.
challenge
Happening faced significant challenges in creating a FinOps-focused culture, grappling with the complexities of large-scale tagging, and implementing scalable cloud solutions.
Solution
Happening addressed these challenges, in part, by integrating Infracost into their CI/CD process, enabling early-stage tagging compliance, and optimizing cloud resources being launched from the start.
Results
Implementing Infracost at Happening has supported an ongoing cultural shift in FinOps, contributing to a significant improvement in tagging coverage, the efficient transition of storage volumes to AWS gp3, and a notable reduction in their cloud cost footprint.
Challenges
“The biggest challenge for FinOps is a myopic culture when efficiency, observability, and other metrics are sidelined.“
Shreshth Tuli, Senior Research Engineer
At Happening, the key challenges in cloud cost management and FinOps, as outlined by Shreshth, centered around cultural shifts, tagging complexity, and implementing scalable solutions. Shreshth emphasized the difficulty in fostering a FinOps-focused culture, noting that across the industry, it’s often sidelined in favor of immediate service delivery.
Tagging, a critical aspect of cloud management and FinOps, posed significant challenges due to its complexity at scale. Shreshth strongly advocates for a ‘shift-left’ on tagging policies, believing that early implementation is critical to effective management. The complexities of tagging across various resources and ensuring compliance with FinOps policies added to the challenge.
Moreover, another significant hurdle was implementing best practices at scale, such as AWS gp2 to gp3 volume conversions. Shreshth discussed the difficulties in converting existing volumes to more efficient gp3 volumes and ensuring that new volumes were launched with optimized settings from the beginning.
These challenges highlighted the need for a comprehensive, AI-driven approach to FinOps at Happening that could address the cultural, technical, and scalability aspects effectively.
Solution
In addressing their FinOps challenges, Happening implemented a capacity management solution using Infracost. Infracost, integrated into their CI/CD process, provided real-time insights into cloud costs, enabling proactive cost management.
A significant part of their solution involved a ‘shift-left’ approach to tagging policies. By enforcing tagging in pull requests, Happening enhanced compliance and efficiency. Shreshth mentioned the value of early tagging, explaining its importance in controlling resources and costs.
Happening focused on optimizing cloud volumes, specifically transitioning from AWS gp2 to gp3 volumes. This shift ensured that they were using the latest, most efficient storage solutions and established policies to prevent using outdated resources in future deployments.
Additionally, Infracost’s capabilities extended to detecting several issues across thousands of pull requests, significantly reducing the time engineers would have otherwise spent rectifying issues. This level of automation and integration helped transform Happening’s approach to cloud management, making the capacity management teams more efficient and effective.
Shreshth also highlighted the operational advantage of Infracost, pointing out that it eliminated the need for dedicated personnel to fix issues. “We don’t need to hire dedicated people to fix these issues, the automation created using Infracost is a force multiplier,” he remarked. This focus on leveraging AI for FinOps, not just for AI services, has set Happening apart in its industry, revolutionizing their approach to cloud cost management and optimization.
The Infracost Impact
At Happening, the integration of Infracost facilitated a shift in addressing their cloud management challenges. Shreshth emphasized the value of Infracost in providing real-time, detailed insights into cloud costs and resources. This granular level of visibility was crucial in enabling the team to make more informed and efficient decisions regarding their cloud infrastructure.
Infracost’s impact extended beyond mere cost management. One of the most significant advantages was the improvement in tagging. Through Infracost, Happening was able to enforce and improve its tagging policies significantly. This enhancement was crucial for efficient resource management and aligning with their FinOps strategies.
The transition to more efficient cloud storage solutions, like the move from AWS gp2 to gp3 volumes, was effectively facilitated by Infracost. This strategic change, driven by the tool’s insights and recommendations, led to substantial storage efficiency and cost improvements.
Infracost’s role at Happening highlights its capability not just as a cost estimation tool but as a comprehensive solution for optimizing cloud resource management and facilitating a data-driven approach to FinOps.
Results
Implementing Infracost at Happening has substantially improved cloud cost management and optimization. The results of this integration are multifaceted and profoundly impact the company’s approach to FinOps and cloud infrastructure.
- Cultural Shift in FinOps: Happening experienced a cultural shift towards FinOps, a notable accomplishment in an industry where such a transition is not commonly prioritized. This shift represents a major realignment in their approach to cloud cost management.
- Cost Prevention and Savings: Happening significantly improved its infrastructure optimization and reduced their cloud bills. By leveraging Infracost for early-stage cost estimation, engineers were able to launch more optimized resources from the outset, rather than revising post-deployment. This proactive approach led to a more efficient use of cloud resources, contributing to substantial cost savings and enhanced operational efficiency.
- Efficiency and Automation in FinOps: Happening’s use of Infracost led to detecting several issues across thousands of pull requests, significantly reducing the need for post-deployment fixes and saving significant engineering time. This efficiency negated the need to hire dedicated personnel for issue resolution, transforming their cloud management approach with the automation created using Infracost.
Overall, the impact of Infracost at Happening has facilitated the development of cost-aware capacity management techniques in terms of savings and supporting a culture of proactive and informed decision-making in cloud resource management.
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