Safe Fleet
Safe Fleet’s Strategic Shift: Embracing FinOps and Infracost for Cloud Efficiency
Safe Fleet is a global leader in safety solutions for fleet vehicles, bringing together best-in-class brands to form an integrated safety platform for fleets of every type. With a strong focus on cloud-based systems, primarily in Azure, Safe Fleet’s cloud engineering team is responsible for developing, implementing, and deploying infrastructure components across multiple cloud providers.
Safe Fleet operates in diverse industries, such as transit and law enforcement, employing advanced technologies like AI and video analytics for safety and compliance. This diverse technological ecosystem poses unique challenges in cloud management and cost optimization. Guil Dametto, Director of Cloud Engineering, supports product and software engineering teams, ensuring that infrastructure resources are efficiently provisioned and managed. Their use of Terraform and commitment to infrastructure-as-code represent a strategic approach to cloud management.
The company’s growth, partly driven by acquisitions, has led to the inheritance of various cloud infrastructures, each with its unique configurations and challenges. Guil focuses on creating a streamlined, efficient cloud infrastructure that aligns with the company’s rapid scaling and diverse technology requirements. The journey with Infracost began as a necessity to control escalating cloud costs and implement a sustainable cloud resource management framework.
Key results
Cost Prevention and Savings
Infracost was instrumental in enhancing Safe Fleet’s financial efficiency, achieving a remarkable reduction of approximately 30% in cloud infrastructure costs. This includes both savings and preventing costs.
Framework for Cloud Cost Management
Infracost provided a structured approach, aligning with the FinOps framework to manage cloud expenses more effectively.
Enhanced Decision-Making
Infracost’s integration into Safe Fleet’s workflow allowed proactive cost evaluations, effectively ‘shifting left’ by embedding cost considerations early in the development process, promoting proactive and efficient cloud resource utilization.
challenge
Safe Fleet faced complex cloud management challenges, with diverse infrastructures from rapid growth and acquisitions, making unified cost optimization and management essential.
Solution
Adopting FinOps practices and integrating Infracost, Safe Fleet implemented a proactive approach to cloud cost evaluations, enhanced by Infracost’s Jira integration for streamlined decision-making and approval workflows.
Results
The implementation led to a robust framework for cloud cost management, fostering enhanced decision-making and significant cost prevention, with a cost reduction of approximately 30% and a culture shift towards informed cloud resource utilization.
Challenges
“It’s very difficult to understand cloud pricing. You have so many different services!“
Guil Dametto, Director of Cloud Engineering
Safe Fleet faced significant challenges in cloud cost management stemming from its diverse cloud infrastructure. The company’s rapid growth, fueled by acquisitions, added layers of complexity to its cloud environment, resulting in a mosaic of infrastructures, each with its unique configurations.
Managing these disparate systems was not just a technical challenge; it also involved aligning various teams and processes to ensure efficient and cost-effective cloud usage. The inherent complexity of cloud pricing models further complicated this task. Guil noted, “It’s very difficult to understand cloud pricing. You have so many different services!”
Moreover, the growth of Safe Fleet brought about the need for a unified approach to cloud cost management across the entire organization. The challenge was to optimize costs and instill a culture of cost-awareness and proactive management within the engineering teams. Guil emphasized the importance of this cultural shift, “We started adopting FinOps. This is the set of values on how you should be addressing your cloud cost.”
The combination of technical complexity, diverse cloud environments, and the need for cultural change in cloud cost management presented Safe Fleet with a multifaceted challenge that required a sophisticated and holistic solution.
Solution
Safe Fleet’s adoption of FinOps practices and integration of Infracost marked a significant shift in their cloud cost management. By embedding Infracost within their CI/CD pipeline, Safe Fleet achieved a ‘shift-left’ approach, allowing real-time feedback on cloud costs and enabling proactive, informed decisions early in the development process.
Infracost’s integration with Jira was a significant enhancement, creating a cohesive environment for discussing cost impacts alongside cloud infrastructure changes. This setup allowed for approval workflows, ensuring budget holders’ oversight on changes exceeding set cost thresholds, thus preventing surprises and fostering budget adjustments in line with evolving project needs.
Integrating Infracost into Safe Fleet’s systems facilitated an environment where developers and cloud engineers could make more informed decisions, optimizing cloud resources while adhering to budget constraints. This solution wasn’t just about reducing costs but about instilling a culture of cost-awareness and proactive management within the engineering teams.
The Infracost Impact
At Safe Fleet, the integration of Infracost marked a significant turning point in managing cloud costs. Guil highlighted the substantial support and rapid responsiveness of the Infracost team as crucial factors in successfully adopting the tool.
Implementing Infracost allowed Safe Fleet to address two critical aspects of cloud management: cost savings and cost prevention. With Infracost, Safe Fleet gained the ability to forecast cloud costs accurately before deployment, enabling their engineers to make cost-effective decisions. This pre-emptive approach to cost management led to significant savings.
Moreover, Infracost’s integration into Safe Fleet’s software development lifecycle transformed its approach to cloud resource deployment, fostering a culture of cost-awareness and proactive management. Guil appreciated the tool’s functionality and alignment with their workflow, noting, “From a FinOps standpoint, we’re trying to impose those constraints to make developers and engineers more creative.”
In summary, the impact of Infracost at Safe Fleet was profound in terms of tangible cost savings and promoting a more strategic and thoughtful approach to cloud cost management.
Results
Implementing Infracost at Safe Fleet led to notable outcomes in cloud cost management. The integration into their processes provided substantial financial benefits and fostered a shift toward a more informed and proactive approach to handling cloud resources.
The creation of a framework for cloud cost management aligned with the FinOps principles enabled Safe Fleet to manage its cloud expenses more effectively.
Furthermore, enhanced decision-making was facilitated by Infracost’s real-time cloud cost feedback, allowing for proactive financial evaluations.
Implementing Infracost enabled Safe Fleet to prevent unnecessary costs, resulting in cost prevention and savings of approximately 30%, significantly lowering their cloud infrastructure bill.
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