How Malwarebytes Improves Cloud Cost Efficiency and Measures the Cost of Their Products

“CloudZero quickly enabled us to put a laser focus on what we needed to address,” explains Shawn.

CloudZero has also given the Malwarebytes team the confidence to work quickly and experiment, knowing that unanticipated costs will be caught quickly, before they can balloon out of control.

“Before CloudZero, we had a weekend where somebody left a debug log on, which led to some pretty significant costs. That kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore,” shares Brian.

With CloudZero’s anomaly alert feature, the engineering team no longer has to worry about retroactively catching these mistakes. “We now get alerts directly in our internal chat tool channels — CloudZero notifies the teams responsible for a product when there's an anomaly in costs. We didn't have that visibility as rapidly before,” explains Brian.

THE RESULTS

A deeper understanding of the reasons behind the costs

CloudZero helped the Malwarebytes Engineering Team understand why their cloud costs were increasing and empowered them with the data to make informed decisions.

"CloudZero has helped us become extremely cost efficient and gives us the insights to effectively manage our cloud investments," says Brian.

CloudZero has helped the team to better understand where they might have bloat in their cloud and has given them the data insight needed to optimize those areas.

"We get a lot of useful information from CloudZero with the unit cost metrics we obtain on a daily basis. It has also enabled our product teams to see if our unit costs are going up or down and to understand the costs for the respective products," says Brian. 

"The team can now confidently state whether it costs more to deliver a product than it used to, and why. CloudZero enables us to have constructive conversations about how to efficiently design new features and products as we continue to innovate and grow as a company," says Brian.

Improved cost communication between the finance team and business partners

CloudZero has enabled Shawn and his team to make cost data available to the finance team and business partners without giving people access to their master billing account.

"Before adopting CloudZero, monthly cost forecasting requests from the finance team would require time consuming analysis of our AWS costs," shares Brian.

The forecasting capabilities available in CloudZero have helped the team resolve this problem. "Our finance partners can now directly log into CloudZero so we can review the costs and predictions together. This data and visibility has improved the quality and focus of our expense planning conversations," explains Brian.

A shared approach to cost management

CloudZero’s anomaly detection feature has been a big hit at Malwarebytes. It has helped the team accurately allocate costs so they can effectively communicate cost abnormalities to teams.

"With CloudZero, our teams are now empowered to make decisions that are mindful of the impact on costs and to share responsibility in managing the expense," says Brian.

CloudZero’s intuitive design has also helped the team leads tremendously since there’s no need to train engineers on how to use the software.

“One of the big selling points of CloudZero is that it was built for engineers. CloudZero is intuitive enough that our engineers are able to go in there, self-serve, and understand exactly what they're looking at,” explains Shawn.

Saved 10 hours a week in cost management time

With CloudZero in place, the DevOps team leads no longer have to spend hours drilling into reports and having unproductive conversations about their cloud bill.  

“Cloud cost is now a very small portion of my day — and by very small, I mean I don't have to think about it anymore,” says Shawn, adding “I always dreamed about a solution that can take me out of the picture and that's why I think we landed at CloudZero.”

Since engineering teams now have visibility into cost data and can get feedback in CloudZero on how their decisions affect cost, it has given them autonomy and freed up time for other business activities.

“CloudZero has really changed the way we think about cost. It decentralized our cost management and put the power into the hands of our engineers,” says Brian.