Overview
About
Shutterstock, Inc. is an American provider of stock photography, stock footage, stock music, and editing tools; it is headquartered in New York. Shutterstock maintains a library of around 200 million royalty-free stock photos, vector graphics, and illustrations, with around 10 million video clips and music tracks available for licensing.
Challenge
Shutterstock’s manual cloud cost management processes took up significant time and didn’t drive accountability among their engineering teams. They needed a platform that would provide a single source of truth for cloud efficiency.
Solution
Implemented CloudZero to boost spend allocation, reduce overspending, and give engineers relevant, timely data about the cost of their cloud infrastructure.
Outcomes
- Exceeded cost avoidance targets
- Reaped significant time savings
The Challenge
With one of the world’s largest libraries of stock images, video footage, and music, Shutterstock has a substantial cloud footprint. Leadership wanted technology leaders to be accountable for their cloud costs with the goal of reducing cloud spend.
“As a Cloud FinOps team, we needed to identify the factors driving our cloud costs and ensure teams received accurate cost information,” said Becky Canterbury, Senior Manager of Business Operations and Cloud FinOps at Shutterstock. But, according to Senior Cloud Architect Bill Jorgensen, “Due to our use of Spot instances in Kubernetes, we were unable to accurately allocate spending by team.”
“We have struggled with this for seven years,” Becky said. “We used to gather data from multiple sources and manually process it in Google spreadsheets. As you can imagine, this approach was neither efficient nor accurate.” Both Becky and Bill noted that manual cost reporting consumed over ten hours of their individual time each month.
Shutterstock’s Cloud FinOps team understands that engineers play a critical role in optimizing cloud usage efficiency. Engineers are directly responsible for cloud infrastructure deployment and maintenance, so they have the best context to make informed decisions. However, without accurate visibility into costs, engineers lacked the crucial data needed to identify areas for optimization and drive smarter infrastructure decisions.
After evaluating other platforms, a colleague at Shutterstock suggested the Cloud FinOps team take a look at the industry’s most robust cloud efficiency platform: CloudZero.
The Solution
Coming into the proof-of-value (POV) with CloudZero, Shutterstock listed a handful of objectives:
- Automated Kubernetes allocation. Shutterstock needed granular, accurate cost visibility into the “black box” of Kubernetes.
- A constructive communication pattern. Notifications had been sent manually across multiple mediums that proved to be largely ineffective; Shutterstock needed a common medium that automatically sent targeted messages to the right people.
- Cloud-agnostic cost reporting. Shutterstock wanted a cost management platform that could transcend the boundaries of multiple cloud providers.
In a matter of weeks, CloudZero tackled all these issues.
“For starters — and this would have been a non-starter if it failed — the accuracy of Kubernetes cost reporting was spot-on,” Bill said. “Our target was to keep the variance within 5% of what we observed in Cost Explorer. CloudZero delivered with less than a 2% variance, which was impressive.”
After accurately allocating their Kubernetes costs, CloudZero used CostFormation® to distribute the remaining Shutterstock costs in a framework that aligned with their business structure. This approach ultimately included more than 120 custom Dimensions. These ranged from common ones like cost per team, product, and business unit, to more specialized Dimensions such as DTO for a specific division and Spot versus on-demand costs by environment. It also covered AI-related expenses and other niche categories for individual cost owners.
Best of all, many of these were Dimensions that Shutterstock created themselves.
“I would show a Dimension to a teammate; they would want one for themselves,” Bill said. “We never had this kind of visibility before. Once we did, everyone wanted views of their own costs. We quickly became fluent in CostFormation.”
After building environment and team-specific Dimensions, the Shutterstock Cloud FinOps team created tailored reports and alerts to simplify cost-related communication. For the first time in their FinOps journey, Shutterstock had accurate cost data for their entire cloud footprint, delivered automatically to the engineers responsible for managing it.
The Results
Exceeded cost avoidance targets
“The Cloud FinOps team established a quarterly cost avoidance target,” Becky explained. “Thanks to CloudZero, we have not only met but exceeded our goal each quarter.”
The enhanced visibility into cloud costs related to engineering and business workflows increased engagement from engineering teams. Individual teams began actively reaching out to the central Cloud FinOps team to discuss optimization opportunities. With this increased awareness, teams requested specialized reports tailored to their needs.
One such Kubernetes report helped an engineering team identify unused services left over from ephemeral deployments, resulting in a cost avoidance of over $2,000 per month. In another case, a report for another provider uncovered a misconfigured service in a lower environment, saving the company over $5,000 per month.
The CloudZero cost anomaly reports alerted the Cloud FinOps team to spikes in cloud spending, prompting immediate investigation and resolution efforts. This proactive approach enabled the team to address cost spikes early, preventing them from impacting the monthly invoice. By identifying these anomalies in real time, the Cloud FinOps team could implement corrective measures swiftly, ensuring more accurate budgeting and financial planning.
“It’s the level of engineering-led optimization that we were looking for,” Becky said. “We’re saving significant expenses because engineers are enabled to make informed decisions.”
Reaped significant time savings
The Shutterstock story is one of accuracy and automation: Where they had relied entirely on laborious, manual cost reporting, they now have automated, accurate cost allocation, reporting, and alerting. For the Cloud FinOps and engineering teams, the time savings have been, to quote Bill, “significant”.
“It’s three things: data accuracy, automation, and a simplified workflow,” Bill said. “These elements have transformed our approach to Cloud FinOps.”
Added Becky, “CloudZero is a reporting and alerting tool that provides information from individual engineers all the way up to the C-suite to enable more informed decision making. It has been a game changer for us.”
