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Creating a culture of cloud spend awareness at Hulu

As demand grows for Hulu programming, cloud engineers keep pace with performance needs while monitoring cost and utilization

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Hulu

“For our engineers, time is money. Yotascale helps engineers quickly find answers to their questions about where cloud spend is going, and see the impact of changes to service utilization. That contributes to more cost-effective resource utilization, and better decision-making – as well a culture that balances cloud infrastructure projects with cost.”

Anthony Logan
FinOps Manager
Hulu

Company: Hulu, Los Angeles, CA

Industry: Media

With double-digit subscriber growth year over year, engineers at Hulu – the subscription video-on-demand service – have responded to consumer demand for programming by focusing on stability and performance. As that focus evolves, engineers also need to respond to questions and concerns about AWS cloud spend. When the company shifted from on-premise workloads to the cloud, AWS Cost Explorer provided only a small slice of the spend picture.

By implementing Yotascale, Hulu FinOps and Engineering teams now have always updated cloud spend and allocation data at their fingertips. The availability and visibility of cloud data is creating a culture of cost awareness among engineers, helping them balance performance needs with budgets and improving cloud utilization.

The Challenges

  • Manage transition from on-premises workloads to the cloud
  • Raise awareness of cloud spend among engineers
  • Manage exponential increase in cloud spend due to consumer demand
  • Reduce reliance on solution training
  • Generate data on cloud spend over time

The Solution

  • When Hulu migrated from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, the company chose Yotascale for its ability to optimize cloud resources and improve cost visibility, as well as the simplicity of the UI.
  • With Yotascale, engineers can easily see high-level insights on cloud spend, and also drill down into cost and optimization over time in specific cloud resources.
  • Hulu worked with Yotascale to customize the UI, including combining two AWS master payer accounts for a consolidated view into spend.

The Results

  • Yotascale is helping FinOps build a culture of cost management among Hulu engineers, who can now respond to cost-conscious Hulu leadership with details of cloud spend, utilization, and service trends.
  • Hulu engineers new to the cloud team can easily access spend and utilization data
    without the training previously needed for AWS Cost Explorer.
  • FinOps and Engineering are using Yotascale to validate cloud service changes, which helps reduce the likelihood of underutilized resources.

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