Document360 is one of the fastest-growing products in self-service knowledge base category. In this paper, we will talk about some of the cost-intelligence challenges faced in operating Document360 with better profit margins, which is running on top of Microsoft Azure, and how Turbo360 helps to optimize their Azure cost.
Business Need
As Document360 started acquiring enterprise customers at scale for years, the status quo of growth-at-all-cost was over, and the organization thrived towards striding the profit margins to keep the business healthy.
Like other SaaS businesses, the cloud Infrastructure cost is one of the significant cost drivers for Document360 after operational expenses like employee wages.
The organization strategically decided to cut down the cloud wastage and optimize the infrastructure to increase the profit margins. Also, they had plans to maximize the profit margins of enterprise customers based on their consumption at renewals and introducing a freemium plan to acquire more users.
Tracking key SaaS metrics like COGS only indicates something is going wrong while watching the margins shrink and does not provide meaningful context in improving the situation. It is essential to track the unit cost, like products, teams, and features which is being owned to reduce Azure Infrastructure cost and implement a show-back policy.
The Challenge
The key challenges fell into three main areas.
-
The actual Azure bill or native cost management tool provides a zoomed-out view of the cost per Azure service, which does not provide context like cost per feature or team to optimize Azure Infrastructure cost.
- They don’t have visibility into the cost per specific customer to maximize customer margins at renewal.
- There is no comprehensive tool to recommend resource right sizing and reservations within the Azure portal to reduce the cost after figuring out the optimization areas.
Steps taken to reduce Azure Infrastructure cost
Document360 engineering team realized that a successful SaaS business would know if a particular release were efficient or bleeding money, and they take steps to fix it right away. Also, it is vital to understand if any existing feature was eating away the overall profits.
Why is it important to keep track of individual feature costs?
If you’re wondering how tracking the individual feature cost will help optimize cloud wastage, keep reading to learn more.
When using Azure cost management, you can view what you’ve spent in total and, over time, use that information to break the cost into environmental categories, for example, spending on production, development, and testing.
When using Azure cost management, you can view what you’ve spent in total and, over time, use that information to break the cost into environmental categories, for example, spending on production, development, and testing.
