Scality - Large-Scale Automation with Wiv.ai

The integration of Wiv.ai into Scality’s operations marked a significant improvement in how their engineering team managed their internal cloud infrastructure. Facing increasing costs, Scality’s team of around 100 engineers worldwide struggled to efficiently manage development and testing resources across their multi-cloud internal environment, especially within the AWS stack. Unchecked growth of stopped EC2 virtual machines and unattached Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes on AWS created unnecessary costs and operational overhead.

By deploying Wiv.ai, Scality achieved an immediate 25% reduction in cloud spend on idle resources within the first six months, preventing hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential waste annually. Wiv’s workflow-driven automation streamlined processes, empowered engineers and managers with the information for responsible usage, and fostered a culture of efficiency and cost-consciousness across the entire engineering organization.

Scality’s engineering leadership faced a critical three-pronged challenge:

• Reduce Resource Wastage: Idle development and testing resources, such as thousands of stopped EC2 instances and unattached EBS volumes, accumulated unnecessarily. This consumed valuable storage and compute capacity, leading to tens of thousands of dollars in wasted spending each month.
• Global Coordination: With around 100 engineers spread across 18 countries, streamlining resource usage and accountability was a particularly complex task, especially if run manually.
• Improve Cost Visibility: Engineers and managers lacked the clear, granular cost insights needed to drive responsible resource usage. This lack of transparency was a primary driver of waste.

Wiv’s solutions provided an immediate return on investment by automating key processes:

• Automated Cleanup: Wiv’s platform automatically identified and alerted engineers to idle resources, such as unattached EBS volumes older than 30 days and stopped virtual machines older than 8 days. These resources were queued for deletion, always requiring user consent to maintain control and prevent accidental loss of data.
• Engineer-Level Cost Reports: Wiv’s detailed reports provided each engineer and manager with a clear breakdown of their individual and team cloud costs, promoting accountability and fostering a culture of optimization.

Wiv’s support team played a vital role in the smooth rollout of these solutions. With hands-on guidance and quick response times, Scality was able to integrate new workflows with minimal disruption and maximum impact. This partnership ensured the successful adoption of the new FinOps practices across the entire engineering organization.

Building on a foundation of efficiency and cost visibility, Scality plans to continue its partnership with Wiv to explore new FinOps automation opportunities. The next phase will focus on embedding Wiv’s workflows into new areas of their multi-cloud environment, including automated cleanup of all orphan resources and proactive budget alerting. This strategic collaboration will support innovation and ensure a cost-conscious engineering culture for years to come.