CloudZone revolutionizes multi-tenant FinOps and customer billing

The hurdles: navigating complex cloud cost management

As an MSP delivering cutting-edge FinOps services, CloudZone faced significant challenges in managing its extensive portfolio, which includes hundreds of billing accounts across various models and multiple cloud providers. Key obstacles included:

Scaling multi-tenant FinOps

CloudZone needed a unified, single-pane-of-glass platform to manage diverse, multi-cloud customer environments effectively. It was crucial to provide customer stakeholders - executives, DevOps, and FinOps leaders - with access to personalized dashboards while ensuring strict data segregation.

Achieving granular cost visibility

Existing solutions primarily offered infrastructure-level visibility, making it difficult to pinpoint true cost drivers at the application or user level. Granular analyses, such as per-query costs in data warehouses or Kubernetes namespace-level insights, were challenging to obtain with traditional tools. CloudZone sought a way to bridge the gap between infrastructure costs and detailed application insights to deliver actionable analytics.

Streamlining cloud service resell and rebilling

While offering tailored pricing and discounts from premier partnerships with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, CloudZone grappled with operational complexities. These included inefficient, error-prone manual rebilling processes, difficulties in accurately applying complex pricing structures without automation, and the growing customer demand for transparent, timely billing. An advanced, self-service-capable platform for cross-cloud pricing and automated rebilling was essential.

The breakthrough: Pelanor's tailored solution

CloudZone partnered with Pelanor to implement a modern cloud cost management solution, strategically designed to enhance the value delivered to their customers. The implementation focused on:

Configuring workspaces

Pelanor enabled the setup of dedicated workspaces for each customer, ensuring secure and individualized data views. CloudZone retained overarching visibility for aggregative reporting and billing.

Automating pricing pules

Global and customer-specific pricing rules were established within each workspace, streamlining the application of discounts and markups across all services.

Comprehensive cloud data integrations

CloudZone integrated their end customers’ CSP billing data alongside application-specific data sources, including Kubernetes, Snowflake, and Redshift, into the Pelanor platform.

The transformation: measurable results and empowered FinOps

The adoption of Pelanor's platform yielded significant improvements for CloudZone and its customers:

Rapid multi-tenancy achievement

Within weeks, CloudZone achieved fully functional multi-tenancy, with complete customer data separation through flexible selection conditions for each workspace. This architecture easily accommodated diverse cloud account hierarchies, enhancing maintainability and scalability. Automated tagging and dimension grouping allowed CloudZone's FinOps teams to dynamically map resources and ensure consistent reporting.

• Kubernetes: breaking down network costs by specific namespaces and workloads.
• Snowflake: analyzing compute and storage costs by database, user, or even individual queries.
• Amazon S3: segmenting costs by bucket, file extension, or object path segments.
• Role-based access controls (RBAC) were also implemented to ensure data security and compliance.

Automated re-billing and enhanced transparency

Pelanor’s Customized Pricing module directly addressed CloudZone’s re-billing challenges:

• Automated billing: complex markup and discount scenarios (e.g., per -service markup, custom support cost calculation, EDP discount sharing) were automated.
• Flexible pricing strategies: end-customer pricing could be fine-tuned based on actual cost, list price, or custom rates, with rules applicable at granular scopes (specific services, regions, or resource types).
• Real-time cost transparency: both CloudZone and its end-customers gained immediate visibility into applied discounts and markups. Account Managers could also easily view effective margins per customer and download billing summaries.
• API integration: Pelanor’s open REST-based API facilitated integration with CloudZone’s back-office and ERP systems for seamless invoicing and billing.

The bottom line: mastering cloud data service costs

CloudZone and its customers can now effortlessly analyze and monitor costs at highly granular levels, including individual Kubernetes workloads and namespaces, database queries, and detailed data storage activities. This deep level of insight facilitates precise cost allocation and drives strategic decision -making, significantly improving resource optimization and overall cost efficiency. As a result, CloudZone has solidified its competitive advantage, reinforcing its leadership position in the market and setting a new standard for cloud cost transparency and operational excellence.

"Pelanor's AI-driven approach aligns perfectly with CloudZone's forward-thinking strategy, autonomously handling cost attribution across our entire ecosystem in real-time. Their platform doesn't just solve today's challenges; it's built for tomorrow's, where AI-generated infrastructure and shared workload models will only accelerate."