Toast uses the CloudHealth platform to manage their cloud budget and identify cost-saving opportunities, resulting in $50,000 in cloud cost savings during the first month of COVID-19 without negatively impacting business performance.
Toast provides an all-in-one solution across point of sale, guest marketing, digital ordering, delivery, payroll, and human resources for restaurants of all sizes to build great teams, increase revenue, improve operations, and delight customers.
Founded in 2011, Toast is an innovative startup and leader in its field. They built their business in the cloud because they wanted the ability to quickly scale and meet customers’ demands.
Cloud challenges
As Toast ramped up their cloud usage, they faced two primary challenges: decentralized operations and limited visibility into cloud costs.
- Decentralization: Toast invested heavily in the cloud early on, with the main focus on releasing new features and stabilizing the platform. Disparate teams across Toast were operating in silos without a unified cloud strategy. To address this, Ken Siskind, Engineer Programming Manager at Toast, aligned with other teams, program managers, and key stakeholders throughout the business to ensure everyone was working under the same goals, processes, and policies in the cloud.
- Limited visibility: Toast started out using Amazon’s native tools to manage their AWS environment. However, this didn’t provide the granular visibility they needed, especially as they developed new features and needed to track the costs of running them.
AWS native tools weren’t enough to figure out where our spend was. The team was moving so fast and focusing on features and we realized we needed another tool to help figure out where our spend was.
Engineer Programming Manager, Toast
Cloud cost management with CloudHealth
For improved visibility and cloud cost management capabilities, Toast partnered with CloudHealth. Toast uses CloudHealth reports to manage their cloud budget, identify cost-saving opportunities, and give time back to employees. In addition to custom-built reports, Toast leverages the following within the CloudHealth platform:
- RDS Instance Usage Report: Toast uses the RDS Instance Usage Report to see instances that haven’t been used in 30 days. Ken describes the report as “a quick win” that saves the team about $1,000 per month.
- Unattached EBS Volumes Report: With the Unattached EBS Volumes Report, the Toast team realized there were cost spikes that had previously gone unnoticed. Once the team identified the wasted spend, they were able to quickly optimize, saving Toast more than $27,000 each month.
- Cost History Reports: Toast reviews regular Cost History Reports within the CloudHealth platform to see a detailed breakdown of where their money is being spent in order to stay on track with their budget.
- CloudHealth Perspectives: In the wake of COVID-19, Toast looked for ways to save money fast. CloudHealth Perspectives enabled Toast to see cloud costs grouped by team, department, or project so they could quickly identify the areas where they could pare back or optimize spend. As a result, Toast saved $50,000 during the first month of COVID-19 without impacting business performance.
Moving forward, Toast plans to continue using CloudHealth to optimize their cloud environment and save on unnecessary cloud costs. Read the complete case study to learn more!
