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“We have an obsession with data because that’s the business we are in. We understand the importance of data. With Apptio Cloudability, we have a greater level of clarity. We now have real insight that we never had before.”
Sportradar, the world’s leading sports technology company, moved most of its workload to cloud to improve resilience, performance, scalability, and reliability.
As a data-centric organization, Sportradar processes more transactions a year in Europe than Visa. Consequently, tying its cloud investment and delivery costs to the value being created for the company is critical for the business. But a lack of cloud cost visibility kept the company from optimizing its investments.
With Apptio Cloudability, Sportradar has the insight needed to support their FinOps capability, understand their cloud spend and the related benefits, calculate unit economics, and lower costs while scaling its systems to meet the growing demand for sports technology and analytics.
For 22 years, Sportradar has seen tremendous growth, both organically and through acquisition. Keeping up with that growth required a large investment in data-center infrastructure to support the business. But as the technology landscape changed and the market for sports technology continued to grow, the company began exploring the benefits of moving to cloud.
Sportradar began its migration to cloud in 2020. As the company migrated workloads, however, there were concerns about cost management. While cloud offered unmatched scalability and reliability, early cloud investment was seen by some business leaders as a duplicate cost because the company already had a large investment in data-center infrastructure and could not eliminate those expenses immediately after workloads had been moved.
“Many business leaders wanted to know how much money they would save by moving to the cloud,” said Ian Poland, chief information officer at Sportradar. “That lack of transparency — the information needed to really understand what it costs to deliver IT services — was a problem, and it caused confusion for some of the folks.”
At the beginning of their cloud journey, Sportradar relied on AWS Cost Explorer and third-party tools to help them monitor usage of the company’s cloud resources and purchase Reserved Instances to optimize costs. But the company soon realized these tools lacked the ability to provide key insights such as business hierarchy, real-time spend, and breakdown by service level to fully support the Inform and Optimize phases of FinOps.
The company tried to accomplish distributing their cost data to applicable teams by importing it from multiple tools into a spreadsheet and running manual calculations to cross-charge business units. But this was time-consuming, and it still did not provide the detailed information they really needed to make better decisions about the company’s cloud spend.
“We realized we had gaps,” said Scott Dunbar, director of engineering enablement at Sportradar. “If we were going to bring cost visibility down to the developer level, we needed more capabilities.”
To address this need, Sportradar purchased Apptio Cloudability in 2022. The implementation was completed in one month, Dunbar said. Within six months, they had agreed internally on business hierarchy and cross-charging of legal entities, and the application was operational and surpassing their requirements for consolidating and distributing their cloud cost data to the necessary teams.
At the beginning of their cloud journey, Sportradar had limited visibility regarding the company’s cloud spend. The tools they were using could not structure and distribute data in scalable ways that could be understood by all the teams and cloud consumers who needed it to support their FinOps capabilities, especially for the Inform phase. But implementing Apptio Cloudability has changed that.
“We have an obsession with data because that’s the business we are in,” Poland said. “We understand the importance of data. With Apptio Cloudability, we have a greater level of clarity. We now have real insight that we never had before.”
This insight has enabled the FinOps team to dig deeper into the company’s cloud investments and more clearly deliver allocation, chargeback, and cost driver information for business unit leaders. This information not only helps them understand how much they are actually spending on cloud resources but also enables them to calculate unit economics, so everyone understands the value that cloud spend is delivering back to the company’s bottom line.
“Now, I can tell them exactly what it costs to deliver a service,” Poland said, “and calculate the margin contribution of the product they are selling.”
According to Poland, keeping transaction costs as low as possible is very important to Sportradar’s business model because of the huge number of transactions the company processes.
With Apptio Cloudability, Sportradar now has insights that help managers and developers make decisions that lower transaction costs. One example of this was how data from Apptio Cloudability helped one developer see the high costs of how an application was using Amazon DocumentDB. “We saw the high cost right away in Cloudability,” Dunbar said. “Our head architect then started to tweak how we managed indexes and key search IDs in Amazon DocumentDB, and we were able to lower the cost by changing the way we interrogated and stored the data.”
In another example, Sportradar used insight gained from Apptio Cloudability to lower transaction costs by shifting to a different technology. Dunbar said, “We were running a given service in a Kubernetes cluster and saw the cost was expensive. When we shifted to AWS Fargate, we were able to reduce the cost per transaction by 90%.”
Speed and flexibility are key at Sportradar. As a result, few restrictions are placed on developers when they are working with cloud service offerings. But that doesn’t mean costs are allowed to run wild.
This is where Apptio Cloudability helps. “We plan in rightsizing sprints,” Dunbar said. “We expose the rightsizing data out of Cloudability, ring-fence a portion of our resources, and focus on rightsizing our workloads. The first time we did this, we saw a significant amount in savings.”
According to Dunbar, the benefits really come back to better visibility provided by Apptio Cloudability. “Cloudability enables us to generate specific reports and specific dashboards around specific service types and detect anomalies. If a group is misusing a particular service, we can see that in Cloudability and then take action to address it,” he said.
Today, Sportradar has made tremendous progress delivering actionable insights on its cloud spend. Poland attributes much of their success to Cloudability’s capabilities along with the team’s approach to working with their business unit leaders.
“Communicate, communicate, communicate,” he said. “Getting team-level engagement is an ongoing effort. Every day is a school day for our FinOps team, and we have used Apptio’s education offerings to help us inform others and bring them along on our journey.”
The next step in the journey, according to Poland, is to surface costs down to the developer level and encourage them to be mindful of cost as they go about their work.
“Part of our goals this year as a FinOps group is to enable developers,” he said. “We want them to ask themselves questions like, ‘How do I manage costs when I’m developing a piece of software?’ and ‘How do I optimize it at the point of origin rather than retrospectively?’ and ‘If I change the number of times my app queries S3 for a given operation, can I lower the cost of the service?’ If we can do that, we are effectively doing FinOps at the code level. That’s where we want to be.”
Apptio Cloudability helps developers by providing cost optimization tooling that works at the pace and level of detail they need. Cloudability’s Workload Planning feature allows developers to plan the details and compare the costs of workloads across cloud platforms (inclusive of custom pricing) before they deploy, enabling them to understand the impact resources supporting planned workloads will have on their budget. The ability to perform scenario analysis and share planned workloads across teams further enables technical teams, finance, and IT leaders to ensure workloads are optimized for cost and will fit within budgets before they are deployed.
As resources are deployed and teams move into development and testing, Cloudability’s rightsizing recommendations ensure continuous cost and performance optimization through production. These recommendations are backed by machine learning algorithms, which have been trained on millions of hours of utilization data. In addition, recommendations are surfaced at the resource level and produced by analyzing actual performance and utilization data for each resource, which then generates multiple recommendation scenarios for GPU-backed instances, autoscaling or managed instance groups, containers, and most of the services provided by AWS, Azure and GCP.
By taking advantage of near-real-time analysis and multi-scenario proactive recommendations as they build, developers can understand which instance types are best suited for their workloads and applications and track the savings that re-architecting brings back to the organization.
Start a free trial of Apptio Cloudability and see how your organization can leverage cost transparency and customized reporting to lower transaction costs and make better decisions about your cloud spend.
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