SiriusXM scales cross-cloud visibility using Finout and AWS

Thousands of SiriusXM’s engineers and developers run cloud workloads that range from data science pipelines to application backends, so cost visibility is essential for the company. Although AWS makes up the backbone of SiriusXM’s cloud  infrastructure, the company also runs workloads on other cloud providers and uses multiple software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions. This setup made it challenging for SiriusXM to see and allocate costs. The company needed unified visibility—a single pane of glass to combine spend data from dedicated and shared AWS accounts, cloud projects, and SaaS services. Although native tools offered insights into individual accounts, cross-account and cross-cloud reports still required extra queries and data manipulation. In addition, SiriusXM needed a mechanism for engineers to see spend at net rates that factor in complex contractual nuances.

Building workload and business-level reporting categories meant pulling data into spreadsheets and writing custom SQL, increasing the FinOps team’s lead time on spend-reporting requests. SiriusXM’s engineers needed an intuitive, self-service portal that complemented existing AWS tools and fostered a culture of cost ownership. A more flexible interface was also necessary for merging cost insights into everyday workflows. “We wanted a unified solution to see costs across environments and providers,” says Scottie Enriquez, director of cloud FinOps at SiriusXM. “The myriad cost-visibility tools that were previously used by stakeholders caused confusion and often did not present contractually correct rates.”

SiriusXM implemented Finout’s solution to unify costs across its cloud and SaaS providers while giving engineers an intuitive FinOps experience. As a result, the company implemented Finout’s Virtual Tag feature. This feature makes it possible for users to create tagging to sort and view costs based on user-defined categories. Finout’s Virtual Tags complement AWS tags by applying dynamic, rule-based labels at the billing data level, so engineers can unify and correct inconsistent tagging without changing native AWS resource tags. Finout’s MegaBill and Data Explorer features further enhance visibility by providing a unified multicloud dashboard, where teams can filter by service, time period, or description without writing SQL.

To improve reporting and accountability, teams build dashboards to track initiatives and schedule automated reports through email or other communication channels so that leadership receives clear, recurring insights. Finout’s anomaly detection engine flags unusual spend and sends alerts to communication channels, helping teams act quickly. The solution also supports contract-aware pricing ingestion: Finout imports billing profiles so that engineers can see numbers that match finance’s invoices. What’s more, Finout’s AWS Cloud Operations Software Competency confirms that it delivers scalable FinOps solutions with advanced security features, giving SiriusXM confidence in the solution.

Finout’s solution uses a host of AWS services. The container-based architecture is powered by Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service. It uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for secure and resizable compute capacity and stores data on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)—an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability. And to simplify database management, Finout uses Amazon DynamoDB—a serverless, fully managed, distributed NoSQL database.

By implementing Finout’s solution, SiriusXM now has one standard tool for cloud cost visibility. As a result, SiriusXM has increased productivity, visibility, and trust across internal teams. Many engineers can self-onboard by using shared links. As a result, adoption has scaled quickly, with more than 100 unique users per quarter, compared with minimal engagement with the previous tools. Meanwhile, the FinOps team reports a two to three times boost in productivity and 30–50 percent reduction in the time to create recurring reports. The team can now complete tasks in days instead of weeks and refresh recurring analysis in seconds instead of hours. Finout’s Virtual Tags provide precise and detailed cost reports, mapping shared accounts to the right teams across more than 100 workloads. This helps foster cost ownership and awareness. “Everyone from engineers to finance and leadership can request access, get approval, and use the tool with little to no training,” says Anthony Logan, senior director of FinOps and sourcing at SiriusXM. “Virtual Tags and dashboards lower the barrier to entry for new users with limited knowledge of cloud billing schemas.”

What’s more, custom contractual pricing integration and unified views have helped rebuild trust by displaying the same data for engineering and finance. This gives leadership confidence in SiriusXM’s investment in AWS infrastructure. By combining the robust AWS infrastructure with Finout’s intuitive solution, SiriusXM is transforming a fragmented cost landscape into an empowered, cost-aware engineering culture. “Our cost management became intuitive and accessible,” says Enriquez. “The dashboards and alerts provide everyone with the information they need in a digestible format. Using Finout’s solution, everyone from finance to engineering can quickly make informed decisions and derive meaningful insights from reliable and correct cost and usage data.”