How BigBasket Achieved 99% Tagging Coverage with CloudForecast

“We quickly realized that the only way to control AWS cost moving forward was through accurate attribution to the teams responsible.”

Sushant Gulati

For an online grocer that processes some 15 million digital orders per month, across more than 300 cities in India, managing AWS Cloud costs is critical to continued scalability.

Yet the company had a problem: for 20+ different engineering teams, tagging compliance hovered around 60%, making it difficult for BigBasket to accurately attribute total AWS costs back to teams.

Challenge

Control AWS Costs Through Tags

“Eventually, costs started ballooning to the point that AWS costs was mentioned at every high-level meeting,” says Sushant. The cloud team’s existing response to a cost increase had some inherent issues:

• Too reactive
• Time-consuming
• Not scalable

The further back the investigation went, the more difficult it was for the cloud team to diagnose and fix cost anomalies. They needed a more accurate, centralized, and automated method for ensuring near-complete coverage.

Solution

Tag, Report, and Delegate Response

After finding a CloudForecast blog post on best practices for optimizing AWS cloud spend with AWS tags, the BigBasket cloud team immediately put the platform to work:

CloudForecast’s Tagging Center for Daily Tag Monitoring and Compliance

By inputting BigBasket’s internal tagging policy into CloudForecasts’ Tagging Center, the cloud team could quickly verify the overall tagging compliance of their AWS environment. The dashboards and reports gave them a baseline compliance number (~60%) to reference and a list of resources not following compliance as they worked toward their goal of >90% coverage.

CloudForecast Tagging Center helped the BigBasket team answer the following questions:

• What’s my Overall Compliance?
• What’s my Compliance by Accounts?
• What’s my Compliance by Products?
• What’s my Compliance by Tag?
• What are all the resources that are not following compliance?

Reporting and Visibility for 20+ Engineering Teams

BigBasket’s cloud team uses CloudForecast to create ‘cost groups’ based on tags aligned with their engineering teams. With strong tagging, CloudForecast delivers accurate daily AWS cost reports tailored for each team, automatically sent to key stakeholders via email and Slack.
Cost Groups and Daily AWS Costs Report:

• “Today’s” AWS costs
• Cost overruns and anomaly alerts
• Shareable links to cost summary dashboards with key cost insights
• End-of-the-month AWS cost forecast
• Products \ Regions \ Tags \ Sub-accounts graphs

“Because we get anomalies reported based on tags, it is effortless for the teams also to take a deeper dive into their inventory of services so they can figure out what’s creating a lot of costs,” says Sushant. “We have monthly meetings to analyze each team’s cost trends and facilitate response.”

Outcomes

99% Coverage and Greater Cost Control—in a Lot Less Time

The team has now achieved 99% tagging coverage with CloudForecast, dramatically enhancing their AWS cost control efforts.

Beyond time savings and cost reduction, CloudForecast acts as an early warning system for BigBasket, enabling faster resolution of cost issues that previously took months to address.

“Customer experience and support have been top-notch,” adds Sushant. “CloudForecast genuinely brings a fresh approach to provide a great customer experience overall in addition to a great product.”

As part of their ongoing partnership, the two teams are developing a custom cost report for the leadership team.

“Our leadership team wants to see cloud costs based on team-specific trends,” says Sushant. “This will not only give leadership greater visibility into what’s happening on each team, but broaden the involvement and engagement of more teams.”

“We’ve used the tool to identify missing or invalid tags, and gradually but persistently work our way from 60% tagging compliance to 99%. This enables us to have solid confidence about 99% of the total cost being attributed accurately.”

Sushant Gulati, Senior Engineering Manager—DevOps, Cloud & Platform