Fulcrum Rocks: 20% saved on AWS bills with Uniskai

Turning ideas that inspire into products that help

Fulcrum Rocks is a design and development agency focused on working with startups worldwide to create meaningful products and find a product-market fit. The company’s mission is to turn ideas that inspire into products that help.

The Fulcrum Rocks’ team prefer working in an environment where everyone has enough freedom and responsibility to offer new approaches, deliver projects most effectively, and develop as a professional.

Partnership goals

Since 2018, the company has taken on 40 projects from scratch, offering customized development services primarily to marketplace and healthcare businesses. In 2022, Fulcrum Rocks started implementing an outsourcing project for a company from Israel. Given the scale of the budget, Fulcrum Rocks was asked to also optimize cloud infrastructure and reduce AWS costs.

Initially, the DevOps team at Fulcrum Rocks tried to rightsize instances manually, looking for cost optimization possibilities and hibernating unused resources. But this manual task was time consuming, and with more burning issues on their ‘to do’ lists, finding the time and a dedicated person to put everything in order became a real challenge.

As team members with different accounts have access to the cloud infrastructure, the DevOps team needed a solution to monitor cloud costs centrally otherwise they would never be able to get a grip on the company’s cloud budget. They started looking for automated DevOps/FinOps tools. Most applications on the market were good for separate tasks – spotting, rightsizing, waste cleaner, reserving instances, etc., but none of them could provide an all-in-one cost optimization solution. And that’s when Fulcrum Rocks’ journey with Uniskai by Profisea Labs kicked off.

Why Uniskai by Profisea Labs

Fulcrum Rocks chose Uniskai by Profisea Labs to manage its AWS and GCP resources after assessing options from numerous vendors and discovering that Uniskai’s FinOps platform could actually maximize the value of its cloud investment, mitigate security risks and ensure regulatory compliance.

Fulcrum Rocks was impressed with how Uniskai by Profisea Labs converts cloud data into actionable insights, including billing, configurations, policies, permissions, etc. and with how its all-in-one FinOps platform keeps track of system usage. Better still, they could now enjoy all these features without in any way impairing company performance since they quickly learned that Uniskai’s AI-based suggestions actually reduce cloud costs and keep them within budget.

Achieving FinOps Goals

  • Cloud visibility. Uniskai by Profisea Labs enabled Fulcrum Rocks to have a comprehensive view of all activity within the cloud network. The Cloudnet feature helps draw diagrams and layouts for the project and display what is happening in the infrastructure, which is also helpful when introducing it to a new team member. Cloudview gives the DevOps team more control over AWS and GCP cloud infrastructure, allowing engineers to monitor cloud security, resolve performance issues, and minimize cloud expenses. Now, through the Uniskai dashboard, the DevOps team lead can quickly and easily recalculate all their cloud expenses.

  • Spots. Uniskai’s FinOps platform reduces Fulcrum Rocks’ cloud spend by converting on-demand instances into spots. Even though managing them can be difficult due to disruptions, Uniskai helps Fulcrum Rocks deal with those disruptions and delivers AI-based recommendations to make the best pricing decisions, while also allowing more customer applications to operate on Spot Instances.

  • Cloud waste. As Fulcrum Rocks wanted to maximize cloud usage and cut expenses, identifying sources of cloud waste was essential. With Uniskai’s Waste Manager, the customer can easily remove inefficiencies, including unattached volumes, load balancers, and databases, and generally improve cloud adoption. The ease in recognizing cloud waste also helps DevOps engineers better understand their cloud consumption trends and make smarter usage decisions.

Uniskai features leveraged by Fulcrum Rocks

Cloudlist, Cloudnet, Cloudmap, Billing, Waste Manager, Rightsizing, Cloudsitter, Account Manager.

Results

Fulcrum Rocks’ engineers were first interested in the cost-management solution, but they quickly realized how much Uniskai by Profisea Labs could assist with cloud visibility and cloud security.

Uniskai by Profisea Labs gives Fulcrum Rocks the tools it was looking for to raise overall effectiveness. Its architectural diagrams provide a comprehensive perspective of the entire cloud environment, allowing DevOps experts to streamline monitoring and maximize resources in a multi-account infrastructure. Uniskai also improves communication between project managers and non-technical personnel.