About Hippo
Leveraging AI and big data, Hippo aggregates and analyzes property information to offer tailored insurance solutions. The company distributes its policies directly to consumers and through independent insurance brokers, ensuring wide accessibility and personalized customer service.
High-level Architecture:
Their cloud architecture utilizes advanced technologies to meet Hippo’s applications’ data processing requirements. Container orchestration with ECS and EKS, data management and workflow automation via Apache Airflow, robust database solutions using RDS, and efficient storage with cross-account S3. These technologies are integral to optimizing operations and enhancing the customer experience across the insurance sector.
The Challenge: Enhancing Efficiency Through Cost Transparency and Team Accountability
Hippo’s cloud teams faced the challenge of efficiently owning and managing their cloud spend while ensuring high team accountability.
They aimed to establish an internal process to improve cloud efficiency and provide ongoing enhancements. To accomplish this, they chose to reinforce their cost center control with capabilities that would:
Promote cost consciousness among engineers
Drive accountability and motivate engineers to take proactive measures
Simplify management’s ability to track and oversee the process.
Hippo extensively uses various AWS services, requiring a more granular and comprehensive approach to cost management. Their architecture utilizes ECS for container management, EKS for Kubernetes orchestration, RDS databases, and S3 buckets.
The objective was to achieve meaningful cost tracking for engineering teams while promoting budget accountability without compromising operational agility.
- Business unit costs: Cost attribution by business units was a missing insight for team accountability to allocate spend.
- Microservices cost structure: Provide service owners with relevant, engineering-level insights to understand cost drivers and make better-informed decisions
Attribute’s cost grouping technology took our cost visibility and allocation to a whole new level. Now, our teams are fully accountable for their budgets, significantly improving our cloud efficiency and helping us minimize unnecessary costs.”
Solution Discovery
Hippo explored several strategies to address these challenges but lacked the data and insights required to drive impactful changes. They lacked deep and granular visibility into Hippo’s cloud costs, causing blind spots and stretching thin engineering teams with tagging resources.
Hippo’s engineering leadership understood that compromising on cost-attribution capabilities requirements would not help them reach their objectives.
After Hippo was introduced to Attribute, they knew they had found the ultimate technology to solve their ever-growing cost visibility challenges and decided to implement the platform.
Attribute seamlessly integrated with their AWS infrastructure and provided the missing granular cost insights, enabling them to manage their cloud spending more effectively and align costs with the team’s usage.
Hippo finally has access to the necessary data, insights, and capabilities to gain full control over its cloud spending and tie it to profit margins, enabling it to make better business decisions related to its cloud investments.
Phase I Results:
1. Increased Team Accountability: Teams now have clear insights into their cost contributions, fostering a cost efficiency and accountability culture.
2. Enhanced Engineering Engagement: Service owners can access detailed, contextual consumption information, enabling proactive tracking and management of their resources.
3. Improved Cost Attribution: Clear and simple breakdowns of service costs, including shared resource attribution, with an accountability index marking the primary contributors to each resource cost.
“Integrating Attribute into our environment was as seamless as it can get and was completed in a matter of minutes.”
Phase II Plans:
Hippo plans to further refine its cost management practices by implementing Attribute as part of its engineering workflows and proactively eliminating inefficiencies.
“Attribute helped us clear the cloud spend blind spots we had in our complex cloud architecture.”