Synopsys Boosts Cloud Visibility and Cost Control with Harness Cloud Cost Management

About

Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq: SNPS) is the Silicon to Software™ partner for innovative companies developing the electronic products and software applications we rely on every day. As an S&P 500 company, Synopsys has a long history of being a global leader in electronic design automation (EDA) and semiconductor IP and offers the industry's broadest portfolio of application security testing tools and services. Whether you're a system-on-chip (SoC) designer creating advanced semiconductors, or a software developer writing more secure, high-quality code, Synopsys has the solutions needed to deliver innovative products. Learn more at www.synopsys.com.

Challenge: Increasing Cloud Infrastructure to Support Growth

Over the years, Synopsys has broadened its technology portfolio to serve customers across a variety of markets. As it continued to scale product lines through mergers and acquisitions (M&A), the company was also increasing its cloud infrastructure to support that growth, specifically with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Service (AWS). 

M&A expansion also resulted in a drastic cloud spend increase, amplifying an ongoing issue at Synopsys: lack of visibility into additional cloud infrastructure resourcing, particularly with Kubernetes clusters and workloads. In addition, teams from these acquisitions had their own tools and ways of managing and visualizing cloud costs, resulting in inconsistent data measurement across organizations. 

Synopsys tried resolving these challenges in the past through a traditional cloud cost management product. The results were mixed, and didn’t provide a comprehensive solution that the team needed. The prior product was designed for FinOps teams, offering some visibility for cloud resources and recommendations for cloud-native services through open-source tools. However, it lacked granular recommendations for cost transparency and optimization that the CloudOps team needed.

The ideal solution for Synopsys would unify cloud management of the entire application lifecycle — from deployment to cost optimization. This would result in their CloudOps team managing resources efficiently, and their FinOps team achieving cost control. It would also make it easier for developers to act on cost recommendations with added context that was historically missing from cloud cost tools.

Solution: Simplified Cloud Cost Visibility and Optimization at Scale

Synopsys chose the Harness Software Delivery Platform to solve this challenge, leveraging Harness Cloud Cost Management (CCM). It was the only single, integrated solution that met the needs of both the CloudOps and FinOps teams, delivering performance efficiency for engineering and minimizing ongoing cloud costs for FinOps goals.

“The big advantage was that we could enable developers to deploy the applications and manage costs from the same tool,” said Jim D’Agostino, Senior DevOps Engineer, Synopsys. This ultimately resulted in costs being more proactively managed as part of the software delivery process instead of being treated as an afterthought optimization that compounded cost inefficiencies.

In addition to the technical features that made significant improvements, Synopsys also valued the Harness customer success and engineering teams’ support, helping to customize views and recommendations for their business requirements. As Colleen Kelleher, IT Manager, Synopsys put it, “Having a cloud cost management tool and a support team that is aligned with our business goals is key to the success of all our teams here at Synopsys.”

“All developers in Synopsys have access to recommendations within Harness CCM. We recommend that developers use this information when deploying new microservices to the cloud. This is what makes this cloud cost management tool a game changer for us as we balance the speed of innovation with its cost.” -Jim D’Agostino, Senior DevOps Engineer, Synopsys

Results: Increased Cloud Visibility and Cost Control

Synopsys leverages three key capabilities of Harness CCM to simplify their visibility needs and inform decision-making. 

1. Custom Business Intelligence (BI) Dashboards

The BI dashboards in Harness Cloud Cost Management offer customizable views that eliminate the effort needed for finance users and engineers to understand resource inventory as well as track cost trends across their multi-cloud architecture. Harness Cloud Cost Management can also set and send alerts when user-defined thresholds are exceeded.

The flexibility of these BI dashboards allows organizations to personalize the experience and provide clear visibility into what’s most important to them. For example, Synopsys customized dashboards to find and investigate suspicious activity with cloud resources. They’re able to address issues as they occur, resolving them quickly and minimizing their impact on budgets. 

2. Kubernetes Cost Visibility and Optimization 

Because the developers have direct access to Harness Cloud Cost Management, the team enabled one of its unique features: deep visibility and granular recommendations into Kubernetes workloads and clusters.

Developers can view costs by workloads, clusters, namespaces, or pods. They can also tailor recommendation calculations to include or exclude certain instance types, add CPU/Memory buffers, or even specify the minimum CPU/memory requirements. Metric granularity into workloads and clusters levels is crucial for developers to make the right decisions for their applications, instead of relying on generic recommendations. 

3. Cost Anomaly Detection Across Cloud Providers

Synopsys uses the Cost Anomaly feature in Harness Cloud Cost Management to identify resources across GCP and AWS that show cost spikes deviating from the usual spend – all in one place. This helps them track potential waste and unexpected charges on a regular basis, alerting affected teams so they can immediately take action, avoiding the usual cost overrun fire drill at the end of the month. 

The team at Synopsys uses this capability extensively with the budgeting and forecasting feature. Harness Cloud Cost Management shows their spend as the month goes on, and it projects what costs will be at the end of the period. Now, the team can proactively manage budgets across cloud providers and keep them under control.

Next Up: More Cloud Cost Reductions

As Synopsys continues to count on Harness for visibility and to optimize their cloud accounts, the IT and CloudOps teams plan to automate idle resource management with Harness Cloud Cost Management’s Intelligent Cloud AutoStopping. This feature automatically stops/starts idle resources, which can reduce costs by up to 75% across their pre-production environments. 

Synopsys set out to take on two major challenges with their growing portfolio of company acquisitions: manage the high cost of cloud infrastructure expansion and unify the different cloud cost data measurement tools across companies. With key Harness Cloud Cost Management features and customized BI dashboards, the Synopsys CloudOps and FinOps teams now gain unmatched visibility and cost control for cloud management. That’s a win-win for Synopsys and the new companies acquired through M&A.

Harness Cloud Cost Management offers best-in-class cost visibility, recommendations, and automation for both FinOps and DevOps users. Request a demo to see the savings your team can achieve.