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Comprehensive Cloud Cost Visibility with Zero Tagging

How Akamai automated cost allocation across shared resources and unlocked real-time service-level visibility.

The Challenge

Akamai's complex cloud environment, built on Kafka, Apache Flink, ClickHouse, EMR-based data pipelines, and Kubernetes, made it difficult to tie cloud costs directly to business outcomes. Achieving complete cost visibility required tagging thousands of resources and building internal enrichment tools. Tracking usage and costs on shared resources was inaccurate, and budgeting and resource allocation were challenging without precise attribution.

The Solution

Akamai adopted Attribute™ to open the FinOps black box and contextualize every cloud spend. Powered by eBPF technology, Attribute™ automatically ingested, categorized, and organized data from multiple sources into application-level groupings without requiring tags or additional engineering work. The platform revealed how Spark jobs affect compute, database, and data transfer costs across the EMR pipeline.

Results

Eliminated the need to tag thousands of resources, freeing engineering capacity for platform improvements.
Achieved seamless, complete cost allocation across shared resources with zero tags.
Gained real-time, service-level cost visibility across a complex cloud architecture.
Enabled extension into customer-level cost attribution to drive architectural decisions with business impact.

Eliminating the need to tag thousands of resources has freed up my team and we've invested our efforts in enhancing our platform significantly.
Ziv Sivan, VP of Engineering

About Akamai

Akamai is a global leader in cloud services and digital innovation, helping over 100,000 businesses build, secure, and scale their applications in the cloud. The company offers a range of cloud-based PaaS and SaaS services, including CDN, edge computing, web and application performance, security, and enterprise solutions. Its latest launch is a SaaS API security platform that provides full visibility across clients' API estates through continuous discovery, monitoring, risk audits, and behavioral analytics.

The challenge: unlocking impactful data and business insights from the cloud

Akamai's architecture leverages Kafka for event streaming, Apache Flink for data processing, ClickHouse databases for scalable querying, an EMR-based data pipeline, and Kubernetes for container orchestration. To drive cost efficiency and maximize cloud revenue potential, the engineering team needed to move FinOps beyond right-sizing and align technology with business objectives. Complete cost visibility required heavy manual tagging, shared resource costs were difficult to track accurately, and budgeting was inaccurate due to the complexity of the data pipeline. Akamai also needed to reduce costs without disrupting the business.

Solution discovery

Before adopting Attribute™, Akamai explored internal tool development and tested several market solutions. Each option proved slow, manual, and incomplete, lacking the depth and granularity needed for true cost attribution. After being introduced to Attribute™, Akamai found a platform that promised automated, in-depth service-level visibility and clear cost allocation. Powered by innovative eBPF technology, Attribute™ delivered a new level of cost attribution that required no tags or additional engineering effort.

Phase I results: seamless and complete cost allocation, with zero tags

Integrating Attribute™ into Akamai's cloud environments was easy and seamless. The platform automatically ingested, categorized, and organized data from multiple sources into application-level groupings without manual effort. Akamai instantly gained detailed insights into the real-time costs of every service. Attribute™ clarified the cost drivers within the EMR-based data pipeline, revealing how Spark jobs affect compute, database, and data transfer costs. Financial traceability across shared resources made it easy to identify and adjust inefficient services and applications.

Phase II results: building business impact on cost visibility

After reaching their desired cost-visibility posture, Akamai is now focused on making cloud spend more impactful from a business perspective. The team is extending Attribute™'s analytics to include customer cost attribution by cost per message and is using the platform as a decision-making tool for architectural improvements with measurable business impact. As Ziv Sivan, VP of Engineering, put it: 'Their tagless technology made it extremely easy to overcome the data blindspots we had, and we can clearly discover and contextualize how each service or customer utilizes cloud resources, helping us make informed decisions rapidly.'

See how Attribute™ reveals the hidden profit in your cloud spend

Explore how Attribute™ delivers runtime cost attribution without tagging, so teams can understand cost per workload, service, and customer.

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What they say

DoiT gave us the confidence to move from experimentation to production. They helped us understand the right way to build AI for the real world.

Milad Rezazadeh, CTO

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.

Eli Zilbershtein, Head of DevOps, Hippo

You can't tag a customer in a multi-tenant environment. Attribute™ finally shows us what each customer costs and what's driving those costs.

Omri Cohen, Director of Engineering, Platform

Attribute™'s data is truly unmatched. No other solution on the market could deliver the precise customer cost and usage profiles we needed in such a complex infrastructure. Within weeks, the data from Attribute™ transformed our understanding of cost structures, influencing key strategic decisions in pricing, renegotiations, and market positioning.

Jonathan Langer, COO, Claroty

Attribute™ simplified tracking customer costs in our multi-tenant environments. Customer cost measurement is now clear and standardized, and finance gets the business context they need. Integration was quick and required no changes.

Kfir Lippmann, CFO, Salt Security

Attribute™ translates complex cloud bills into actionable, business-centric insights that empower our engineering teams to take true ownership of their costs.

Balamurugan Mohandossgandhi, Head of IT and Infrastructure, PropertyGuru

This has let us get a better idea of what our cost of goods sold really is. It's not every day you come across something that delivers value as quickly as yours did for us. I was seeing useful insights inside the POC, and we had only deployed it to a couple of real clusters.

Jason Moore, Principal DevOps Engineer, Accrete AI

Eliminating the need to tag thousands of resources has freed up my team and we've invested our efforts in enhancing our platform significantly.

Ziv Sivan, VP of Engineering

PerfectScale by DoiT has become an important part of how we optimize Kubernetes at scale at OneFootball. It gives our platform team the visibility, automation, resiliency insights, and confidence we need to balance cost efficiency with production readiness, especially as we prepare for major global football moments like the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

Andrea Benfatto, Platform/Cloud Runtime Engineering Manager

Cloudflow's new RDS End of Life alerts have allowed us to be more proactive on keeping our database instances up-to-date. The new solution gives us internal visibility ahead of time so that we can prepare for upgrades, instead of having to upgrade under pressure while incurring extended support costs.

Jon Fairbanks, Site Reliability Engineering Manager

PerfectScale cut 40% off our total EKS spend, and the automations handle what used to take our team 20 hours a month. Now we spend that time on reliability and performance instead of chasing cost metrics.

Caio Cristo, Director of Infrastructure/SRE

What I really like about DoiT's approach is that you're very hands-on and proactive. Satyam would ping me a few times a sprint, letting me know about the most current features, checking in on how things are going. When we are going through a peak time, that proactiveness makes a real difference. Satyam always comes through whenever we need support and helps us leverage the right experts to get us where we need to be.

Chiamaka Ibeme, Engineering Manager, Platform

SELECT has made important cost data readily accessible. I will often pull it up during engineering design reviews so we can quickly evaluate cost impact and projections and factor that into our design decisions.

Douglas Zickuhr, Senior Data Platform Engineer at Personio

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