Summary
octonomy, a fast-growing German AI company, partnered with Automat-it to professionalize AWS cost management as its platform scaled. The engagement delivered per-environment cost transparency, a prioritised optimisation roadmap, and enterprise-grade support SLAs that let the team focus entirely on building their product.
About octonomy AI
octonomy is an AI company that automates technical customer service and field service support in the energy, industrial manufacturing, and insurance industries using multi-agent AI systems.
Its agentic Visual Cortex platform processes documents visually to understand wiring diagrams, schematics, product tables, and multi-source manuals without hallucinations.
The Challenge: Scaling AWS Cost Management
Before engaging Automat-it, octonomy AI was a fast-moving, product-focused organization in a phase of rapid growth. As the platform scaled across multiple environments, the team wanted a dedicated FinOps practice in place so that cost management would keep pace with engineering, without pulling engineering focus away from the product.
Specific challenges that needed to be addressed included:
- Cost transparency: AWS spend arrived as a single consolidated invoice. The team wanted spend broken down per environment to support internal financial accountability.
- On-demand AWS expertise: The team wanted specialised AWS DevOps expertise available on demand, alongside its own engineers, to implement best practices and future-proof their infrastructure.
- Cost anomaly detection: Across production, development, and staging, the team wanted an automated way to distinguish genuine cost anomalies from routine noise, so that engineering time was not spent investigating expected changes.
- Reservation strategy: The team wanted structured guidance on reservation commitments in order to maximise coverage and utilisation without over-purchasing.
- Support SLAs: octonomy AI required enterprise-grade response times for business-critical AWS cases.
The Solution: A Fully Managed FinOps and DevOps Practice
Automat-it assigned an AWS Certified FinOps Analyst and Solutions Architect who worked hand-in-hand with octonomy AI’s team. This created a direct communication channel that was a key requirement for the customer.
They also coordinated with Automat-it’s DevOps engineers to combine financial and technical expertise and best practices to balance cost and performance.
Automat-it dedicated specific DevOps hours to the Well-Architected Review project and optimizing the AWS account setup, and implemented the following recommendations:
- Cost Optimization roadmap: Through a Well Architected Review and recurring Cost Optimization Reports, Automat-it gave octonomy AI a prioritized savings roadmap, identifying which optimisations to implement immediately and what to defer until the architecture stabilized. Additional AWS-specific savings opportunities were surfaced to expand savings without compromising performance.
- Full cost visibility via Umbrella: Dashboards were built to segment costs by environment with tag-based breakdowns, custom service-level alerts, and an API integration feeding data into the customer’s own reporting for a complete internal cost picture.
- DevOps implementation to gold standards: Automat-it’s DevOps team supported a wide range of infrastructure tasks, ensuring all AWS accounts are aligned with AWS best-practice standards.
- Proactive anomaly monitoring: FinOps-led monitoring identified cost spikes across the relevant AWS services and flagged them for review before they became material.
- Reservation management: Step-by-step guidance ensured reservations maintained all-time-high utilization and appropriate coverage, with disaster-scenario planning to prevent wasteful over-purchasing.
- Enterprise-grade PLS support: Through Automat-it’s PLS (Partner Led Support) program, octonomy AI achieved enterprise-grade support SLAs at a fraction of the cost. With this, the team could expedite urgent and business-critical cases without managing tickets themselves.
The Results: Cost Control, Visibility, and Focus
By partnering with Automat-it, octonomy AI established a mature, fully managed FinOps and DevOps practice alongside its own engineering team.
This resulted in real business-impact:
- Measurable savings on AWS spend: Annual cloud infrastructure spend on AWS was reduced through a prioritized optimisation roadmap. Additional optimization strategies continue to be implemented for further savings.
- Comprehensive financial oversight: Full cost visibility and cost management established across multiple complex environments, with spend attributable per environment
- Cost spikes instantly flagged: Proactive cost anomaly safeguards via automated near-real-time alerts catch sudden surges in service costs
- Enterprise-grade SLAs: Business-critical issues resolved under strict SLAs, allowing the engineering team to stay focused on building product features.
Customer Testimonial
“Automat-it gave us full transparency over our AWS spend per environment and a clear, prioritised optimisation roadmap,” explains Thorsten Grote, Director IT, octonomy AI GmbH. “Together with the enterprise-grade support SLAs, that means our engineering team can stay focused on our product instead of on cloud administration.”
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Whether you’re scaling on AWS credits or managing production workloads, Automat-it’s combined FinOps and DevOps expertise ensures all money spent is accounted for.