FinOps should be automated. Yet too often, practitioners spend much of their time manually addressing recommendations from their visibility tool. While reporting and cost transparency are important, the value of recommendations is only realized with effective execution. FinOps, DevOps, and platform teams need to ask themselves, how much of this can be automated?
Together, ProsperOps and Alvin can automatically reduce costs for your compute and data spend in Google Cloud with no on-going effort. Your teams stay focused on top priorities and your Compute Engine and BigQuery bills drop by 40 to 50 percent. Sounds too good to be true? Let’s unpack what this partnership can mean for your FinOps stack.
Multi-layer rate and workload optimization
Your Compute Engine and BigQuery bills can be their own beasts individually, especially with manual management. On the Compute Engine side, workload demands can turn on a dime and batch purchasing commitments often leave you over-or-under provisioned. Meanwhile, managing BigQuery costs is complex due to high variability in resource options: editions, PAYGO vs reservations, slots, autoscaling, caching, and wildly different query patterns across BI, ELT, and ad-hoc analysis.
Cost optimization for compute and data are separately-moving targets. So, it is no surprise that maintaining efficiency across your stack is difficult to do manually — no matter how much staff time you dedicate to the job. Here’s where intelligent automation comes into play. To better understand the compounding value of ProsperOps and Alvin, let’s first understand where each solution specializes.
ProsperOps automatically minimizes hourly rates for your cloud resources
Think of ProsperOps like autopilot for commitment management. The solution continuously monitors billing data from your Google environment and structures a sophisticated portfolio of Committed-use Discounts (CUDs) to keep the majority of your Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Run, and Cloud SQL consumption covered by commitment discounts at all times. Organizations consistently maintain over 40 percent effective savings with ProsperOps compared to what they would pay on-demand.
Alvin automatically maximizes cost efficiency of your BigQuery usage
Alvin delivers a similar outcome for BigQuery that ProsperOps does for compute consumption. Organizations using Alvin automatically reduce their BigQuery costs by ensuring every SQL query is optimized before reaching the warehouse. The solution routes workloads to the most cost-effective pricing option based on the query characteristics, rewrites queries to maximize cache hit rates and avoid unnecessary re-execution, and minimizes slot waste by intelligently allocating compute to meet query demand.
Alvin and ProsperOps are cut from the same cloth: both are autonomous FinOps solutions that execute advanced rate and workload optimization strategies in the background with no effort or dependency from engineering teams. The twist is where they operate.
ProsperOps sits at the billing and commitments layer for Google Cloud (and other clouds), automatically managing CUDs and other discount instruments across a variety of services. Alvin sits at the workload and SQL layer for BigQuery, optimizing queries before they hit the warehouse to cut costs and speed up performance. Together they simultaneously optimize multiple layers of your GCP stack so your teams can stay focused on building while your organization saves money.
Intelligent FinOps automation, not just another dashboard
Alvin and ProsperOps are not adding to your recommendations fatigue. In fact, they’re taking tasks off your plate by taking action continuously to keep your rates low and your workloads optimized.
- Active and outcome-based, not advisory
- Neither tool is “yet another dashboard of recommendations.” Both are built to act — buying/sizing Cloud commitments (ProsperOps) or rewriting/routing queries and sizing reservations (Alvin) — based on telemetry and algorithms, not manual spreadsheets.
- Aligned incentives via savings-share model
- ProsperOps and Alvin only charge for the savings achieved. Neither solution charges a subscription or licensing fee, on-boarding fee, or support fee. The savings share fee is based on the actual savings realized, not a percentage of total monthly spend.
- Lightweight permissions, least-privileged access
- ProsperOps plugs into billing and usage data; Alvin sits transparently in front of BigQuery and uses metadata rather than full table data access. Both are secure by design, lightweight, and easy to implement and run autonomously in the background.
Together, they drive a FinOps principle that’s increasingly apparent: visibility is not enough—action has to be automated.
Why use both? Alvin and ProsperOps compound Google Cloud savings
Alvin shrinks and smooths your BigQuery workload while ProsperOps maintains the right level of commitment coverage for your computing resources over time. You pay less and use less for your Compute Engine and BigQuery workloads.
1.) Reduce base costs with automated rate optimization
Ensure your Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Run, and Cloud SQL usage is covered by commitments. ProsperOps helps maintain a consistent maximal effective savings rate (ESR) for all your CUD-eligible resources with intelligent commitment portfolio automation. This keeps the costs for your computing foundation as low as possible without performance trade-offs and can apply to many workloads across your fleet.
2. ) Smoothen variable costs with automated BigQuery Optimization
Boost the efficiency of your BigQuery workloads. Alvin reduces the amount of billable work BigQuery actually has to perform resulting in 52% reduction in BigQuery costs and around 30% faster query execution. Their solution automates BigQuery optimization by routing queries to the most efficient billing option, right-sizing reservations to minimize compute waste, and boosting cache hit rates to minimize repeat scans.
Bottom line:
If you’re serious about taming Compute Engine and BigQuery spend, Alvin and ProsperOps deliver a full stack approach for you Google Cloud Optimization:
- ProsperOps maximizes your discounts and commitment strategy
- Alvin maximizes the efficiency and reduces waste for your BigQuery workloads
Two specialists, one outcome — world-class cloud savings.
Get started with your free Savings Analysis and BigQuery Savings Report.
