About Ripple
Trillions of dollars flow across borders every year, and the need for efficient international payment systems is only growing as globalization continues to interconnect economies. Ripple is a financial services company that uses blockchain technology for faster, cheaper international payments than traditional interbank transfers. Built on a distributed open-source platform, Ripple facilitates secure, traceable, near-instantaneous transfers around the world, with lower transaction costs and the floating capital requirements of the traditional system.
Ripple’s Previous Cloud Management Challenges
As Ripple has grown its array of products, and as the company has increased in size and complexity since its founding in 2012, streamlining its compute has become an urgent priority. “We want to get the most out of the cloud,” said Ripple VP of Platform and Technical Operations, Pete Webb. “Probably 90% of my time is spent looking for efficiencies.”
Cloud infrastructure, largely on Amazon EC2, underpins all of Ripple’s work. But when Webb joined the company, the tools at his disposal offered little insight into the specifics of how the company’s cloud resources were allocated, and no team attribution or ownership of the associated costs. “Some of the challenges I was encountering were things like simply determining how much a product costs us to offer,” said Webb. “How much is our development environment costing us, versus our production environments? Tangling apart those various environments to get the information we needed was not easy or user-friendly.”
Why Vantage?
Ripple wanted tools that would allow teams across the company to see the real-time impacts of their decisions on their compute usage. Both to manage costs and to better serve its users, Ripple needed a more efficient cloud cost management system, capable of generating real-time reports with granular insights, but Webb found little available that offered the required specificity and ease of use. “We were starting to get into things like Kubernetes, which is a whole ecosystem that sits on EC2 but is very abstracted,” said Webb. “It’s like a data center within a data center: how do you get the full view of both of these things and know what you’re spending money on? There are open-source tools, but none of them could give us that complete picture. So that was a big part of our choice to work with Vantage.”
Vantage Impact on Ripple
Vantage’s tools have given Ripple much greater insight into its everyday business operations, not just in terms of the cloud costs per organizational unit of the company, but per product and per instance of that product being used—which also means it has a better understanding of where profits are being driven.
Ripple’s employees have also greeted the new possibilities generated by Vantage with excitement. “We have tons of folks who love to fiddle with numbers and efficiency,” said Webb. “Folks who want to see the effects of their changes.” Vantage lets Ripple’s engineers understand in real time the value of their optimizations for the products they work on. “For our developers, there’s an attitude of, ‘I’m going to put something out there, and I want to see the change it creates,’” said Webb. “The ability to see that what you’re doing is actually making a difference is very powerful.”
No-Surprises Budgeting
With the detailed insights made possible by Vantage’s easy-to-use tools, Webb can work with teams across the company to optimize cloud spending, and to see where compute resources are going as they are deployed. “Now, I can work with teams to set budgets for product compute costs, with no surprises at quarter’s end,” said Webb. “Weekly reports and anytime access to Vantage mean there is no way not to know what your product is costing all along.”
Better Forecasting
The Vantage data also reveal information about business cycles and demand, which has enabled better strategic decision-making and better forecasting for Ripple’s future capacities and growth. “Like a lot of companies, we go through a yearly planning process,” said Webb. “We now have a much more fine-grained understanding: Here’s how much you’ve been spending for the past two years. Here’s what your cycles look like. We can use these insights as constructors to build a much more accurate forecast. That’s huge.”
Greater Focus on Customers
For Ripple, implementing Vantage’s automated tools is not just about reducing costs, but about leveraging efficiency to keep improving its products and better serve its users. “Ripple shares a lot of commonality with Amazon in the sense that we’re very customer-centric,” explained Webb. “We will spend as much money as it takes to make the customer happy and give a good customer experience. It’s not just about reducing costs. It’s about being efficient overall, and Vantage is critical to our ability to be efficient.”
The Future of Vantage and Ripple
Ripple’s focus on fast, secure, and cheap international transfers has positioned the company as a leader in creating a more interconnected and frictionless global economy. With the continued optimizations driven by Vantage, Ripple is set to reshape the global payments landscape and catalyze economic growth across borders in the years to come.
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