Getting the most out of cloud computing is about more than just lifting and shifting an on-premise application to a cloud provider, it’s about empowering engineering organizations to move faster and innovate efficiently. But how can you tell if your cloud investments are paying off? CloudZero’s vision is that every engineering decision is a buying decision and their mission is to make efficient innovation a reality for every cloud-driven organization. The companies behind some of the most complex systems in the world rely on CloudZero to gain deeper insights into their cloud platforms, measure their return on investment, cut costs, and, most importantly, meet their business objectives.

Customer delight is a core principle for CloudZero, and one of the company’s top engineering priorities is reducing friction for its developers so they can focus on creating the best customer experiences possible. “I want every developer at CloudZero to not only contribute to our customers’ delight, but share in that delight,” says Adam Tankanow, CloudZero’s principal engineer. 

That’s why CloudZero streamlined its developer tooling by building on the GitHub platform. Since launching in 2016, CloudZero has used GitHub for Startups to manage and collaborate on code. More recently, the company has tapped the full capabilities of GitHub’s platform, including GitHub Actions, GitHub Copilot, and GitHub Advanced Security. 

“We used to use a lot more disparate tools,” Tankanow says. “Now, GitHub provides developers with a single pane of glass. Code review, automation, security, deployments, environment definitions, and governance rules are all in one place so we can focus on solving the problem at hand.”

We used to use a lot more disparate tools. Now, GitHub provides developers with a single pane of glass. Code review, automation, security, deployments, environment definitions, and governance rules are all in one place so we can focus on solving the problem at hand.

CloudZero’s developer ethos revolves around making small, frequent commits to stay “five minutes away from production” at all times. This development approach makes it easy to roll back to a known good state without losing too much work when something goes wrong. But this level of agility doesn’t come easy. The more tools and processes developers have to contend with, the harder it is to achieve. CloudZero got there by replacing its entire CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions.

The company also uses Actions to automate other processes outside of its developer organization. For example, the customer success team has automated some of its tasks using GitHub Actions, and GitHub Actions' workflow dispatch feature means they can be run directly from GitHub, freeing developers from building separate tools or interfaces.

CloudZero has no dedicated teams for QA or operations, thanks in part to their decision to rely primarily on serverless infrastructure, but also in part to their use of GitHub’s platform. “GitHub Advanced Security ensures we adhere to security best practices, which is important because most of us are not security experts,” says Erik Peterson, CloudZero CTO & CISO.

GitHub Advanced Security ensures we adhere to security best practices, which is important because most of us are not security experts.

The company was quick to enable secret scanning on every repository, which Peterson notes is imperative for ensuring compliance with SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type 2 standards. By simply checking a box, the burden of manually preventing secrets from being exposed was lifted from the shoulders of CloudZero’s developers. Additionally, CloudZero uses Dependabot and CodeQL with push protection on every repository, playing a central role in helping CloudZero maintain a successful security posture, and remediate vulnerable code.

GitHub Copilot has also increased CloudZero’s developer agility. “It's revolutionized the way we write code,” Tankanow explains. "Editing code suggestions from GitHub Copilot is exponentially faster than writing everything manually. It radically reduces the time from idea to implementation." With GitHub Copilot, CloudZero’s developers are able to keep true to their goal of being just five minutes away from production.

I could never pull GitHub Copilot out of our organization without triggering a revolt. Everyone loves using it so much. It has truly made us more productive.”

”I could never pull GitHub Copilot out of our organization without triggering a revolt. Everyone loves using it so much. It has truly made us more productive,” says Erik Peterson, CloudZero CTO & CISO.

CloudZero is growing quickly, having gone from six developers to 24 in just a year. Tankanow says he wants the next 24 developers who join the company to have just as good an experience as he did when he started at the company in 2016. He sees GitHub as a core component in making that possible. The GitHub platform has helped CloudZero scale, enabling them to shed unnecessary complexity and to make new hires productive more quickly than ever before.

“We're delighted when we use GitHub,” says Tankanow. “It helps us delight our own users.”