Cloud cost optimization service provider Vantage today is adding support for Microsoft Corp.’s GitHub software version control and collaboration platform to its growing list of native integrations with cloud platforms and applications.
Vantage, the business name of VNTG Inc., helps companies track how much they spend on cloud services to find cost-cutting opportunities. It already supports the three largest public clouds as well as cloud services from Snowflake Inc., Databricks Inc., Datadog Inc. and nine other infrastructure and observability platforms.
The software automatically ingests data using an agent that acts as a virtual user to extract billing data from GitHub. Businesses can continuously track usage and costs associated with GitHub services, such as GitHub Actions, Shared Storage, and Copilot, including compute costs for self-hosted runners from a single platform.
Conquering complexity
GitHub’s billing interface is notoriously complex, said Vantage co-founder and Chief Executive Ben Schaechter. “The only way to get cost data is to download a bloated CSV file that is like a very long receipt and port it into Excel,” he said. The task is even more complex at organizations that use a combination of GitHub-hosted and self-hosted runners, which are servers that execute automated tasks from GitHub Actions workflows for jobs such as building, testing and deploying code.
Runners “are one of the largest GitHub charges,” Schaechter said. “Your costs are driven by how often people on your team are kicking off tests and how efficient those tests are. Our software will show you the specific user on your team that triggered a specific repository and how that cost is being allocated to you.”
Vantage logs on to GitHub as a user and fetches the CSV file, which is then ingested into Vantage’s data warehouse. The data is “automatically adjusted and structured by Vantage, and then all of the features that we provide around visibility, recording and forecasting let you see down to the specific user on your team or workflow what’s driving costs,” Schaechter said.
Vantage combines data for both GitHub-hosted and self-hosted runners into a single report. Customers who use GitHub Enterprise can track the license usage of enterprise members.
Configuring the service takes just a few minutes and reports take 15 or 20 minutes to run, Schaechter said. Some customers who have tested the feature have reported that they quickly identified automated workflows that they were unaware of that were “needlessly racking up costs,” he said. “They changed the configuration and saved a bunch of money.” Simply sharing cost reports with software engineers can also reduce costs by raising awareness about the consequences of usage.
There is no additional charge for GitHub support. Vantage sells its service on a subscription basis with prices determined by the volume of monthly costs tracked. The company, which raised $21 million early last year, intends to add reports that compare costs across multiple similar services so users can identify opportunities to save money by shifting workloads between clouds.