Tapping into power of cloud for business success
StepStone is one of the world’s leading next generation recruitment platforms. Through our AI-powered hiring platform and smart autonomous matching technologies we aim to disrupt the way talent and all-sized businesses connect. StepStone has majority of its platform hosted in cloud and our cloud strategy is shaped with business success at its core.
Cloud has been the go-to “hosting” alternative for many companies that chose to migrate out of on-prem data centers. And in many cases the workloads are moved “as-is” by running on compute capacity in the cloud. Due to that, these workloads needed more or less similar support and support structures as before. While the enterprises were promised a better world with cloud migration, many companies struggled to reap the real benefits of cloud hosting due to as-is migrations and seeing cloud as just the hosting layer, resulting in relatively higher costs and low business value. However, the cloud hosting did and does, to a certain extent, speed up provisioning and ease up the operations.
Stepstone is taking a radically different approach to its cloud strategy, aiming to leverage cloud capabilities for business success. At the core of this strategy are Support for product innovation, Platform elasticity, Cost efficiency, and Growth readiness. We don’t see cloud as just another hosting layer, but a buffet of capabilities that can be utilized towards business success.
Product innovation and experimentation for many companies is a key success factor. They want to experiment new ideas and bring innovative products to market as quickly as possible. Cloud offers read-to-use services and functional capabilities that can be stringed together to create innovative products and bring them into market quickly. Such services may be expensive as compared to self hosted bespoke implementations. The initial higher cost for these services balance out the benefits of early experimentation. Once product value is proven, the setup can be optimized in the later phases.
Enabling ownership for infrastructure layer with teams and breaking away from centralized support structures has become possible in the cloud world. Centralized support teams owned and optimized infrastructure setup while development teams focused on application and data layers. If one can look at all the layers together, then the scope for optimization increases enormously. For example, teams can build more cloud native applications to reduce infrastructure wastage and optimize data lifecycle to reduce data storage costs. Stepstone is pursuing the YBIYRI strategy (You Build It You Run It) working towards enabling and increasing ownership of applications with the teams. Enabling ownership around infrastructure layer is included in those efforts too, using self-service tools, tag-based access to infrastructure, and cost visibility. Teams will be able to manage and optimize their cloud setup and hence costs. While cost reduction is desirable, it should not cause any impacts on product performance. Hence we ask our teams to be ‘cost efficient’, i.e. returns (business value) on investment (cloud spend). Viewing costs in relation to product/business KPIs brings about meaningful insight. The product teams can use this insight to prioritize their focus on cost efficiency.
Technical elasticity is a vital part of our strategy. We (re)defined elasticity as a combination of scalability and efficiency, i.e. scale in/out/up/down instantly and with zero wastage”. A lean cloud architecture has less drag and hence can support growth. Cloud provides the required (auto-)scalability, which is first part of our elasticity definition. Ensuring we have no wastage is something at our hands. Provisioning compute capacity in cloud the same way as in a data center is one of the big reasons for high wastage. Teams tend to provision infrastructure for peak loads and future spikes, which goes unused for most of the time. At Stepstone the best practice is to cover the capacity needs based on workload pattern. For example, the “always running” applications with (almost) stable workload pattern could be operated on self provisioned compute with long-term commitments for better price, while spikey workloads should be operated on serverless or managed compute to reduce wastage. Another option could be to run stateless, micro-applications on least expensive compute (e.g. spot instances) with auto-scaling, which could enable (near) instant scaling with minimal cost. The application and data architecture should support this approach, hence we have been on the micro-services and cloud-native journey already.
Engage closely with your cloud partner to explore opportunities in going deeper with cloud services and identify best-in-class capabilities to help your product innovation. Where it makes sense, its ok to look at other services/providers that might bring substantial business value, but use them with sufficient discretion as you would need to have proper support in place especially for production workloads.
Seeing cloud as not just a hosting layer, but as collection of capabilities supporting business agility and technical scalability with an eye on cost efficiency is our mantra for business success.
More about how we use Cloud Technology:
Read more about the technologies we use or take an inside look at our organisation & processes. Interested in working at The Stepstone Group? Check out our careers page.
