March 2025 Summaries

Vantage has announced the availability of a new integration with GitHub's Enhanced Billing API, allowing customers to track costs for various GitHub services—such as Actions, Large File Storage, Copilot, Codespaces, and Packages—alongside their other infrastructure costs. This integration enables Vantage customers to programmatically grant access to GitHub billing data, facilitating the automated ingestion and visualization of costs in the Vantage console. The new system replaces the previous method of tracking costs, which involved inviting a Vantage-owned email as a billing administrator, and resolves prior limitations like the inability to integrate with SSO-authenticated GitHub accounts. Customers can now install the billing-vantage-sh GitHub application to gain insights into cost and usage data through a structured format, with options to filter and group costs by various dimensions. The integration is available at no additional cost, although costs will count towards Vantage's quota tier enforcement, and it supports daily data refreshes in the console.

Vantage transitioned from using Sidekiq to Temporal for handling its background job processing due to the increasing scale and complexity of its operations, which required enhanced reliability, scalability, and debuggability. Sidekiq, a Redis-dependent job processor, was initially effective but struggled with complex ETL tasks and job orchestration, leading to challenges like race conditions and lack of state management. Temporal, on the other hand, offers durable, stateful workflow execution with automatic retries and better visibility into job progress and dependencies, making it ideal for Vantage's needs. The migration process was divided into learning and implementation phases, where Vantage adopted an incremental approach, ensuring no downtime for customers. Temporal's architecture supports scalability and simplifies handling long-running, complex workflows, providing improved orchestration, error handling, and the ability to manage job dependencies more effectively. This shift has enhanced Vantage's internal engineering operations and improved its capacity to support its customer base by ensuring efficient ETL processes.

Vantage has integrated cur.vantage.sh into its console, enhancing the clarity of AWS billing codes by linking users to detailed description pages for each code. This integration allows AWS practitioners to access easy-to-understand definitions and variations of billing codes directly from Vantage's Cost Reports and Active Resource pages. Cur.vantage.sh, a free utility, provides distinct pages for every AWS service, clustering similar billing codes and offering editorialized definitions researched by the Vantage team. This feature is available to all Vantage customers with an AWS integration at no additional cost and facilitates better understanding and management of AWS billing codes. Users can view these descriptions by navigating to the Cost Reports or Active Resource pages within the Vantage console, and Vantage plans to expand this integration to include other providers in the future.

Vantage has introduced Re-Rating Tiered Discounts for Managed Service Provider (MSP) Managed Accounts, enabling MSPs to automate the recalculation of tiered pricing at the customer level. This allows MSPs to replicate the pricing model a customer would receive if purchasing directly from a cloud provider, such as AWS, and removes free tier usage from new accounts. The feature benefits MSPs by reducing the manual workload associated with calculating discounted pricing tiers, thereby minimizing errors and increasing efficiency. This enhancement is available at no additional cost to Vantage MSP customers, and it supports only AWS at present. The Re-Rating Tiered Discounts feature allows MSPs to create billing rules that accurately reflect each customer's usage and tiered pricing in real-time, facilitating margin comparisons without altering the AWS-billed cost displayed in the parent Management Account.

Vantage has introduced Nested Virtual Tags, a new feature allowing customers to incorporate existing Virtual Tags into the creation of new ones, thereby enabling the establishment of hierarchies or nested structures for Virtual Tags. This enhancement allows users to leverage previously defined business logic without duplicating filtering logic, facilitating the alignment of cloud provider data with internal taxonomies for more efficient grouping and querying. The Nested Virtual Tags can be utilized for filtering, grouping, and cost allocation models within the Vantage console, and are available at no additional cost to all Vantage users, specifically those with the "Owner" role. While there are some limitations, such as the inability to reference cost allocation-based Virtual Tags or create cyclical references, the feature supports up to 49 nested layers and is accessible via the VirtualTagConfig API endpoint for further integration.

Vantage has introduced a new feature that enables Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to reset customer usage pricing to public list prices, eliminating enterprise discounts or private pricing agreements. This innovation, known as Service Re-rating to Public Pricing for MSP Managed Accounts, aims to simplify the billing process, which typically involves complex recalculations of billing line items from cloud providers. By automating the repricing of billing line items, MSPs can more easily manage pricing structures and provide clear cost plots for end customers, reflecting accurate billing without discounts. This feature is now available for all Vantage MSP accounts and currently supports only AWS. It allows MSPs to maintain margin comparisons by showing the AWS-billed price in the parent account, ensuring transparency in cost management. The implementation of this feature involves setting up billing rules in the Partner Settings, which can also be applied programmatically.

Vantage has introduced a new feature called Discount Toggling for MSP Managed Accounts, which enables Managed Service Provider (MSP) customers to control whether end customers receive Reserved Instance and Savings Plan benefits from commitments purchased on an AWS Payer account. This feature allows MSPs to decide if the discounts should be applied to the managed accounts or if the usage should revert to list price, thus simplifying the billing process and eliminating the need for manual adjustments in Cost and Usage Reports. This change helps MSPs manage their margins by allowing them to choose which commitments' benefits are passed on to the end customers, with the option to create a custom billing rule to manage these adjustments. The feature is designed to ease the complex and error-prone reconciliation processes typically required to segregate MSP and customer commitments, and it currently supports AWS with no additional cost for using this feature. Users of the parent Vantage Management Account will still see AWS-billed costs, facilitating margin comparison and cost analysis, while end customers will see usage at list price in their managed accounts.

Amazon S3 Tables, announced at the 2024 re:Invent, aim to simplify analytics on S3 by offering a fully managed way to store structured data using Apache Iceberg and the Parquet format. While some speculate that S3 Tables could challenge Snowflake and Databricks, they mainly provide a middle ground between traditional object storage and specialized analytics databases by focusing on performance and cost optimization for analytics workloads. This service automates tasks such as table maintenance and integration with AWS analytics services, offering benefits like higher transaction throughput, row-level transactions, and schema evolution. However, it's more expensive than S3 Standard storage and may involve some vendor lock-in due to its reliance on AWS-specific APIs, limiting its current availability and integration capabilities. Despite these constraints, S3 Tables are designed for analytics workloads optimized for tabular data and could become a stronger competitor in the data lake market as AWS expands its regional availability and service integration.

Vantage has announced the integration of Temporal Cloud cost tracking into its console, allowing users to monitor their Temporal Cloud expenses alongside other infrastructure costs. This integration enables customers to add multiple Temporal Cloud accounts and automatically visualize their costs based on usage data, which is billed according to the number of Actions and storage used. Vantage allows filtering of costs by various dimensions such as Temporal account, usage category, and namespace, providing comprehensive visibility into application deployment expenses. Customers can set custom rates for Actions and storage, and historical data is reprocessed with any updated rates to ensure accurate cost reports. The integration requires users to authorize Vantage access via the Temporal Cloud Operations API, and while Vantage only has read access to billing information, it does not include taxes or discounts in the cost calculations. This feature is available to all Vantage customers at no additional cost, and the company is planning future support for additional cloud service providers.

Vantage has introduced support for ClickHouse Cloud costs within its console, enabling customers to monitor their ClickHouse Cloud expenses alongside other infrastructure costs such as those from AWS, Azure, and GCP, in a single report. This integration allows users to connect multiple ClickHouse organizations through an API key, which Vantage uses to automatically ingest and visualize cost data, thus eliminating the manual work previously required to retrieve and format such data. The integration facilitates detailed cost reporting with filters for organization, usage type, and subcategory, and offers notifications for cost anomalies or budget alerts. The ClickHouse Cloud integration is available to all Vantage customers at no additional cost, although usage may affect quota tier limits. Additionally, Vantage plans to expand its support to other cloud service providers like Cloudflare, Temporal, and Vercel in the future.