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Boeing case study

Learn how Cloudaware helped Boeing gain multi-cloud and AI cost clarity, saving $958,250 per year

1. About Boeing

Boeing is the world’s largest aerospace company. It designs, builds, and supports next-generation commercial jetliners, defense platforms, and space systems for customers in over 150 countries. Boeing's global workforce runs mission-critical engineering, analytics, and manufacturing workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. As this multi-cloud infrastructure grows, real-time cost intelligence and stronger financial controls have become essential.

2. Challenges

As Boeing expanded its use of AI services and multi-cloud infrastructure, its FinOps team ran into growing cost management challenges:

• Limited visibility into AI-related costs, especially Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, and SageMaker usage. • Unclear utilization of savings plans (SP) and reserved instances (RI), leading to missed opportunities for savings. • High S3 storage costs due to idle, orphaned, and underutilized resources. • No centralized tool to detect cost anomalies or track forecasted spend. • Teams lacked easy access to chargeback reports and resource-level insights. • Rightsizing opportunities were often missed due to fragmented data.

Boeing needed a smarter, automated FinOps layer that could make multi-cloud and AI usage transparent across the business.

3. Solutions

To solve these issues, Boeing implemented Cloudaware’s FinOps suite:

• AI cost tracking: Cloudaware broke down Azure OpenAI spending by token type (input/output) and by AI account, giving Boeing full visibility into how much was spent - and why. boeing azure openai • Bedrock and SageMaker visibility: AWS AI usage was monitored for cost and consumption trends, helping the FinOps team allocate budget more effectively.

• SP/RI optimization: Dashboards showed SP and RI coverage, highlighting which reservations were active, expired, or underutilized, helping Boeing improve coverage and reduce waste. boeing ri • S3 optimization: Cloudaware identified underused and idle storage across all accounts, allowing the team to clean up and reduce monthly costs. boeing s3optimization • Anomaly detection: Cost spikes and drops were automatically flagged, helping avoid surprise bills and identify misconfigured workloads. boeing anomaly detection • Rightsizing: Over-provisioned instances were highlighted, with actionable suggestions to downsize.

• Forecasting: Boeing’s teams gained access to granular, interactive forecasting, enabling cost breakdowns by account, business unit, and stakeholder for precise planning.

• Chargeback reports: Cloudaware auto-generated chargeback reports by team, project, and business unit, making internal billing easy and reducing friction between engineering and finance.

4. Implementation

Cloudaware FinOps was deployed over a six-week period:

  1. API integrations were established to pull billing and usage data from AWS, Azure and GCP.
  2. Token-level tracking was configured for Azure OpenAI and AI workloads.
  3. Dashboards for S3 optimization, AI usage, and SP/RI coverage were customized for Boeing’s environment.
  4. Created custom chargeback reports for finance teams.
  5. Enabled rightsizing insights for compute workloads.
  6. Forecasting, chargeback reports, and anomaly detection alerts were activated.
  7. Boeing’s finance and engineering teams were trained on the platform and onboarded to cost-saving workflows.

5. Results

In 90 days, Boeing achieved: • 100% visibility into AWS Bedrock, AWS SageMaker, and Azure OpenAI token usage and cost, with clear input/output breakdowns. • $958,250 in annual savings from S3 cleanup, SP/RI optimization, and rightsizing. • 37% fewer cost anomalies thanks to near real-time alerting. • 34% improvement in the speed of cost reporting and chargeback processes. • Clear chargeback reports delivered monthly to all stakeholders. • Accurate cost forecasting enabled finance to plan quarterly budgets with confidence. • Stronger collaboration between finance and engineering teams through shared data and goals.

6. Testimonial

“Cloudaware surfaced insights we just couldn’t see before. From hidden AI costs to storage waste, the platform showed us exactly where to act. It paid for itself almost immediately.” - Marc Schwartz, Lead FinOps Manager, Boeing

7. Conclusion

Boeing’s FinOps success demonstrates that greater visibility, automated processes, and smarter cloud tools can lead to savings and increased accountability. Cloudaware helped Boeing reduce waste, control AI costs, and expand its cloud operations with confidence.

Ready to control your multi-cloud budget like Boeing? Schedule a Cloudaware FinOps demo to discover potential savings in your AWS, Azure, or GCP environments.

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