At a large-scale tech company with a sprawling data platform, compute was being provisioned to services manually—and it showed. Lifecycle management was mostly done by hand. No automation, no guardrails, just tribal knowledge and fingers crossed.

That setup worked—until it didn’t. Human errors led to major incidents. Resource requests were inconsistent, bin packing was inefficient, and workloads were scattered across hosts with no real strategy. The general pool of compute hosts became a dumping ground for chaos.

Engineers were frustrated. Infra teams were burned out. Leadership flagged the whole thing as a critical risk—and it was.

💥 Fewer Site-Impacting Incidents
Automation and stronger guardrails cut down on human error—leading to a measurable drop in outages tied to resource mismanagement.

📉 More Efficient Use of Compute
Bin packing helped consolidate workloads, freeing up capacity without buying new hardware. We made the most of the infrastructure we already had.

🧠 Better Team Scalability
With less manual overhead, infra teams could scale support without scaling headcount. New team members could onboard faster without learning a maze of exceptions.