FinOps Cloud Cost Optimization Practices at Bilibili – A Case Study

Recently, the "2023 Trusted Cloud Conference – Industry Cloud Platform and Cloud Optimization Governance" sub‑forum, co‑hosted by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) and the China Communications Standards Association, announced the FinOps Cloud Cost Optimization Pioneer Enterprises and held an award ceremony.

Shanghai Bilibili Technology Co., Ltd. (Bilibili) was recognized for its systematic construction and practical implementation of public‑cloud cost optimization, becoming one of the first FinOps Cloud Cost Optimization Pioneer Enterprises.

Bilibili operates a typical hybrid‑cloud environment: it maintains its own data centers while also consuming resources from multiple public‑cloud providers. The scale of workloads deployed on the cloud is large and diverse, covering online services, offline processing, and gaming. While benefiting from public‑cloud advantages, Bilibili faces several cost‑management challenges (see reference [1]):

Resource waste is hard to identify, and effective optimization methods are lacking.

Cloud billing data is massive and complex, with insufficient professional tooling.

The hybrid‑cloud model increases optimization difficulty; cloud product pricing models are varied and intricate.

Optimization processes are not well‑structured, leading to inefficient cross‑team collaboration.

Cost management on the cloud is a continuous iterative process. In this journey, Bilibili has embraced the FinOps philosophy and accumulated experience in three main areas:

Cross‑department communication and collaboration.

Platform‑level tool implementation.

Data‑driven decision making.

These three aspects are embedded throughout the entire cloud lifecycle, including:

Budget declaration and execution phase:

Forecast business goals, translate them into compute demand, assess overall compute gaps, and propose budget procurement needs.

Combine technical optimization solutions with growth targets and cost‑reduction goals to derive the final budget target.

Analyze monthly bills to detect overspending early, let FinOps roles discuss improvement measures, and then adjust resources or budgets accordingly.

Cloud vendor selection and bidding phase:

Procure based on price inquiries and technical scores, selecting the most cost‑effective provider that meets business requirements.

The cloud‑management side combines performance test data and pricing to recommend resource selections, using project and tag capabilities for precise resource attribution.

Cloud resource request and operation phase:

Build an internal CMP platform (ARES multi‑cloud management platform – see link ) that provides resource inspection capabilities, quickly discovers idle or abnormal resources, and drives business teams to down‑size or retire them, enabling an end‑to‑end "discover → notify → optimize" workflow that boosts optimization efficiency.

Business teams, based on resource, cost, and business data, perform technical refactoring and upgrades to reduce resource demand from the business side.

Each team plays a crucial role in cost optimization; clear responsibilities, shared cost‑reduction goals, and rigorous checks at every stage are essential for fully embracing FinOps and increasing the value of cloud adoption.

Looking ahead, Bilibili will continue to drive innovation in cloud computing, provide higher‑quality services, and pursue green, low‑carbon operations by constantly refining cost‑management strategies, improving resource utilization, and contributing to sustainable social and environmental development.

References

[1] "China Academy of Information and Communications Technology Cloud Computing White Paper (2022)"

[2] CAICT First "Cloud Cost Optimization and Low‑Carbon Operation" Pioneer Practitioner Selection and Results Release – link

[3] "Saving Hundreds of Millions of IT Costs – Bilibili FinOps Practice" – link