How Zhihu’s Big Data FinOps Cuts Costs and Boosts Efficiency

Introduction

This article introduces Zhihu’s big‑data practices for cost reduction and efficiency improvement.

Four Main Aspects

Background Zhihu is a high‑quality online Q&A community where users can ask, answer, like, and comment to obtain valuable content.

FinOps‑Driven Cost Reduction Since 2022 Zhihu has built an internal economic billing system called FinOps, using it to promote cost‑saving initiatives. FinOps emphasizes that cost reduction is not only a development issue but also an organizational one requiring cross‑team collaboration.

Technology‑Driven Cost Reduction Zhihu adopts a hybrid‑cloud architecture, leveraging services from multiple cloud providers (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS). This multi‑vendor approach increases the difficulty of cost management.

Summary and Outlook Enterprise cost‑reduction faces challenges such as numerous vendors, frequent organizational restructuring, and sustainability. Gartner reports only 11% of companies achieve continuous cost reduction over three years, highlighting the need for both short‑term “exercise‑style” savings and long‑term, steady‑flow strategies.

Key Challenges

Multiple vendors and resource types (physical machines, virtual machines, SaaS services) complicate management.

Organizational changes can cause billing entities to disappear, requiring robust mechanisms to maintain continuity.

Maintaining sustainable cost reduction is difficult; many initiatives lose impact over time.

Additional Resources

Douyin Group’s data‑warehouse cost‑reduction case

Douyin’s data lineage architecture and optimization practice

Kuaishou e‑commerce data metric system construction

Blaze: Kuaishou’s self‑developed Spark vector engine

NoETL: Automated data management era

Kuaishou big‑data security governance practice

How Zhihu’s big data cuts costs and improves efficiency

Ant Group’s EB‑level big‑data governance architecture