Finops is extremely challenging to navigate for a lot of startups. You can regain cost control by automating idle resource cleanup, GPU-aware autoscaling, and policy-based infrastructure management.
Startups live and die by their ability to manage costs. According to CloudKeeper's 2024 FinOps survey, 82% of global organizations waste at least 10% of their cloud spend, and 38% waste more than 30%. For early-stage companies, that kind of inefficiency is existential. A single idle GPU instance or an over-provisioned volume can quietly chew through your runway while everyone’s focused on shipping.
And it's not just small teams feeling the burn. Figma, a company valued at over $20 billion, disclosed in their IPO filing that they are spending close to $300,000 per day on cloud infrastructure - roughly $545 million over five years. Their setup runs entirely on a hyperscale, making them deeply dependent on one vendor’s pricing, uptime, and terms.
On the flip side, companies like 37signals moved off public cloud entirely, projecting over $10 million in five years. But that math doesn’t include the operational headcount, managing refresh cycles, building an observability stack, or power and cooling costs that come with managing your own infrastructure.
So where does that leave startups?
Infrastructure Sprawl Kills Velocity
In year one, public cloud feels like a bargain: no upfront investment, usage-based billing, fast spin-ups. But once your workloads stabilize and scale, that flexibility turns into bloat. On one side, public cloud bills that balloon overnight. On the other, bare metal deployments that require a full-time ops team before you've even hit product-market fit.
And for startups, you need to know where every dollar is going.
Predictability and visibility into infrastructure use become more important than flexibility alone.
That’s where and specifically, a managed distribution like Atmosphere, comes in. Packaged with Kubernetes integration, observability, and policy enforcement, Atmosphere lets you tune infrastructure over time while giving your team production-grade defaults from day one.
Let’s walk through how it keeps your infrastructure lean without sacrificing developer speed.
Efficient Management of Resource Utilization
One unused volume here, a forgotten VM there, and suddenly the cloud bill is 30% higher than expected.
At the infrastructure level, project-level quotas help enforce boundaries from the start. Teams can’t over-provision beyond their allocated VMs, storage, or snapshots which means runaway environments are capped before they balloon.
For Kubernetes workloads, Atmosphere goes a step further. It supports autoscaling clusters via Magnum and the Cluster API, including:
- Scaling down worker nodes automatically when pods go idle and minimum thresholds are met.
- Scaling up when workloads spike — with GPU-awareness baked in.
This dynamic elasticity ensures that idle nodes don’t linger, helping Kubernetes teams keep compute efficient without manual cleanup.
Outside of Kubernetes, lifecycle management (like TTLs for test environments or auto-expiry of volumes) can be built using OpenStack’s orchestration tools.
Knowing What You’re Spending
Atmosphere includes Stratometrics, a usage telemetry engine that reports consumption in real time across compute, block storage, object storage, and GPUs. Developers can drill down into per-project, per-user, or per-service utilization.
Instead of waiting on monthly cost breakdowns, teams can correlate GPU-hour spikes with model training pipelines. Or monitor staging environments to catch drift before they inflate the bill. Stratometrics exposes this data via API so cost control workflows can be automated directly in CI/CD pipelines or engineering dashboards.
All of this before the bill comes.
Native Observability
You shouldn't have to pay extra for basic visibility. Atmosphere comes with an open-source observability stack built-in:
- Prometheus for metrics.
- Grafana for dashboards.
- Loki for logs.
- AlertManager for routing.
Policy as Default, Not Punishment
Most startups don’t have time or resources to set up cloud cost policies from scratch. Atmosphere gives you sane defaults. Idle dev environments shut themselves off. GPU quotas cap rogue jobs before they snowball. When storage volumes cross thresholds, you get notified or the volumes expire, if they’re tied to throwaway test jobs.
This helps ensure that your infra doesn’t balloon in the background while everyone’s chasing delivery.
It's Not Rocket Science (We Promise)
You don’t need an infra team to operate raw OpenStack. Atmosphere is built to abstract the heavy lifting. It uses OpenStack-Helm and Ansible for provisioning and upgrades, includes hardened HA topologies, and supports rolling updates for services.
Your workloads run on tested OpenStack projects: Nova for compute, Cinder for storage, Neutron for networking, and Keystone for identity. If you want to run Kubernetes clusters alongside VMs, Atmosphere integrates with Magnum and the Cluster API, so your team can deploy GPU-accelerated K8s nodes or hybrid stacks with consistent network and identity.
As you grow, you can move from the Hosted edition to On-Premise, giving you full control of hardware without abandoning your tooling. Our migration toolkit, Migratekit, can help you migrate off VMware with near-zero downtime.
Infrastructure for Long-Term Efficiency
OpenStack’s economics shine over time. Especially if you’re running workloads that don’t go away like persistent services, AI training pipelines, analytics jobs that keep growing.
Public cloud penalizes you for stability. But not OpenStack.
With Atmosphere, infrastructure cost can be a lever for your dev team to control, right from the instance types they deploy to the policies they enforce to the metrics they respond to.
And because Atmosphere is based on open-source technology, it avoids vendor lock-in. You’re not trapped in a pricing model. You’re not waiting for a roadmap update. You run what the open community supports (Ceph, Prometheus, Kubernetes, Atmosphere) and choose how it fits your future architecture.
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
Whether it’s tracking GPU time per service, enforcing resource boundaries, or scaling based on actual application metrics, Atmosphere gives you primitives that work without asking for a platform team you don’t yet have. The automation lives in the infrastructure, not in your backlog. And it’s tuned for startups, where every dollar saved is another week of life.
So, if you’re trying to avoid being the next headline about surprise $100k cloud bills, or if you're simply tired of chasing cost issues after they’ve already hit, building on Atmosphere helps you stay fast and frugal, without having to pick one over the other. We're happy to chat about what a more predictable path could look like.
