Coiled Value#

You know Coiled makes your team more productive, but how do you explain its value to decision makers who focus on business metrics and ROI?

This document outlines four common reasons organizations choose Coiled.

1. Project Acceleration
2. Reduced Maintenance
3. User Efficiency
4. Cloud Cost Efficiency

They may not all apply to your situation, but most teams find that 2-3 resonate strongly with their needs.

We're able to do things we couldn't do before

Every try nailing a nail without a hammer? It takes a while.
Having the right tool for the job makes the impossible trivial, and turns a three-month endeavor into an hour-long task.

This benefit is the hardest to quantify financially, but it's the most important, which is why we put it first. The only way to demonstrate this is by using the tool, which is why Coiled comes with a generous free tier.

We want you to feel the power Coiled gives you, the same power you feel with a hammer or power-drill.

Free up key engineers from infrastructure overhead

Every team has that crucial senior engineer who becomes the de facto cloud infrastructure expert. Their day typically includes:

• Keeping the Kubernetes cluster alive
• Publishing Docker images for the team with a new version of PyTorch
• Helping colleagues debug cloud workflows when they get stuck
• Coaching the team on turning instances off over the weekend
• Figuring out how we spent $15k last month

This engineer is often your most senior technical resource - the one who should be architecting solutions and mentoring the team. Instead, they're spending half their time figuring out why Kubernetes doesn't behave like it claims, or how to set up CUDA drivers on Docker images, which isn't their specialty, and isn't core to your business.

That engineer still enables cloud computing for the team, but now it takes about 10% of their time, and it's aligned with their technical expertise. Their day includes:

• Looking through Coiled dashboards of all users to see what problems team is working on
• Reviewing all user errors that their team experienced
• Reviewing cloud costs with Coiled cloud experts monthly

These tasks take significantly less time and give your senior engineer better visibility into team productivity. They spend less time maintaining infrastructure (Coiled handles that) and more time driving technical innovation.

Senior engineers are both expensive and difficult to replace. Freeing up half their time for high-value work delivers immediate ROI.

Enable your team to focus on core business value

Your data scientists and ML engineers are domain experts in fields like geophysics, medicine, or genomics. But distributed cloud computing introduces significant complexity to their workflow.

They often spend 80% of their time managing infrastructure instead of applying their expertise to business problems. Common challenges include:

• "How do I install the newest version of my library on remote machines? Do I need to learn Docker now?"
• "My program failed but I can't access the error logs"
• "I'm not sure if this long-running job is making progress"
• "Should I run this program? How much will it cost? Will I get in trouble?"

There's so much uncertainty and friction in using the cloud that many teams simply avoid it. They have powerful computational resources available, but the complexity of using them creates a significant barrier to adoption.

Coiled feels just like your team's existing toolset. Now they use the cloud more frequently because it works predictably:

• It's so easy to install software. I just pip install locally and the right packages show up like magic.
• My program failed and I got the error right here in my computer. Oh! I forgot to update the filename.
• My program has been running for five hours, and oh I see that it's running out of memory. I'll just bump up to a new machine type.
• This stuff is so cheap! Let's try running this at 10x the scale we were planning.

Personnel costs typically represent the largest item in your budget by a significant margin. Coiled targets this cost center by increasing team productivity. Even modest efficiency gains across a few team members can generate substantial ROI.

How many people plan to use the cloud? How much of their day do they spend struggling with it today?

Spend less on your cloud provider

The cloud is like a freight train, extremely efficient when it runs on the rails, disastrously expensive when it runs off the rails. Unfortunately, comercial cloud providers don't build rails.

We see people waste money needlessly. Common culprits include:

• Inter-region egress costs ($0.10 / GB)
• Intra-region data transfer costs between data centers ($0.05 / GB)
• Accidentally leaving machines on for months
• Turning machines off, but accidentally leaving networking or storage resources running
• Failing to right-size machines due to poor observability
• Lack of use of Spot
• Lack of use of ARM

These are entirely typical. Every organization does them. They're needlessly wasteful.

A typical small team we see comes in spending $5k a month, only $700 of which is relevant to their work.

Coiled's architecture and UX make efficiency the default behavior:

• Raw-VM approach makes it easy to target any job to the right region, avoiding egress costs
• Zero-maintenance architecture leaves nothing up when you're done with a job. There are no lingering resources.
• Alerts and dashboards let you know when your team's jobs are either struggling (not enough resources) or idling (too many)
• Auto-shutoff ensures that clusters without work turn off quickly

The cost efficiency here is a combination of mature and sensible technical decisions, along with a thoughtful user experience that puts the cost of what you're doing front and center so that you have the information and the agency to make intelligent decisions.

Cloud costs vary significantly between organizations.

For some teams, cloud costs are minimal compared to the value of accelerated development. Even in these cases, Coiled provides peace of mind through built-in cost controls and visibility.

For others cloud costs can become significant, like adding the cost of a new team member to a small team. In these cases we often find order-of-magnitude cost decreases once people start using the cloud well with Coiled.

As we said earlier, the cloud is like a freight train; incredibly efficient and powerful when it runs on the rails, but disastrously expensive when it runs off the rails.

At Coiled we care about getting that computational freight train running, running smoothly, and running quickly in the right direction. When computation comes fast, easy, and efficient then it brings with it a sense of abundance. For information-driven businesses that abundance can transform what's possible.