Milk Moovement brought clarity and predictability to cloud spend

The challenge

Milk Moovement connects producers, cooperatives, and processors across North America through a cloud-based platform that manages milk supply-chain logistics in real time. As customer adoption accelerated, so did infrastructure costs.

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The company’s workloads spanned data ingestion, analytics, and customer-specific deployments. Engineering focused on performance and reliability, while Finance received monthly AWS invoices that offered little explanation of cost movement.

As CFO Danial Shaikh put it, it was one of their biggest costs, but there was no visibility into what was driving it. Without a clear connection between usage trends and business metrics, forecasting gross margins or modeling customer-level profitability was nearly impossible.

Cloud Capital was brought in to close that gap, establishing clear visibility, measurable savings, and a repeatable financial process that aligned Finance and Engineering around the same plan.

Business impact

“Cloud Capital helped us bring structure and visibility to a cost line that used to be opaque. We now have predictable forecasts, and Finance and Engineering are speaking the same language.”— Danial Shaikh, CFO, Milk Moovement

Cloud Capital’s engagement reshaped how Milk Moovement manages cloud economics.

The team began by translating AWS usage into business language that Finance could model. Monthly review sessions replaced ad-hoc cost checks. Engineering’s time spent managing infrastructure commitments dropped to minimal levels, and Finance gained rolling forecasts that tie directly into board and margin reporting.

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Inside the model

“We’ve built an efficient, flexible foundation. Cloud Capital handles the commitments, and we can keep focusing on scaling the product.” — Christopher O’Malley, CTO, Milk Moovement

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Cloud Capital began by structuring Milk Moovement’s cloud governance model around its core workloads. The platform’s environments were segmented into production, staging, and development, each mapped to key cost layers that are relevant for their business. These layers were then connected to business metrics like customer environments onboarded, data volume processed, and daily platform transactions—allowing for projections that give a clearer picture of how the business scaling impacts costs.

To support scalability, Cloud Capital integrated directly into Milk Moovement’s AWS environment and introduced a governance framework built for growth. A dedicated payer account and a separate commitments account were created to manage Reserved Instances and Savings Plans securely. IAM and delegated-admin roles preserved Milk Moovement’s full control over infrastructure while enabling Cloud Capital to execute commitments and manage forecasting safely.

With consistent tagging and account visibility in place, Cloud Capital built detailed forecasting models to project how spend would evolve with product growth, onboarding schedules, and seasonality. The system ingests AWS usage data daily, aligns it with operational metrics, and refreshes cost forecasts that flow directly into Finance’s planning dashboards.

Each month, Cloud Capital and Milk Moovement review coverage levels, utilization trends, and upcoming architectural changes. Commitments are laddered strategically as forecast confidence grows, allowing savings to scale without constraining flexibility for new services or customers.

This approach has turned cloud spend from a volatile operating cost into a governed, finance-aligned function that supports growth and margin discipline.