Stacklet Governance-as-Code Platform

Initially, we started with Cloud Custodian, which was the core engine of Stacklet, where we defined YAML and JSON templates to control cloud costs. When we grew exponentially at Sleep Number Labs, which had more than five AWS accounts, managing all those accounts in different organizations became really hard, and that's where Stacklet added real value by allowing us to control all our AWS accounts from a centralized dashboard.

Predefined best practice policies helped to accelerate our governance setup process. In a nutshell, we were able to save around $40,000 USD per annum. We identified over-utilized and under-utilized resources, notifying teams about resources that would be shut down within a set timeframe, and Stacklet helped to implement this efficiently.

The feature I appreciate the most about Stacklet is the multi-account policy orchestration, which is very valuable because while Cloud Custodian is completely open source and anyone can use it, managing more than 5 to 20 accounts with it can be difficult. Another feature I appreciate is the policy approval workflows, which are production critical, enabling us to define actions to terminate or tag EC2 instances effectively.

When it comes to Stacklet's automated remediation, everything Stacklet does could be accomplished with manual steps; however, the added action capability from the clicks makes it really helpful. Yet, there were some challenges, such as not being able to identify how much we were saving from a policy implemented across different accounts.

I believe Stacklet could be improved in terms of granular cost attribution; it needs to show exactly how much each policy saves across different accounts and introduce a more accessible YAML editor for users without technical backgrounds. Improving alerting features for more flexibility and customization would also be beneficial.

I used Stacklet since last year in 2025.

The reliability and level of stability of Stacklet were quite good; the dashboard was accessible, and when we encountered issues, our team approached relevant stakeholders for support, receiving great communication and responsiveness.

We tested Stacklet across five to six different AWS accounts and found the scalability to be really great.

I had communication with Stacklet's technical support when we needed to onboard an additional AWS account; they were very helpful during that process. I would rate their technical support around an eight.

Before Stacklet, I used Cloud Custodian, which is the core engine, as it is completely open source. We used Cloud Custodian before from 2023 to 2024, initially with one AWS account; however, with Sleep Number using several AWS accounts that had costs in millions, we required either a dedicated team or to transition to Stacklet.

I did not participate in the initial setup of Stacklet, but I knew there were complexities when granting Stacklet access to our infrastructure; it took longer than the documentation suggested to set it up.

I noticed a return on investment with Stacklet because Sleep Number saw high cost savings of around $40,000 per annum, but I wonder how impactful Stacklet would be if we had a single account.

I also evaluated other options including building our own solution, which was the X-grid Cloud Custodian tool, but that effort proved less effective and was ultimately abandoned due to missing features.

I utilized the declarative configuration interface of Stacklet, which has helped me in policy management in particular. For example, when we create a policy to shut down a specific EC2 instance on the weekend, it shows us from the console exactly how the Cloud Custodian policy in YAML looks, which someone with basic knowledge of YAML can really understand.

From Stacklet's reporting features, I relied on tagging and identifying which resources were underutilized or over-committed; we examined savings plans, reserved instances for RDS, and utilized Stacklet dashboards to maintain compliance.

I have a general idea that Stacklet works well if operating with around 5 to 20 AWS accounts, but may not be suitable for smaller AWS accounts. I leveraged Stacklet for real-time visibility across cloud resources; we were able to see the exact types of resources present in our infrastructure, particularly with EC2 instances, RDS instances, and ECS microservices for cost optimization.

I would rate this review seven out of ten.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I used Stacklet during my experience at Xgrid, particularly in the last year when we were optimizing cloud costs for SleepIQ Tech for different clients. One thing we were proud of was the Cloud Custodian configurations, which were YAML-provided manifest files where we could provision the infrastructure and then access custom pre-built dashboards that provided governance as a code. This was really helpful.

We used Stacklet for cloud optimizations and were able to save around 40,000 US dollars per annum. We identified exactly where we were burning costs. After identification, we took remediation steps to cut down the extra costs due to overcommitted resources, underutilized resources, and identifying EIPs. We also re-architected some of the architectural components and moved to serverless. This is how we achieved around 40,000 US dollars per annum in savings.

Stacklet's dashboards helped us identify cost-saving opportunities. They were really helpful because Stacklet uses Cloud Custodian under the hood, and Cloud Custodian retrieves all of those metrics from the different dashboards of services from AWS cloud, since we were using AWS. This enabled us to get everything in a centralized dashboard, which provided out-of-the-box policy packs and visual reporting for all of our different AWS accounts.

Recently, Stacklet has introduced remediation and workflows that perform intelligent, multi-step workflows with native integrations to Jira, ServiceNow, and Slack. At that time, we used these with some custom wrappers, but now they are available within Stacklet.

The best features that Stacklet offers are the dashboard and the UI, the remediation and the workflows, and the asset visibility. Stacklet has an Asset DB that unifies all cloud resources in real-time with history tracking. For deployment and maintenance, it is a totally managed SaaS, and it is scalable as well. These are some of the features which I really love.

One thing which was really helpful about the asset visibility and Asset DB was real-time monitoring. We did not need to run or click on a button to sync and then look at the dashboards. Our dashboards were never old or outdated. They were always in sync with the current status. If our costs were going down after we took an action, we did not need to wait for a week or for days. We were able to see everything from the console, showing exactly how it would look at that very point.

The one metric which showed everything is the 40,000 US dollars per annum cost that we saved, and we pay very little to Stacklet.

One area for improvement is visual policy builders. Stacklet features natural language query tools, but newer users face a steep learning curve when building complex multi-step automated remediation workflows. There could be runbooks to help with this.

When we were using Stacklet, we did not have complete ownership of what was happening under the hood. For example, improvements in IaC enhancements and improving real-time risk assessment before deployment are something which should be achievable.

I have been working in my current field since 2001, and it has been more than five years.

I have not tested Stacklet at a much higher scale. It appears to be good. As it is a SaaS solution, it will scale on higher loads.

Customer support was cooperative.

We did not switch from a previous solution. We directly tried using Cloud Custodian, but that did not provide dashboards and other features.

We were able to invest this money in other areas and were able to focus on delivering the same quality with fewer resources and lower costs. When we pruned and terminated a lot of resources, our engineering efforts to manage all of those resources also reduced because we needed to manage a smaller number of resources.

If you want to exactly govern your cloud, then you should go towards Stacklet. It does not only help in saving costs, it helps in governance as well. It shows how you should organize resources, allocate costs, and then identify any loopholes. Stacklet is a solid choice for this purpose. There is nothing you need to change. I would rate this review seven out of ten.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

What do you like best about the product?

Real time enforcement of security policies across all the cloud environments. Provides the security by reducing the risks by centralizing the governance. Also, provide the historical revisions and dashboards for tracking purposes.

What do you dislike about the product?

I think the biggest missing part from Stacklet platform has been lack of compliance frameworks. Whenever we talk about data governance, there's always talk about different compliance frameworks but it looks like there are not many frameworks currently available at this time.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

1. Real time business security policies.
2. Achieving data governance across all the platforms.
3. With different laws coming out, it helps in achieving CCPA and GDPR.

What do you like best about the product?

Reasons why I like Stacklet

-Open-source policy language - Our engineers already use Cloud Custodian (c7n). Hence, they can easily add their own policies or adapt the pre-written c7n policies provided by Stacklet.
-Scalable - Stacklet makes it easy to deploy across hundreds of accounts
-Connect to Jira - Policy violations can be posted to Jira (or Slack) which our Engineers use to manage their work
-Cloud asset database - SQL-friendly cloud asset database makes it easy for our engineers to query resources or user visualize them with BI tools

What do you dislike about the product?

The user interface could be more user-friendly.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Stacklet is helping manage our cloud policies, monitor cloud resources and identify savings opportunities at scale (across hundreds of accounts).

What do you like best about the product?

Stacklet brings the best of Cloud Custodian compliance policies within manageable reach of even the most disparate and large organizations. With Stacklet, we can automate compliance checks for any of our cloud environments, along with auto-remediate any of our findings without requiring any human interaction. Compliance checks are easy to create and are well documented. Actions taken upon findings can range from as simple as record findings in a database, to sending notifications (email, IM bot messaging, ticket generation), to making a cloud provider API call to correct the setting, to custom calls to fit your unique desires. Stacklet also provides access to a database of most cloud resources defined, allowing for answers to most cloud platform questions easy to answer, as long as you can envision the SQL query. In addition to the above product portfolio, I truly love the fact that Stacklet is tightly bound with the cloud custodian community, with each team improving core aspects of the compliance policy execution framework. Stacklet's add-on of management tools and assetdb make the community offering something which is manageable with minimal effort, no matter how complicated out environment may be.

What do you dislike about the product?

Stacklet is a younger company that is still maturing their offerings. This has meant that I may need a newer feature which has not yet been coded up. In my experience, this had meant that I may need to wait a few months for most of my new feature requests. On the flip side, this has been beneficial for me in the long run as more established/older companies have a track history of equating lack of current features with a lack of desire to address my new requirements on any timeline.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Stacklet provides an easy framework to take audit requirements in the morning, have policies and remediation actions in place by lunch, and immediately turn over to my operations team. When operational questions come up, Stacklet's assetdb allow us to immediately provide the answers we're looking for so we don't need to waste time assessing our environment.