All case studies
How HEO Space Built Full Cloud Visibility Across 3 AWS Environments with Pump View
7
Custom cost reports built across 3 AWS environments
~$40K
Monthly AWS spend tracked in one platform
81%
AWS Well-Architected pass rate on first Pump Secure scan
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Overview
"What I'm after is a single place that I can identify all of my accounts and be able to understand the billing trends and then accordingly adjust, because I bake that into our software development roadmap. It's definitely more intuitive than the AWS workflows."
DJ Ciubotaru
Head of Security (Security, Cloud Architect, and DevOps)
HEO Space images satellites and assets in orbit by repurposing Earth observation cameras (the same technology behind services like Google Maps) to calculate when a satellite will intercept a camera's field of view, capture it, and derive intelligence for their customers. DJ built the company's AWS infrastructure from the ground up, taking research scripts from HEO's science team and productionizing them into the company's Inspect application. As DJ put it, he "started at the company from practically greenfields": everything from the code repository to the applications in AWS, the security components, and now scaling out the teams. As HEO scales rapidly, keeping cloud costs visible across multiple environments has become central to how they plan their engineering roadmap.
Industry
Space Technology
Integrations
Location
Sydney, Australia
Pump services
Use Case 1
Seven Reports That Replaced the AWS Cost Explorer Workflow
DJ built a full reporting system inside Pump View: seven custom dashboards covering each of HEO's environments individually, combined resource-level cost views across all accounts, and a year-to-date cost analysis. He structured the reports around HEO's tagging system so he can slice costs by ecosystem or by project, then analyze trends across accounts over any time period.
The shift from AWS's native tools to Pump View wasn't just about a better interface. It changed how cost data feeds into HEO's engineering decisions. "I bake that into our software development roadmap," DJ said. He uses these dashboards to understand which services are growing, which projects are driving spend, and where rapid iteration is creating cost that the team hasn't accounted for.
The reports also serve an audience beyond DJ. He described being the permanent bottleneck for cost questions from executives and the finance team, fielding ad-hoc requests for spend breakdowns and manually translating AWS data into something leadership could act on. Pump View changed that dynamic. "Obviously, it's great for execs. Show them graphically how to identify certain trends or justify certain billing improvements," DJ explained. "And then additionally, our finance team, giving them the ability to self-serve so that I'm not just the bottleneck the whole time."
During the call, DJ discovered Pump View's report subscription feature and immediately set up a monthly Slack subscription so cost reports would flow to leadership automatically without him having to pull or present them.
Use Case 2
Resource-Level Visibility That AWS Couldn't Provide
When DJ first joined Pump, one of his earliest requests was resource-level cost reporting. He needed to see not just that Lambda or S3 was expensive, but which specific functions and resources were driving the spend. AWS cost allocation tags were managed at the payer account level, which created friction. After working with the Pump team to get the right organizational structure in place, DJ now has the granularity he was after.
His Production resource view shows exactly which components cost what: the heo-cartographer mapping service running at roughly $250 per day, Lambda functions processing satellite flyby calculations, mission-results pipelines, and RDS instances, all broken down by name across a combined view of 372 individual resources. When a cost spike hit Production around May 1 (daily spend doubling from $900 to over $1,800) the anomaly was visible immediately in the resource-level view, traceable to specific services rather than buried in an aggregate number.
DJ described discovering the anomaly detection capability organically while reviewing his dashboards. "What was interesting is in the View dashboard, I saw Pump was actually doing analytics on the trends. Anything that bumps up over a certain percent, it brings up a little triangle," he said. "That was pretty cool. I would love to get alerting around that."
That's a fundamentally different position from a year earlier, when a Lambda spike triggered budget alerts but DJ couldn't drill deep enough through AWS's tools to find the root cause. Now, with resource-level breakdowns showing individual Lambda functions by name, the same kind of spike would be immediately attributable.
"I used View to basically get a good understanding of how I could repurpose the AWS budgets or the cost estimation tool in AWS, so that I could identify any runaway processes or runaway costs."
– Don John, Head of Security, HEO Space
Use Case 3
Laying the Groundwork for Security and Compliance with Pump Secure
DJ's role at HEO has expanded beyond infrastructure into security, governance, risk, and compliance. Pump Secure is becoming part of that toolkit. HEO ran its first AWS Well-Architected scan through Pump Secure, scoring an 81% pass rate with 244 findings across the Production environment, including 32 high-severity items like security groups allowing open ingress on database ports.
DJ sees Secure as part of a broader initiative as HEO scales. "Secure, I think, is a great initiative," he said. He's planning to do a deeper walkthrough with the Pump Secure team to review findings, run a fresh scan to benchmark improvement, and build security compliance into HEO's operational rhythm alongside cost visibility. As the company goes through a major hiring round and scales its engineering teams, having architecture-level security insights in the same platform where he tracks costs means DJ doesn't need to context-switch between tools.
What stood out in the conversation was DJ's perspective on where the real savings come from. Having previously worked at AWS, he has a sharp view on cost optimization that goes beyond commitment purchases. "A lot of the savings that are presented, the true value in the cost reduction is actually taking time to do a review of the services that we utilize and then change that, as opposed to trying to go after group deals," he explained. "While that does assist, the biggest saving is around solution architecture." He sees Pump as being positioned to drive that kind of review, connecting customers with the right AWS resources and acting as the intermediary that delivers on the customer obsession that AWS itself has deprioritized.
Pump’s impact
Since joining Pump, DJ has built a complete cost visibility system for HEO Space. Seven custom dashboards covering three AWS environments replaced a manual workflow of navigating AWS's native tools across accounts. Cost data that used to live only in DJ's head now flows to executives and finance through visual reports, with automated Slack subscriptions making that self-serve.
The resource-level visibility has changed how DJ approaches the engineering roadmap. Instead of reacting to budget alert surprises, he can see which specific services and resources are growing, where rapid iteration is creating untracked cost, and where architecture decisions might yield bigger savings than commitment purchases. Anomaly detection flags deviations automatically, giving him early warning on spikes before they become monthly billing surprises.
HEO Space plans to deepen its use of Pump across multiple fronts. DJ is setting up Slack report subscriptions so the finance team and executives get cost data delivered automatically. He's planning a deeper engagement with Pump Secure to build AWS Well-Architected compliance into HEO's security posture as the company scales its teams. And he's interested in bringing non-AWS costs into Pump View. HEO uses Anthropic for AI, GitLab for code, and other SaaS tools that DJ wants consolidated into a single cost view. "That would be immensely useful," he said, "to just consolidate everything."
Having worked at AWS before joining HEO, DJ has a unique vantage point on where Pump fits in the ecosystem. "I see Pump as being able to actually deliver that now, where AWS has lost a lot of that," he said, referring to AWS's original ethos of customer obsession. He sees Pump as the intermediary that drives real outcomes for customers, connecting cost visibility, security posture, and architecture guidance in a way that AWS's own tooling no longer prioritizes.
DJ has already recommended Pump to friends running their own businesses. "It's definitely a tool I like, and I do promote," he said.