Long story short, we have put down a tremendous amount of engineering effort to make Alvin into a turnkey solution. Just follow the setup guide, which usually means adding your credentials and pressing play.

We only collect metadata, and jobs from the connected platforms themselves. We do not access the underlying data stored in your platforms. For all integrations, we have to the extent possible designed roles with minimal access levels to provide value.

At the moment, Alvin is read-only. However we are seeing increasing demand from customers to perform actions in their connected platform to automate cost mitigation or tag tables/columns based on derived insights. While this is something we likely will do in the future, it will not be a requirement for offering the current functionality and customers can always choose to integrate Alvin with the level of access they are comfortable with.

Alvin’s uses native APIs and connectivity. All of our integrations uses a fire-and-forget pattern to minimize any holdup to your processes. In short, we do not process any data while collecting it from the connected platforms. Beyond this, we have gone above and beyond to ensure as small impact as possible. We also recommend per integration different best practices to cut cost and runtime as much as possible when Alvin needs to execute workloads within a customer environment. See the integration sections for more details and advice here.

Alvin is dedicated to security, with a strong commitment to safeguarding our clients and their data. The solution developed by Alvin ensures the protection of customer information, adhering to the five SOC trust services criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. We implement TLS encryption, the same standard deployed by secure websites, to protect data both in transit and at rest. Alvin has achieved SOC 2 compliance, securing a Service Organization Control (SOC) 2, Type II certification. We conduct regular penetration testing and provide annual training for our staff, fostering a culture that prioritizes security beyond just technical aspects.

Our custom plans offer enhanced features beyond the free version, tailored to meet the unique needs of your business. These plans provide variable limits on the number of tables, compute and users, accommodating the scale of your operations. They also introduce advanced governance functionalities, including Single Sign-On (SSO), ensuring streamlined access control and security. Additionally, these plans come with bespoke contracts, offering flexibility and alignment with your specific requirements and objectives.

Alvin is hosted on GCP and is packaged as a turnkey SAAS solution. Upon request we can offer customers the ability to run data extractors within their own VPC and / or run the complete Alvin software inside a VPC / Peering setup. We do however not offer on-premise deployment at the moment.

All customers can access in-app chat support. Paying customers have email access and depending on the plan, a dedicated direct access to support via Slack.

A user in Alvin is someone that can log in and use the platform. Any additional integrations such as CICD or API key usage are not counted as a user.

Savings will vary greatly depending on your starting point. If you have never taken cost measures before, potential immediate savings may be large. If you already are on a cost journey, expect the immediate savings to be somewhat lower. However, the valuable aspect of Alvin is not just the immediate and ongoing cost savings, its also about creating a culture of transparency and accountability of cost and making FinOps a team effort.

Setting up credentials typically takes 15-30 minutes. Depending on the amount of data in your environment it may take a few hours to process everything. That’s about it. As mentioned above, the only work on your end is to add credentials