Online Healthcare Advice Provider Saves 70% on AWS With GorillaStack
A national Australian, government-owned, not-for-profit organization that works with governments to develop and deliver health and related services.
Challenge
As a government funded entity and an NPO, budget performance is critical. As the organization matured its use of cloud, visibility into escalating costs for their flagship web app became a concern in 2015. The team was searching for a way to schedule non-production resources to shutdown out-of-business hours without resorting to writing their own code. This is when they became aware of GorillaStack and signed up as one of our earliest customers.
One important challenge was that the Rules Engine couldn’t be deployed as SaaS but had to instead be deployed inside the customer’s environment due to regulatory constraints.
Solution
In August 2016, GorillaStack’s AWS Rules Engine was deployed as a self-hosted solution for the public sector customer and resource policies/rules to manage resources were setup. The main focus has been scheduling non-production EC2 instances to turn off out of hours so that unutilized runtime does not generate cost. The platform supports a chat workflow in Slack that made it easy for users to intervene if a given execution of a rule needed to be suspended or cancelled so that critical work could proceed. This innovation in particular made the solution more attractive than a homegrown solution of custom code plus AWS native tools.
Results
The organization has reduced monthly spend on non-production workloads by as much as 70%. Their business stakeholders are confident in their choice of cloud as a platform and that cost governance is optimized.