How a London FinTech Saved 70% On Their Dev Resources
The company provides an optimized, cloud-based platform to handle multi-regime financial reporting obligations. This streamlines compliance and reporting for their global customers.
Challenge
The cloud ops team had the classic challenge of trying to contain ramping cloud costs whilst growing rapidly and onboarding new customers and partners. At one time, they had 400 VPC environments setup for customer/partner UAT and were unsure if these resources were still being actively used. Thus, the challenge was a way to determine if there was resource waste and programmatically address it with resource scheduling and cleanup policies.
Solution
They implemented resource policies/rules in the GorillaStack Rules Engine to schedule shutting down non-production resources out of hours and cleaning up detached, abandoned and aged resources like volumes and snapshots. In a spectacular one-off event they suspended the 400 UAT environments to see if users would request they be re-activated. After 30 days, there were very few complaints about the VPCs being turned off indicating that very few were in fact were still required and thus the resources were terminated all together.
Initially, the team was not using any third-party applications to analyze cloud spend. Along the way they started to use CloudHealth to get a better understanding of resource utilization and opportunities for savings. They then created additional policies/rules in GorillaStack to automate taking action and driving savings.
Results
Typically, the customer is seeing savings of 20%-30% on their total AWS spend. Development resources see savings as high as 70%.