How Lorica Health Optimize Their AWS Costs By 25%
As Lorica Health, a leader in the field of health analytics, began to move from on-premise to a cloud consumption model they did so with a vision of adopting what they referred to as “true cloud” – efficient infrastructure that would capitalize on optimal elasticity.
Todd Turner, DataOps engineer, told us Lorica felt their time and resources were best spent “on delivering transparency to the Healthcare marketplace; not slaving away in the cloud”.
This is how Lorica Health realized that vision:
The Challenge Of Cloud Cost
Being a successful and growing business comes with its challenges, particularly around the scaling up of operations and infrastructure.
As Lorica Health grows market share and scales globally they need efficient and optimal utilization of cloud infrastructure to ensure they can continue to deliver high performing products to customers at an optimal price-point. Inefficient scaling can become expensive.
Choosing A Solution
Ultimately Lorica Health wanted an efficient and cost-effective way to manage the elasticity of their EC2, ECS and RDS – optimizing for elasticity without being constricted by homemade solutions or scripts.
Lorica Health first became aware of GorillaStack and its capabilities through technology-based events and local meetups. There they were able to get to know a number of the GorillaStack team on a first name basis before launching into the product and trialing its efficacy.
During the roll out, Todd and the team at Lorica were able to maintain an ongoing and collaborative dialogue through Lorica’s own private channel in GorillaStack’s public Slack workspace – something that GorillaStack makes available to every customer. Eighteen months later, the lines of communication are as open as ever.
According to Todd “Every request we have made is taken seriously by the GorillaStack team and it is an amazing feeling to be able to talk directly to those who develop the product. It is such a satisfying feeling seeing GorillaStack continually improve and evolve, based on our day-to-day interaction with the product.”
Todd admits that as a result of GorillaStack’s “phenomenal developer support”, Lorica Health were so confident that they “didn’t opt for trying any other products”.
Defining Success
Todd explains “The definition of success to us at Lorica Health was simple; see a material indent in our cloud spend whilst ensuring our teams had full control of their infrastructure, with no blocks or bottle-necks. GorillaStack has met our definition of success while allowing our teams to remain agile-as-ever.”
How Lorica Health Achieved Success
As Todd points out, Lorica Health were able to empower their teams “to take ownership of their own infrastructure; whether they are software engineers, data scientists or product owners….anybody, regardless of their technical abilities, can manage and control cloud”.
Todd continues “The user-friendly (and dare I say, stylish) graphical interface is great and the API makes it easy for teams to create, administer and maintain their own infrastructure precisely and consistently”.
“Checking the Engine Room stats is also great for seeing the impact that GorillaStack has on our cloud spend and allows us to focus on areas where continued improvement could be made.”
What does Cloud consumption look like now for Lorica Health?
“GorillaStack has had a huge impact on our overall cloud spend” says Todd. “GorillaStack enables us to ensure we are only paying for the infrastructure we are actually using, what a refreshing feeling!”To track efficiency; Lorica uses a mix of in-house dashboarding, log consolidation and statistics offered by the GorillaStack’s Engine Room tool.Todd adds “Since we have started utilizing GorillaStack, we have saved roughly 25% of our cloud billing; nearly a 20x ROI for GorillaStack. How can you argue with those economics?”.
Key Takeaways
Identify Opportunities to Save
Are there AWS services you could be saving on? Do you have opportunities to improve your elasticity? Identify where these opportunities lay, perhaps your organization could be scheduling EC2 instances, AutoScaling, ECS or RDS.
Start a Demo
You can get kicked off right away, just start a free trial and we’ll reach out to you to support if you need any help.
Get In Touch And Build A Plan
Reach out to us via our contact us or our public Slack workspace and start a chat if you want any help – we’re super friendly and we love hearing from users about their challenges.
Empower The Whole Team
Invite other members of your team to get involved, you can use SAML for quick onboarding. Distribute responsibility for costs savings and elasticity among colleagues with all levels of technical expertise.
Measure Your Savings
Once your demo is up and running, you’ll be able to measure your savings right away.