Introduction: 

Cloud cost optimization is a crucial issue that is often overlooked as more companies move to the cloud. While organizations identify areas for cost savings, implementing them is a challenge in cloud operations. Furthermore, companies lack insight into their cloud environment, making it difficult to accurately identify expenditures and which department drives costs upwards. Recently, the FinOps of our client was struggling to avoid resource waste as they were not able to forecast the spending for the cloud. Appzlogic has helped the company with Cloud Cost Optimization to reduce their cloud bill by 1.7 million annually. 

About the Client:

Our client was a giant eCommerce group based in the USA. They have gradually migrated their operation recently to the cloud infrastructure. Unfortunately, there was no proper strategy or architectural preplanning was held during the transformation. They were looking for a reliable service provider to optimize the cost of cloud service.   

What Do They Want:

As there was no planned strategy for the migration; the cloud bill was inappropriate. There was the minimum insight into usage as well as spending on the existing resources. There was a lack of FinOps culture in the company as well. As their cost for the cloud was mounting, they asked for the help of their cloud consultancy firm. However, they specialized in transformation and finally, they ended up with Appzlogic for cloud optimization service. 

Challenges

Our client has 15 business verticals which are managed as a separate business unit under their umbrella. For that, there were 72 AWS accounts without any centralized optimization practice. There was no entity to govern the general cost operation of the cloud for our esteemed client. The engineers were utilizing only 5% of CPU in most of the cases as they prefer to increase the machine size in case of underperformance of any application instead of finding out the issues and putting effort to resolve those to optimize cost and performance.  

Solutions We Provide: 

Appzlogic conducted extensive monitoring of Cloud costs and interviewed key officials in the company, identifying various cost-saving opportunities such as EC2 services, ElasticSearch, NAT gateway, and AWS Premium Support. Based on short-term and long-term savings, Appzlogic proposed an annual savings of $1.7 Million through quick wins and sustainable cost optimization. Along with cost optimization solutions, Appzlogic offered an end-to-end service, including 24/7/365 help desk support, personal dashboard establishment, weekly calls and updates, and monthly reporting to increase shared responsibility for cloud cost management across the client’s management, infrastructure, and finance teams.

Result

Identifying expenses is the easy part, but implementing effective cloud cost optimization is the real challenge. This was no different in the case of an eCommerce organization with 72 AWS accounts spread across 15 business units, making the optimization process long and complex. Although some quick-win savings were achieved in the first month, it took time to see actual results that impacted the entire operation. Additionally, building trust and generating cooperation with different business units was challenging, as not all employees embraced the idea of external intervention and inspection. The main goal was to establish a smooth implementation of FinOps solutions.

With the cloud cost optimization, the cloud bill of our client has decreased by 20%. Moreover, there was a 30% hike in website traffic and feature development.

In the first four months, they have

• $250K savings
• 15% deduction in monthly bill
• Ensure sustainable growth by implementing FinOps best practices