Customer success stories can be one of a solution provider’s most valuable assets to secure. In the cloud and IT space, when potential prospects can see the proven success of a current user rather than just taking a provider’s word for it, it can make a big difference in whether they choose to work with that vendor. However, these customer success stories can prove to be incredibly valuable for the current users too.
The current customers can look at case studies and success stories to get a strong sense of how like-minded FinOps teams and professionals are approaching common challenges, such as cloud cost optimization.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is working with the likes of AIG, Meta, Adidas, Boeing, and so many others to help them make the most of their investments in the cloud. Now, AWS is sharing case studies and helpful tidbits to arm prospective and current customers alike with proven methods for AWS cost optimization.
With many Hystax OptScale customers leveraging AWS as their cloud or in the multi-cloud strategy, we wanted to take a moment to share some of their success stories with you to help in your FinOps team’s work.
You’re likely familiar with the need to prioritize items like right-sizing underused resources, setting up budgets and allocating rules to certain teams and projects, and reserving instances for common workloads. However, having specifics, data, and details on how other companies are achieving cost optimization is much more helpful.
If you go to the AWS site, you have public access to a library of case studies with a variety of use cases discussed. For example, you can read how:
◆ Capital One is bringing sustainability to its cloud migration
◆ Perfios is halving development time on AWS by upskilling more than 60% of its workforce
◆ Chainstack is leveraging AWS to help thousands of Web3 developers scale blockchain applications
◆ ZS is enlisting always-on security best practices
In addition to working with Hystax OptScale to get access to dashboards and rule-setting to automate your processes and avoid challenges, take a moment to learn from the struggles and success stories of others leaning on AWS. Here are helpful takeaways from case studies put together on Airbnb and Infocast, which showcase how two companies are approaching cost optimization by utilizing the platform and AWS offerings to their fullest.
How Airbnb is optimizing cloud usage and cloud costs
Airbnb is using multiple AWS services to develop ways to manage capacity, storage, and compute capacity. Plus, they’ve built a custom cost and usage data tool. Airbnb is able to reduce its costs, benefit from actionable business metrics and drive forward data-informed projects so its teams can work more efficiently.
Two of the benefits Airbnb is utilizing the most are the AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Cost & Usage Report. The former offers a simple interface that helps users to visualize and manage AWS costs and usage over time. The latter has enabled Airbnb to “make use of its internal data infrastructure and extend the cost visualization capabilities of its data warehousing stack.” The AWS Cost & Usage Report offers a full set of AWS cost and usage data. This functionality allows Airbnb to go in and look granularly at hourly, daily, or monthly levels and attribute them to different management teams.
Airbnb is also saving on its use of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), using Savings Plans, a pricing model which offers lower prices compared to Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances when committing to specific usage, and much more. Airbnb’s Senior Finance Manager, Ari Siegel, touted that “using Savings Plans has been a significant improvement to Airbnb’s cloud management process. It’s helped reduce our operational workload while also driving meaningful cost savings for our business.”
Additionally, Airbnb is taking steps to manage and save on storage costs with Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering (S3 Intelligent-Tiering). Making sure these helpful AWS tools are available to you, as Airbnb has, presents one way to save substantially and optimize your efforts.
Savings by Infocast
Another company, based out of Hong Kong to take note of is Infocast. Infocast Ltd. is a FinTech company that provides market data, investor apps, and brokerage platforms to more than 200 banks and financial services companies in Asia. By using AWS, Infocast now reports it’s seeing a 75% increase in its ability to deliver new features and attributes it largely to its greater adoption of cloud infrastructure.
Infocast was seeing the limitations of standard on-premises data centers for handling market volatility. Its customers had to reserve IT resources for Infocast’s systems well in advance to ensure enough compute capacity to handle spikes in trading amounts. The result was idle hardware capacity and excess costs outside of peak trading windows. The company, therefore, began investing more in the cloud in 2020 to scale more effectively.
Infocast leaders have stated that migrating their trading workloads to AWS saved them 31% on infrastructure and helped them respond effectively to market fluctuation. Its team is spending time on AWS training courses, such as AWS Technical Essentials and Advanced Architecting on AWS.
Currently, Infocast leaders say its daily operation is likely 62% more productive since it began adopting cloud architecture with AWS. It’s also not providing new streams of revenue for its customers and was able to build a disaster recovery platform at a low cost.
“With this virtual solution in AWS, costs are minimal when the service is inactive and the market is quiet. When markets are on an upswing, and clients want to offer trade gaming, it’s an efficient way to quickly scale up and provide new services for our customers,” said Felix Li, the company’s project director.
These case studies are useful to reference and share with your team, but we also welcome you to consider a solution like Hystax OptScale to optimize across multiple clouds.
How multi-cloud cost savings are possible with the right partner
Most companies aren’t just interested in AWS, but in MS Azure cost optimization and that on other platforms as well. They’re using multi-cloud strategies, which can be made easier by working with a partner like Hystax OptScale. With OptScale, users can widen the capabilities of native tools and receive the opportunity to spearhead multi-cloud IT infrastructure plans effectively.
Cloud optimization shouldn’t be manual. OptScale can help you with cloud cost management by offering up complete transparency to achieve cloud cost optimization. So many notable companies need help and require greater solutions, and they’re turning to OptScale to help them cut cloud consumption and cloud usage. OptScale offers them cloud cost transparency to help them cut their cloud costs down by identifying errors or overspending before it happens.
Businesses benefit from OptScale by establishing FinOps processes and optimizing cloud costs in the long run. Customers are provided with a transparent view of cloud costs, ways to improve resource utilization, methods to identify wastage, and loads of other cost optimization ideas.
Partnering with OptScale can help you with connected cloud account monitoring and setup, Kubernetes clusters, and report generation. Reports can provide users with thorough analyses of the state of IT infrastructure, shine a light on challenges and offer up recommendations to make important changes.
Integrations are also a key to cloud cost optimization. Hystax OptScale supports work as it occurs on Jira, Jenkins, Slack, GitLab, and GitHub. Customers can assign IT environments to any task using Jira and draft schedules, plan and book IT environments for R&D teams to avoid conflicts, all over Slack.
All FinOps teams can benefit from access to systems that offer real-time notifications about IT environment availability, TTLs which have expired, or cloud budget overspending. Hystax OptScale offers its users these important updates on IT environments, deployment information, and tips to reduce cloud costs in a seamless, visual way. Having an experienced partner who has heard it all and seen it all can help with cloud usage optimization techniques that will make your team’s jobs much easier.
As you seek out maturity assessments, free cloud and K8s cost optimization, cost anomaly detection, IT environment management, multi-cloud management, and the like, Hystax OptScale can offer incredible solutions to you.
Contact us here to gain a better understanding of how we can help you with cloud optimization dashboards, and cloud cost management across teams and promote greater transparency within your organization by assisting with your cloud cost optimization processes. We can help you cut cloud costs, thereby optimizing cloud usage as a whole.
👆🏻 Get infrastructure cost management tips and tricks for early-stage, growth and late-stage companies and learn when you should prioritize infrastructure costs → https://hystax.com/the-best-way-to-find-inactive-iam-users-with-aws-management-console-access-to-avoid-security-issues
