Utilizing best practices of FinOps

The Challenge

Looking for speed, low cost, a breadth of features, and the ability to quickly reach global customers and provide a worldwide SaaS Service, Iguazio’s technical leadership chose to develop and launch their platform in the Cloud. As the company began its Cloud journey working directly with AWS, its focus was on fast development of an advanced platform, rather than cost management or optimization. Its Cloud spend increased dramatically, up 300% by the third month of operations, mostly due to the use of EC2. Something had to be done to introduce best practice and optimize costs.

The Solution

• Audit – using a third-party tool to review AWS usage against known cost-optimization best practice.
• Redeploying main platform – moving infrastructure from Frankfurt, Germany to North Virginia and Ohio, saving the company 7% of its monthly EC2 costs.
• Optimizing strategies based on instance type.
• Purchasing AWS Savings Plan – leveraging the flexibility of the Compute Savings Plan to reduce EC2 costs.
• Ongoing monitoring of on-demand EC2 costs by Iguazio’s finance team – keeping a check on on-demand EC2 costs and tracking the development team’s need for additional EC2 resources to assess the need for additional savings plans.

The Results

By implementing the recommendations of the CloudZone review, purchasing AWS compute plans and performing cost optimization best practices, Iguazio’s estimated yearly saving is 15% (based on a full year usage pattern), which is equal to 2 months of AWS charges before using CloudZone services. The EC2 reservation / Saving coverage jumped from 0% to 70% within 4 months.

“Thanks to the process we went through with CloudZone, we now have better visibility into our consumption on the cloud,” says Ilan Gayda, Director of QA, DevOps and Dev Support at Iguazio. “Being able to control and monitor our monthly Cloud spend has improved our business efficiency.”