Achieving a significant Cloud cost reduction

The Challenge

Playtech BI provides a substantial volume of services to the Playtech Group, and its AWS monthly spend reflected massive cloud consumption. 80% was related to EC2 costs, with the rest associated with other AWS services (S3, RDS, EBS etc.). The BI division embarked on a journey to identify advanced methods of reducing its EC2 cost, including educating its team to use the different, more cost-effective types of EC2 instance audited its AWS EC2 available.

The Solution

• Audit – using AWS Technology Partner to audit usage and utilization patterns against established cost-optimization best practices.
• Upgrading EC2 instances – upgrading old generations of EC2 (m3, c3 and r3) to more advanced EC2 types, like c4 or m5, which are cheaper and offer better performance.
• Optimizing instance type according to utilization – moving applications requiring greater memory from C type instances to M type, or from M type to R type.
• Downsizing/ terminating instances – weekly checks of EC2 utilization to identify underutilized EC2; downsizing those with maximum CPU lower than 20% and average CPU lower than 5%; terminating those with maximum CPU lower than 10% and average CPU lower than 3%.

The Results

After a full year of implementing the recommended cost-optimization best practice, Playtech BI had reduced its monthly EC2 costs by 53%, while use of new generation and more suitable instance types helped reduce total EC2 compute hours by 28%, without decreasing the provision of services to the Playtech Group.

“CloudZone’s audit helped us identify a range of EC2 savings options,” says a Playtech BI representative. “Having implemented the recommended AWS cost optimization best practices, we succeeded in achieving a huge reduction in our Cloud spend while improving the efficacy of our services.”