How Attunely Optimized AWS Usage With High Commit Coverage

Intro

Attunely is a financial technology company that provides ML solutions to creditors, collection agencies, and debt buyers. As they developed new functionality, their AWS costs increased proportionally to their customer volume, leading to highly variable EC2 usage. They needed a solution to optimize their expenses while maintaining high commitment utilization & taking minimal time from their engineering team to implement.

Challenge

Attunely's increasing EC2 usage meant their variable AWS costs were becoming a significant expense. They needed a solution to optimize their AWS expenses with high commitment coverage, since early product iterations did not include cost-efficient architecture optimizations, but they didn’t want to hold long-term commitments tied to the unoptimized architecture.

Solution

Attunely’s AWS account team suggested they connect with Archera to explore short term, flexible alternative commitments to Amazon’s 1 & 3 year offerings, which could be sold back any time after 30 days. This Archera specific product called GRI's (Guaranteed Reserved Instance) allowed them to unlock savings by being able to apply commitments to their highly variable ML workloads with no engineering effort required.

Through the use of GRIs, Attunely saved a total of $182K in AWS costs over 2022. This is not even accounting for the potentially wasted commitment Attunely avoided by selling back GRIs that were going to go unused, saving them an additional $20K/mo by Archera taking $554K in future committed payments off their books.

The Results

The GRI buyback option provided Attunely with the control & flexibility to handle temporary EC2 usage drawdowns while still maintaining a high commitment utilization rate & avoiding unused commitment waste. For example, in September 2022, they went from a committed monthly spend of $13K/mo down to $4.5K/mo as existing workloads were optimized but then in October, as new projects came online, went back to $12K/mo of committed monthly spend.

Overall, through the course of 2023, Attunely was able to significantly reduce their variable AWS costs through a migration effort to ECS, bringing costs from a peak of $96K/mo in June 2022 to around $27K/mo in April 2023, resulting in a 71% cost reduction. Despite these fluctuations in their AWS cost & usage, Attunely maintained an average commitment utilization rate of over 95% throughout 2022, which was critical in helping them achieve significant cost savings.

Why Archera

Attunely chose to work with Archera because of the customer aligned model, where Archera only charges for savings generated by GRIs customers choose to purchase. Additionally, Archera never charges for native 1 or 3 year AWS commitments purchased through the platform. Finally, other parts of the Archera platform such as forecasting, automation, attribution/budget management and cost visibility are provided free of charge, unlike other vendors who charge a percentage of ongoing spend or savings for these commodity features.

Ryan Kosai, CTO & Co-Founder of Attunely, said, "We were impressed with Archera's expertise and ability to provide us with a solution that allowed us to optimize our AWS costs while still maintaining high commitment utilization rates. The flexibility provided by GRIs allowed us to take advantage of the cost savings without commiting to a long-term contract. We highly recommend Archera to anyone looking to quickly optimize their AWS costs with no hidden savings tax & no additional engineering effort."