“Most of our cost optimization projects are longer, they’re more stressful, they involve trading instances in and out, turning things off, turning things back on, doing things by hand. And, we’ve seen substantial savings with those projects. But we’ve also seen about the same amount of savings from just implementing Archera and turning Archera on for RDS and EC2 to get the Guaranteed Reserved Instances.”
Spec delivers a platform that enables online ticketers, retailers, and marketplaces to analyze user behavior and transactions in real time to proactively identify fraudulent users and bots. Spec’s customer base has expanded rapidly, requiring significant growth of Amazon RDS and EC2 usage. Alongside this growth, Spec’s corporate cloud cost management posture has evolved from one of simply constraining spend to a concerted focus on active cost optimization and reduction. Meeting these new requirements necessitated that Spec’s Engineering and Finance teams:
“We had a pretty big shift in prioritization across the board from, ‘let’s make sure that the bill doesn’t significantly jump month to month,’ to, ‘what can we do here to be really smart about how we spend money? How do we get the best bang for our buck when it comes to our infrastructure?’ and, ‘how do we best support our customers along the way?’ Since then, me and the Head of Finance have basically taken all the numbers and dug through them [to determine], ‘what can we do?’ and Archera has played a really big part in allowing us to make a lot of progress really quickly.”
— Scott Tsuchiyama, Director of Engineering, Spec
Spec sought a cloud cost management solution that would allow them to achieve AWS cost reductions while ensuring they could dynamically adjust their infrastructure as needed. Archera provided the ideal solution, offering:
“I think Reserved Instances or general bulk discounts on Amazon are fairly challenging to get access to. Our volumes and our loads change fairly significantly over the course of time, and so, for us to go out and buy a one-year subscription for a Reserved Instance is something that we had never really considered because, what we thought was overloaded six months ago is now extremely underutilized today, and we would have just been stuck with that commitment for a year — hopefully we wouldn’t have paid for three years in that case. So, the ability to access some of the Reserved Instances-like pricing, being able to do all of that in Archera with a couple clicks, was probably as easy as we could shave 15–20% off our bill as we’re going to get.”
— Scott Tsuchiyama, Director of Engineering, Spec
By implementing Archera’s free platform, Spec was able to rapidly meet new goals for cloud fiscal responsibility and improving cost governance, all while keeping their infrastructure agile. Results included:
“We went straight down the list, top to bottom of, ‘what are we spending the most money on?’ when it comes to AWS. And the top line item for us, by far, is RDS. The first question is, ‘what can we do on RDS? Okay, great. Let’s go buy some Guaranteed Reserved Instances: that’ll save us 15–20% right off the top.’ I think we had to work together pretty closely to figure out the right number of RDS instances to reserve. It’s been pretty straightforward when it comes to the math and figuring out how much money we’re actually saving.”
— Scott Tsuchiyama, Director of Engineering, Spec
Spec continues to leverage Archera’s cloud commitment lifecycle management platform to ensure ongoing AWS cost efficiency while maintaining the cloud service usage flexibility required for its evolving fraud prevention infrastructure. As their platform scales, Spec plans to expand its use of Archera’s commitment products to further effortlessly optimize cloud savings without limiting infrastructure decisions.
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