Platform9 slashes AWS costs and gains real-time commitment flexibility with Archera
Impressive AWS growth demanded flexible commitment alternatives
Platform9 helps enterprises deploy, manage, and optimize complex on-premises and public cloud environments. Delivering a seamless and simplified customer experience across Platform9’s AWS-hosted managed OpenStack and Kubernetes platforms requires dynamic scaling and the optimization of underlying high-performance EC2 and RDS infrastructure.
As Platform9’s customer base grew, monthly AWS costs surged and their existing AWS Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans (SPs) commitment management solution fell short of enabling the aggressive cost-cutting posture Platform9 demands:
- Immediate savings: Platform9 needed to collapse the yearly timeline on which their existing solution operated down to a scale measured in days
- Flexible discounts: The inflexible one and three-year commitment terms of the native AWS RIs and SPs managed by their existing tool were incompatible with Platform9’s need to secure discounts for dynamic and rapidly-scaling workloads
- Unparalleled commitment governance and orchestration: Platform9 sought greater visibility into underutilized and inefficient commitments across cost centers, as well as the ability to automate the process of moving away from suboptimal discounts
Selecting Archera to enable new savings strategies
Platform9 needed a solution that increased visibility and confidence, accelerated decision-making, and offered new primitives for discounting fluctuating cloud resources — one available without a traditional Enterprise sales cycle:
- Frictionless install: Within a day, Platform9’s DevOps Manager was able to launch Archera from AWS Marketplace, completely configure the minimal-privilege platform, and begin identifying savings — all without engaging internal approvals or sitting through an Archera demo or sales pitch.
- Pricing transparency and broad capabilities: Archera’s free platform delivered comprehensive AWS cost and usage visibility and complete management and automation of native RIs and SPs, while Platform9’s existing provider charged 24% of savings for fewer features.
- Flexible-term Insured Commitments: Archera’s unique 30-day Guaranteed Reserved Instances (GRIs) and Savings Plans (GSPs) enabled Platform9 to increase coverage and get the savings of native three-year commitments without long-term lock-in.
Real-time commitment agility helps Platform9 streamline savings
Archera enables Platform9 to swiftly reduce AWS costs and streamline cloud rate optimization, allowing DevOps to minimize the time they have to allocate to cost management tasks. Archera’s solutions deliver the confidence and flexibility Platform9 needs to aggressively optimize commitments, ensuring the dynamic demands of their customers are fully met.
- Faster decision making: Platform9 shifted from a reactive commitment management approach to a data and automation-driven process that allowed them to assuredly adopt cost-saving contracts on a timeline of days, rather than years.
- Improved visibility into commitment waste: Archera’s commitment inventory revealed thousands of dollars of suboptimal reservations. Platform9 was able to renegotiate contracts, sell off underutilized commitments, and aggressively manage discounts due to Archera’s RI and SP insights and low-risk automation.
- Expanded discounts with elastic commitments: Archera’s flexible-term GRI and GSP Insured Commitments help Platform9 cover their expanding infrastructure with discounts, without taking on the risk of under or overcommitment. Archera’s insurance empowers Platform9 to rightsize and optimize infrastructure resources that are concurrently covered by commitment-based savings.
Building on their successful partnership, Platform9 plans to expand its use of Archera’s free cloud cost management platform and first-of-a-kind commitment insurance products, leveraging them to optimize additional cloud services and automate more cloud cost management tasks.
Platform9 on Archera
