Alchemer reduces AWS spend by 30%+ utilizing SHI’s Cost Optimization Managed Service

SHI helps Alchemer reduce EBS cost by deleting $29K/month in unattached EBS volumes.

Challenge:

Overpaying for products and services in business is never a good idea. Fortunately, organizations today have the option to identify wasteful resources through assessing their environment with Cloud Managed Services solutions like SHI’s Cost Optimization Managed Service.

Alchemer – a cloud-based feedback platform that helps over 15,000 customers drive business decisions and solve core challenges – was looking to cut costs dramatically while maintaining the integrity of their product.

The company had built their platform in AWS and had not developed a governance or tracking strategy to identify wasteful resources. With their spend increasing monthly, and a small engineering team busy developing the application and addressing performance issues, they needed to act quickly to find cost-saving opportunities.

Solution:

SHI met with the customer to implement our Cost Optimization Managed Service – a Cloud Managed Services solution designed to help organizations gain full visibility into their IT environment, take control of their assets, simplify technology usage, and reduce costs.

The cost optimization service ran an initial 30-day assessment which yielded more than 30% in initial achievable savings.

Outcome:

Overall, the customer saved 20%+ on their bill in the first 30 days of the service and realized 30%+ in cost savings within one year by terminating idle resources and developing a plan to address architectural changes.

SHI helped Alchemer achieve the following results:

• Reduce Elastic Block Store (EBS) cost by deleting $29K/month in unattached EBS volumes
• Create policies to delete future unattached EBS volumes and snapshots older than 90 days
• Implement a Compute Savings Plan to save approximately 32% of their On-Demand EC2 compute cost
• Provide guidance on moving EC2 web applications to Spot instances
• Recommend moving from Dedicated to Default tenancy for three regions
• Rightsize autoscaling groups and databases on EC2
• Rearchitect their application to lifecycle S3 objects to Glacier while working with the customer’s development team

SHI is currently working with the customer to incorporate more automation and governance in their environment through policy alerting and tagging.