How Heap Saves Over $1 Million per year on AWS
“I wish we would have had this thing five years ago. We would have saved a lot of money and a lot of stress”.
“Zesty automatically scales reservations up and down according to usage so we get all the savings with none of the commitment.”
“Using Zesty, we were able to significantly reduce our EC2 spend, which was pretty transformative for our business”.
“Zesty saves us over a million dollars a year. If you’re running a workload on EC2, it’s pretty much free money”.
Customer
Brief
Heap is a SaaS company that offers product analytics software that provides insight into the user’s digital journey across company websites and apps. The digital analytics software provides the quickest time to provide insight on everything users are doing, to enable product and marketing teams to create the best possible digital experiences and accelerate their business. Based in San Francisco, Heap has a user-base of over 8,000 companies around the world.
Key
Challenges
With new services released every month, Heap’s dynamic workloads made it risky to fully take advantage of 1-3 year commitments.
Key
Results
After implementing Zesty, Heap achieved 95% RI coverage and saved over $1 million within the first year.
The Challenge:
Heap’s digital analytics software is built on AWS and utilizes hundreds of EC2 instances, adding up to millions of dollars per year. Prior to implementing Zesty, they were purchasing Reserved Instances from AWS, but because they released new services every month, their workloads are extremely dynamic. This made committing to AWS for one to three years in advance extremely risky.
With each new feature release, Heap’s engineers invested in forecasting and planning their reservations in advance. This took a lot of time, yet, despite all these efforts, they were only able to achieve 50% RI coverage because their workloads were too volatile. This resulted in On-Demand costs that were extremely high and hard to account for.
Zesty’s Solution:
Zesty was the answer to Heap’s difficulties.
Implementing Zesty was simple and only took a couple minutes to set up with a CloudFormation stack. Once setup was complete, Zesty automatically scaled Heap’s reservations up and down according to their real-time usage so they could take advantage of all the savings of three year Reserved Instances with none of the commitment to AWS.
Zesty’s buyback guarantee meant there’s zero risk of paying for commitments that are not being used. Within minutes of setting up, Heap was able to automate, save, and scale with zero risk, zero planning, and zero predictions.
The Result:
With Zesty, Heap now has a 95% reservation coverage on their EC2 workloads. As a result, they save over $1 million dollars per year. Heap gets all the cost savings of three year Reserved Instances for their entire workload with none of the lock-in and none of the upfront payment.
Best of all, with the extra million dollars, Heap can hire four to five more engineers to develop their product. Today, Heap’s engineers no longer have to do the intense actuary work behind forecasting or planning reservations. Instead, RI provisioning is completely automated, highly responsive, and able to adjust to changes in workloads within minutes. Zesty has enabled their engineers to work on projects that create more value for Heap’s client-base and because Zesty only charges a portion of what Heap was saving, the value was indisputable.
Customer
Brief
Heap is a SaaS company that offers product analytics software that provides insight into the user’s digital journey across company websites and apps. The digital analytics software provides the quickest time to provide insight on everything users are doing, to enable product and marketing teams to create the best possible digital experiences and accelerate their business. Based in San Francisco, Heap has a user-base of over 8,000 companies around the world.
Key
Challenges
With new services released every month, Heap’s dynamic workloads made it risky to fully take advantage of 1-3 year commitments.
Key
Results
After implementing Zesty, Heap achieved 95% RI coverage and saved over $1 million within the first year.
“I wish we would have had this thing five years ago. We would have saved a lot of money and a lot of stress”.
Heap’s digital analytics software is built on AWS and utilizes hundreds of EC2 instances, adding up to millions of dollars per year. Prior to implementing Zesty, they were purchasing Reserved Instances from AWS, but because they released new services every month, their workloads are extremely dynamic. This made committing to AWS for one to three years in advance extremely risky.
With each new feature release, Heap’s engineers invested in forecasting and planning their reservations in advance. This took a lot of time, yet, despite all these efforts, they were only able to achieve 50% RI coverage because their workloads were too volatile. This resulted in On-Demand costs that were extremely high and hard to account for.
“Zesty automatically scales reservations up and down according to usage so we get all the savings with none of the commitment.”
Zesty was the answer to Heap’s difficulties.
Implementing Zesty was simple and only took a couple minutes to set up with a CloudFormation stack. Once setup was complete, Zesty automatically scaled Heap’s reservations up and down according to their real-time usage so they could take advantage of all the savings of three year Reserved Instances with none of the commitment to AWS.
Zesty’s buyback guarantee meant there’s zero risk of paying for commitments that are not being used. Within minutes of setting up, Heap was able to automate, save, and scale with zero risk, zero planning, and zero predictions.
With Zesty, Heap now has a 95% reservation coverage on their EC2 workloads. As a result, they save over $1 million dollars per year. Heap gets all the cost savings of three year Reserved Instances for their entire workload with none of the lock-in and none of the upfront payment.
Best of all, with the extra million dollars, Heap can hire four to five more engineers to develop their product. Today, Heap’s engineers no longer have to do the intense actuary work behind forecasting or planning reservations. Instead, RI provisioning is completely automated, highly responsive, and able to adjust to changes in workloads within minutes. Zesty has enabled their engineers to work on projects that create more value for Heap’s client-base and because Zesty only charges a portion of what Heap was saving, the value was indisputable.
“Using Zesty, we were able to significantly reduce our EC2 spend, which was pretty transformative for our business”.
“The personal support we received from Maxim (CEO) & Alexey (CTO) during the on-boarding was beyond words”
Liran Ben Abu
Head of DevOps
“Zesty Disk are more than a software, they’re a key part of our team.”
Sanjeev Kishore Yarnapati
Principal Cloud Architect
“We chose Zesty because of the significant savings that we could achieve with absolutely minimal effort involved.”
David Ting
Senior VP of Engineering
