How Greenlight Guru reduced cloud spend by 50% with Zesty’s Commitment Manager and Insights
“The savings that we would have gotten without Zesty would not be near what we’re saving with Zesty.”
Jordon Kersey
Senior DevOps Engineer at Greenlight Guru
“Zesty is easy and requires no effort.”
Jordon Kersey
Senior DevOps Engineer at Greenlight Guru
“Without Zesty, we would be spending quite a bit more time on cost optimization.”
Jordon Kersey
Senior DevOps Engineer at Greenlight Guru
Customer
Brief
Greenlight Guru is a rapidly growing SaaS company that provides a cloud-based Quality Management System (QMS) software tailored to the medical device industry. Their software helps companies reduce risk throughout the product lifecycle by enabling effective tracking of quality events and tracing design controls to risks, ensuring regulatory compliance. As a leader in leveraging cloud technology for medical device quality management, Greenlight Guru offers essential tools that support compliance and operational excellence in a highly regulated sector.
Key
Challenges
Greenlight Guru’s main challenge was lowering the cost of rising cloud expenses amidst rapid expansion of product offerings and customer base.
Key
Results
Greenlight Guru achieved coverage of 78%, consistent savings of 50% on EC2, and significant time savings, all contributing to accelerated product development and time to revenue.
The Challenge:
Greenlight Guru leverages AWS cloud technologies to drive its business, supporting a continual rollout of new applications and features. As the company rapidly expanded both its product offerings and customer base, its cloud expenses increased significantly. With the company’s focus on controlling costs and maintaining a predictable monthly spend for their product development, it was crucial to reduce the escalating costs of cloud resources. Jordon Kersey, Senior DevOps Engineer II with expertise in cloud cost optimization, is one of the team members responsible for managing these escalating expenses.
As a SaaS company, Greenlight Guru faces the constant challenge of adapting to customer feedback and market demands to stay competitive. This agility is driven by the Platform Team, who are the primary users of cloud resources. With the recent expansion of the engineering team, Jordon and the team recognized that cloud costs were likely to escalate even further. As cloud costs began to rise, the team focused on ensuring maximum return on their spend. The need for transparent and effective cloud cost management became a priority and pushed Jordon and the team to provide timely strategic solutions to curb these escalating expenses.
The team also knew that any strategic initiative would have to be complemented with a cross-departmental mind-shift in regard to resource provisioning and allocation, with Jordon noting that “a developer isn’t aware of the amount of cloud resources a single service uses.” They faced the challenge of implementing a broad strategic overhaul, focusing on optimizing cloud resource utilization and fostering a cost-aware culture within the company.
Zesty’s Solution:
With his prior cloud cost optimization experience, Jordon knew he needed a solution to better manage and automate cloud costs. He adopted a people, processes, and technology approach. To lower EC2 costs, he initially came up with his own plan using Savings Plan and Reserved Instances. While this approach would improve some cost efficiency, as the plan was able to attain a 40% coverage, it was not enough and did not provide the adaptability needed within an agile environment.
As Jordon was looking for a more automated yet aggressive, cost-effective solution, he consulted with his AWS representative, who recommended Zesty for automating the solution. The team was particularly drawn to Zesty Commitment Manager for its robust automation capabilities, which aligned perfectly with his need to manage cloud costs more efficiently. They also liked the fact that Zesty Insights provides a report on Unused Resources, mapping unattached EC2 volumes that can easily be deleted or right-sized to reduce costs and boost efficiency. Zesty’s dedicated customer success manager gave them peace of mind, knowing that they had someone they could call for guidance or support anytime they needed.
In addition to adopting Zesty’s solutions, Jordon spearheaded the development of internal tools and processes aimed at enhancing a cost-conscious culture within the company. This included setting up dashboards that showcased real-time data on memory and CPU usage to identify inefficiencies and guide resource allocation decisions effectively along with giving the company insights to the costs associated with portions of the application.
The Result:
By leveraging Zesty’s automation capabilities, Greenlight Guru has successfully doubled cloud coverage from 40% to 78% and achieved consistent cost savings of nearly 50% on EC2 usage.
Jordon noted the operational simplicity and reliability of using Zesty and the benefits of the visibility provided by Zesty’s Platform, stating that its management is simple and effortless. The integration of Zesty’s Commitment Manager has also saved Jordon a significant amount of time as he does not need to spend time managing Zesty. Jordon also relies on the Unused Resources report to quickly identify cost savings opportunities.
Significantly, the savings achieved by Zesty have been redirected into product development, particularly enhancing memory and processing capabilities. This strategic reinvestment has not only accelerated time to market but also facilitated quicker time to revenue, marking a pivotal advancement in the company’s growth trajectory. Looking ahead, Jordon is enthusiastic about expanding the use of Zesty to other areas of their cloud architecture. With the recent launch of Zesty for RDS, Jordon is keen to explore how this can be applied to Greenlight Guru’s RDS, EBS, Open Search, and DocumentDB instances.
Customer
Brief
Greenlight Guru is a rapidly growing SaaS company that provides a cloud-based Quality Management System (QMS) software tailored to the medical device industry. Their software helps companies reduce risk throughout the product lifecycle by enabling effective tracking of quality events and tracing design controls to risks, ensuring regulatory compliance. As a leader in leveraging cloud technology for medical device quality management, Greenlight Guru offers essential tools that support compliance and operational excellence in a highly regulated sector.
Key
Challenges
Greenlight Guru’s main challenge was lowering the cost of rising cloud expenses amidst rapid expansion of product offerings and customer base.
Key
Results
Greenlight Guru achieved coverage of 78%, consistent savings of 50% on EC2, and significant time savings, all contributing to accelerated product development and time to revenue.
“The savings that we would have gotten without Zesty would not be near what we’re saving with Zesty.”
Jordon Kersey
Senior DevOps Engineer at Greenlight Guru
Greenlight Guru leverages AWS cloud technologies to drive its business, supporting a continual rollout of new applications and features. As the company rapidly expanded both its product offerings and customer base, its cloud expenses increased significantly. With the company’s focus on controlling costs and maintaining a predictable monthly spend for their product development, it was crucial to reduce the escalating costs of cloud resources. Jordon Kersey, Senior DevOps Engineer II with expertise in cloud cost optimization, is one of the team members responsible for managing these escalating expenses.
As a SaaS company, Greenlight Guru faces the constant challenge of adapting to customer feedback and market demands to stay competitive. This agility is driven by the Platform Team, who are the primary users of cloud resources. With the recent expansion of the engineering team, Jordon and the team recognized that cloud costs were likely to escalate even further. As cloud costs began to rise, the team focused on ensuring maximum return on their spend. The need for transparent and effective cloud cost management became a priority and pushed Jordon and the team to provide timely strategic solutions to curb these escalating expenses.
The team also knew that any strategic initiative would have to be complemented with a cross-departmental mind-shift in regard to resource provisioning and allocation, with Jordon noting that “a developer isn’t aware of the amount of cloud resources a single service uses.” They faced the challenge of implementing a broad strategic overhaul, focusing on optimizing cloud resource utilization and fostering a cost-aware culture within the company.
“Zesty is easy and requires no effort.”
Jordon Kersey
Senior DevOps Engineer at Greenlight Guru
With his prior cloud cost optimization experience, Jordon knew he needed a solution to better manage and automate cloud costs. He adopted a people, processes, and technology approach. To lower EC2 costs, he initially came up with his own plan using Savings Plan and Reserved Instances. While this approach would improve some cost efficiency, as the plan was able to attain a 40% coverage, it was not enough and did not provide the adaptability needed within an agile environment.
As Jordon was looking for a more automated yet aggressive, cost-effective solution, he consulted with his AWS representative, who recommended Zesty for automating the solution. The team was particularly drawn to Zesty Commitment Manager for its robust automation capabilities, which aligned perfectly with his need to manage cloud costs more efficiently. They also liked the fact that Zesty Insights provides a report on Unused Resources, mapping unattached EC2 volumes that can easily be deleted or right-sized to reduce costs and boost efficiency. Zesty’s dedicated customer success manager gave them peace of mind, knowing that they had someone they could call for guidance or support anytime they needed.
In addition to adopting Zesty’s solutions, Jordon spearheaded the development of internal tools and processes aimed at enhancing a cost-conscious culture within the company. This included setting up dashboards that showcased real-time data on memory and CPU usage to identify inefficiencies and guide resource allocation decisions effectively along with giving the company insights to the costs associated with portions of the application.
By leveraging Zesty’s automation capabilities, Greenlight Guru has successfully doubled cloud coverage from 40% to 78% and achieved consistent cost savings of nearly 50% on EC2 usage.
Jordon noted the operational simplicity and reliability of using Zesty and the benefits of the visibility provided by Zesty’s Platform, stating that its management is simple and effortless. The integration of Zesty’s Commitment Manager has also saved Jordon a significant amount of time as he does not need to spend time managing Zesty. Jordon also relies on the Unused Resources report to quickly identify cost savings opportunities.
Significantly, the savings achieved by Zesty have been redirected into product development, particularly enhancing memory and processing capabilities. This strategic reinvestment has not only accelerated time to market but also facilitated quicker time to revenue, marking a pivotal advancement in the company’s growth trajectory. Looking ahead, Jordon is enthusiastic about expanding the use of Zesty to other areas of their cloud architecture. With the recent launch of Zesty for RDS, Jordon is keen to explore how this can be applied to Greenlight Guru’s RDS, EBS, Open Search, and DocumentDB instances.
“Without Zesty, we would be spending quite a bit more time on cost optimization.”
Jordon Kersey
Senior DevOps Engineer at Greenlight Guru
