How MiQ Saved 45% off EC2 with Zesty, Crushing their Cloud Cost KPIs
“If you can’t commit to more than one year, don’t think about it, just go with Zesty.”
“Zesty has helped us improve DevOps efficiency because we no longer need to worry about RI cost savings anymore.”
“Zesty has done wonders behind the scenes for cost savings. We know that it’s made a significant difference.”
“Zesty has allowed us to reduce our overhead. We now have a zero point deviation from cost KPIs”
Customer
Brief
MiQ Digital is a programmatic media partner that builds bespoke programmatic advertising solutions designed to help marketers and agencies make the smartest decisions for every campaign. They are experts in data science, analytics, and programmatic trading. The company, which is headquartered in the United Kingdom and has 15 global offices across four continents, employs more than 1,100 people around the world.
Key
Challenges
MiQ’s manual cloud cost management processes were incredibly time-consuming and labor-intensive. This impacted DevOps productivity and inhibited agile workflows.
Key
Results
With Zesty, MiQ was able to dynamically adjust Reserved Instances according to application needs, enabling significant savings without occupying engineering hours.
The Challenge:
With 98% of their infrastructure running on AWS, cloud savings was an important KPI for MiQ. However, achieving the performance goals was easier said than done. Every six months, they used an EC2 recommendation engine to manually scan their instances and check how many of them were utilizing savings programs. This took a ton of time and effort from their DevOps Engineers, and greatly impacted their productivity.
As a result, MiQ decided to invest in automation. First, they went with a few open source cloud cost optimization platforms to automate the scanning of instances. While these tools helped, DevOps Engineers were still stuck collecting, monitoring, and analyzing data in order to create reports, take action, and achieve their savings goals.
But their problems were just getting started. As application usage increased, they began scaling up more containers at a staggering rate. Yet their resource allocation for discount programs remained stagnant, rigid, and unable to quickly adapt to these changes. Availability was the highest priority, making use of On-demand instances the obvious option. But it came at a cost. Was it worth going over their cloud savings KPI?
To reign in costs, MiQ coupled workloads with 1-3 year Reserved Instances wherever they could. But the financial commitment they entailed and their relative rigidity inhibited them from having the flexibility and agility they craved.
When looking for alternatives to their Savings Plans program, their Technology R&D team came across Zesty and the rest is history.
Zesty’s Solution:
To identify a program that would provide greatest cost-savings with the greatest flexibility, MiQ evaluated other automated cloud optimization platforms, but finally concluded that Zesty came out on top. They also evaluated how Zesty could be used in addition to their AWS Savings Plans to leverage deeper cost savings.
Zesty’s unique ability to adapt itself to dynamic environments made it more than just another cloud savings platform, but rather a flexible solution that can roll with the punches of both new technology and fluctuating demand. This was critical to MiQ because the majority of their workloads were data analytics based, so they needed the flexibility to frequently adjust instance types that would better support their variable workloads.
Zesty’s technology was a perfect fit. The algorithms simultaneously analyze the customer’s environment and the AWS RI Marketplace, then buys and sells RIs according to real-time application needs. As a result, MiQ was not locked into any instance type for 1-3 years, and could instead, leverage the right type of instance just for the time that it’s needed.
As an added bonus, Zesty also provided visibility into unused resources, so MiQ could optimize the efficiency of each instance, providing even more opportunity to meet their cloud cost KPIs.
Onboarding was simple and straightforward, their biggest concerns were around security. From the very beginning it was made clear that Zesty was not touching the instance, but only interacting with the payment structure. While there were some concerns about the range of permissions, this was whittled down to a brief list for which MiQ felt comfortable. Once deployed the savings started immediately.
The Result:
After implementing Zesty, MiQ achieved 45% savings off their On-Demand costs. They crushed their cloud cost KPIs without any effort from their team and turned a manual and inefficient process into something that is both automated and proactive.
In addition, Zesty’s self-service management capabilities enable MiQ to access the dashboard and review cost-savings performance independently without requiring service support.
The continuous nature of Zesty’s algorithm means infrastructure is perpetually adjusted to workload demands at any given time. This relieves MiQ’s DevOps Engineers from hours of collecting, monitoring, and analyzing data as well as from taking manual actions for effective cloud savings.
With Zesty, there was no more need for humans to respond to changes in application needs. Instead, Zesty responds to their dynamic reality for them so they can spend more of their time on innovation.
Customer
Brief
MiQ Digital is a programmatic media partner that builds bespoke programmatic advertising solutions designed to help marketers and agencies make the smartest decisions for every campaign. They are experts in data science, analytics, and programmatic trading. The company, which is headquartered in the United Kingdom and has 15 global offices across four continents, employs more than 1,100 people around the world.
Key
Challenges
MiQ’s manual cloud cost management processes were incredibly time-consuming and labor-intensive. This impacted DevOps productivity and inhibited agile workflows.
Key
Results
With Zesty, MiQ was able to dynamically adjust Reserved Instances according to application needs, enabling significant savings without occupying engineering hours.
“If you can’t commit to more than one year, don’t think about it, just go with Zesty.”
With 98% of their infrastructure running on AWS, cloud savings was an important KPI for MiQ. However, achieving the performance goals was easier said than done. Every six months, they used an EC2 recommendation engine to manually scan their instances and check how many of them were utilizing savings programs. This took a ton of time and effort from their DevOps Engineers, and greatly impacted their productivity.
As a result, MiQ decided to invest in automation. First, they went with a few open source cloud cost optimization platforms to automate the scanning of instances. While these tools helped, DevOps Engineers were still stuck collecting, monitoring, and analyzing data in order to create reports, take action, and achieve their savings goals.
But their problems were just getting started. As application usage increased, they began scaling up more containers at a staggering rate. Yet their resource allocation for discount programs remained stagnant, rigid, and unable to quickly adapt to these changes. Availability was the highest priority, making use of On-demand instances the obvious option. But it came at a cost. Was it worth going over their cloud savings KPI?
To reign in costs, MiQ coupled workloads with 1-3 year Reserved Instances wherever they could. But the financial commitment they entailed and their relative rigidity inhibited them from having the flexibility and agility they craved.
When looking for alternatives to their Savings Plans program, their Technology R&D team came across Zesty and the rest is history.
“Zesty has helped us improve DevOps efficiency because we no longer need to worry about RI cost savings anymore.”
To identify a program that would provide greatest cost-savings with the greatest flexibility, MiQ evaluated other automated cloud optimization platforms, but finally concluded that Zesty came out on top. They also evaluated how Zesty could be used in addition to their AWS Savings Plans to leverage deeper cost savings.
Zesty’s unique ability to adapt itself to dynamic environments made it more than just another cloud savings platform, but rather a flexible solution that can roll with the punches of both new technology and fluctuating demand. This was critical to MiQ because the majority of their workloads were data analytics based, so they needed the flexibility to frequently adjust instance types that would better support their variable workloads.
Zesty’s technology was a perfect fit. The algorithms simultaneously analyze the customer’s environment and the AWS RI Marketplace, then buys and sells RIs according to real-time application needs. As a result, MiQ was not locked into any instance type for 1-3 years, and could instead, leverage the right type of instance just for the time that it’s needed.
As an added bonus, Zesty also provided visibility into unused resources, so MiQ could optimize the efficiency of each instance, providing even more opportunity to meet their cloud cost KPIs.
Onboarding was simple and straightforward, their biggest concerns were around security. From the very beginning it was made clear that Zesty was not touching the instance, but only interacting with the payment structure. While there were some concerns about the range of permissions, this was whittled down to a brief list for which MiQ felt comfortable. Once deployed the savings started immediately.
After implementing Zesty, MiQ achieved 45% savings off their On-Demand costs. They crushed their cloud cost KPIs without any effort from their team and turned a manual and inefficient process into something that is both automated and proactive.
In addition, Zesty’s self-service management capabilities enable MiQ to access the dashboard and review cost-savings performance independently without requiring service support.
The continuous nature of Zesty’s algorithm means infrastructure is perpetually adjusted to workload demands at any given time. This relieves MiQ’s DevOps Engineers from hours of collecting, monitoring, and analyzing data as well as from taking manual actions for effective cloud savings.
With Zesty, there was no more need for humans to respond to changes in application needs. Instead, Zesty responds to their dynamic reality for them so they can spend more of their time on innovation.
“Zesty has done wonders behind the scenes for cost savings. We know that it’s made a significant difference.”
"Our cloud ROI has greatly improved since using Zesty and these improvements could not be achieved through our efforts alone.”
Yonatan Deshel
CTO
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