How Nylas Achieved Seven Figures of Savings with Zesty’s Commitment Manager
“…It’s up to the technology team to find ways of pushing down cost. Zesty helped us improve our gross margin by double digits.”
“Honestly, the thing that I like best about Zesty is that it does what it claims to do.”
“We chose Zesty because of the significant savings that we could achieve with absolutely minimal effort involved.”
“I was wondering whether it could reach that 90% threshold of coverage which it did, and right now, we’re at the 99% threshold of coverage which is wonderful.”
Customer
Brief
Nylas provides a developer software program that helps to quickly and securely build email, scheduling, and work automation features into applications. The embedded features provide companies with communications data from their users, pre-built workflows that automate manual tasks, UI/UX components for easy front-end development, and security capabilities all of which are integrated through APIs. The company is based in San Francisco with offices across the USA and Canada. It has around 400 employees, with 160 people in the product and engineering teams.
Key
Challenges
Improving RI (Reserved Instances) coverage to lower the cost of unpredictable traffic hot spots.
Key
Results
With Zesty, Nylas surpassed a 99% threshold of coverage, resulting in seven figures worth of savings and a two-time improvement to gross market calculation.
The Challenge:
A large proportion of Nylas’ cloud operations is on AWS, using load balancers to coordinate sporadic and unpredictable traffic. Email accounts integrated with their product APIs are distributed across instances. With time they noticed that there were moving traffic ‘hot spots’ where some email accounts experience a large volume of communications at changing points in time. The auto-scaling group would automatically spin up new instances to meet these increases in demand, however, the volatility made it difficult to apply static allocations of discounted commitments.
Nylas was manually procuring EC2s through 1-year standard RIs, which at its worst entailed over $1 million spent per month, leaving a lot of dollars wasted because the deeper discount of 3-year RIs was too much of a high-risk commitment. Their coverage levels were at about 60%, leaving over a third of their instances On-demand. While this gave the flexibility for their workloads to contract and expand, they were losing out on about 50% of savings as a result. Nylas enlisted Zesty’s services so they could leverage bigger RI savings, but have the flexibility to elastically expand application servers over time.
Zesty’s Solution:
Before Nylas started using Commitment Manager for the automated procurement engine, they used the built-in visibility and monitoring features to benchmark their performance at covering compute costs. With the insight into how much they were covering on their own, they could effectively assess how much more they could cover with Zesty.
Using Zesty saved them from writing their own code to automate the buying and selling of commitments. While Nylas considered developing the ability in-house, the time this would consume combined with the expense of hiring skilled developers who are able to write the specific type of code required, made this unfeasible. The comparison cost to deploying Zesty became a “no-brainer”. Zesty has the distinct advantage of being able to obtain more cost-effective commitments by leveraging its purchasing power to get the best prices in the AWS RI marketplace.
To ensure the solution was going to deliver as promised, Nylas’ SRE team analyzed the AWS cost reports and confirmed there were no anomalies with the data presented on the Zesty dashboard. After having deployed the solution in December 2021 they watched the coverage gradually increase from the 60% mark they were already achieving to the 85-90% mark and then continue to exceed expectations to reach 99% coverage.
The Result:
The SRE team found a gradual increase in savings. At first, these savings were minimal, however, week after week, the number of servers being covered rose, going from hundreds of dollars saved to hundreds of thousands of dollars, elevating Zesty to a serious product with serious value.
As a SaaS company, these EC2 savings have tremendous value as they powerfully impact their growth market capitalization. By dramatically reducing the cost involved to serve their customers, Zesty was instrumental in helping Nylas expand its growth margin by double digits.
Customer
Brief
Nylas provides a developer software program that helps to quickly and securely build email, scheduling, and work automation features into applications. The embedded features provide companies with communications data from their users, pre-built workflows that automate manual tasks, UI/UX components for easy front-end development, and security capabilities all of which are integrated through APIs. The company is based in San Francisco with offices across the USA and Canada. It has around 400 employees, with 160 people in the product and engineering teams.
Key
Challenges
Improving RI (Reserved Instances) coverage to lower the cost of unpredictable traffic hot spots.
Key
Results
With Zesty, Nylas surpassed a 99% threshold of coverage, resulting in seven figures worth of savings and a two-time improvement to gross market calculation.
“…It’s up to the technology team to find ways of pushing down cost. Zesty helped us improve our gross margin by double digits.”
A large proportion of Nylas’ cloud operations is on AWS, using load balancers to coordinate sporadic and unpredictable traffic. Email accounts integrated with their product APIs are distributed across instances. With time they noticed that there were moving traffic ‘hot spots’ where some email accounts experience a large volume of communications at changing points in time. The auto-scaling group would automatically spin up new instances to meet these increases in demand, however, the volatility made it difficult to apply static allocations of discounted commitments.
Nylas was manually procuring EC2s through 1-year standard RIs, which at its worst entailed over $1 million spent per month, leaving a lot of dollars wasted because the deeper discount of 3-year RIs was too much of a high-risk commitment. Their coverage levels were at about 60%, leaving over a third of their instances On-demand. While this gave the flexibility for their workloads to contract and expand, they were losing out on about 50% of savings as a result. Nylas enlisted Zesty’s services so they could leverage bigger RI savings, but have the flexibility to elastically expand application servers over time.
“Honestly, the thing that I like best about Zesty is that it does what it claims to do.”
Before Nylas started using Commitment Manager for the automated procurement engine, they used the built-in visibility and monitoring features to benchmark their performance at covering compute costs. With the insight into how much they were covering on their own, they could effectively assess how much more they could cover with Zesty.
Using Zesty saved them from writing their own code to automate the buying and selling of commitments. While Nylas considered developing the ability in-house, the time this would consume combined with the expense of hiring skilled developers who are able to write the specific type of code required, made this unfeasible. The comparison cost to deploying Zesty became a “no-brainer”. Zesty has the distinct advantage of being able to obtain more cost-effective commitments by leveraging its purchasing power to get the best prices in the AWS RI marketplace.
To ensure the solution was going to deliver as promised, Nylas’ SRE team analyzed the AWS cost reports and confirmed there were no anomalies with the data presented on the Zesty dashboard. After having deployed the solution in December 2021 they watched the coverage gradually increase from the 60% mark they were already achieving to the 85-90% mark and then continue to exceed expectations to reach 99% coverage.
The SRE team found a gradual increase in savings. At first, these savings were minimal, however, week after week, the number of servers being covered rose, going from hundreds of dollars saved to hundreds of thousands of dollars, elevating Zesty to a serious product with serious value.
As a SaaS company, these EC2 savings have tremendous value as they powerfully impact their growth market capitalization. By dramatically reducing the cost involved to serve their customers, Zesty was instrumental in helping Nylas expand its growth margin by double digits.
“We chose Zesty because of the significant savings that we could achieve with absolutely minimal effort involved.”
“The model is very transparent. The more we save, the more commission Zesty get for it, and that's something that works for us.”
Kinga Otffinowska
Engineering Manager at Bryter
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Artiom Levinton
Head of DevOps
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