In the past few years, as a leader in the IT management field, Zerto has demonstrated unprecedented growth in its customer base and enhanced product development. 

In order to support its continuous scale, Zerto has adopted several AWS services and is currently managing hundreds of EC2 instances for Dev, QA, Production on multiple AWS accounts. 

As their infrastructure grew larger, so did their AWS bill, and it didn’t take long for Zerto’s IT department to initiate some cost optimization strategies in order to reduce their costs. 

The first phase of their cost optimization approach was identifying idle resources (S3 buckets, EBS, Elastic IP’s), rightsizing, and limiting the organization’s cloud consumers’ options of purchasing resources while allowing a self-service portal with preconfigured compute templates per business unit. 

After witnessing the immediate and positive effect of applying these disciplines, Zerto was ready to tackle the biggest superstar of their AWS bill, which was EC2. 

Zerto’s IT department quickly realized that manually purchasing RI’s requires a confident enough forecast, and due to the fact that their environment is dynamic and constantly changing, it was very difficult for them to set a benchmark for the number of instances that needed to be purchased in accordance with Dev and Production requirements.

Eventually, Nadav and another IT director from the group understood that their current process is time-consuming and they are unable to maximize their savings, and that’s what drove them to search for a solution that will automate commitment purchases on their behalf. 

When searching for a solution, Nadav was introduced by a colleague to Zesty, and after a short demo call, he connected his AWS accounts in order to see Zesty in action. 

After analyzing and benchmarking their EC2 usage, Zesty’s automated commitment manager began buying and selling RI’s in the AWS marketplace and rapidly increased the amount of EC2 instances covered by savings.

Zesty’s automated commitment manager reacts to capacity changes in real-time by analyzing already collected data (AWS Cloudwatch and AWS Cloudtrail) and based on that data decides independently to purchase\sell commitments, relieving cloud engineers from the overhead of inaccurate manual forecasting. 

As their confidence in the platform increased, Zerto was encouraged to migrate more workloads, and nowadays all of their AWS accounts are continuously optimized by Zesty.

Zerto was mainly impressed by the simplicity of the platform, which allows all types of users (technical\non technical) to adapt and gain benefits. 

Besides full leverage of Zesty’s automated commitment manager, which provides continuous significant cost savings, Zerto quickly adopted some additional capabilities offered by the Zesty platform:  

• EC2 Scheduler – Using this feature, Zerto was able to preconfigure shutdown hours for unused clusters (outside of working hours), adding another pillar of cost reduction to their overall strategy. 
• S3 Explorer – Zerto’s engineers have also found the S3 explorer extremely useful, as it provided them with a unified view of all S3 buckets in all of their associated AWS accounts, and allowed them to discover and delete idle buckets and resolve any potential security risks such as buckets publicly open. 

Since the initial implementation of Zesty, approx 8 months ago, Zerto was able to slash their EC2 costs by 40%.

Besides the significant cost savings, Zerto’s engineers were relieved from manually calculating RI’s and have therefore saved hundreds of man-hours, knowing that Zesty has got them covered 24/7.