Cutting Cloud Costs: How GlenFlow Achieved a 30% Reduction on AWS Expenses

NIX helped GlenFlow reduce AWS costs by 30% through resource optimization. Learn how this holistic approach allowed to strike the optimal balance between cost, performance, security, and compliance.

Business Domain

Internet Services and Computer Software
Service

Cloud Services
Technologies

AWS

Business Overview

GlenFlow is a consulting and project delivery organization in the field of information technology that provides solutions for multiple industries and verticals—ranging from insurance and healthcare to entertainment and social media.

The company provides services to dozens of clients—from local startups to global S&P organizations, and is dedicated to providing quality service and exceptional product support.

GlenFlow sought the expertise of a seasoned technology partner to optimize their allocation of cloud infrastructure resources and minimize expenses related to their deployments in the healthcare vertical.

NIX was chosen to devise and execute novel strategies, techniques, and systems to enable GlenFlow to offer more effective and dependable solutions to its clients.

Challenge

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a mature cloud platform, but deploying a range of solutions can still pose numerous challenges. GlenFlow encountered several difficulties during deployment, but the most demanding ones were:

Performance

Client solutions may necessitate significant processing power or memory usage, both of which must be readily available in the cloud environment. It’s essential for organizations to ensure that their cloud systems can meet the necessary performance requirements.

Cost

Deploying complex solutions to the cloud can come at a considerable expense, especially for large and intricate systems. Therefore, it’s essential for organizations to carefully assess the cost implications of deploying their solutions to the cloud—considering expenses for hardware, software, and maintenance, along with any additional expenses for services such as bandwidth and storage.

Solution

GlenFlow opted for AWS as their primary platform to tackle intricate problems and implement solutions as AWS is a prominent cloud solution provider that offers versatile tools and widespread, easy availability globally.

After a thorough audit of the existing practices and infrastructure, the NIX team incorporated the following techniques and tools as mandatory aspects for brand-new or existing GlenFlow solutions:

01 Reserved Instances (RIs)
02 Auto-scaling
03 Serverless Computing Usage
04 Monitoring and Alerting

01
Reserved Instances (RIs)

This is a low-cost way to reserve capacity in the AWS cloud for one to three years. When compared to on-demand pricing, RIs offer significant cost savings, making them an appealing option for GlenFlow with steady-state workloads.
02
Auto-scaling

Auto-scaling enables the automatic scaling of resources based on workload demand. This helped GlenFlow improve efficiency by ensuring that resources are available when needed and reducing costs by automatically scaling down when demand decreases.
03
Serverless Computing Usage

AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service that removes the burden of managing and provisioning servers, enabling developers to concentrate on code creation. The NIX team adopted this approach as a key shift in the future development to improve performance and cut costs, as users are only charged for the computing time utilized.
04
Monitoring and Alerting

AWS CloudWatch and CloudTrail provide comprehensive monitoring and alerting capabilities for infrastructure, allowing for real-time identification of performance issues and potential cost overruns.

Outcome

NIX’s holistic approach resulted in optimizing GlenFlow’s med-tech environments by combining technical and organizational solutions with the adoption of best practices to strike the optimal balance between cost, performance, security, and compliance.

Reduced costs: We reduced cloud costs by 30 percent by implementing cost optimization best practices, properly sizing resources, utilizing reserved instances, and utilizing autoscaling and serverless computing. Consequently, GlenFlow has achieved higher profit margins while also experiencing lower operating costs.
Improved performance: Leveraging auto-scaling and serverless computing allowed to improve application performance and availability. This resulted in better customer experience, increased customer satisfaction, and higher revenue.
Better resource utilization: The resources are used more efficiently, reducing waste and maximizing the value of GlenFlow’s investment in the AWS cloud.