LibraryPass Cloud Infrastructure: Cost Optimization with AWS

Business Overview

LibraryPass is a company with a flagship product, ComicsPlus, that provides global access to tens of thousands of digital comics, graphic novels, and manga titles under a simultaneous access or unlimited use model to students and library patrons.

LibraryPass required a significant upgrade to its overall systems administration, and engaged NIX to take over this function.

Project Scope

Project Scope

NIX initially conducted a full audit and analysis of the launched services and then took the next steps of optimizing the company’s spending on infrastructure by proposing and then implementing more effective solutions.

LibraryPass’s infrastructure expanded in two AWS regions and the company’s key goal was to include the East Asian region to improve the overall user experience for users.

Solution

The NIX team performed an audit of the AWS infrastructure and found outdated services and implementations that hampered system performance and delivery process. To reorganize and/or substitute the legacy components and make the system more scalable, we used AWS services such as Application Load Balancers and Lambda Functions.

These services include resolution of unforeseen challenges, taking an active position in the constant improvement of the infrastructure, and development and planning of current and future systems operations.

Key solution highlights include:

01 Clean-up of the Production Environment
02 Launch of Third AWS East Asian Region

01
Clean-up of the Production Environment

To streamline the production infrastructure, the NIX team undertook a significant cleanup of unused services and artifacts from the active development phase. We successfully eliminated more than 3,000 resources that were remnants of the development process and had no use in the production environment.
02
Launch of Third AWS East Asian Region

As a part of the setup, we established two autoscaling clusters for the API and web autoscaling groups. Amazon RDS was configured in Write-Forwarding replica mode with caching for stored procedures execution. Additionally, a LoadBalancer and two target groups were set up for each auto scaling cluster in this region. Moreover, we created a Memcashed cluster to improve application performance by reducing the number of database queries.

Outcome

NIX’s approach resulted in optimizing LibraryPass’s environments by combining technical solutions and development approaches with the adoption of best practices to strike the optimal usage of resources and services.

Reduced costs: We reduced AWS account expenses by 18 percent by implementing cost optimization best practices, properly sizing resources, and utilizing autoscaling and serverless computing. Additionally, LibraryPass was able to optimize resources, resulting in an additional annual savings of $100,000.
Better resource utilization: By implementing cost optimization and performance best practices, NIX helped LibraryPass improve resource utilization. This resulted in more efficient resource usage, minimizing waste and reducing the need for redundant resources in the AWS cloud.