Cloud Cost Optimization Through Nearshore Teams


Cloud adoption is no longer a luxury but an all-important necessity for any business looking to stay afloat the digital innovation wave.
In fact, the public cloud market worldwide is forecast to grow 17% in 2020 to total $266.4 billion, according to Gartner, Inc., with Software as a service (SaaS) remaining the largest segment. 

Many businesses have jumped on the innovation bandwagon and have adopted a cloud-first strategy, but still some are struggling to reap the benefits of moving the bulk of their legacy systems to the cloud. Simply carrying a migration doest not guarantee yielding the benefits that cloud computing can provide. In fact, when not done correctly, that approach can result in IT infrastructures that are more costly than before. Obtaining the full value of cloud technology comes from approaching this option as part of a holistic digital transformation strategy, including having the right team with the right capabilities and mindset in place. 

This case study is one example of the importance of managing and leveraging cloud investments in order to truly secure its' cost-saving benefits. Our goal was to improve and better allocate our client's Amazon Cloud Services. 

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About The Company

The iTexico client partner is a nonpartisan not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping the U.S. business community actively participate in the public policy process and increase its political effectiveness through voter education.

 

Business Challenge

The client had over 20 underutilized Amazon Web Services (AWS) virtual machines and databases as a result of a cloud project being implemented by an inexperienced team. iTexico’s client was locked into a high fixed cost for a monthly service they weren’t using and determined it needed an experienced partner to perform a complete Cloud optimization assessment and right-sizing of the AWS Cloud services to lower costs.


What is a Virtual Machine?

A virtual machine or VM is a virtual computer file or environment that works and behaves like an actual computer. It has its own physical hardware system, called the host, comprised by CPU, memory, network interface, and storage. The virtual hardware is mapped to the real hardware of the physical computer which helps save costs by reducing the need of additional physical hardware systems and the associated maintenance costs that go with it. Multiple VMs can exist on a single piece of hardware, like a server. 

In simpler words, it’s creating a computer within another computer, running in a window, providing the same experience as the host operating system itself. 

The virtual machine is isolated or sandboxed from the rest of the system, so its software cannot tamper with the computer itself. VMs can be moved between host servers as needed to utilize resources more efficiently.  

Virtual machines provide a positive environment for installing and running multiple operating systems at the same time, testing them in creative ways, creating backups, accessing virus-infected data; all without affecting the host machine. 

This technology can provide time and cost saving benefits for organizations, by allowing mobile work forces and virtual work environments.  

 

What Are Cloud Databases?

A cloud database is a database built and accessed through the cloud, providing the added benefits of cloud computing: pay-as-you-go system, flexibility, accessibility, scalability as needed, and disaster recovery. AWS continuously monitor their database services to ensure workloads are up and running with self-healing storage and automated scaling.

 



What We Did

An iTexico Subject Matter Expert (SME) and Delivery Owner assessed the AWS Cloud infrastructure to determine which Cloud services could potentially be reallocated, optimized more efficiently and cost-effectively. iTexico recommended AWS Lambda, a highly dynamic and scalable serverless computing platform with a pay-as-you-go and use service model.

iTexico implemented the following:

  • Database migration from on premise servers to Amazon RDS.
  • The static files from legacy servers were moved to Amazon S3.
  • Every shared server for the VM's was moved to Amazon EC2.




Benefits of AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is Amazon’s serverless computing service allowing you to run code without server management, and scaling automatically depending on workloads. You pay only for the compute time that is consumed, meaning there is no billing when your code’s not running. 


Benefits of Amazon S3

Amazon S3 is a storage service that can be accessed over the internet, allowing to keep and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. This service actually uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its global e-commerce network, and guarantees 99.9% uptime. 

 

How We Did It

During a 6-week period, an iTexico team ran the assessment, provided cost and effort analysis, created the script and serverless architecture, and migrated applications within Amazon. Every step of the process was planned to be executed based on the client’s best timeframe. 

The iTexico team consisted of an AWS Certified Solutions Architect and a Tech Lead, with Full Stack JavaScript as their tech stack.

 



Business Impact

After the Cloud optimization, the business benefits for the iTexico partner include:

  • A 65% labor cost reduction
  • A 45% Cloud resource reduction
  • A 75% monthly support ticket reduction

Following this Cloud optimization, our client was able to improve their overall customer experience by prioritizing new feature development while having a stable and reliable Cloud platform for the development and deployment of their services.

 

 

Wrapping Up

Running applications and workloads on the cloud is easy. Doing so in a cost-efficient manner can be considerably more challenging. 

Cloud computing has become a significant promoter of the current digital economy by enabling organizations to innovate, operate and deliver more promptly and efficiently. Nonetheless, as with any investment, you’ve got to make sure you continually manage your cloud services to optimize its financial performance.

Organizations can benefit greatly from running applications on the cloud, with advantages ranging from cost reduction by using pay-as-you-go billing facilities, quicker time-to-market, increased scalability, reliability and business mobility. As companies’ needs evolve with more processes in place in order to automate operations, leveraging cloud computing services proves a great solution for businesses of any size.

If you wish to know more about Nearshore+ cloud optimization and how to ensure efficient cloud usage, feel free to reach out to us.

Confused about your AWS purchase? Contact us and right-size the value and effectiveness of your AWS investment. iTexico's Cloud Innovation Center helps you manage and leverage your current investments and resources in the cloud.  

 

Service Reference

Amazon RDS (Amazon Relational Database Service), it supports 6 different relational database engines MySql, Postgresql, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Amazon Aurora and MariaDB. The main purpose of this service is to manage relational databases and it provides features like, automatic backups, vertical and horizontal scalability, database encryption, etc. https://aws.amazon.com/rds/

Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service), this service allows you to store any kind of file and serve it to your users. It can be used to store your web application files and in combination with Amazon CloudFront you can distribute the content around the world with very low latency. https://aws.amazon.com/s3/

Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing), with this service you can create cloud server instances. It allows you to create Linux or Microsoft OS instances. Also it allows you to scale your web application as you need. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/


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