Milk Video is a company developing a better video editing tool for marketing and sales teams to turn your webinars, customer interviews, and podcasts into captioned clips for social media in minutes.

The Challenge

Milk Video asked us to recommend ways in which they could reduce their AWS spend that could be implemented quickly and safely in the context of their upcoming plans for the platform.

Although Milk Video was subscribed to a leading cloud cost optimisation and automation platform they were struggling to use it. As the Milk Video engineering team had changed over time the deep technical knowledge of their cloud infra had been fragmented. Actioning the recommendations of a 3rd party tool to make changes to their cloud platform was not something Milk Video felt confident doing.

The Solution

Tech Amigos started work on our “no win, no fee” basis whereby Milk Video pays a percentage of the achieved cost savings. At Tech Amigos we have deep AWS knowledge and extensive experience using tools such as AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Trusted Advisor to recommend and action durable cost savings using approaches like discount instruments (savings plans and reserved instances), right-sizing, suspending workloads and deleting resources no longer in use.

Analysis

Using Cost Explorer, Trusted Advisor and some technical and business context from Milk Video we were able to bring visibility to the cost breakdown of the Milk Video platform across their AWS estate. Visibility is the first step in any cost optimisation effort.

At this stage, we can use any tagging strategy the client may already have in place to provide different slices of the cost breakdown. Similarly, if workloads are running in different AWS accounts (e.g. staging and production) then there is already a natural cost grouping.

We often find that small and scale-up organisations only begin to think about their cloud cost management when their monthly invoice suddenly increases, often when the business starts to grow rapidly. Putting in place an ongoing cost management process is understandably a lower priority when companies are starting and growing but very quickly it can become a critical issue that has to be addressed. How workloads are designed and run can also have a massive impact on cost and this is where some of the sophisticated cloud management tools available on the market may not be the right choice at this stage of the organisation’s growth. This is where Tech Amigos can help you make the right optimisation decisions by considering the bigger picture.

After analyzing Milk we identified several opportunities to reduce their costs.

Plan

We presented Milk with their current cloud cost breakdown and a series of recommendations with a plan for optimisations. Each recommendation was justified based on our analysis and, crucially, taking into account the plans and strategy that Milk Video had for the platform. Each recommendation came with an expected monthly cost saving and rationale.

– Unused Environments

Milk Video was running several non-production environments which were no longer needed. They were incurring fixed costs related to the VPCs, gateways and other resources.

Our recommendation here was simple: safely decommission these environments.

– Auto Scaling Issues

The analysis pointed to the high costs of the compute environments used by AWS Batch. The utilisation patterns looked suspicious when compared to customer activity. After investigation, we could see that the auto-scaling group was not scaling in during quiet periods because a daemon process installed on the nodes was blocking the termination of the node. After re-creating the issue in our environment and checking with the client we recommended the removal of this agent as it was no longer required.

– Unintended AWS Market Place Opening

Our analysis also picked up a substantial monthly subscription to a product installed from AWS Marketplace. As this was rolled into the monthly AWS invoice it was going unnoticed. When quizzed, Milk confirmed this product was no longer in use.
Recommendation: cancel the subscription.

Execute

Milk Video reviewed and agreed with our recommendations and asked Tech Amigos to action them immediately. We worked with Milk to set up an IAM role that we could assume to carry out the work safely and with the minimal privileges needed.

After the first month, Milk Video achieved a saving of 65% on their AWS invoice.

Summary

Effective cloud cost optimisation can be challenging for small and scale-up organisations. Finding the best way to reduce cloud expenditure often requires a nuanced, targeted and bespoke approach and this is where Tech Amigos step in to create specific cost savings strategies that are right for your organisation’s unique situation and cloud architecture to deliver actual reductions in your AWS bill.

There are many different way in which your company can save on cloud costs. Tech Amigos and OptiMigo can help identify and execute the right optimisation strategies for your company. Get in touch at heyamigo@techamigos.co