International Toy Manufacturer Reduces Expenses

The Challenge

This Toy Manufacturer has been an Amazon Web Services (AWS) customer since 2009, developing and delivering its core tablet interface, content and shopping experience to kids and their parents worldwide. As demand increased for their flagship tablet, so did the growth of AWS services utilized to support this success. This infrastructure had to be highly elastic and always available to cope with significant traffic spikes and seasonal demand but had grown to over 650 instances by late 2015. The Toy Manufacturing team was challenged to look for immediate savings within their AWS instances in 2016 and turned to Mission for optimization strategies that would allow them to realize significant operating expense (OPEX) reductions while also limiting any potential impact to their core business or to their end consumers. Mission utilized CloudHealth to provide the depth and clarity in order to rationalize potential cost optimization opportunities.

The Solution

Mission was able to work closely with the Toy Manufacturer’s technology team to develop a working plan that allowed the team to iterate towards the savings target. Ultimately, Mission was able to reduce the Toy Manufacturer’s AWS footprint by over 90 instances without any impact on their sites, services or end user experience while also achieving the $37,500/month operating expense saving goal. Key to this strategy was leveraging CloudHealth to provide visibility across the Toy Manufacturer’s entire AWS ecosystem while maximizing cloud efficiency.

On top of achieving this saving target, Mission was able to provide additional OPEX savings which allowed the Toy Manufacturer to purchase AWS business support at no additional budget impact. Overall, this amounted to more than 29% in monthly recurring OPEX savings (invoice reduction) over their legacy AWS invoices.

Working in the AWS cloud gives this Toy Manufacturer the confidence that its business has a solid foundation to grow from while Mission continues to be a critical technology service provider and cost optimization partner in assuring continued day-to-day success within AWS.

Results

• 14% reduction of instances under management (dev / test / prod)
• Overall operating expense reduction of $600K/year
• > 55% of total instances covered by Reserved Instances
• Net reduction in monthly AWS billing by over 35%
• Net addition of AWS Business Support at no additional cost (5% overall savings)
• Continuing to provide Cost Optimization opportunities beyond current state