Maximizing Efficiency: How DoiT Transformed Starchive’s Cloud Spend Management with AWS
Meet Starchive
Starchive is a digital asset management platform designed for today’s creators. Its mission is to make it easy for creators to access, use, and build on their work. With over a decade of experience, including archiving Bob Dylan’s catalog, Starchive offers a system that mirrors an artist’s mind, allowing for seamless storage and organization of digital assets. Key features include advanced search, access control, version control, and Web3 integration, making it a crucial tool for commercial, cultural, and community creators.
The Challenge
As Starchive’s user base grew, so did its cloud spend, increasing the urgency to link spend to value and unit economics. The digital media company, known for its comprehensive asset management solutions, found its cloud costs escalating quickly, outpacing existing budgeting guardrails. The introduction of AI-assisted functionalities and image recognition capabilities compounded this surge, while raising the bar on performance and governance expectations. Without a clear strategy to track and manage these costs, Starchive faced significant operational inefficiencies due to missing allocations, guardrails, and near real-time visibility. The lack of insight into cloud expenditure made budgeting and forecasting increasingly challenging, obscuring unit economics and undermining confidence to scale on AWS.
The Solution
DoiT initiated its engagement with Starchive by conducting a thorough governed optimization review of its AWS workload. This review encompassed various dimensions such as account, resource type, and cost categories. Leveraging Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Compute Optimizer data, DoiT identified opportunities to downsize and de-provision underutilized resources, immediately reducing costs.
DoiT implemented Flexsave for Compute to enhance further savings, automatically optimizing cloud resource costs. Recognizing the need for better cost tracking, DoiT introduced a comprehensive tagging strategy to enable allocations-grade reporting and unit economics. The new tagging involved updating Starchive’s Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to include tags for dynamically created resources such as AWS Lambda and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) tasks. The teams at DoiT and Starchive manually tagged static resources using AWS Tag Editor, closing gaps for complete coverage.
Finally, Starchive enforced tag policies at the organizational level, ensuring consistent usage across the board and preventing untagged spend from reaching production. This strategy allowed Starchive to conduct detailed cost analyses, enabling it to derive critical Unit Economics metrics. Consequently, Starchive gained the ability to perform more accurate budgeting, forecasting, and planning, restoring confidence to scale AI workloads on AWS.
The Results
Starchive saw substantial financial and operational benefits following the implementation of DoiT’s solutions. Through cost optimization and using Flexsave for Compute, Starchive realized 32% annual savings on cloud spend. More importantly, the detailed tagging and cost analysis introduced by DoiT’s experts enabled Starchive to model their business margins accurately, providing insights into the cost of production and service delivery. This newfound clarity facilitated improved budgeting and strategic planning, ensuring better allocation of resources and investment in critical areas, and strengthened confidence to scale AI features on AWS.