ablefy: Breaking the bottleneck to give entrepreneurs a faster path to success
Meet ablefy
ablefy is the all-in-one platform for digital growth, enabling more than 68,000 entrepreneurs to create online courses, member areas, e-ticketing, and digital payment interfaces. Founded in Germany in 2017, and securing Series A funding four years later, ablefy has grown to a team of 200 employees. It is now scaling up and expanding internationally as it empowers global entrepreneurs to monetize their digital offerings.
The Challenge
ablefy has grown rapidly since launching in 2017. Like many startups, the company spent its early years refining its business proposition, and its Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure gave it the flexibility to evolve its strategy. In 2021, ablefy secured Series A funding, accelerating growth and expanding into international markets.
With more than 68,000 entrepreneurs relying on ablefy to monetize digital productsโand millions of end customers purchasing and consuming its contentโthe company must provide a fast, stable platform with consistent Service Level Objectives (SLOs) across regions. However, rapid growth meant its cloud infrastructure had been assembled quickly, creating challenges around performance and cost predictability.
โStartups want to go to market before the competition, and the rush and โhackathon-styleโ solutions can lead to technical debt. Likewise, trying out different approaches can result in overly complex systems. All of this can slow down the application.โ
โ Alex Ischenko, VP of Engineering at ablefy
This was particularly true of ablefyโs Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), a core component of the companyโs platform. ablefy was experiencing response-time challenges that impacted page load speeds and put customer-facing SLOs at risk. This created a bottleneck for further scaling. At the same time, Amazon RDS had become one of the largest cost drivers, with uneven unit economics.
Alex recognized it was time to simplify the companyโs infrastructure, address accumulated technical debt, and build more efficient systemsโwhile improving cost predictability and long-term unit economics.
The Solution
ablefy initially worked with AWS to address its RDS challenges. Then, after recognizing the specificity of the issue and the intensive consultation it required to solve it quickly, ablefy turned to DoiT. After comparing DoiT to a number of alternatives, Alex was convinced that DoiT was the sparring partner he needed to help ablefy optimize its infrastructure and scale confidently with better performance and unit economics.
Alex was particularly impressed with how DoiT hit the ground running.
โIt was very fast, which is rare for such a big company. From the very start, the DoiT team was providing valuable advice to reduce our cloud costs and improve performance.โ
โ Alex
A faster database service, a smaller cloud bill
Prior to working with DoiT, ablefy had made some improvements to its RDS performance by reconfiguring the database to use a larger instance that could handle more storage. While this had bought ablefy some time until the underlying issues were resolved, it had also resulted in higher costs.
Cloud Reliability Engineers (CREs) worked with ablefy to address the underlying architectural causes of the RDS performance issues, with dedicated CRE Pol Alzina being allocated to support the company in reviews and implementations. Alzina recommended changing the instance type to one that could handle more input/output operations per second (IOPS) to relieve contention without code changes. He also advised changing the storage layer to a more cost-efficient type, resulting in a ~90% reduction in RDS costs while maintaining performance and reliability targets.
โDoiT helped us change our RDS configuration to strike the right balance of performance and price. Now weโre working together to develop the architecture further, improve the database performance even more, lower the response time, and provide the best service to our customers.โ
โ Alex
Among these additional architectural changes is the introduction of a caching layer to handle certain data requests, freeing up RDS for other tasks and helping to reduce page load speeds for the end consumer.
Gaining control of cloud expenditure with DoiT Console
ablefy is making significant progress in reducing its overall cloud expenditure with the help of DoiT Console. Alexโs engineering team uses Cloud Analytics daily to gain insights into its cloud architecture, allocate costs to specific operations and workloads, and improve cloud governance through Real-Time Anomaly Detection. With regular consultations with the DoiT team and an open messaging channel, ablefy works with DoiT to understand where expenditure can be reduced without sacrificing performance.
โI really appreciate DoiTโs open culture. The team is always available to provide support, and the open messaging channel gives us direct access to their expertise. It makes a change from most other companies that use support tickets and keep you waiting.โ
โ Alex
ablefy also uses DoiT Flexsave for Compute to save on its compute spend by automatically identifying and applying discounted rates to EC2 workloads not already covered by commitments. This helps to reduce the companyโs cloud spend while saving time manually searching for the best available rates, allowing the team to focus resources on growing the business instead.
Building the right infrastructure for global expansion
ablefy is now working with DoiT to design its architecture to best support its plans to scale globally. This includes a decision to use Amazon CloudFront as its content delivery network, helping deliver content quickly and efficiently. This will allow ablefy to provide a better user experience in international markets while optimizing data transfer and egress costs.
The Results
65% reduction in RDS database costs
After reconfiguring its Amazon RDS database, ablefy saved thousands of dollars per monthโequating to an approximate 65% reduction in monthly RDS expenditure.
Up to 10ร faster load speeds through database optimization
After working with DoiT to redesign its Amazon RDS system, ablefy reduced latency and improved response times, resulting in page load speeds up to 10ร faster while maintaining SLO targets.
The improved customer experience led to a marked increase in ablefyโs customer satisfaction score, along with positive feedback from stakeholders. This performance improvement has also helped attract new customers to the platform.
Building a FinOps culture for efficient cloud resourcing
Working with DoiT has helped ablefy embed FinOps governance practices, ensuring spend efficiency and predictable unit economics.
โDoiT has helped bring a financial optimization culture into our business. We are starting to look more closely at our bills and resource allocation to ensure we are always saving where we can.โ
โ Alex Ischenko, VP of Engineering at ablefy
14% savings on EC2 instances with Flexsave for Compute
With Flexsave for Computeโข automatically applying discounted rates to its Amazon EC2 workloads, ablefy has saved approximately 14% on compute costsโwithout commitments or additional engineering overhead.
These savings, along with broader infrastructure efficiencies achieved with DoiTโs support, allow ablefy to reinvest in growth initiatives such as hiring, investing in new tools, and expanding marketing campaigns.
What's Next?
As ablefy continues working with DoiT to refine its architecture and support global expansion, the two teams are introducing governed AI services with clear cost guardrails.
This includes plans to use machine learning for fraud detection and to develop a governed proof of concept for generative AI content, with full cost visibility in DoiT Cloud Intelligenceโข.
Through initiatives like these, DoiTโs expertise is helping ablefy maintain a stable, scalable platform while delivering a smooth customer experienceโpositioning the company for sustainable long-term growth.