Candid: Bringing a smile to its cloud infrastructure

Candid searched for a digital partner to govern its cloud spend and align investments to business outcomes, and was impressed with DoiT’s eagerness to reach out and offer insightful advice before the two companies had an official working relationship. DoiT offered Candid an in-depth analysis of immediate efficiencies and long-term engineering benefit, enabling confident scaling with clear guardrails.

Candid also found DoiT’s in-depth knowledge of the cloud landscape useful in helping it develop new ideas and stay up to speed with AWS. “The world of AWS is growing so quickly, it’s hard to keep up. It’s good to have someone we can bounce ideas off. The team is really on top of AWS and they can give us great suggestions on various topics,” says Tony Bussieres, Staff DevOps Engineer at Candid.

DoiT’s expertise convinced the Candid team to adopt Flexsave for Compute and begin working with DoiT to find the savings it needed across the board.

Automated savings with Flexsave for Compute

Candid wanted to identify any savings it could make on its AWS usage. DoiT recommended Flexsave for Compute, which automatically identifies and applies discounted rates to any of Candid’s AWS EC2 workloads not already covered by commitments, freeing engineers from manual tracking. Candid’s small team no longer has to spend hours each week reconfiguring their compute workloads or monitoring their commitments to make sure it is always getting the best available price.

Redesigning storage solutions with CRE expertise

When Candid began working with DoiT, it used a large RDS database to run the application that dentists use to submit patient cases. This was running up considerable costs for the company. After talking with DoiT’s Cloud Reliability Engineers (CRE), the Candid team decided to reduce its RDS container size, significantly reducing the spend on its RDS database.

The DoiT CREs also helped Candid manage its Amazon S3 storage costs. Candid has a huge amount of patient records that it legally cannot delete for 8-10 years. This was creating significant storage costs. DoiT CREs figured out that there was a default setting in Candid’s system that was keeping old versions of files, even though the company only needed to retain the latest one.
“DoiT showed us how to use one tool in AWS to see that data and help us set up a lifecycle policy to remove the old versions,” says Bussieres. “There was no impact on the customers, no impact on the legal side. The CREs helped us reduce our S3 costs with insights that would have been difficult for us to make, because we are a small team.”

Building more efficient cloud infrastructure

Candid then worked with DoiT to optimize its cloud usage, focusing on removing inefficiencies in its infrastructure. DoiT console enabled the Candid team to explore in depth what was happening across its cloud infrastructure, focus on cost reduction, and identify possible savings across the business.

With Cloud Analytics, Candid can now identify rising costs as they happen, as opposed to reviewing them after they’ve been incurred, helping it to quickly identify savings and take action. “I use the dashboard every day, and then I will spend part of the day in the reports. I really like the multiple custom reports and their flexibility,” says Bussieres.

Cutting out cost anomalies

Candid can now also identify cost anomalies in its cloud usage, with the help of DoiT console’s Anomaly Detection feature. This alerts the Candid team to unexpected cost spikes, allowing them to take fast remedial action to help keep costs under control.
“We have spotted several cost anomalies during the past year. There was an instance that cost $1,000 a day just because something was poorly configured. DoiT was quick to help us investigate it, pinpoint the problem, and stop the bleeding,” says Bussieres.

Helping build innovative use cases with AI

When Candid noticed dentists were spending considerable time manually inserting patients’ dental images into their system, Candid used Amazon SageMaker to create an AI-powered tool to select the images automatically which has drastically reduced the time required for case submissions: improving efficiency by reducing 1-5 minutes per case. DoiT worked with the Candid team to help develop the proof of concept and adhere to AWS best practices. DoiT also helped Candid to secure R&D credits from AWS, saving the company thousands of dollars on its SageMaker costs. Moving forward, they will also be able to benefit from Flexsave for Compute in its SageMaker usage as well, using the same type of 1-year commitment discounts that they get on their EC2 workloads.