CattleEye has been familiar with DoiT International since they launched their first version of the livestock monitoring platform. Given this history, McFarland knew he could leverage DoiT’s zero-cost consulting and cloud management technologies to reduce compute costs and complete their Foundational Technical Review.

First, CattleEye turned to DoiT Spot Scaling, which manages the instance composition of their Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) so they could better adopt Spot instances. Initially relying solely on on-demand instances, now their batch processing runs 100% on Spot instances – and CattleEye is saving big as a result. 

“We use Spot Scaling for running our batch processing, and we’ve saved between 50% – 60% compared to on-demand by benefiting from Spot Scaling’s instance recommendations.”

With costs better managed, McFarland set out to help his internal stakeholders to better understand and visualize their cloud costs. For this, he leveraged DoiT’s Cloud Analytics Reports and Attributions. Using Attributions, CattleEye grouped cloud resource costs into “buckets” that represented different cost centers (production, dev, data science, etc.). With these “buckets”, they could build reports and use them as a Grafana data source to unify cloud and observability costs in a single dashboard. Finally, internal stakeholders had a view and understanding of the costs of their work!

Finally, McFarland was ready to put these new reports and insights into practice. Like many engineering leads, however, he had a small team that was already focused on developing and supporting their own products. Instead of leaning on his own in-house engineers, McFarland and CattleEye were able to leverage DoiT’s Senior Solutions Architects to prepare for their Foundational Technical Review (FTR). Together, McFarland and the DoiT team underwent a Well-Architected Review to validate some architecture decisions made ahead of the FTR.

“DoiT’s Solutions Architects have been an invaluable resource, particularly in helping us navigate and prepare for the AWS Foundation Technical Review. We are a start-up with a small team, so DoiT’s inside knowledge of the processes allowed us to focus our efforts in the right places. This saves us time and minimizes distractions from building our product.” 

The results have been impactful to this small, growing innovator. CattleEye has expanded its sales channels, secured AWS funding for additional deployments, and added credibility to their product with the “Reviewed by AWS” badge.