Onedot began working with DoiT in the spring of 2023 by explaining its current architecture and challenges.

DoiT then embarked on a two-pronged service approach. For one, DoiT took Onedot through an AWS Well-Architected Review to identify opportunities to align Onedot’s workloads and architecture to AWS best practices.

The second part of the service engagement focused on optimizing resource usage to reduce cloud costs. These optimization opportunities centered around three key areas:

Automating AWS instance capacity with Flexsave
The first step Onedot took to optimize its cloud spend was to implement DoiT Flexsave, automating the management of its AWS Savings Plans coverage to continually make the most of its AWS commitment-based discounts. This gives Onedot the freedom to increase or decrease its cloud usage as needed, without incurring huge bills, or having to spend time continually adjusting its commitments.

Continually refining infrastructure
Onedot has also begun using the DoiT console for reporting on its AWS cloud usage, working with DoiT consultants to set up automated alerts for unexpected patterns of usage that are likely to incur higher costs. Armed with the insights provided by the DoiT console, Widmer and his team then worked with the DoiT consultants to analyze certain spending, and how they might refine Onedot’s AWS infrastructure to reduce costs.

Getting the big decisions right
A key discussion surfaced from Onedot’s use of Apache Spark on EMR, investigating whether Onedot could reduce its cloud expenditure by managing its own Kubernetes cluster and running Spark on that instead. Working with the DoiT team, Onedot examined in depth the relative costs of the various system permutations, and ultimately decided that using EKS – the managed Kubernetes service from AWS – would be more cost effective than either EMR or running its own Kubernetes cluster.

“This whole balancing of costs versus savings, and the pros and cons of various infrastructure, is the kind of thing that DoiT helps us with,” says Widmer. “We’re not beginners with AWS, so we’re definitely challenging DoiT with our requirements, and they help us come up with advanced solutions on an architectural level.”