Pinecone uses Flexsave for Compute to control AWS and Google Cloud compute spend
Meet Pinecone
For a compute-heavy vector database like Pinecone, Flexsave for Compute’s compute discounts are vital to its multicloud architecture strategy.
Pinecone is a vector database built specifically for developers and designed to make it easy for engineers to build fast, scalable vector search into their cloud applications through an API. This gives their customers’ applications superior search capability while also meeting performance and cost goals.
The challenge
As a vector database, Pinecone fields hundreds of millions of compute-intensive searches daily. In fact, compute resource needs account for over 90% of its cloud usage in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud environments.
Additionally, as an early-stage startup that is still growing rapidly, it must be especially mindful of its cloud costs to ensure that its financials are sound and optimized. However, its primary method of managing costs has been to secure discounts through long-term commitments – commitments that are nearly impossible to forecast due to the scale of monthly usage growth.
The company’s compute usage depends almost entirely on the number of customers it has and the volume of searches those customers run. This dynamic usage makes it very difficult to predict the amount of compute they will need from month to month; in 2022 alone, Pinecone’s compute needs have increased roughly tenfold. Given those challenges, it needed an automated management solution that could ensure discounted compute spend without demanding too much effort from the Pinecone operations team.
The solution
The Pinecone leadership team found it easy to enable Flexsave for Compute and started receiving 1-year commitment discounts on all of their on-demand AWS compute workloads. Flexsave for Compute allows Pinecone to scale up or down compute instances as required. The company no longer needs to waste time and money making risky forecasts of the commitments it may need to support its rapid growth.
Pinecone now saves 25-35% percent each month on its on-demand workloads across its Google Cloud and AWS environments. Perhaps more importantly, it does so while providing the flexibility the company needs to both service its customers and spin up new instances in development environments, as it continues to enhance its product offering.
Pinecone leverages the full DoiT technology portfolio. This includes a single view of the analytics of their multicloud environment, which saves time and makes it easy to contextualize the company’s cloud spend, as well as cost anomaly detection to ensure that they don’t have any unexpected cost spikes on their monthly cloud bill.
The result
- 25% savings on Pinecone’s AWS on-demand EC2 costs
- 34% savings on Google Cloud on-demand Google Compute Engine workloads
- Increased flexibility to add new workloads as needed while still able to optimize on-demand compute spend