How mobile tech company Sliide drives major cloud savings with DoiT
Meet Sliide
Founded in 2013, Sliide is a suite of mobile products and services that help companies get more from the mobile economy. Sliide helps mobile operators and OEMs build, integrate and monetize rich content experiences, anywhere on the device. Its suite of mobile apps empower millions of users to unlock their essential device, and enable mobile carriers, handset manufacturers and app developers to engage, retain and maximize the value of their users.
Sliide seamlessly connects carriers and customers by building the next generation of carrier experiences via highly personalized, compelling content through a delightful on-device experience that engages users and drives strategic value for partners. Covering over 50% of the new Android devices, they have become the default partner for Telcos in the US for providing on-device news and content experience.
The Challenge
Sliide needed better visibility of its costs using both AWS and Google Cloud infrastructure, as Jay Rawal, Head of DevOps at Sliide, explains: “As any startup, we started off with a few 100 devices, but we’re now up to many millions of devices. In the beginning, your main focus was winning clients, getting those users, and signing those contracts just to make sure you have the distribution in place. But as we’ve grown the challenges have shifted to a technical perspective, visibility of cost in the cloud, scalability, and resiliency.”
Sliide was experiencing a common problem of visibility gaps driving costs quickly as its business scaled. It needed a single, shared, real-time view over its resource usage and associated costs to prioritize and optimize. Sliide’s multicloud approach, using both AWS and Google Cloud, adds material operational complexity to its operations. While driven by necessity, this setup made governed cost management and optimization significantly more challenging.
“We are distributed across Google Cloud and AWS, and having a kind of unified view across both cloud providers is difficult, but we want to be able to have a look at both of the costs, analyze them, get insights out of it, without having the faff.”
This lack of visibility slowed test-and-validate cycles for ideas and Proff of Concepts (POCs), making it harder for engineering teams to move quickly. To succeed, Sliide needed explainable, real-time visibility over its cloud resources and to model associated costs up front.
The Solution
Sliide partnered with DoiT beginning in 2022 to provide cost optimization and technical support. Before working with DoiT, Sliide’s small DevOps team manually managed cloud costs and infrastructure. With limited internal resources, the company relied on in-house monitoring and ad hoc optimizations, which were time-consuming and inefficient.
DoiT provided Sliide with DoiT Cloud Intelligence™, giving the team a single, shared, real-time view of cloud costs across AWS and Google Cloud, including real-time monitoring, scheduled reporting, and Real-Time Anomaly Detection.
Real-Time Anomaly Detection automatically identifies unexpected spikes or irregularities in cloud usage, allowing the DevOps team to act proactively before costs spiral. Instead of relying on manual monitoring, Sliide benefits from actionable insights driven by a blend of advanced technology and human expertise, minimizing wasted spend and improving financial predictability across its multicloud environments.
DoiT also implemented automated compute spend management with Flexsave for Compute, delivering commitment-free savings without engineering changes. “Flexsave for Compute is amazing,” says Jay. “because without doing anything, you can start seeing discounts on usage costs.”
Sliide’s DevOps team is small, so as part of DoiT’s consultative support, it has on-demand expert guidance for technical validation and strategy reviews to improve its cloud architecture. This was especially useful in the first few months of DoiT’s work with Sliide, with a focus on infrastructure and validating the thinking that underpinned Sliide’s engineering practices.
Finally, DoiT helped Sliide implement governance guardrails for its multicloud environment, including structured resource management policies and ongoing support by DoiT’s Cloud Reliability Engineering (CRE) team.
The Results
“I think we’ve saved a lot of money over the years, over $200,000 in Flexsave for Compute without doing any optimizations or any work at all,” says Jay.
One aspect of DoiT’s service that impressed Jay and his team was the seamless, rapid onboarding: “Usually when you’re trying to integrate a tool that’s going to give you a lot of insights and access to support and everything, you would expect the onboarding period to take a long time,” he says. “Onboarding with DoiT was surprisingly quick, I was on a call with an engineer and the account manager. I was ready to run scripts and go through lengthy integration docs. Instead they told me to log into the root account, accept an invite from the DoiT billing account and that’s all! I think it was a Friday and we were done in 10-15 minutes. It was seamless!”
The single, shared visibility across AWS and Google Cloud gave the team at Sliide the clarity they needed to make informed, predictable, unit-economics-driven decisions. That savings amounts to nearly 15% cost reduction over two years, improving budget predictability. As well, DoiT’s strategic guidance on emerging technologies, including AI, aligns investment with market trends and helps maintain Sliide’s competitive edge in the mobile app space.
Ultimately, Sliide’s DevOps team has reclaimed engineering hours by offloading cloud management labor to DoiT’s experts, focusing on higher-priority tasks like product research and development. Jay contrasts this with the company’s previous experience with cloud management partners.
What's Next?
Jay underlines how DoiT’s support gives Sliide additional leverage to negotiate and close new commercial deals with major cloud providers, supporting confident scale.
“With DoiT, I don’t have to chase down account managers for Google Cloud or AWS, even though we have great relationships with them, things are just simpler with a single account manager on the DoiT side. If you’re a startup like us, whose spend is not as large as other medium to large organizations, but when it comes to commercial deals, it’s all about who you know and how big of a fish you are. With DoiT on our side, suddenly there’s a sweet deal with multi-year contracts.”