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Phenix gets the benefits of AWS discounts and saves time to focus on building functionality
Phenix confronts the challenges of food insecurity and food waste through a number of ventures, including a consumer-facing application that offers buyers discounted rates on groceries that would otherwise be discarded by local retailers. With over 15,000 retail partners and 3.5 million users, the app requires significant investment in infrastructure and optimization efforts from Phenix’s DevOps team.
Like many other ecommerce platforms, one of the biggest challenges Phenix faces is ensuring that the inventory listed on their application is always up to date. This requires extensive database functionality, for which they primarily use the AWS Relational Database Service (RDS).
Building that application and scaling it to meet the current demand posed challenges for the small DevOps team at Phenix when it came to availing of AWS discount opportunities. The full-time management of their Reserved Instances or Savings Plans would have detracted from their ability to complete the necessary engineering and operational work, forcing them to choose between saving money and actually growing their products and business.
The challenge would complicate efforts to scale the company and its DevOps capabilities, with the DevOps team devoting even more time to managing Phenix’s growing infrastructure portfolio as it expanded to new countries and built new functionality. Even improvements to their systems would cost them because more backend efficiency would lower their compute and database needs, thereby risking underutilization penalties on any discounts tied to usage commitments.
Understanding these challenges before building their platform enabled the Phenix DevOps team to proactively seek a way to realize infrastructure savings without commitments or labor-intensive usage management. DoiT International provided the solution with Flexsave, which provides the savings equivalent of a 1-year commitment, thereby empowering Phenix to take advantage of AWS discounts that would otherwise have been unattainable for them
In addition to generating significant savings for Phenix, Flexsave runs entirely in the background with no maintenance or management needed from the Phenix DevOps team. After enabling it in July of 2021, they haven’t had to make any adjustments; Flexsave runs on autopilot and the savings appear on Phenix’s AWS bill each month.
