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Phenix cuts AWS compute costs 26%

Flexsave for Compute delivers Savings Plan-level discounts with zero commitments, freeing the DevOps team to build instead of manage rates.

Meet Phenix

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.

The Challenge

Phenix's small DevOps team faced a difficult choice between saving money on AWS infrastructure and focusing on engineering work. Managing Reserved Instances or Savings Plans would detract from their ability to build and scale their platform. The challenge would worsen as they expanded to new countries, with more time needed for infrastructure management and risk of underutilization penalties.

The Solution

DoiT International provided Flexsave for Compute, which delivers savings equivalent to a 1-year Savings Plan without commitments or management overhead. The solution runs entirely in the background with no maintenance needed from the Phenix DevOps team. After enabling it in July 2021, they haven't needed to make any adjustments.

Results

Realizes benefits of Reserved Instances and Savings Plans without signing a commitment
Enjoys 26% savings on on-demand AWS usage since enabling Flexsave for Compute
DevOps team spends time building and optimizing platform instead of managing usage rates

All the time needed to manage cloud compute costs is time that could be spent doing other things. Without Flexsave for Compute, we probably wouldn't be able to use Reserved Instances at all; now we can get the savings benefits with almost no effort whatsoever. We just turned it on and were able to forget about it, which allows us to focus on building out the other functionalities within the Phenix platform.
Kyâne Pichou, DevOps Team Lead, Phenix

The Infrastructure Challenge

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 Cost Management Dilemma

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.

Flexsave for Compute Solution

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 for Compute, which provides the savings equivalent of a 1-year Savings Plan, thereby empowering Phenix to take advantage of AWS discounts that would otherwise have been unattainable for them.

Automated Savings Without Management

In addition to generating significant savings for Phenix, Flexsave for Compute 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 for Compute runs on autopilot and the savings appear on Phenix's AWS bill each month.

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What they say

Partnership with DoiT is extremely significant. We've been able to grow significantly over the last year, mostly because we could reinvest our resources in new technologies instead of new internal resources.

Jason Hartin, CTO

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Attribute™'s platform is truly unique. We now have crystal-clear visibility into our cloud spend at the workload and tenant level, and that insight has already led to actionable savings and powerful insights as we further scale our service.

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