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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

What I really like about DoiT's approach is that you're very hands-on and proactive. Satyam would ping me a few times a sprint, letting me know about the most current features, checking in on how things are going. When we are going through a peak time, that proactiveness makes a real difference. Satyam always comes through whenever we need support and helps us leverage the right experts to get us where we need to be.

Chiamaka Ibeme, Engineering Manager, Platform

SELECT has made important cost data readily accessible. I will often pull it up during engineering design reviews so we can quickly evaluate cost impact and projections and factor that into our design decisions.

Douglas Zickuhr, Senior Data Platform Engineer at Personio

I love clicking through SELECT to understand how our environment and workloads are evolving. I probably check it every day. It's coffee and SELECT for me every morning.

Ian Fahey, Senior Analytics Engineer at Loop

You guys have the best UI experience that I've had of any software. It's like you just read my mind where, like, oh, I wish I could click there. Oh, I can

Diana Koshy, Sr. Director of Data Engineering at Kargo

SELECT feels like exactly what Paul and I would have built if we had locked ourselves in a room for 18 months to create our ideal monitoring solution.

Devin McGee, Data Engineering Lead at Home Chef

SELECT dramatically lowers the cognitive load to understanding Snowflake costs. I'm able to sit there and easily understand what's driving the cost. Not to blow smoke up your ass, but it's just so easy to do in your platform

Blake Baggett, Head of Data Operations at Entain

One of the most helpful cost rituals we've setup from SELECT is the weekly spend digest sent to Slack. I can start high level and ensure things are in check. If not, I can very quickly drill down into specific workloads which may have driven the cost spike and remediate them before they become a bigger issue.

Michael Revelo, Manager of data and analytics engineering at ClickUp

Through SELECT's automated savings feature and deep cost visibility, we were able to instantly lower our Snowflake spend by over 40% and achieve a 20X ROI on our SELECT investment.

Skyler Chi, SVP, GTM Productivity & Excellence at Exiger

Our costs had jumped up 3X as we scaled, so we're talking about 60% savings in Snowflake spend after adopting SELECT.

Edward Mancey, GTM Lead at Synthesia

DoiT was a true partner, not a vendor. They helped us understand the problem, refine the vision, and build something production-ready far faster than we could have on our own. Their expertise, responsiveness, and commitment made all the difference.

Dr. Anish Kapur, Founder & CEO, Promptly

DoiT's Customer Success and Forward Deployed Engineering teams work very closely with us. The regular sessions with our CSM keep us focused on the right priorities, and the FDEs provide the deep technical guidance we need to validate decisions and optimize our environment. That combination has been genuinely valuable for us.

Alexander Lundberg Santos, Platform Engineer at Extenda Retail

Every customer has unique usage patterns. Manual resource optimization simply didn't scale—we needed automation to ensure every customer, regardless of size, had right-sized infrastructure without consuming our team's capacity.

Brad Quinn, Lead Platform Engineer, PlayHQ

SNCF

PerfectScale allowed us to grow capacity without growing cost. We effectively absorbed 30% more usage for free.

Thomas Comtet, Senior Staff Engineer, SNCF

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