Challenge:
- A genomics and biotechnology company lost several key members of their Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team due to a workforce reduction.
- With a shift in focus to prioritize different offerings due to a decline in sales in another business unit, the company needed to find operational cost savings.
Solution:
- With AWS as a key part of the company’s operational strategy and spend, it was natural that AWS would be one of the key areas to focus on to drive savings.
- Given that Converge manages the client’s significant AWS contract, our team quickly aligned with them to look for ways to support the SRE team. The immediate focus was on finding ways to increase efficiency of engineers’ use of AWS without hindering their productivity with new processes.
- Weekly review meetings were immediately established between the client, AWS, and Converge teams. During the review, it became apparent that better utilization of spot instances could drive immediate savings, however, driving a consistent spot-first strategy across all engineering teams would be a challenge.
- Like many companies with a “build-your-own” mindset, the client needed the value proposition of any paid solution to be immediately apparent in order to invest. The Converge team felt confident in introducing Spot.io.
Results:
- The company decided to implement Spot.io after demonstrations with the executive, SRE, and engineering teams to identify how to drive operational savings.
- The ease of enabling Spot.io via an AWS Marketplace private offer from Converge (and Spot.io pricing model being a percentage of their savings versus a traditional upfront pricing model) led to a significantly short sales cycle.
