Successes

Managed Services Rightsizing and Scheduled Cadences

bluesentrycloud / May 21, 2021

The Challenge

This fund management firm creates and maintains customized customer data platforms which allow clients to dive deep into the data they create every day. By aggregating customer data from disparate sources and applying warehousing and data science techniques, They apply a predictive model that gives its customers unique insights into consumer behavior. This Fund management firm previously depended on developers to spin up and maintain large-scale data warehousing environments for its customers — a methodology that, due to the global nature of their business model, resulted in scattered resources across multiple regions with no clear picture of what was in use and what was absolutely needed.

The Solution

This fund management firm called upon Blue Sentry — a certified Managed Service Provider with AWS — as a means of right-sizing its resources. With deep AWS capabilities and experience, Blue Sentry deploys the latest techniques, tools, and processes to help its customers maintain a best-practices posture for security, compliance, performance, and cost optimization. Blue Sentry’s Infrastructure as Code (IaC) method supports a repository of pre-written modules in Terraform that allows the company to quickly spin up solutions for customers. Using a combination of configured native AWS and third-party services, Blue Sentry observes customer’s environments for all of the above best practice pillars. Blue Sentry also leverages a monthly cadence with its clients to review and analyze customer environments, and, if necessary, suggesting ways that clients can improve functionality, security, and cost in the customer environment.

The Benefit

After configuring tools and processes to alert and report on their environment, Blue Sentry engineers were able to suggest several areas of improvement — chiefly, the right-sizing of resources. Blue Sentry discovered, through a combination of custom AWS Config rules as well as third-party reporting, that two PIOPS volumes with sizes of 400GB and 500GB existed with very high IOPS. The 400GB volume was assigned to 20000 IOPS while the 500GB volume was assigned 25000 IOPS along with four more volumes attached to the instance and configured as GP2 volumes. Our analysis also uncovered a way that they could convert other resources to GP2, realizing total annual savings of $40,000. By bringing Blue Sentry into the fold and relying on its tools and expertise, they were able to cut their monthly spend from around $220,000/month to around $180,000/month after a single cadence call and review with our team.