ablefy is the all-in-one platform for digital growth, enabling more than 68,000 entrepreneurs to create online courses, member areas, e-ticketing, and digital payment interfaces. Founded in Germany in 2017, and securing Series A funding four years later, ablefy has grown to a team of 200 employees. It is now scaling up and expanding internationally as it empowers global entrepreneurs to monetize their digital offerings.
ablefy has grown fast since it launched in 2017. Like most startups, the company spent its early years refining its business proposition, and its Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure gave it flexibility as it honed its business strategy. In 2021, ablefy won Series A funding, which sparked a rapid acceleration in growth and expansion into international markets.
With more than 68,000 entrepreneurs now relying on ablefy to monetize its digital products and millions of end customers buying and consuming its content, ablefy needs to provide a fast, stable platform. However, its rapid growth meant its cloud infrastructure had been assembled quickly, creating challenges around performance and costs.
“Startups want to go to market before the competition, and the rush and ‘hackathon-style’ solutions can lead to technical debt,” explains Alex Ischenko, VP of Engineering at ablefy. “Likewise, trying out different approaches can result in overly complex systems. All of this can slow down the application.”
This was particularly true of ablefy’s Relational Database Service (RDS), one of the main components of the company’s platform. ablefy was experiencing challenges with RDS response times, which resulted in slow page-loads for end consumers. This was in turn creating a bottleneck for ablefy’s ambitions to scale the business further. At the same time, RDS was one of the biggest costs in ablefy’s cloud spend.
Alex knew it was time to simplify the company’s infrastructure, correcting the technical debt that had built up over time to create more efficient systems, while simultaneously reducing the company’s cloud bill.
ablefy initially worked with AWS to address its RDS challenges. Then, after recognizing the specificity of the issue, and the intensive consultation it required to solve it quickly, ablefy turned to DoiT. After comparing DoiT to a number of alternatives, Alex was convinced that DoiT was the sparring partner he needed to help ablefy optimize its infrastructure and cut costs.
Alex was particularly impressed with how DoiT hit the ground running. “It was very fast, which is rare for such a big company. From the very start, the DoiT team was providing valuable advice to reduce our cloud costs and improve performance,” Alex recalls.
A faster database service, a smaller cloud bill
Prior to working with DoiT, ablefy had made some improvements to its RDS performance by reconfiguring the database to use a larger instance that could handle more storage. While this had bought ablefy some time until the underlying issues were resolved, it had also resulted in higher costs.
Cloud Reliability Engineers (CREs) worked with ablefy to address the underlying architectural causes of the RDS performance issues, with dedicated CRE Pol Alzina being allocated to support the company in reviews and implementations. Alzina recommended changing the instance type to one that could handle more input/output operations per second (IOPS). He also advised changing the storage layer to a more cost-efficient type, resulting in a 90% reduction in billing costs, while maintaining the same performance.
“DoiT helped us change our RDS configuration to strike the right balance of performance and price,” says Alex. “Now we’re working together to develop the architecture further, improve the database performance even more, lower the response time, and provide the best service to our customers.”
Among these additional architectural changes is the introduction of a caching layer to handle certain data requests, freeing up RDS for other tasks and helping to reduce page load speeds for the end consumer.
Gaining control of cloud expenditure with DoiT console
ablefy is making significant progress in reducing its overall cloud expenditure with the help of DoiT Console. Alex’s engineering team uses Cloud Analytics daily to gain insights into its cloud expenditure, allocate costs to specific operations and workloads, and improve cloud governance through detection of cost anomalies and spikes. With regular consultations with the DoiT team and an open messaging channel, ablefy works with DoiT to understand where expenditure can be reduced without sacrificing performance.
“I really appreciate DoiT’s open culture,” says Alex. “The team is always available to provide support, and the open messaging channel gives us direct access to their expertise. It makes a change from most other companies that use support tickets and keep you waiting.”
ablefy also uses DoiT Flexsave™ to save on its compute spend by automatically identifying and applying discounted rates to EC2 workloads not already covered by commitments. This helps to reduce the company’s cloud spend, while saving it time having to manually search for the best available rates, allowing it to focus resources on growing the business instead.
Building the right infrastructure for global expansion
ablefy is now working with DoiT to design its architecture to best support its plans to scale globally. This includes a decision to use Amazon Cloudfront as its content delivery network, to help it deliver content quickly and efficiently. This will allow ablefy to provide a better user experience in international markets, while simultaneously spending less on data storage and transfer.
65% reduction in RDS database costs
After reconfiguring its RDS database, ablefy was able to save almost thousands a month, equating to a reduction in monthly RDS expenditure of 65%.
Up to 10x faster load speeds due to database optimization
After working with DoiT to redesign its RDS system, ablefy has reduced latency and improved response times, resulting in page load speeds that are up to 10 times faster.
This improved customer experience has resulted in a marked increase in ablefy’s customer satisfaction score, along with positive feedback from ablefy stakeholders. This in turn has helped ablefy to attract new customers to the platform.
Building a FinOps culture for efficient cloud resourcing
Working with DoiT has helped ablefy to focus more closely on cloud cost governance to ensure its expenditure is as efficient as possible.
“DoiT has helped to bring a financial optimization culture into our business. We are starting to look more closely into our bills and resource allocation to ensure we are always saving where we can,” says Alex.
14% savings on EC2 instances with Flexsave™
With Flexsave™ helping ablefy to automatically find and apply discounted rates for its EC2 workloads, the company has saved 14% on its compute costs.
These savings, along with cloud infrastructure savings made with DoiT’s support, are allowing ablefy to focus resources on growing the business, such as hiring more staff, investing in new tools, and funding marketing campaigns.
As ablefy continues to work with DoiT to refine its existing architecture and support its global growth ambitions, the two teams are also introducing new technology into the company’s infrastructure. This includes plans for ablefy to use machine learning to detect fraudulent payments, as well as developing a proof of concept to use generative AI to create platform content. Through projects like these, DoiT’s expertise is helping ablefy to provide a stable platform and smooth customer experience to keep the company growing long into the future.
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