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.