Trusted by leaders in the food and beverage industry, including Campbells, KraftHeinz, Nestlé, Mars, and PepsiCo, Tastewise is a GenAI-powered food and beverage platform that transforms consumer data into unique insights. This allows food and drink brands to make decisions and execute at speed and scale.
Tastewise gives food brands fast access to data insights into emerging food trends and the GenAI tools to develop concepts, design products, and plan marketing and sales campaigns that cater to consumers’ changing tastes.
Food trends move fast. Products can go from obscurity to ubiquity almost overnight. For those catering to these fast-changing tastes, it can be hard to keep up. Gone are the days when a simple phone survey would do — Food brands require extensive data to truly understand their customers and innovative tools to efficiently scale their marketing efforts. That’s where Tastewise comes in.
By gathering and storing a treasure trove of publicly available data, it gives brands instant insights and execution tools to keep pace with emerging trends and stay ahead of the competition.
Tastewise’s cloud infrastructure runs mostly on Amazon Web Services (AWS), with its wealth of data stored in S3 buckets. Elasticsearch powers its search and analytics engine. However, the sheer volume of data Tastewise handles meant its storage costs were rising fast. “Usually S3 isn’t an issue because it’s not that expensive,” says Doron Gill, VP of R&D at Tastewise. “But when you start getting into huge amounts of data, costs can start rising very quickly.” Tastewise needed a more effective way of storing its data to prevent its costs from spiraling.
At the same time, the complexity of certain customer searches was placing a strain on Tastewise’s system, leading to slow responses and, in some cases, timeouts. “in extreme situations when users ask heavy queries, the Elasticsearch index is huge and it quickly becomes a very heavy operation,” Gill explains. Tastewise needed an Elasticsearch expert to help it optimize performance to deliver fast insights with no timeouts.
Rather than spending valuable resources hiring in-house, Tastewise chose to work with cloud partners to solve these challenges. It turned to DoiT and BigData Boutique.
Keeping cloud costs in check with DoiT consultancy
Tastewise started working with DoiT in 2021 to manage its cloud spend. A key priority was to lower its S3 storage costs without impacting performance. DoiT recommended tiered storage to ensure Tastewise had fast access to the data it needed frequently while moving backup data and secondary files to more cost-efficient storage layers.
With Tastewise paying for a large number of API calls to access its stored data, DoiT also recommended storing data in larger files to limit the number of calls it had to make.
The DoiT team continues to analyze Tastewise’s cloud usage during quarterly reviews and makes recommendations to increase efficiency and control costs. It also proactively provides advice and follows up afterward.
For example, DoiT recently noticed Tastewise was running ElastiCache on expensive on-demand instances and recommended switching to reserved instances. This simple change saved Tastewise $1,000 a month.
Simplifying FinOps with DoiT
As well as relying on DoiT’s cloud expertise to help reduce its cloud bill, Tastewise also saves money using DoiT’s intelligent technology. With Flexsave™, which automatically finds and applies discounted rates to Tastewise’s EC2 workloads, Tastewise has saved money on its compute instances each month.
Using DoiT’s analytics technology, Tastewise can monitor its cloud spend, gaining detailed oversight of its AWS costs and the few services it runs on Azure and Google Cloud. “With DoiT’s technology, I can see all our expenditure in one place, and I don’t have to go to three different platforms to work out our total costs,” explains Gill.
With Anomaly Detection, Tastewise receives alerts whenever its cloud costs rise unexpectedly, allowing it to take immediate action to fix the issue. For example, a recent alert revealed that the company was spending more than expected on its CloudTrail logs.
This prompted Gill to investigate, discovering that the debug flag had accidentally been left on. Without Anomaly Detection, Tastewise would have had to wait until the end of the month to spot the issue in its monthly cloud bill. Instead, it fixed the issue immediately, saving the company thousands of dollars.
“I use Anomaly Detection all the time,” says Gill. “Sometimes the amounts are quite small, making them easy to ignore, but those amounts can quickly add up to a thousand dollars or more. DoiT shows us the anomaly as it happens, which helps us a lot.”
Giving customers faster, smarter insights with BigData Boutique
With its costs under control, Tastewise needed support with Elasticsearch to deliver the fast insights its customers expected. DoiT recommended its long-time partner BigData Boutique to Tastewise, and the companies began working together in 2022.
BigData Boutique initially assisted Tastewise in migrating from single-node Elasticsearch clusters to a more resilient, scalable infrastructure on AWS. Tastewise has gone on to leverage BigData Boutique’s Elasticsearch expertise for everything from routine maintenance to fixing performance issues as they arise, helping to give food brands the data insights they need on demand, without timeouts.
“Elasticsearch is a great persistence engine,” says Gill. “But things like adding more nodes when our indexes are filling up, or rebalancing shards, require expertise, which BigData Boutique gives us. And if we ever experience downtime, BigData Boutique helps us identify the root cause. This is very important because, without our Elasticsearch up and running, we’re dead in the water.”
Re-architecting data services with an Elasticsearch expert
Tastewise and BigDataBoutique have also worked together on re-architecting its data stack, such as how the company ingests and processes data. Previously, data ingestion pipelines and customer queries occurred in the same compute, sometimes affecting customers’ ability to gain fast insights.
Recommending that Tastewise separate the data development and production environments, BigData Boutique helped to ensure the vast amount of data it ingests didn’t affect the stability of its customer-facing service.
Checking the health of Tastewise’s data stack with Pulse
In addition to relying on BigData Boutique’s Elasticsearch expertise, Tastewise was an early adopter of BigData Boutique’s Pulse solution. With proactive monitoring, Pulse alerts Tastewise to performance issues causing slow queries. The health assessment feature of Pulse continuously analyzes the health of Tastewise’s Elasticsearch clusters, and quickly pinpoints the cause of any issues.
With this information, Tastewise can then turn to BigData Boutique’s support experts for help fixing the problem, ensuring its search clusters are stable and providing a reliable service to customers.
“Pulse is an excellent Elasticsearch observability platform,” says Gill. “And the best thing is, it sits in our cloud infrastructure, so it’s not something our engineers need to maintain. All we need to do is show the insights to BigData Boutique, which then resolves the issue.”
Comprehensive cloud support from complementary cloud partners
Working with both DoiT and BigData Boutique in tandem has given Tastewise comprehensive cloud expertise to help grow its business.
With BigData Boutique, it has the Elasticsearch expertise to provide faster, smarter insights to customers, with no more timeouts. With DoiT, Tastewise can manage its costs effectively and deliver more for less.
Two full-time engineer salaries saved
Relying on DoiT and BigData Boutique for their expertise means Tastewise doesn’t need to hire two additional full-time engineers. “In simple terms, BigData Boutique saves us the cost of a dedicated Elasticsearch engineer and DoiT saves us the cost of a FinOps engineer,” Gill explains.
Keeping its team lean in this way allows the company to invest its resources in developing core products and services.
40% savings on Elasticsearch maintenance with BigData Boutique’s expertise
By running Elasticsearch on its own EC2 instances and relying on BigData Boutique to help maintain the service, Tastewise spent 40% less than it would have spent on a managed Elasticsearch service.
$1,000 a month saved on ElastiCache instances
DoiT’s recommendation to switch ElastiCache from on-demand instances to reserved instances saved Tastewise $1,000 a month.
$1,000s saved with Anomaly Detection
Being able to spot and fix cost anomalies quickly with Anomaly Detection has saved Tastewise thousands of dollars on its monthly cloud bill.
36% saved on EC2 workloads with Flexsave™
With Flexsave™ identifying and applying discounted rates to Tastewise’s EC2 workloads, Tastewise saves 5-10% a month on those workloads, amounting to an all-time effective savings rate of 36%.
With DoiT helping to manage its cloud costs, and Pulse giving it visibility of its Elasticsearch clusters, Tastewise can now focus on scaling up its business, confident that any issues will be quickly identified and remedied by its cloud partners.
As Gill explains, “If we want to use a new service, we can simply go ahead, safe in the knowledge that DoiT will help us to save money as we use it. And with BigDataBoutique, we can continue to use Pulse, as well as the company’s Elasticsearch expertise, to keep optimizing our search capabilities. I can sleep soundly at night knowing that with DoiT and BigData Boutique, we have the expertise to handle any challenges that might arise.”
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