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.”