After 3 months:
MONETA Money Bank is one of the first large corporations to operate its applications and environment in the cloud. How did the search for a tool that would provide the bank with quality data for optimization and efficient resource management in the cloud?
YOU CAN'T DO WITHOUT RESOURCE OPTIMIZATION IN THE CLOUD
The cloud is not for everyone. Here's how to know if it's worth it for your company, we wrote here. In the case of Coins the advantages outweighed (despite the jungle of laws and other norms) and the company started to add IT architecture, processes and cost management take a different approach.
Optimizing resources in the cloud has become a key issue in Moneta. Unfortunately, the proprietary tools offered by cloud service providers at the turn of 2019/2020 in Moneta could not be fully utilized. For example, they did not allow detailed budgeting of actual monthly costs between individual applications and teams. They also contained insufficient support for deciding on the right configurations or subscription services.
In accordance with its cloud strategies embarked on a project whose primary goal was to achieve better use of resources in the cloud environment (specifically EC2, RDS, but also Auto scaling group settings) and getting perfect overview of all costs in a multi-cloud environment. Radim Jablonka adds: "I recommend not to underestimate the control over what happens in the cloud, as it is a completely different environment from what we are used to in our own or even hosted datacenters."
A secondary goal was automation to speed up the EC2 or RDS resizing process. The expected benefit of the solution was obvious: we expect savings in operating costs and greater efficiency.
JUST DENSIFY IS NOT ENOUGH
The customer was very demanding in his expectations. He had a clear idea, what information it needs a in what form he wants to receive them. Moneta's specific requirement was to use existing infrastructure monitoring as a source of metrics (and not to work only with data from the cloud).
The basis of the applied solution was to be the company's products and services Densify. They will provide the customer with the required reports and, after implementation of the optimization recommendations, significant savings in opex costs. multiple returns.
It was challenging to create all the necessary reports and provide access to all users and a combination of pre-built and bespoke reports and dashboards were used.
According to the customer's requirements, we are within optimization of operation developed by custom tool for processing daily doses of other workload metrics from information stored by tools outside the cloud. After uploading it to the Densify instance, we thereby provided additional data refining individual optimization recommendations by additional percentages, translating ultimately into units of thousands of dollars per month.
How does Densify work? Watch a brief webinar with examples.
REPORTS ARE ROLLING OUT, RESOURCE OPTIMIZATION CAN BEGIN
We delivered the Densify implementation, reports and optimization recommendations to the customer within three monthsthat is, according to the original agreement. The additional metrics and their import required intensive communication with the service provider and a number of adjustments to the software setup. They were therefore prepared with a delay of several weeks, but this did not compromise the value of the solution:
- We managed to expand our portfolio by new instance variantsthat were unknown until then.
- We have optimized a total of 19 EC2 and 18 RDS, namely no impact on traffic.
- We have identified three instances whose performance was inadequate.
- Bottom line: we expect that optimizing resources in the cloud will bring Moneta operational savings of around 20 %.
And a final pearl: thanks to an attentive cloud analyst from MONETA Money Bank, we discovered a built-in modification of certain data in Densify that was slightly distorting the output load information, which until now none of the thousands of other users noticed.
WE LEARN (EVEN BY MAKING MISTAKES)
With each new project we learn and this one could not be an exception. It made us understand mental setup of the client in the cloud environment and realized the advantages and disadvantages of the Densify tool and service. We learned that next time we need to put more emphasis on proper tagging and filtering of systems or on savings in reserved instances.
A poorly communicated report storage folder was again the cause of an unpleasant experience where some laboriously filed reports were stored in an unbacked up part of the data and simply disappeared during the upgrade to a new version. We had to restore some of the reports and recreate others manually. Nothing we would ever want to repeat.
"CLOUD JOURNEY" NOT ENDING
Any change requires time to adapt and this is going well in Moneta. Despite initial hesitations, today (three months after the end of the project) more than half of the users are using and navigating Densify. The aim is to have the tool working effectively and independently for staff who are responsible for operation of the resources themselves in the cloud.
"The tool becomes more user-friendly with each new version. The new default dashboard, where you can quickly and easily get all the information you need, is the best feature." adds Radim Jablonka, who assumes that MONETA Money Bank will gradually implement Densify over the company's entire multi-cloud solution.
He has a good reason for this, namely: