FinOps Case Study

The challenge

Horsefly Analytics is a talent market analytics business that uses data and knowledge to support informed decision making and drive a competitive advantage on time/cost per hire, workforce planning, and strategic decisions.

The business wanted to enhance and maximise performance across its sophisticated polyglot persistence data estate, and had three main goals. It was looking to make cost savings on its infrastructure, ensure its environment was built to AWS best practices, and then immediately implement any necessary changes following this appraisal of its systems.

The solution

Rebura was brought onboard to undertake a Well-Architected Review and, alongside this, our cost optimisation and billing suite options were deemed the best course of action.

We moved Horsefly Analytics onto our billing platform to allow the team to leverage the AWS upper tier billing thresholds and immediately extend the company’s payment terms, helping to shift away from credit card use. Alongside this, Rebura gave Horsefly Analytics access to cloud management platform CloudHealth for free.

Next, Rebura carried out a Well-Architected Review (WAR) to ensure Horsefly Analytics’ AWS environment was aligned to current best practice against the five pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. We recommended various remediation actions that corresponded with each of the following pillars:

• Operational excellence
• Reliability
• Cost optimisation
• Security
• Performance efficiency

The results

After working through the AWS WAR tool, Rebura identified a number of items across three production workloads, and some of these were deemed high risk. Rebura then worked closely with Horsefly Analytics to address these issues, taking the lead on resolving problems where limited in-house expertise was readily available. This included:

• Implementing some improvements in security across security groups and IAM
• Introduction of cost saving maintenance plans
• Providing advice and guidance on future software usage
• Infrastructure is now fully in line with AWS best practices and ‘well-architected’

Moving forward, Rebura’s cost optimisation specialist is proactively working with Horsefly Analytics’ internal team to fully utilise CloudHealth to help ensure the business continues to reduce its expenditure using savings plans, and not spend more on its infrastructure than is required. Looking ahead, this will help the business to maximise on its investment in AWS.