Cutting cloud costs without cutting service.
Confidential European bank
3 Min
The case study in 30 seconds
Paying more for cloud, and getting less from it.
A European bank’s AWS footprint had become expensive, with many legacy instances in a hybrid cloud model. Support cost too much and delivered too little: SLAs were poor, response was slow and the backlog of issues kept growing. DevOps and cloud management were visibly delaying service delivery and development.
Arenema took on DevOps as a managed service. A FinOps review, better resource management and reservations cut cloud costs by 25%. Automation and self-service reduced tickets by 23%, and a shared resource model delivered headcount savings of 47%.
The bank also gained follow-the-sun support around the clock, without asking anyone to work nights.
The challenge
Rising costs and a growing backlog.
The bank came to Arenema with four problems:
- 01A costly EC2 footprint, with many legacy instances in a hybrid cloud model
- 02High labour costs to support AWS, with poor SLAs and slow response
- 03A large backlog of issues caused by poor support, weak planning and a high level of toil
- 04Clear evidence that DevOps and cloud management were delaying service delivery and development
Cloud cost was the symptom. How the platform was run was the cause.
Our approach
Run it as a service, and fix the economics.
Arenema took responsibility for DevOps as a managed service, working on four fronts: what the bank paid for cloud, how its platforms were built, how much work was automated, and how support was staffed.
01. FinOps
Paying for what the bank actually uses
Better resource management, reservations and a FinOps review reduced cloud costs by 25%.
02. Architecture
Certified expertise, scalable platforms
Certified subject-matter experts and architects helped the bank make better product decisions. Kubernetes services, a service mesh and Red Hat OpenShift improved scalability, and a journey to cloud using VMware migration and VMware Cloud on AWS cleared on-premise data-centre space and improved disaster recovery compliance.
03. Testing and automation
Safer releases, less toil
The Istio service mesh enabled canary and blue-green testing. Automation reduced manual toil and sped up the resolution of support issues, and self-service scripts cut ticket numbers by 23%.
04. Managed service
Follow-the-sun, not night shifts
A shared resource model delivered headcount savings of 47%. Follow-the-sun coverage through the managed service replaced the need for teams to work night shifts.
Lower costs, fewer tickets.
What changed once DevOps ran as a managed service.
−25%
cloud costs
−23%
support tickets
47%
headcount savings
The outcome
A leaner platform, and support that keeps up.
The bank runs a leaner AWS estate at lower cost, with fewer tickets, faster resolution of support issues and coverage around the clock.
Moving workloads out of its on-premise data centre also improved its disaster recovery compliance.
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