Helping Metamap lower EC2 costs by 33% with better cloud cost observability
Year
MetaMap (formerly Mati) was founded in 2017 in San Francisco. They now operate globally and are trusted by 600+ companies worldwide. MetaMap has created a platform that sources, integrates, and interprets a vast range of data for a truly global population. The result is a database enabling businesses to yield superior commercial outcomes.
Industry
Region
Key Features
Aggregated Billing/Multi-Cloud, Cloud Optimization, K8s Optimization
Introduction
The burgeoning requirements of customer identity verification come with their own challenges. Delivering secure and complete clarity into customers requires the support of robust and scalable infrastructure. However, keeping costs under control is a trade off that several businesses continue to navigate. In the case of Metamap, the challenges were somewhat similar, however the team identified the need for complete cloud cost observability early. The journey towards 360-degree cost observability and running a lean cloud infrastructure was facilitated via Amnic, whose platform was implemented at Metamap.
Challenges Faced
With growing scale, one of the largest challenges for Metamap was the soaring costs attributed to their cloud. As a team, they were able to understand the need for cloud infrastructure cost management tools that matched the requirements of their significantly growing resources and keep up with the scale.
The team wanted to explore a solution that would provide them the ability to understand the granularity associated with their cloud costs. They needed a solution that would not only give the team visibility into their spends, but also deliver a roadmap that would help them trim unprecedented costs and stay ahead of their cloud expenses.
“Considering the scale of our growth, we were very aware of the imminent need to stay ahead of our cloud cost problem. We needed a solution that can plug in and give us continuous visibility of where costs are bloated and might get out of control. Moreover, we needed a system that facilitated continuous cost visualization and governance. And that’s how we landed with Amnic.”
Piyush Jain
Sr Staff Engineer, Metamap
Solution
Amnic’s cloud cost observability platform was able to help Metamap get started almost instantaneously with no major dependencies or blockers. As a completely agentless solution and stringent security certifications in place, the team was able to connect their infrastructure in under 15 minutes. Within 24 hours, Amnic was able to debug their costs and showcase the necessary changes needed to optimize their existing workloads.
One of the biggest recommendations from Amnic came in terms of optimizing their AWS EC2 on Kubernetes. Amnic’s platform recommended the move from self-managed K8s to EKS which in itself was a major driving in streamlining costs. Other recommendations included:
Right-sizing of Kubernetes Nodes and Pods: Amnic was able to provide observability into Metamap's Kubernetes environment, identifying opportunities for right-sizing nodes and pods to match workload requirements precisely.
Auto-Scaling of Nodes: Leveraging Amnic's visibility into workloads Metamap implemented auto-scaling mechanisms for Kubernetes nodes, ensuring optimal resource allocation based on workload fluctuations.
Optimal Mix of Spot and On-Demand Instances: Amnic was able to identify and recommend based on billing parameters on the strategic utilization of spot instances alongside on-demand instances. This allowed them to minimize spends without compromising performance or reliability.
Optimization of EBS Volumes: Metamap optimized their Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes to align with actual storage needs, eliminating unnecessary expenses associated with over-provisioning.
Results
33% Lower EC2 Costs
The concerted efforts in optimizing cloud usage and expenditure yielded a substantial reduction in EC2 expenses, significantly enhancing Metamap's cost efficiency. Providing the roadmap into the migration from self-managed Kubernetes to EKS also played a huge role in streamlining costs and running a lean cloud infrastructure.
“Amnic facilitated our transition from a self-managed Kubernetes environment to EKS, concurrently streamlining costs through implementation of elastic scaling mechanisms and strategic utilization of spot instances.”
Piyush Jain
Sr Staff Engineer, Metamap
Metamap's partnership with Amnic continues to-date, and cost observability has ingrained itself in ensuring the teams align with a culture of cloud cost optimization. With Amnic, Metamap not only achieved significant cost savings but also transformed their cloud infrastructure to successfully scale in future without costs becoming a bottleneck. Amnic’s cloud cost observability platform helps teams steer proactive cost management and optimization, while focussing on the strategic utilization of cloud resources. But most of all, Amnic is able to help put Metamap’s team back in control of their cloud costs.
