News UK

Demands of Cloud Migration & Growth Don’t Leave Time For Cost Optimization

The News UK team, headed by Technical Integration Manager Nikhil Gupta, was always focused on maintaining and growing the company, servicing its tens of millions of daily readers being a higher priority for the team than optimizing costs.

The team first improved analysis by using AWS Cost Explorer and CloudHealth to visualize costs. Then began implementing best practices for instance management by right-sizing and scheduling instances. Finally, the team purchased a large set of reserved instances to further optimize costs.

Implementing these initiatives did optimize costs and cut wastage, but Nikhil and his team had hoped to optimize costs even further. Spot instances were always on News UK’s to-do list, however, the time needed to use spot for mission-critical without compromising availability was too great a demand on top of the team’s usual work.

News UK See EC2 Costs 74% Lower Than On-Demand

Despite the fact that using spot instances had been a goal for News UK for some time, the team’s main priority of growing and managing the business left too little time for the team to manage spot. As such, a spot strategy remained appealing but inactionable for the team.

When the News UK team came across Spot, two main features were immediately appealing:

• The Savings: Working with Spot generates savings between 75-80%. Numbers this high are always eye-catching, and were exactly what Nikhil’s team were after
• The Simplicity: A company as large and growing as quickly as News UK doesn’t have time to implement large-scale architectural changes. The ease of integration with Spot’s platform was of significant appeal to the team, as it meant that savings could be acquired quickly.

Spot worked with Nikhil’s team to configure the platform over several days, the speed, and ease of the integration being a key aspect for News UK’s success. With the integration complete after only a few days, Nikhil’s team now have the time and resources to meet the cloud requirements of the company whilst Spot takes care of running News UK’s workloads at 70-80% lower costs.

“I would highly recommend this platform to any company who wants to reduce their costs, and who doesn’t want to reduce their costs? The ease of integration and the type of savings that it helps you to bring in would be loved by any company”

— Nikhil Gupta, Technical Integration Manager at News UK

What’s next for News UK

Since the start of Spot and News UK’s relationship, Nikhil Gupta has taken the stage alongside our own Karol Ussher to talk about cutting wastage and optimizing costs in the cloud through best practices, optimization and of course spot instances.