At first, Haptik mostly ran using AWS on-demand instances, alongside a small set of reserved instances. Their cloud costs quickly rose and reducing costs became a major focus as a way to reduce cost-of-goods-sold (COGS).
When first contemplating the need to reduce cloud computing costs, reserved instances were considered but deemed too inflexible to be rolled out on a large scale. This led Haptik to start experimenting with the AWS Spot Market. This bore initial fruit, as AWS spot instances were available at a cost of 70-80% lower than on-demand instances.
Unfortunately, managing spot instances was very complex, requiring lots of internal focus and maintenance. They built automation scripts to help handle the process, but the risks of running production environment on it were still high. In search of an automatic and reliable solution for managing spot instances, Ranvijay Jamwal, Engineering Manager – Architecture & DevOps at Haptik, found Spot. Today, Spot is a major element of their cost-reduction strategy.
“We are currently saving at least 85% costs on EC2 instances using Elastigroup by Spot,” says Jamwal. “There are many features available now when using Spot platform which we easily use to improve our performance while keeping the costs down, one example is that we are checking for Idle resources and releasing them to save costs.”
Spot is an online cloud management platform that allows companies to run their mission-critical applications on the excess capacity of cloud providers, saving up to 85% on costs. Spot supports AWS, Azure, Google Cloud & Packet.
The main Spot product utilized by Haptik is Elastigroup by Spot – a software layer on top of the Cloud Infrastructure that functions as a cost-oriented Auto-Scaling Group. Elastigroup first uses predictive algorithms to predict spot behavior, capacity trends, pricing, and interruption rate. Whenever there’s a risk of interruption, Elastigroup acts accordingly to balance capacity, ensuring 100% availability and no risk of downtime. This means that your application will always run on the most cost-efficient collection of instances – the best-priced spot instances when available and falling back to on-demand when not, in addition to prioritizing any reserved instances you may already own.
As Haptik found, the main drawback of using spot instances themselves (and not using Elastigroup by Spot) is the massive time suck and focus spent bidding on spot instance and managing the server count 24*7 for your critical operations.
Ranvijay Jamwal, Engineering Manager – Architecture and DevOps At Haptik “Working with Spot is helping us to reduce 80% of our cloud computing costs on a monthly basis with no risk of downtime, which is crucial to our business. We’ve improved our performance with no additional IT resources and now we can invest more time and effort in our clients.”
Note: This was a guest post written by Ranvijay Jamwal of Haptik
Haptik is one of the world’s largest chatbot platforms, building applications for consumers, publishers, and enterprises. The company is at the forefront of the paradigm shift from apps to bots, building bots for an array of use cases- from e-commerce to customer service and utility to lead generation.
Haptik was born out of a personal need. The founders realized they were using text communication more than any other application on their phones. What’s now obvious to the rest of us became obvious to them – chat is doing to mobile what search has done to the internet.
https://haptik.ai/Complete access
for up to 20 instances