How N26 cut their EC2 bill by 85%

Using Elastigroup as an efficient way to scale EC2 cost-effectively

N26 has been working with Spot for the last 2 years and found Elastigroup to be a natural fit. N26 was determined to quickly scale their EC2 infrastructure in a cost-effective manner. With Elastigroup by Spot they were able to achieve those cost-efficiencies to the tune of 85% savings on EC2 spend!

The Challenge

For a rapidly growing business like N26, managing and scaling the company’s infrastructure cost-effectively is a challenge, especially in a world of rising cloud computing costs. One member of the N26 DevOps team was already familiar with Spot and introduced the solution to her colleagues.

The Solution

Importing their auto-scaled environments from AWS, to be managed by Elastigroup, was an extremely quick task with Spot’s import wizard and native integration with AWS. Once the N26 team selected the environments, they seamlessly imported all their infrastructure to Spot with just the click of a button.

N26 is a heavy ELB user and one of their requirements was to keep the same architecture as they had previously, while they ran on-demand instances. Spot provides seamless integration with AWS Load Balancers (CLB/ALB/NLB) and by choosing the required LBer it registers the launched spot instances automatically.

To ensure that the load balancer stops sending requests to instances that Spot predicts their termination, Elastigroup will de-register and drain the instances several minutes before the instance gets a shutdown signal from AWS. At the same time, Elastigroup will begin spinning up new instances in parallel to ensure the desired capacity won’t be degraded.

Additionally, Spot provides an Auto Healing feature that checks the ELB status every few minutes, and gracefully replace unhealthy instances.

What’s next for N26 and Spot

As N26 roll out new services and expand their existing infrastructure, they can trust Spot to improve scalability, reduce costs and quickly support more native integrations.

These days N26 started using more of Spot’s native integrations – Jenkins and Hashicorp Nomad.

The Jenkins plugin helps you to do more with your Jenkins setup, by allowing you to configure Jenkins to automatically scale a designated Amazon EC2 VMs as Slaves up or down depending on the number jobs to be completed. Spot Plug-in enables you to get these resources on spot instances with 100% uptime.

Elastigroup Nomad integration enables you to provision capacity across multiple Instance Types and Availability Zones, which helps improve your application’s availability while reducing operating costs using the EC2 spot instance market. Combining the Autoscaler for extensible and flexible container placement system, provided by Elastigroup, allows you to efficiently deploy containerized workloads and easily manage clusters at any scale for a fraction of the cost.