How CodeSignal saved 60% in cloud costs and achieved 99.9% uptime with Cloudchipr

About CodeSignal

‍CodeSignal is a skills assessments and AI-powered learning platform that empowers high-performing teams to go beyond skill gaps and help individuals cultivate the skills they need to level up.

Key Results

• Reduced cloud costs by: 60%
• Gained 99.99% uptime.
• Automated enforcement of cloud cost hygiene and resource tagging policy.

Here are the insights that Tigran Sloyan, CEO of CodeSignal, shared about their journey with Cloudchipr.

Challenge

We started our journey by hosting our application on Galaxy Meteor. It was an amazing platform that let us move fast and build our product quickly, however, as Codesignal grew in popularity, we got overwhelmed by a variety of infrastructure-related problems. It ranged from cost, to reliability to uptime and everything in between. We talked to a lot of vendors, and while everyone had a seemingly interesting point solution, we couldn’t find anyone who would agree to take the responsibility and own the platform end to end. We were looking for a comprehensive solution and partner who could work shoulder to shoulder with us, understand the intricacies of our architecture, understand our customer needs, the work style and culture of our team, but all we were able to find were point-solution tools. Cloudchipr was by far the only company that, right from the get-go, suggested us to structure our relationship in a way we wanted. We started our conversation around saving costs and cloud automations, but we very quickly realized that they can help us with much more than that. In fact, they offered to involve their services team and take over the redesign (full migration to Kubernetes and AWS)  and management of our infrastructure end to end - from architecture to deployment, maintenance, monitoring, alerting, scaling, and, of course, cost management. The icing on the cake was the fact that they also made folks over at our Finance department really happy. The platform offered not only a comprehensive suite for infrastructure cost management for DevOps, but it includes a full-fledged FinOps platform for the cloud cost management. It was also very reassuring that we could model the price of services as well as running our infrastructure from the get go, and we knew from the start what we were going to get and when.

Why Cloudchipr?

Cloudchipr had all three pillars that we needed.

• A cloud cost optimization platform with the support of automation workflows. We are running multiple automation workflows that take actions to clean up our cloud accounts. 
• Team of certified DevOps professionals who helped us design our new infrastructure on AWS, choose the proper DevOps tooling and AWS services, test the application, and finally migrate to AWS. 
• Dedicated FinOps consultant who works with us to control the cloud costs daily.
  
  The Cloudchipr team made the migration to AWS very smooth. It looked like a complicated open-heart surgery where hundreds of thousands of our users continued to use our platform daily, but underneath it a massive migration was going on. Thanks to the professionalism and the dedication of the team it all went without a hitch.
  The result was everything we could have hoped for, and then some! The migration saved us 60% of our cloud costs and made our infrastructure horizontally scalable, maintainable, and cloud-agnostic with 99.99% uptime.
  
  As part of the migration, Cloudchipr team helped us to move our whole infrastructure to Kubernetes with autoscaling. Then they helped us define a custom resource tagging and usage policy across different teams and groups in the organization. The tooling was implemented to enforce the policy, clean unused and underutilized resources, and constantly maintain our cloud account utilization targets across the board. There are about 100 users involved in interacting with various cloud accounts, from DevOps to developers to our colleagues in finance, and our current system satisfies all of them! Overall, Cloudchipr is a huge productivity enabler and a time saver for our entire team. 

Which Cloudchipr’s features do you like?

‍We are using Automation workflows, Recommendations, Dashboards, and Resource Explorer.

• Automation Workflows: We have dozens of automation workflows that check for underutilized instances, unattached load balancers, volumes, IP addresses, and Kubernetes node groups. If they are Dev or Sandbox resources, we delete them or notify them in case they are found on production accounts.
  
• Recommendations: With recommendations, we are constantly aware of what cost saving opportunities we have and what actions we need to take. In less than 1 minute we can spot all the cost-saving opportunities on one single page without checking all cloud providers.
  
• Resource Explorer: With the help of Resource Explorer our engineers and FinOps experts can easily explore, share and collaborate on their multi-cloud spend reports.
  
• Dashboards: We built multiple cloud usage dashboards for tracking the cloud costs, spotting anomalies and getting automated cost reports. Dashboards are a great way to increase accountability within the entire organization.

Cloudchipr vs Others‍

We explored DoIt, Vantage, CloudZero, Cloudability, Cloudhealth. We decided to go with Cloudchipr as they have everything that we needed

• An action-oriented cloud cost optimization platform and a Team of very dedicated, professional, and certified DevOps engineers of the highest caliber. We delegated our entire infrastructure management to them and could not be happier about it. Last but not least, we get a Dedicated FinOps consultant who keeps the cloud costs under control on a day-to-day basis.