SoftServe Implements Workload and Cost Optimization Strategy for American Real Estate Giant

Our client is one of the biggest international real estate franchises based in the US, holding a record-breaking sales volume and agent count. Harnessing decades of experience, they provide their customers with unmatched expertise in real estate, technology, and entrepreneurship. As leaders in their industry, our client has all the tools necessary to pave the path for their customers’ success.

Business Challenge

The real estate market has suffered a major hit due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Our client has been experiencing a few business challenges in light of this crisis. As a result, they needed to make urgent decisions that would keep the company going for the foreseeable future. Choosing between following a cost optimization strategy and reforming some of the development and operational teams was the key challenge that SoftServe helped to solve. Preserving business-critical operations and continuing new feature development was also an important challenge our client faced.

Project Description

SoftServe conducted an assessment of the current cloud infrastructure spending, software delivery process and operational practices to determine the best path to take in addressing our client’s business challenges. Upon completing the analysis stage, SoftServe concluded that the client could save at least 30% of its monthly cloud expenses while preserving valuable talent resources.

SoftServe proposed a meticulous optimization plan that included all the changes and upgrades necessary to significantly cut operational expenses. The strategy covered action items with different levels of complexity and dependencies, taking into account potential risks. A Kubernetes cluster and MIG auto-scaling, VM re-shaping, utilization of preemptible instances, committed use discount plan, and shared resources consolidation were among the possible solutions that could preserve a stable initial infrastructure. SoftServe created high-level estimations on the monthly savings our client would see with the implementation of each step in the strategy.

The decision to focus the DevOps team on the cost optimization tasks came with the risk of decreasing the team’s velocity in current goals and delaying strategic business milestones. SoftServe offered our client a phased implementation plan, delivered by a team of highly skilled experts, which would let our client’s teams stay focused on feature development and business targets.

During the first two weeks, SoftServe tackled the tasks that had the lowest complexity but would deliver substantial operational cost cuts. The team re-shaped and fine-tuned our client’s infrastructure, keeping in mind the possible limitations and risks that could arise during the implementation process (like services availability, data consistency and performance spike bottlenecks). As a result, in four weeks we were able to cut 16% of our client’s monthly cloud costs.

In the following month, SoftServe implemented the rest of the strategy steps that cut their monthly cost by additional 19%.

Value Delivered

Our client received a cost optimization plan that would reduce their cloud expenses by 35% or more. SoftServe delivered a rapid and effective solution to a time-critical problem. Helping our client to cut costs entailed preserving the knowledge and expertise of the operational teams. As training and educating new people in the future would be an expensive and time-consuming necessity, SoftServe’s solution gives our client the opportunity to reinvest those saved expenses to expand and develop the business further.