Digital Ad Platform for FinServ Saves $900K+ Annually with Pepperdata on Amazon EKS
Digital Ad Platform for FinServ Saves $900K+ Annually with Pepperdata on Amazon EKS
About the Client
The customer is a digital advertising platform that partners with banks to create incentive programs promoting consumer loyalty. The company then provides its banking customers a secure, anonymized view into how consumers are spending their money.
Challenge
As the company’s data operations team was migrating their large data workloads to Amazon EKS, the team was keen to identify additional solutions to reduce their monthly workload costs.
Solution
Following migration to Amazon EKS, the client deployed Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer to improve resource utilization and reduce costs.
Capacity Optimizer immediately delivered an initial 22 percent reduction of instance hours (vCPU hours) in the company’s Apache Spark and Amazon EMR workloads on EKS.
Results
The customer realized increased price/performance equivalent to a monthly cost reduction of approximately $75K. Having achieved an initial 22 percent savings, the client is continuing to migrate additional workloads to Amazon EKS and reinvest its savings from Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer into further business growth.
A large, data-driven, digital advertising platform that partners with banks to operate customer rewards programs was in the process of migrating its significant Spark workloads to Amazon EKS to benefit from the flexibility, control, simplified operational overhead, and reduced costs of a managed Kubernetes service.
The company had been running Apache Spark on Amazon EMR to process a high volume of anonymized and aggregated consumer purchase and other behavioral data, but started migrating these workloads to Amazon EKS to further reduce costs.
As part of its efforts to minimize infrastructure costs, the company adopted Karpenter to optimize resource utilization by automating node lifecycle provisioning and autoscaling clusters.
However, the company was keen to further increase its margins on Amazon EKS, and sought out additional cost reduction solutions for its newly migrated workloads.
Pepperdata: Real-Time, Automated Resource Optimization for Kubernetes
Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer immediately provided the system scheduler with real-time visibility into actual node utilization levels. This visibility enabled more intelligent resource allocation decisions by the scheduler, which could then launch more pods on nodes with available capacity—improving utilization levels and reducing costs.
Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer also enhanced Karpenter’s autoscaling capabilities by communicating with the scheduler to ensure new nodes were only spun up when existing nodes became fully utilized—again resulting in improved utilization and reduced resource cost.
Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer real-time, automated resource optimization worked continuously in the background without any need for manual tuning, applying recommendations, or changing application code—freeing the company’s data operations team from optimization to focus on revenue-generating projects.
Immediately Improving Resource Utilization and Realizing Savings in Both Development and Production Environments
The ad platform company achieved its Proof of Value (POV) with Pepperdata in two phases: first in the company’s development cluster to quickly validate the solution robustness and cost saving results, and then in the company’s production cluster.
Capacity Optimizer immediately delivered a 22 percent reduction of instance hours (vCPU hours) for the company’s Spark workloads on its Amazon EKS development cluster. Once installed in the customer’s production clusters, Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer then decreased the number of vCore hours required to run these Amazon EKS production workloads, improving price/performance to the equivalent of approximately $75K in reduced monthly cost.
The company benchmarked its savings by temporarily disabling Capacity Optimizer and observing the resulting 22 percent increase in costs.
Reinvesting Savings for Continued Growth
Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer helped this digital ad platform company achieve significant utilization increases for its workloads and cost savings through real-time, automated resource optimization.
The customer can now reinvest its ongoing savings from Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer in continued migration of data workloads to EKS, as well as in further business innovation and expansion.
