Extole Exceeds Expectations for Resource Optimization with Pepperdata to Save 30%
Extole Exceeds Expectations for Resource Optimization with Pepperdata to Save 30%
About the Client
Extole develops a customer lead growth platform designed to conduct marketing by driving customer acquisition and activation.
Through the usage of first-party and social network data about advocates, the company’s platform assists brands to find and reach higher lifetime value customers, enabling clients to harness the power of online sharing to the benefit of their bottom line and engage consumers across all touch points, including a brand’s website, email, and social networks.
Challenge
Despite achieving a 45 percent reduction in overall cloud costs by moving a majority of its workloads to AWS Spot Instances, Extole leadership sought even greater cost savings due to many customers’ pandemic-driven budget cuts. The company was debating rewriting its entire big data stack to reduce hosting costs below the CFO-mandated target of 14 percent.
Additionally, Extole sought to reduce its increasingly expensive and unwieldy process of daily unique report generation, which required hundreds of virtual machines and significant personnel resources.
Solution
Extole was introduced to Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer through Rackspace for its real-time, automated resource optimization for data workloads on Amazon EMR. Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer automatically increased the CPU and memory utilization of Extole’s applications to minimize resource overprovisioning and reduce costs as the company’s core business expanded.
Results
Within five days, Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer reduced Extole’s Amazon EC2 compute cost by an additional 30 percent without manual config tuning or changing application code—helping the engineering team focus on innovation and revenue-generating projects versus manual optimization.
Pepperdata also helped the operations team realize an improvement in job throughput to significantly reduce the amount of time required to run reports for its customers.
A High-Growth Company Seeking Greater Efficiency
As the market for referral-based marketing platforms and customer-led growth exploded in the last five years, so did Extole’s business. Extole invested several years in manual engineering efforts to reduce its Amazon EMR costs, including rightsizing its instances and moving workloads to Spot Instances—achieving an impressive 45 percent reduction in their cloud costs. At that point, the general belief was that everything possible had been done to achieve maximum cloud cost optimization.
Nonetheless, given Extole’s profitability goal, the company was eager to invest in the continued reduction of bottom-line costs. Generating thousands of unique reports on a daily basis—some of which required hundreds of virtual machines—was growing increasingly expensive and unwieldy in terms of infrastructure and personnel resources, requiring half of a full-time employee’s (FTE) time dedicated to keep the system running.
In addition to the resource cost of running the reports, some were taking up to ten minutes to generate, which created a daily inconvenience for the customer success team. Extole was thus intrigued to engage with Pepperdata when Rackspace, Extole’s trusted partner in cloud cost remediation, made the introduction.
“This Sounds Too Good to Be True”
Pepperdata met with Ben Smith, Extole’s Vice President of Technical Operations to review Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer’s real-time, automated resource optimization capabilities that can increase workload GPU, CPU, and memory utilization by up to 80 percent to reduce costs by an average of 30 percent. The pitch was initially met with some natural “sounds too good to be true” skepticism by the Extole team.
However, within five days of being installed, Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer reduced Extole’s costs by the predicted 30 percent. “Actually seeing it work was surprising,” Ben said. “I was happy about that. That was cool.”
“[I was thinking] there’s no way there’s a 30 percent overhead that everyone is paying that isn’t fixed. The open source community couldn’t possibly leave that as a giant gap.”
—Ben Smith, VP of Technical Operations, Extole
A Friction-Free Install
From the start, Ben was also struck by Pepperdata’s “sweet” onboarding process. Pepperdata installs in under an hour in most enterprise clusters and requires no exfiltration of large amounts of data, no access to Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and no tweaking and tuning—all of which impressed Ben.
“Getting set up [with Pepperdata] was a breeze,” Ben said. “It was almost too easy.”
When the installation team ran into an issue with supporting a particular version of Amazon EMR, the Pepperdata team worked over the weekend to resolve it so the install could move forward uninterrupted.
Reflecting on that experience, Ben noted, “It was really refreshing on the onboarding side of the house to see how quickly [the process] could move, both to meet our needs and to get the problem solved in a way to make it a great partnership going forward.”
The Easy Button for Resource Optimization
Once installed, Pepperdata quickly enabled Extole to do more with less in three key ways:
1. Pepperdata Increased Utilization Without Increased Cost
1. Pepperdata Increased Utilization Without Increased Cost
Before bringing in Pepperdata, Extole had budgeted between 10 and 25 percent of overprovisioned resources as idle overhead for ad hoc reports. Kirk Lewis, Pepperdata Senior Solution Architect, pointed out that with Capacity Optimizer, this would no longer be necessary. Pepperdata empowered Extole to recover these wasted resources by improving workload utilization—putting higher levels of CPU and memory to work towards running reports for greater throughput.
As a result, Extole was able to run up to 27 percent more jobs without increased cloud costs, a dramatic performance increase for a company that believed they had already done just about everything possible to reduce their resource costs.
In addition, Extole’s CFO had set a goal of reducing their cloud hosting costs to 14 percent of cost-of-goods-sold (COGS). Once Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer was enabled, Extole was able to achieve this goal within weeks, even as a large new customer onboarded. In fact, Extole did not even realize the new customer had onboarded until Kirk pointed out that the company’s cloud costs had remained flat despite the addition of the new workload-heavy customer.
Extole’s executives were also thrilled that they were able to achieve the desired reduction of cloud hosting cost relative to COGS while also onboarding this new customer without any increase in their cloud bill.
“[Pepperdata] is great. It does its thing. No one has to think about it. The CFO is very happy with it, as am I.” ”
—Ben Smith, VP of Technical Operations, Extole
2. Pepperdata Freed Engineers for High-Impact Projects
Because Pepperdata automatically increased the resource utilization and performance of the workloads needed to run Extole’s customer reports, the engineering team was freed from manual config tuning to focus on new compelling projects to advance the business, such as an initiative to radically streamline their build cycle from four hours to twenty minutes.
Ben shared that he believed the operations and engineering teams could not have attempted such a large, high-value project if Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer was not quietly remediating cloud costs in the background.
3. Pepperdata Optimization Improved Reporting Performance for Enhanced Employee Productivity
Once Pepperdata was installed, employees in the customer success teams and elsewhere across the company found that their daily reports ran faster, saving them precious minutes throughout the day, reducing the frustration of waiting for reports to load, and improving overall productivity.
For Ben, and, by extension, for his operations and finance teams, the performance improvement from Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer delivered considerable time savings that could be spent on revenue-generating innovation.
Outsized Gains for a Small Investment
By automatically increasing the company’s resource utilization to deliver 30 percent cost savings, Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer real-time, automated resource optimization exceeded Extole’s initial cost reduction goal—all while freeing up the company’s engineering team to focus on projects that advance the business.
“Think about the cost management side. If you can get that money back and save some time too, with this amount of investment, it’s really a no brainer. It’s been awesome.”
—Ben Smith, VP of Technical Operations, Extole
