Introduction
BeeHero is an innovative company in the agrotech sector which provides precision pollination services. Their technology-driven approach aims to enhance agricultural productivity through improved pollination, leveraging advanced monitoring systems to track and manage bee health and activity. As BeeHero expanded, it faced increasing operational costs, particularly in its AWS cloud infrastructure.
Challenges
BeeHero approached the team at Automat-it in late September 2023 with several challenges. The primary issue was their cloud costs, which were impacting their budget significantly. As their operations grew, so did their cloud expenses, creating a pressing need for a structured approach to manage and optimize their spending.
Additionally, BeeHero’s complex infrastructure, which included a wide range of nearly 60 AWS services, required expert intervention to identify inefficiencies and implement cost-saving measures effectively.
The project
Our team used FinOps best practices to address BeeHero’s challenges by first evaluating their cloud usage and expenses. This evaluation highlighted areas for potential cost savings, especially in high-cost services and inefficient resource use.
To optimize costs, we introduced as a first step saving plans, offering discounts based on their compute consumption. This led to an immediate reduction in their monthly expenses.
Additionally, we facilitated Amazon SageMaker proof-of-concept (POC) credits, allowing BeeHero to experiment with new services at a reduced cost. We also noticed excessive CloudWatch costs and implemented strategies to cut these expenses by approximately 60%.
Professional support and continuous improvement are integral parts of our approach. Our DevOps team worked closely with BeeHero to perform a Well-Architected review and remediate high-risk issues along with ongoing DevOps tasks. Furthermore, we implemented automated cost anomaly detection, which alerted BeeHero to unexpected increases in service usage and helped prevent unnecessary expenses.
Data optimization and RDS performance
BeeHero processes 350MB of data samples from IoT devices daily. Automat-it helped introduce BeeHero to an AWS subject matter expert, who assisted in understanding how to use Iceberg on S3 and optimizing this process, including running compaction and deleting orphan files.
In terms of database performance, Automat-it reviewed BeeHero’s RDS Postgres Performance Insights data, provided advice, and arranged for a review. This resulted in improved performance.
Outcomes
BeeHero’s overall cloud expenses were reduced by approximately 20%.
They received AWS POC funding, which facilitated innovation without financial strain.
Our optimization efforts led to a 60% reduction in CloudWatch expenses.
In addition to these financial benefits, our collaborative approach provided BeeHero with improved cost visibility and control at no extra charge to them.
This is achieved by using Anodot as our billing system. This enables our customers to track their cloud costs, generate reports, and create automated alerts of cloud service increase spikes which may affect costs.
Customer Testimonial
Inbar Shani, Principal Engineer at BeeHero, comments:
“Working with Automat-it has been a game-changer for us. Their expertise in FinOps allowed us to gain better visibility and control over our cloud expenses, resulting in a 20% reduction in overall costs.” He continues: “The tailored savings plans, POC funding, and regular meetings have not only optimized our spending but also enabled us to focus on innovation without financial strain.”
For further information or to discuss how we can assist your organization with FinOps, please contact us.
